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New "Dark" Freenet Available for Testing
Sanity writes "The Freenet Project has just released the first alpha version of the much anticipated Freenet 0.7 branch. This is a major departure from past approaches to peer-to-peer network design, embracing a 'scalable darknet' architecture, where security is increased by allowing users to limit which other peers their peer will communicate with directly, rather than the typical 'promiscuous' approach of classic P2P networks. This means that not only does Freenet aim to prevent others from finding out what you are doing with Freenet, it makes it extremely difficult for them to even know that you are running a Freenet node at all. This is not the first P2P application to use this approach, other examples include Waste, however those networks are limited to just a few users, while Freenet can scale up almost indefinitely. The new version also includes support for NAT hole-punching, and has an API for third-party tool development. As always, the Freenet team are asking that people support the development of the software by donating."
This looks interesting. I tried Freenet before, but I could never set it up properly. I will have to try it again.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
Hooray! Now I can browse the net at dialup speeds once more!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The Dark Side of the Freenet is a pathway to many websites some consider to be unnatural.
The Heading of the parent should have been 'Interesting' or 'Can't wait to try it out.' I guess I was simultaneously thinking about two posts and confused myself.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
For example, do you think Google will ever use Freenet in some manner?
I wish there was a way that I could view websites without giving any IP or client information. However, that kind of information is important to webmasters and business.
Thank you freenet team! The ability to remain anonymous is the only way to ensure complete freedom of speech.
Just like the rest of the internet only slower?
Remember, it's not the tool, it's the person (if the person happens to be a tool so be it)
I totally agree. With the lawmakers obviously unconcerned about the steady erosion of civil liberties, practical measures like these could be the only option for maintaining our freedoms.
Read Pynchon.
I'm not a member or involved in the freenet project but if you have paypal or whatever, drop by the freenet project website and donate a few dollars. Mathew Toseland (toad_ on freenode irc) has been slaving away on the project for a long time now, he's poured so much energy into making freenet a reality, kudos to him and a few of the other coders that have spent a lot of energy on the next generation freenet (nextgens/cyberdo/etc.)
Not related to freenet but in the definitely in the same sphere of anonymous networking is I2P. For anybody that interested in that kind of technology should check that out... it's a fairly well functioning network ATM but the main coder is putting off any big announcements until he's sure it's ready.
Also remember it's a darknet; they're trying to *reduce* the kiddy porn.
Freenet is neat, P2P research is phenomenal, darknets are probably the way to go...but boy, it would be nice to have something that is not implemented in Java.
I understand the reasons that they use Java, but still, Freenet is one RAM and CPU-hungry beast.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I tried Freenet once, briefly, out of curiosity. Looking around at listings of content people had compiled (can't remember the terminology now), I didn't notice any terrorism plans, but I sure saw a hell of a lot of people swapping child pornography. I turned off my node, deinstalled the software, and never messed with it again.
Let's all be totally clear on this: Clarke has an absolute belief in free speech, including child pornography. Not only does he believe that government shouldn't be able to regulate any kind of speech, including child pornography, but he is actively helping people to distribute child pornography, and so are you if you run a Freenet node, whether you know it or not.
To me, there's a clear distinction between a belief in free speech (government not censoring speech) and believing that you, as an individual, should help people to propagate certain kinds of speech. And although I do believe in free speech (no government censorship), I don't think that extends to child pornography, which by its nature requires a heinous crime to be committed in order to produce it.
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Good. You should be able to, if you wish to do so.
Well I don't believe that child pornography is a form of speech, free or otherwise.
I tried running a delivery service once, briefly, out of curiosity. Ripping open envelopes and boxes, I didn't notice any terrorism plans, but I sure saw a hell of a lot of people mailing child pornography. I closed my business, fired my employees, and never messed with delivery services again.
I tried starting an ISP once, briefly, out of curiosity. While monitoring my customers' connections with a packet sniffer, I didn't notice any terrorism plans, but I sure saw a hell of a lot of people swapping child pornography. I turned off my routers, shut down my business, and never messed with providing internet service again.
I tried running a telco once, briefly, out of curiosity. Listening in on my customers' conversations, I didn't notice any terrorism plans, but I sure heard a hell of a lot of people discussing child pornography. I turned off my switches, burned my service trucks, and never messed with selling phone service again.
I tried being a mayor once, briefly, out of curiosity. Breaking into residents' houses at night with my police chief, I didn't notice any terrorism plans, but I sure saw a hell of a lot of people looking at child pornography. I shut down city hall, razed my city to the ground, and never messed with human communities again.
As I understand it, Clarke does not support the distribution of child pornography. However, he supports absolute anonymity and absolute freedom of speech. Neither of those can be guaranteed if you're censoring in any way, form or fashion. Once you have the ability to censor one form of speech (whether it's political speech, hate speech, or something like child pornography) you have the ability to censor anything you want. This is what Clarke is trying to prevent. Child pornography is illegal, as it should be, but you shouldn't have to trade your freedom of speech and anonymity to help catch distributors of child pornography, just as you shouldn't have to trade those rights to help stop terrorism. I think you did the right thing by uninstalling Freenet, because you're not ready to accept what freedom means. It's not something you can have in stages.
