Slashdot Mirror
Revamping Freenet
N3wsByt3 writes "Many will have heard about the anonymous P2P-system Freenet. What many probably don't know is, that a big change is at hand: the Freenet developers have decided to drop all support for the 0.5x version, to skip version 0.6 and to completely revamp the 0.7 build into some kind of poorly described, presumably scalable darknet. The main coder even threatened to quit if such a darknet would be rejected.
So, is it finally going the right way with the development of Freenet? Maybe not, since they seem reluctant to provide real data and rather rely on security through obfuscation, and then there is still the problem of their general inability in regard to pooling human resources, which, for any OSS project, is of the utmost importance." Obviously, the article submitter has his own feelings on Freenet, but notwithstanding that, what's the latest scuttlebutt from within the Freenet crowd?
will it take until it becomes something that can be used as easily as an web browser?
I used to run a freenet node - for a while it bloated with kiddie porn, and not much else - now not even the paedophiles bother, it's become so dilapidated, out of date and slow.
A very interesting article about flaw in Freenet
http://www.aviransplace.com
Matthew has indeed indicated that he believes it is essential that we support "trusted links" in Freenet, and the other core Freenet developers, myself included, agree with him - so Newsbyte's attempt to stir that up into some kind of controversy is just another example of his trolling.
I have no idea where Newsbyte's accusation that we are relying on security through obscurity comes from, certainly the archived email he links do doesn't seem to support any such claim.
As for the blog entry he links to, it essentially boils down to whining about why we don't implement each and every one of his suggestions.
When considering the value of Newsbyte's opinions, I would urge you to look first at what he has actually contributed to the project, versus those that he seeks to criticise.
We ran these observations by Freenet founder Ian Clarke. He agreed that the caching behavior does reveal far too many clues. But the next major revision is expected to eliminate the problem. Sometime later this year, it is hoped, the Freeenet developers will release a version that employs premix routing.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
when the speed of freenet comes within an order-of-magnitude of the normal internet, people will start using it again. right now, it's just a nifty way to do things 100 times slower than you could otherwise.
For anyone who reads the freenet mailing list daily (me), you'd know the the submitter of this article (Newsbyte) is a known troll who doesn't actually contribute to the project.
I suggest that people who want to know the whole story check out the mailing lists going back a month or so.
I hear the accusation of Kiddy Porn quite a lot about FreeNet, but how does anybody actually know? I thought the big idea was that you don't know what's stored on your node - unless you're actually downloading FreeNet kiddy porn, how can you tell?
Freenet gets more attention because its developers are very vocal, but it sucks as a working network. You can hardly get any speed off it, you have to use the stupid browser interface, it's bloaty java, and there's no working search. Switch to gnunet, it has decent speeds, working search, and has a graphical client (not a very nice one as yet, but that could be improved).
I am trolling
with comments like these:
5. Slashdot effect doesn't write off the network for a month after release; if we grow by invitation, it will take longer to grow, but we will end up with a better network, and we won't generally have the collapse we have seen every time we've done a release.
this might just be an attempt to bait the slashdot crowd into trying out freenet so that freenet's userbase grows and the speed become reasonable.
I don't want my node to be used to harbor child porn, offensive content or terrorism. What can I do?
The true test of someone who claims to believe in Freedom of Speech is whether they tolerate speech which they disagree with, or even find disgusting. If this is not acceptable to you, you should not run a Freenet node.
Free MacMini
You can't tell what's stored on your node very easily.
However, it is relatively easy to see what is on freenet at large. There are several spiders that roam freenet and index freesites they come across. It's sort of like what Google does. So all one has to do is load up these indexes and see how many of the sites are child porn related. Another way to tell is load up Frost and see how many of the boards of child porn related.
There's a very large number of them.
A lot of people seem to be confused about obfuscation / obscurity.
Obscurity or hiding things is a perfectly valid security technique, and can be used as a component of a defense in depth strategy. One of the main reasons people love NAT boxes is because they provide this property automatically. (I don't like them for other properties they have, and a firewall combinded with public address space will be just as effective at providing this specific property).