What can be done in a truly Peer to Peer situation with a zero knowledge content base though?
He could pass a "rule" saying "no" to it, but how would you enforce it?
Too bad there isnt Naruto on it... right timecop?
First, there's the "dual effect" question. If you set out to support political dissent, whistleblowers, and the like, are you unethical if a side effect is to enable immoral activities? In this case, a predictable side effect? If you have no way of knowing whether you're facilitating it?
Then there's the question: if Freenet is needed, is it right to decide not to run a node because you abhor some of the traffic?
I don't know the answers but do respect your decision.
If you'd actually read the summary instead of posting a pathetic knee-jerk reaction, you'd have realized that a darknet allows you to control your distribution content somewhat. Like, if you're not friends with pedophiles, you shouldn't have a problem. If you are, then quit yer bitchen'.
What are you saying, that black persons can not use P2P the same way as light-skins? Give me a break.
Amen. Freedom isn't pretty.
Now if only they could figure out a way to allow for multi-port + hidden IP + encrypted anonymous bittorrent file transfers inside Darknet without losing speed etc, and the DRM, MPAA, China et all, can say 'good-bye it was a nice try' !
Ok that was a lame rhyme, but you get the point!
Anon
And although I do believe in free speech (no government censorship), I don't think that extends to child pornography
Neither does Ian Clarke. You've missed the point. It's not about protecting child pornography as free speech, it's realising that you can't protect other, legitimate forms of free speech without also protecting child pornography as well. It's the unfortunate reality of information theory. If anybody has the power to stop the kiddy porn, they have the power to stop the legitimate speech as well, e.g. dissidence. The only true protection of freedom of speech is incapable of distinguishing between kiddy porn and legitimate speech by its very nature.
If you've come up with some revolutionary scheme that can stop kiddy porn without harming the protection of the legitimate speech, then I'm sure Ian Clarke would jump at the chance to implement it. But there's every reason to believe this will be completely and utterly impossible forever. Think about it.
The sad thing is, no matter how many times this is explained, there's always somebody as ignorant as you willing to tell people all about how he thinks kiddy porn is free speech. Please stop that.
These are pretty serious charges you are leveling against Clarke. Can you provide quotes with links that indicate Clark does indeed believe what you claim he believes?
"... He is actively helping people to distribute child pornography"
What you have posted is frankly libelous.
You can be sued, and unless you can prove that you know that he was helping to distribute child porn, you will lose. Otherwise, if you know this for a fact, I hope you have reported this to the authorities.*
Do you know for a fact that he is specifically helping to distribute child pornography, rather than simply building a general purpose network? *Any* communications network can be used to distribute child pornogrphy. Remember that usenet, AOL, and most recently Myspace was used to distribute child pornography. Are you making the same claims that the creators and owners of usenet, AOL, and MySpace are "actively helping people to distribute child pornography", like you said of Ian Clarke?
I turned off the freenet myself because I thought it could be used for child porn, and I didn't want any part of it. I do not support child pronography. But, I cannot support you making such claims about a person without evidence. Put up or shut up.
*I have the feeling you do not know this specifically about Ian Clarke. If you do, you should report it to the authorities, and if you had reported it, you wouldn't be blabbing libelously on the internet. You have correctly understood that the freenet, like any network, can be used to distribute child porn, but I don't think you know this about Clark. If you do, for God's sake, don't ruin the investigation by blabbing all over the internet.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Which is fine if you think that's something worthwhile, but is quite different in practice from your examples.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Now you run that statement through the same logical process you used before, and you come up with something like this:
"I used to drive at night, but it was unnecessarily risky, so I decided only to drive during the day. I didn't want to hit a pedestrian."
"I used to drive, but it was unnecessarily risky, so I decided only to ride a bike. I didn't want to hit a pedestrian."
"I used to ride a bike, but it was unnecessarily risky, so I decided only to walk. I didn't want to hit a pedestrian."
Notice how at some point, a quantitative reduction in the level of risk and a simultaneous change in the quantitative level of justification for the action changed a sensible statement into a ridiculous one? The problem isn't with the original statement, it's with the kind of logic you're applying to transform it into other statements.
Freenet's killer app is child pornography. I've never seen any evidence that any political dissident uses it. The level of risk of harming children is extremely high, and the level of justification is extremely low.
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I think the main problem with freenet, I2P, and other similar services is not their privacy concerns (although important), but SPEED.
The speed at which any of these services run reminds me of when I had dial-up. Except these darknets don't even guarantee you can connect to even the most popular darknet sites. Even when I tweaked all the settings I couldn't ever get decent connections on freenet.
These sites are not going to be very viable until a lot of people use them, and a lot of people aren't going to use them until they reach something at least comparable to speeds of the regular web.
I appreciate all the effort of the people who make these pieces of software, but I can't help but feel much of their energy is misdirected.
Just my thoughts.
Let's all be totally clear on this: Clarke has an absolute belief in free speech, including communist literature. Not only does he believe that government shouldn't be able to regulate any kind of speech, including communist literature, but he is actively helping people to distribute communist literature, and so are you if you run a Freenet node, whether you know it or not.
Why aren't there more free public sex videos then?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
But if you don't know three people who are using Freenet 0.7, hop on IRC (which is not the least bit anonymous) and see if some random stranger will give you their noderef. Random people who don't know each other exchanging noderefs over IRC provides what advantage over the prior Freenet implementation, exactly?
I don't know 3 other meatspace people who use Freenet, much less Freenet 0.7. I can't imagine that trading noderefs with some random person on IRC is any more secure than maintaining a node on 0.5.
I'm no Freenet hater, I've been running it for years and I've made several donations. Freenet showed me the "Diebold Memos" and other interesting items. I'm just looking for a plain-English explanation as to how 0.7 is an improvement over the prior Freenet implementation.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Modern Java virtual machines can actually be more efficient than native code in many situations. The old criticism of Java, that it is slow, and a CPU/memory hog relative to native compiled code, was definitely valid back in the 90s, but is much less-so now. Check out some recent benchmarks involving Java if you don't believe me.
On 31 Mar 2006, at 20:08:
> This isn't about *technical* support, I just wanted to tell Matthew
> thanks
> for working on this project. The US government is really scaring
> me and
> I'm glad someone's working on this. You're doing a great job man.
>
> One question I have is that the paypal balance on the home page
> usually
> says something like a few hundred $, and I was wondering if it's
> actually
> generating the required $2300 per month, or if it's falling short.
> I've
> had a monthly donation set up for quite a while now, and I just
> want to
> make sure everything is going well financially for the project.
We have been fortunate enough to generate just about enough to pay
for Matthew for the past few years, but donations have been tailing
off as we haven't put out any new releases in quite a while due to
our work on 0.7, and the financial situation is actually quite
precarious just now.
Our hope is that with the 0.7 alpha release we will get some
donations, but if anyone can contribute, now would really be the time
(as there can be no guarantee that the 0.7 alpha release will
generate the level of publicity we have seen for previous releases).
Ian.
All with the help of freenet. Sounds good to me.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
OK, so maybe the under US$ 400 donations total hints that FreeNet's reputation is low.
Seriously, how to genuinely help the cause of Free Speech, without contributing to in-
creasing the problem of child-porn, is a real problem. Is there a solution?
Of course, taken far enough, one can argue that subscribing to all the world's telco's
has similar side effects (since it often take a telco line to transfer such content).
Still the amount of good side... eg, bringing a world of technology & other ideas
to the home & to the far corners of the world surely outweighs the stuff that I don't
want to support... so I stay connected & use it for what I want to support. Simple.
Distributing child pornography isn't necessarily a bad thing. If it's distributed for free on FreeNet, that means fewer and fewer people paying for it, which hopefully means less child porn all-together.
Now, if you think potentially allowing more people to VIEW child pornography is inherently bad, and will lead to more child abuse, for instance, this isn't much consolation. However, the supreme court has even ruled that *fake* child pornography is not criminal, so viewing animated or CGI child porn, for instance, isn't even illegal. So, as disgusting as it may be, there doesn't seem to be a concensus that individuals privately viewing something that appears to be child porn is bad for society, and will lead to serious crimes.
As an added bonus, the wider and more public spread of child porn, while it can't be traced back to the IP address that shared it, the picture can be tracked back using visual clues as to who is involved, and possibly making it easier for police to apprehend the actual suspects (just not the person sharing it, in this case).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
sounds like p2p is evolving to avoid the likes of *aa... great to have free speech and all that, but suppose it gets bigger and every child porn nut job hops on it and starts downloading... couldnt the gov/isp's step in and kill it? not sure if its even possible anywhere to outlaw a program/technology...
"Not only does he believe that government shouldn't be able to regulate any kind of speech, including child pornography, but he is actively helping people to distribute child pornography,"
So's your local mailman. I hope you didn't send out any Christmas cards last year, and you had better make sure you handle all your bills online, otherwise you're aiding that pernicious distribution medium of kiddie porn known as "First Class Mail" (which, while not anonymous, is physically and legally protected from inspection).
Any screenshots of the app?
Here's my 'freenet/Darknet' wishlist for the next release (hopefuly it won't take another 5 years before any major break throughs):
... you punch through making your traffic seem like standard protocols. An advanced version of this would allow you to load balance your traffic over multiple standard look-alike protocols, thus forcing ISP's to not be able to track (through agregate port router bandwidth stats) which new protocol/port you are using now so they could block it. Also, by allowing multi-protocol chaotic support that means each group of users would be using different protocols & ports... now try to stop that Mr. China firewall!