People are stretching the meaning of Kirchoff's theorm. Krichoff was refering to crytographic algorithms when he said that there is no security in obscurity - the security of a crytographic algorithm should only rely on the secrecy of key. You should assume that the functioning of the algorithm will eventually be discovered by your adversaries, and therefore shouldn't make the security of the system depend on the functioning of the algorithm being kept secret. That being said, restricting knowledge of what algorithm you're using will make a contribution of the system being secured, as it can add to the depth an adversary has to penetrate.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
See, the wonderful thing about such loaded language is that even if you tolerate the existence such content, by using Freenet you are being FORCED to distribute it. Isn't that lovely? And if you complain, the powers-that-be make YOU the bad guy!
-mkb
Every time there's a freenet article on
Personally, I see Freenet as an experiment in what's possible. There's an abstract problem statement: how do you share data anonymously? And Freenet attempts to provide a solution to that problem. There are many valid uses for a solution to that particular problem. The canonical example is "dissidents in ". But it goes beyond that. Everything from corporate and government whistleblowers even in relatively free countries, to those who want to expose sensitive information they might be privy to without giving themselves away.
The problem is that such a system, by design, is necessarily going to be useful for people that organize activities and spread information that has little redeeming value. If dissidents and whistleblowers can obtain anonymity when sharing information, then so can child pornographers and terrorists and gangsters and whoever else.
This dilemma occurs with many systems based on an ideology of freedom and opposition to censorship. The US constitution's first amendment guarantees the right of NAMBLA to express their views on a public webpage.
The point is, freedom to any extent in the public commons will, necessarily, support both good and bad uses of that freedom. The question people have to ask themselves is wether their belief in the ideology behind that freedom is worth the tradeoff or not.
If you believe that the "bad guys" should be kept off of Freenet, then you don't believe in Freenet, or any other truly censorship-free information sharing system.
-Laxitive
i2p.net seems to be a better alternative. especially because it provides an overlay network. you can't just transfer files over it - you can do everything which you can do on the current net. you can even choose how "much" anonymity you would like (over how many nodes should your messages be relayed).
I haven't tried Freenet in quite a while, but when I did use it now and again before (in the 0.3-0.5 days, AFAIR), the main problem was that they'd get a network that kind of worked, lots of people would start posting stuff, it would be usable for a few months, and then they'd break it to introduce the 'next big thing'. And it would stay broken for six months, during which time most people stopped using it.
Frankly, for Freenet to have any future, I think the developers need to get used to the idea of _not breaking it_ every six months. Otherwise the few people with the enthusiasm required to keep it operating are going to find better things to do with their time.
You can either have a research network or a viable, usable system, you can't have both. If it ever gets to a viable, usable network, I might give it a try again, but it's pointless when you can't insert anything and can barely retrieve anything.
I doubt that would work, it has not worked with usenet at all.
Most usenet servers limit posts to a relatively small size, and high ascii characters are severely restricted.
Still, today a full usenet feed is several terrabytes per day, and 99% of it are binaries
heck, IIRC there are some guys that share binaries uuencoded throught slashdot journals
I think a subset of freenet only for text files would be usefull, also because the much higher size and greater popularity of certain binaries would drown most of the text content, but I do not see a way to enforce such restrictions
The problem with anonymous freedom of speech is you eliminate the responsibilty of speech. Sometimes it's difficult to decide what is worth more.
FYI - there is a short response to this article on the Freenet website.
That's odd, because PGP is then "terrorist-friendly" and "pedophile-friendly," yet an awful lot of people support it (you included, I'm guessing from the bit about keeping your communications private). The problem is that if you make the network decentralized, private, and resistant to government censorship, then it seems to be the case that you have made it inherently content-agnostic and secure enough for terrorist use. Some people are willing to make that tradeoff, some aren't. But being willing to make that tradeoff for PGP but not Freenet seems... hypocritical.
We need the market to change to make trading TV shows, movies, and music legal. This article yesterday is a perfect example of tackling the problem from the right direction.
Just trying to hide it will only invite further problems and frankly, the idea of being unable to avoid contributing to the spreading of child pornography bothers me a lot more than the MPAA and RIAA going after people illegally trading copyrighted material.
What we need is for the RIAA, MPAA, or some organization(s) that will eventually supplant them to find a financially viable market in open, distributed file sharing. A solution that makes everyone happy and doesn't contribute to child pornography.
I am convinced that this is possible. If the MPAA and RIAA can't figure out a way to make money doing it, someone else will and the MPAA and RIAA will eventually die off. Evolution: Adapt or die off. Wasn't there an article on that over the weekend as well?
So where do you draw the line as to what one is allowed to post and what they aren't?