1) Bittorrent/utorrent inside Darknet support. (i.e. encrypted semi-anonymous file transfers)
2) Full IP anonymity
3) Multi-port support (i.e. when firewalls block it, you can change ports).
4) User selected periodic chaotic deep packet protocol emulation. Say what?! Imagine if you could download from a list of popular standard protocols & configure your Darknet client to emulate most of these protocols (one at a time & announcing the new protocol to your group of file-exchange-buddies)- anytime you want. You'd periodically select a new protocol (i.e. FTP, HTTP, OSPF, DNS, etc every time some advanced firewall blocks you) & BAM
5) Proxy bounce support
6) Open source API for additional protocol bounce support. (i.e. allows for crackers/hackers of restrictive/oppressive nations to piggy back Darknet inside a legit Server running say FTP or something of the sort) - Once the trusted server is infiltrated, it could allow for proxied clients to connect through it and out to the rest of the world.
I'm sure some of you could come up with more utopian anonymous & liberative strategies.
Cheers
adeptus_luminati
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Its too bad its written in java.. if it was in C/C++ i would have run a node...
Just find a developer who does a C++ implementation based on the sample code of wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/). It shouldn't be that difficult and is cross-platform as well. Sorry, no I don't have the time to do it myself but I'll help with advice.
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
"The level of risk of harming children is extremely high, and the level of justification is extremely low."
Explain to me again, please, how Freenet being available to distribute it means that child pornography is more likely to occur? Does Freenet actually encourage this behavior in some way?
Is that you, BadAnalogyGuy?
The person wasn't spying on the users of his Freenet node. You can't, even if you want to, if Freenet meets its design promises.
What he did was look at published directories of Freenet content and how to retrieve it. He noticed how much of it was kiddie porn, extrapolated that a comparable fraction must be running through his node, and decided to get out of the avoid-law-enforcement game.
In other words, nothing comparable to opening envelopes, sniffing network conversations, or wiretapping. Your analogies are not analogous.
"Freenet seeks to implement a level of anonymity that resolves people of responsibility."
I think the word you are looking for is absolve.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I've never seen any evidence that any political dissident uses it.
Well, that's exactly the point, isn't it?
I have an automatic donation to Freenet of $20 per month set up. These guys really need some support, especially now between versions.
Exactly. The crime is in the production (and in the consumption, if it isn't classed as a mental disorder).
The crime isn't in providing a means of distribution. WWW, postal service, ham radio, freenet, carrier pidgeon, passing on a CD, passing on a DVD, telephones. Any can be used to distribute child pornography, are mostly as anonymous and probably already have your participation. The radio waves pass through your house, you own shares in a telco, the carrier pidgeon flies over your land, just like you might run a freenet node. Why aren't all of the above "bad" like Freenet? Why not shoot all pidgeons, torch all mailboxes or build a Faraday cage around your house, just in case they are carrying child pornography?
The police need to get out there and catch those who produce child pornography.
Police prefer to crack down on computer networks since
Freenet just might lead to more child pornographers being caught. Presumambly child porn currently lives in a part of the Internet that is end to end encrypted and out of sight of the police. Having anonymity (as provided by Freenet) might cause child pornographers to not encrypt their porn, allowing police to capture what they are sending. The producer might then be indentified by the porn images they have produced.
No, I don't advocate child pornography. I do think it is wrong to use child pornography as an argument against Freenet.
If you think there is too much child porn on Freenet, wouldn't it be better to set up a node and dilute it by uploading and downloading better content? Freenet only stores the "most popular" items uploaded. Whenever I've been on Freenet I've never been 'hit in the face' by child pornography. The closest I have been is to have seen a page where someone compiled a general list of severl hundred freenet pages. One or two text entries in the list indicated that the link went on to child porn. I exercised my freewill and decided not to follow those links.
So let's be clear on another point. Your funding of your goverment is resulting in the killing of people you have never even met and likely had no real reason to kill. I don't see you drawing your support away from there though. Mod me and parent TROLL.
...and still browse the internet at dialup speeds. ;)
Hahah the humorless truth-suppressors have demonstrated their true love for freedom of speech - they love any speech they agree with.
Do your worst, dirty mod-point wielding humorless slashbots.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
"The difference between Freenet and your examples is that Freenet is designed to be untraceable,"
Why would you think to trace any of it if you don't know the contents?
Anybody can set up local wiretap to confirm whether or not Person X is the source of Content Y on Freenet ("Gee, he never downloaded the content that's currently uploading..."). It doesn't get in the way of either a sufficiently far-reaching "Big Brother" government nor does it get in the way of of a law enforcement agency that has cause to be suspicious. The only things it gets in the way of is random searches, broad dragnets and datamining, tactics that would have most people up in arms about their civil liberties if they were conducted in other mediums, as the parent tried to show in his analogies.
Okay, so how good is Freenet's network this time? I went to check there once. The first thing I saw was a big fat warning message stating that there's child porn on their network, but that they don't want to remove it because people are supposed to freely share without others being able to delete their content. And yeah, after clicking "I accept", the second thing I saw was that a substantial amount of nodes linked to the stuff.
Frankly, what the hell is up with that? I don't want to use a "fully anonymous" sharing network when I have to browse through such disgusting content to find what I can also find on other networks just fine.
Interesting logic: I must support Ian Clarke and his ideals of absolute freedom of speech, otherwise he might sue me for saying bad things about him?
Are you making the same claims that the creators and owners of usenet, AOL, and MySpace are "actively helping people to distribute child pornography", like you said of Ian Clarke?
No, because child pornography isn't the killer app of AOL, but it is the killer app of Freenet.
Can you provide quotes with links that indicate Clark does indeed believe what you claim he believes?
here and here
Find free books.
You seem to be conveniently forgetting the distinction that I went out of my way to make in my original post, between (a) government censorship, and (b) individual choices of what kinds of free speech to subsidize with my money and computer resources.
Find free books.
a quantitative reduction in the level of risk and a simultaneous change in the quantitative level of justification
That's the flaw in your reasoning right there. You assume there is a "quantitative level of justification" when there is not. What you consider to be just in one case could be considered unjust by someone else. How do you determine who is right? You can't. Justice is a qualitative term.
The problem isn't with the original statement, it's with the kind of logic you're applying to transform it into other statements.
His logic is perfectly fine. All those statements are perfectly sound and logical. The problem is you think "justice" can be quantified so you find fault in those statements because your spectrum of "justice" does not match his. Sure if you assume your spectrum of "justice" to be true his statements appear silly, but that does not change their logical satisfiability.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Well, Clark did write Freenet, which by his own admission is "a means by which information can be shared without fear of censorship of any kind." That being said, said poster you are replying to used Freenet, and saw some amount of child pornography on at least one node. Clark wrote the program, designed to allow anything to be shared / said. This seems to me like he is at least indirectly, but actively, helping spread child pornography. This is quite different than your poor comparisons to AOL and myspace, (I don't know about usenet) which explicitly forbid any sort of child pornography in their EULAs, and I'm pretty sure Myspace forbids anything pornographic period. But I don't really care, since I neither use Freenet, or have a stake in Clarke's reputation.
You have mentioned some rather nasty uses for this technology. However you can also trade music with your friends without being thrown in the clink, and this is what will make this techonology more popular. Interesting how by the music industry making criminals out of so many people it makes it easier for the real criminals to hide amoung the mases when the masses retalliate with technology.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
- Ian (Founder, Freenet Project)
I won't for a second think that the authors of Freened made their software to help distribute child porn, but let's be realistic: there's a lot of it on there and it's very easily accessible. It's just awful to see that warning message everytime you log in, only to find that a lot of nodes really do link to disgusting content. I'm not using Freenet if that sort of stuff continues to be right in front of me everytime I try to browse the network.
welcome the idea that our overlords will have a harder time censoring and surveilling us.
But unlike with your analogy, the original poster was not an active participant in the reprehensible activity (be it kiddie porn or drunk driving), but at worst a facilitator. It'd be more proper if it was "I used to tend bar... until one of my patrons almost hit a pedestrian..." There's a difference between wanting to reform your own actions and wanting to reform the actions of others.
"Freenet's killer app is child pornography. I've never seen any evidence that any political dissident uses it."
Even if no political dissidents use it, "killer app" doesn't mean "only app" (otherwise Slashdot would be a porn site). Where is the line drawn between "single use" and "multiple use" technologies? Who decides?
You're missing the point. The analogies are between Freenet and a delivery service, an ISP, a telco, and a city.
Freenet enables anonymous communication of information. It does so in a non-discriminatory and completely neutral fashion. It makes no effort to censor, or promote, any particular piece of information.
Delivery services operate in a similar way. They don't open envelopes or boxes in order to make value judgments about the materials their customers are mailing. Their business is delivering packages, not investigating crimes.
Internet and phone service can be used to transmit child porn, communist propaganda, and terrorist messages, but ISPs and telcos don't try to prevent it or shut themselves down because such communication is possible over their networks.
Private homes allow people to do bad things secure inside walls of privacy. We don't condemn communities when they don't allow government surveillance inside private residences. We accept that bad things will happen inevitably, and giving up our rights and quality of life to prevent them is a fool's bargain.
Many people in today's world find the constant encroachment by governments into individual privacy disturbing. We believe, as did enlightenment thinkers centuries ago, that the ability to anonymously communicate is critical to preserve true freedom of speech. We accept that anonymity, like many other things in society, can be used for bad ends, but we believe that it is an inseparable part of liberty.
There is always one of you per Freenet discussion.
I've used Freenet off and on for a number of years and I don't see much churn in the number of free sites. The most active free sites tend to be FLOGs (Blogs on Freenet). Many of the sites in Freenet have been there since what seems like the beginning of time. There are new ones added (like someone mentioned the Diebold files), but they tend to not be kiddie porn.
Here's an idea... run a node, access the non-kiddie porn content, post your own content, and use the network. The network is changed by observing it, so by accessing non-kiddie porn, you are encouraging it to be replicated across the network, while also making the kiddie porn hard to find.