* Should people be allowed to post any pornography at all? (illegal in a number of countries)
* Should people be allowed to post a glowing post of support for Falun Gong? (illegal in China)
* Should people be allowed to publish a diatribe denying that the holocaust occurred? (illegal in much of Europe)
Etc. You can claim that, "Well, allowing the posting of child pornography or terrorism-related materials offends universal sensibilities", but this obviously isn't true, or the material wouldn't be being posted in the first place (not to mention, one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter). Just as a demonstration of how much people's sensibilities are different in different parts of the world, this (originally posted on msnbc.com) covers an interview with an Afghan mother who supported her daugter's execution by stoning for the crime of adultery ("My daughter is a criminal. If she hadn't been killed, I could never hold my head up again in my community.")
If the data is being created through abusive means, go after the source of the data. If the data is being used to plan violent action, use proper security at likely targets (not like it's hard for people to hatch plans in secret anyways - this is nothing new). The fact of the matter is that data wants to be free.
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.
Why do you get that impression? "Child pornography" is just the red herring people always trot out when they want to censor speech.
You've heard the expression "I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it," yes? Your idea of "offensive content" may differ wildly from someone else's; the question becomes "who is right?" Sure, you can refuse to run a FreeNet node because you're scared some evil recipe for "instant terror version 3.4" might get stored there or a nasty evil child pornographer might post some horrid icky pictures you don't like onto FreeNet and your node happens to harbor some of the data, but in that case you really are censoring in your own way.
The FAQ's response to this concern is dead-on right. Even with child pornography, you're trying to treat the symptoms instead of the disease when you reason like this -- "oh I'm not running that because it doesn't actively stop child pornographers!" Bad news, buddy, the internet itself doesn't "actively stop" any pornographers. Are you just going to unplug so your browser cache doesn't accidentally store a thumbnail with content that offends you?
If you want to censor what you participate in on a free speech-centric network, you don't belong there. If you believe that, ultimately, full-fledged freedom of speech is more vital to our society than taking a sad, impotent stab at a group you don't like, then run a damned node and deal with the fact that you may not like what lives on it. Remember, there's a far better chance that text a government doesn't like (but that you do like) will be stored on your node than pics of little Suzie.
Claiming FreeNet was just "designed" for child porn is like saying Slashdot was designed to attract trolls. Sure, it happened, but that wasn't the original intent; back when it started, I think they honestly wanted to encourage and support open, public debate on important topics. Heh. Whoops. :)
Read my stuff.
See the excellent article by Paul Graham on this
http://paulgraham.com/say.html
Also, it seems to me that it is inane to think you can somehow prevent evil from occurring, just by somehow preventing someone from talking publicly about it. It is this sort of ostrich mentality that has led to the widespread molestation of children within the very church that preaches most strongly about the immorality of the same. IANA psychologist, but I would think that those who speak about something are at least more approachable, more lucid (and open to arguments against) than those who keep it to themselves. Driving them underground only makes it worse.
The problem is that if freenet gives you the ablity to block arbitrary files based on content you could become liable for not blocking them. Then again IANAL but I would guess that if you had the ablility to block, say mp3 files and you did not the RIAA might be able to take you to court. Its hard to say, on one hand I like the fact that anyone can say anything on freenet, on the other hand I don't really like that kind of stuff on my computer.
Uh, if you are hosting child porn, you are the host of the data, under current law. Many nations are now erasing the line between being a "distributor" of this material and being in possession of it. Really, you need to know this, because you will find very few individuals in Western societies who will vigorously defend you in public or the courts. You will find out what "pariah" means.
And in the strict sense, with Freenet you are a distributor in any case - you are providing a service to obtain this material - remember under the law ignorance is not an excuse, you could find it difficult to claim you were an unwitting accomplice.
I think the point is that every government draws the line somewhere else. In some places a naked 16 year old is child porn, in other places it is not. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
There is not a universal code of what is acceptable to everyone, there is just your own personal code. This may fit the mold of where you live or it may not. The question is not "Should a line be drawn?", everyone would agree there is a line. However "Where do you draw the line on issue X?" is something that cannot be answered globally. The freenet people have taken the approach that since the line cannot be drawn in a specific place, let's just ignore it altogether and let anything go. Interesting experiment if you ask me. I'm not interested in using it, but I am not morally opposed to it just because it does not stop those I disagree with from communicating. As a user of PGP that would be damn hypocritical of me wouldn't it?
Finkployd