Andrew
So this means that all this time people thought they were safe and now to be safe you have to pick who you share with?
How the hell is that going to happen? So you get on a e-mail list and find some "buddies" to share with. How do you know who they are? Are they "enforcers" or spys? How do you know?
Then you find a group of people who are sharing, how do you know there ain't a spy among them?
Then you have only a few people to share with and since everyone is splitting off the main sharing network, who gives a crap if this thing can "scale"? There's nothing to scale to, just 10 people sharing in a group, big deal.
Why not just use SFTP with your "trusted friends"????
This is the most lame thing I have ever seen in P2P!
The old way it worked was better, and more safe why the hell change it?
What happened? That's the important news!
What's wrong with things like "MUTE" P2P ? http://www.planetpeer.de/wiki/index.php
Either you don't get it, or you are delibrately twisting the point. What the previous poster was saying is that you cannot publish claims about a person without proof. You can make a statement like you do not support a politician due to his beliefs, but you cannot write that you do not support a politician because you know that he is involved in drug smuggling, unless you have proof. If you do publish an allegation without having proof, you can be sued for libel.
My mom never taught me to sign.
All I have to do is expose myself to child porn? Sign me up! *eyeroll*
"You can be sued,"
The creator of Freenet bringing forward a libel suit. Now that's irony!
Child pornography and terrorism are the only two uses for Freenet so far discussed in this topic. Genuine preocupations for citizens of the democratic western world, to be sure, yet these things will happen whether Freenet exists or not. Freenet is not the problem, nor a problem per se. Any infrastructure can and will be misused so long as we attack a symptom and not the problem. Furthermore, you cannot shut down supply, no matter how hard you try. What you can attempt is to change the demands of the market, and let's be realistic, as long as there are human beings on this universe, there will always be a certain percentage of deviations from the "established norm".
Here's an example in which infrastructure is crucial - Tons of cocaine and pot make their way up the American continent on a daily basis, all the way up to Canada. If the US government decided to approach the problem from the same viewpoints I'm reading in this topic, their solution could be to try to shut down all incoming traffic into the country, or create highway checkpoints at regular intervals, soviet-bloc style, or even to shut down the highways altogether.
Which brings me to my point, shedding light on a positive aspect of Freenet, such as being a way for citizens of repressive governments to freely communicate with each other, giving them a fighting chance to organize themselves into a resistance. China comes immediately to mind, or Uzbekistan. Knowledge is power, communication its' medium, Freenet one of its' tools.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
How is this different from just trading files with friends and friends-of-friends using sftp?
(I'm probably repeating things that have already been said, but I need to say my piece.)
Certain people are going to do unsavory things to children regardless of whether or not they have an audience. I have always failed to see the extra harm done through dissemination of such material. Would you rather that no evidence be distributed, so that the children suffer in silence? Certainly the extra indignity is insignificant in comparison to the original act.
Truly, I do not understand. Do you somehow think that the urge to abuse children is somehow viral, and that child pornography will "infect" others?
Any way I look at it, all objections to Freenet seem to boil down to one of two things:
1. "By golly, we have to do something about all of this child pr0n!"
2. "I don't want to get in trouble with the authorities."
The problem with #1 is that there isn't anything you really can do about it, and any symbolic act has the effect of harming legitimate use. IANAL, but I think that since, by probability, there isn't necessarily anything illegal flowing through your node, you have plausible deniability. As long as you run it on computers for which you have permission to use in this way, it's unlikely that you will get in any trouble.
If you don't want to participate, then that's fine with me, but make sure that you remember that convincing others not to use Freenet provides no viable benefit to children under abuse and harms legitimate attempts to exercise free speech.
Censorship is censorship. Whether it's from the government, the community, whatever, it's still someone having the ability to filter what you want to say because they disagree with it. You did the right thing by ceasing to run your node, since you did not want to use your resources to fund something with which you do not agree. Freenet requires you accept that the freedom of speech and expression is absolute, and as such there will be things distributed that you do not like. I don't like child pornography, and I think it's horrible and wrong. Though, some people feel the same way about dissident speech (i.e., speaking out against Bush and friends), sexual discussions of any nature (especially health topics), etc. You can't filter one without having the ability to filter all.
Let's all be totally clear on this: Clarke has an absolute belief in free speech, including child pornography. Not only does he believe that government shouldn't be able to regulate any kind of speech, including child pornography, but he is actively helping people to distribute child pornography, and so are you if you run a Freenet node, whether you know it or not.
No, Clarke isn't *actively* helping to spread this any more than any other material. That's just how the protocol work. The eMule devs aren't actively helping to spread pirated material, Pirate Bay isn't actively helping to spread the latest DVD-R movies. They're just providing the service; it's people using it that spread the material.
And why the heck do you feel a need to mention "child pornography" at every chance you get? To make your point more clear? To show that you're against total free speech? Obviously, child porn is one of the things that appear on a network without censorship or easy tracking. Now, what do you think should be done with it while preserving anonymity? Try answering that instead of just throwing shit on the founder who just developed the purely technical service.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
It only "encourages" it like it encourages Chinese people to make a web site about their oppressive government. Anonymity. It's a double edged sword. Blocking child porn and banning such users would imply a need for Freenet to not be anonymous and the project could just as well be ended.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
That of course is a logical fallacy.
The killing is done by armies, controlled by governments, controlled by politicians, aided by media, elected by citizens (at least in a democratic state), and all of it financed by taxation/consumer-spending/lobbying/what-not.
But because you are likely an authority and taxation hater, you chose the government's financing as the point to fixate upon. Ignoring the fact that any of the above factors (and probably many more) are all links in the chain leading to "killing people" and this process can be intrerrupted at any of these points. Furthermore, some of these points are in fact essential, as -- for example -- if the defense of a country is removed, or governance eliminated, external attackers or plain internal thugish opportunists would quickly do the "killing of people" for gratis. The difference being that it would be the hapless libertarians quickly learning the true meaning of their success in the cross-hairs of invading barbarians or in the slave-trade pens of warlords.
All Clarke has to do is demonstrate that Freenet has legitimate uses other than child porn -- which it most certainly has -- and you're in deep doo-doo.
Interesting logic: I must support Ian Clarke and his ideals of absolute freedom of speech, otherwise he might sue me for saying bad things about him?
No, but claiming false things about him can put you into trouble.
Like saying he's actively spreading CP.
No, because child pornography isn't the killer app of AOL, but it is the killer app of Freenet.
So how does that make Clarke actively spreading child porn?
here and here
Those just show that he believe in freedom, and explains that CP can come as part of this, and that just because of this, his entire network shouldn't be taken down. Ask any ISP owner and you'll get the same answer. Finally, he gives a suggestion on how to limit the spread of CP. Again, how does this show that Clarke is an active distributor of CP? He just designed the net. That's all we know.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The level of risk of harming children is extremely high, and the level of justification is extremely low.
I'm not sure that assertion is valid. Freenet enables child porn to be distributed, but it has no impact on its production. With or without Freenet, there are going to be sickos abusing children. I sincerely doubt Freenet has caused a single child to be abused.
What Freenet does is allow perverts to get their hands on child porn. While obviously not good, I don't think the distribution of material is as bad as the act of making the material. I think allowing one child to be abused for the sake of allowing the oppressed to speak would be a bad bargain. But allowing distribution of images of child abuse in exchange for allowing the oppressed to speak...that's a much closer call.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
>> [Because of Java] Freenet is one RAM and CPU-hungry beast.
The main criticisms thrown at Java (overheads and speed) always seem to miss the key matter entirely, as far as I am concerned. because those issues can be fixed, whereas others can't.
Execution overheads can always be reduced and JIT performance can always be improved, and the effect of VM overheads on overall speed becomes ever less significant anyway as our hardware becomes more capable. But there are two things that are getting worse, not better.
Those two things are Java bloat and hence complexity, and Java non-portability.
Java growth is monotonic -- there is never any reduction in its footprint, only increase, because developers usually add code and very rarely eliminate whole sections of it. What used to be a fairly concise VM with a few auxiliary libraries is now an extremely large and hairy monster. And with size comes complexity, and with complexity come continual maintenance, latent bugs, and insecurities. Java has become a liability instead of an asset as a side effect of its unstoppable growth.
And secondly, the "write once, run anywhere" paradigm has failed utterly and turned into a "write once, run only in the few places where gurus have waved magic garlic". Why this is so I have no idea, since the VM is 100% portable in theory. What's probably happened is that the extreme mess of libraries make simple all-inclusive installation pretty much impossible, and the design is unhelpful in that it doesn't bother to search for missing bits in default locations, but I'm speculating about that.
Whatever the reasons, throughout the many years since Java hit the scene (I go back to the dawn of time in OO), Java has managed to work on perhaps 10% of the many dozens of highly varied Unix-type boxes that I have owned or worked on. This contrasts with 100% of those boxes running C/C++, Perl, Python, Tcl, Lua, etc etc. All modern languages seem to work pretty much everywhere, with one exception -- Java. This is very wierd, for a language which is supposed to run anywhere.
So that's my beef with Java, a great pity because gramatically and in concept the language is terrific. Sadly, neither of those two problems will go away, because (i) developers will never shrink the system (that's simply not done), and (ii) Java fanboys simply refuse to believe that their beloved system has extremely poor portability in practice.
So, for me Java is in dead end street, unfortunately. And it's not that I don't like it, quite the opposite. It's simply too big and too selective in where it chooses to run.
As many have already pointed out, albait semi-coherently, this particular aspect of Freenet is highly questionable. The problem is that in any of these oppressive regimes, the very existence of encrypted traffic in/out of your computer is grounds for imprisonment. China for example has the capability to analyse packets at the ISP level thanks to major work done for them by Cisco, who loves money far more then any of our supposedly cherished principles. Therefore Freenet, be it "dark" or "light" net, is fundamentally dangerous and unuseable in those places. Whats worse, Ian and other Freenet enthusiasts seems to actively mislead less-technically savvy potential Freenet users into a false sense of security. Now combine this with the fact that Freenet's present major, so called "killer" application is child porn, and the fact that the "dark" mode is in fact more suitable for closely-knit pedophile rings operating in western countries, where prosecutors are burdened with a need for warrants and the like, and where running arbitrary encryption software is not banned, and you can see why very many people remain skeptical, to say the least, of the activities of Ian and his helpers and the way in which they (misre)present themselves as champions of Liberty and defenders of the downtrotten.
There is also Nodezilla as a very promising anynmous network (grid oriented). It offers file sharing but also distributed storrage, photo sharing, RTP streams relaying.
http://www.nodezilla.net/
You, sir, do not understand how Freenet works. Your node is constantly caching data from the freenet network. Yes, your theory is correct during the first, oh, 15 minutes of using freenet.. but no one can really find your node since no other nodes know you exist nor have a cache of the data on your node. After a week of caching data, anyone monitoring your network will have no clue if you are hosting any illicit data or if you are caching data from another node.
Additionally, there is no law you are breaking by allowing illicit data to pass since you have no idea that such data is passing through your node. However, I would not be surprised for a jury to rule against you, should a case ever be brought up, considering how 80% of america doesn't feel anything wrong was done during the NSA wiretaping scandal. But I digress....
I think the folks jumping on top of parent need to read this line again and take a deep breath. Yeah, I agree, Freenet wouldn't be necessarily a bad thing if it just happened to let in a little child porn around the edges while enabling a massively social benefit, like the postal service or the Internet does. Heck, I'm a regular defender of Bittorrent because it has significant non-infringing uses (Linux distros, WoW patches, etc) even though I know the use the technology is primarily put to is copyright infringement. But Freenet doesn't have just a little child pornography. It doesn't have even a mere majority of child pornography. As it is currently being employed, Freenet has a theoretical capability as a dissident-speech-protecting network dipping its toes in the edges of a flowing river of child pornography. I know the creator probably didn't intend for that to happen. Nobel had some quixotic dreams about dynamite being used primarily for mining. Zyklon B was an agricultural pesticide. Even if you support mining and bug-free crops it does not imply that dynamite and Zyklon B are, on balance, socially beneficial inventions.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I've just finished setting up the new server, some quick specs: 3.2ghz p4, 100mbps uplink, 1.2TB datastore, 4gb ram
Once you've finished setting up your node, get on irc.freenode.net #TekNet (#Freenet is also a good idea). Paste your key url in the channel and it should be parsed & added automatically.
Server key is in the channel topic, please note that this node is publically accepting all keys, so therefor is no longer a "darknet"
At the time of posting, it currently has accrued approximately 40 active links, which is the most seen so far tonight for a node.
Its all dialup speeds, and anyway, freenet is notorious for its "illicit" content. Not for me.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
"If it's distributed for free on FreeNet, that means fewer and fewer people paying for it"
And that's a good thing? The best way to get a prosecution is if someone IS paying to view/download. If they have to key in their credit card details and make a payment they can no longer use the excuse that they were directed to the site in error.
"After a week of caching data, anyone monitoring your network will have no clue if you are hosting any illicit data or if you are caching data from another node."
Everything on Freenet has a timestamp. If a wiretap shows your node pushing an original key with a timestamp newer than when the wiretap started, you're the source. They may not be able to pin older material on you (depending on how much they know about your cache size), but if you continue to put new material on (i. e. continue to molest children), a wiretap will catch you.
The FAQ even alludes to this.
"However, I would not be surprised for a jury to rule against you, should a case ever be brought up"
That's what appeals are for.
Start your own net with your friends and their own friends and so on.
For more information see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend-to-friend
You know, you Java proponents have been saying those exact words since the 90's. And you've constantly refered to becnhmarks. Still, java apps runs slowly for the most part, hogs the memory - and most importantly, it doesn't play nice with any other application running.
Those benchmarks are most likely heavily tuned setups with nothing else running at the same time. Not a real world scenario at all (in the real world, it's easy to observe that it's all lies, or at least just statistics).
But to each his own. Most Java dudes have dug themselves in too deep in "Java is the best and faster than C++" that they can never change their mind or even try something else at least to broaden their views. Have fun. I think it's narrowminded to say the least.
The comment that Freenet is largely used for distributing child pornography...
Is probably true, there are very few people who really need this kind of protection at the moment and it's disturbing but one of these groups is child pornographers.
Slashbots think that the parent poster is commiting a logical fallicy of some form (likely the slippery slope form) when in fact he is perfectly correct.
What he isn't taking into account is that these nets need to be running and populated when censorship does occur so that everyone involved with them can't be labelled a traitor.
As far as child pornography and mitigating circumstances, exposure to child pornography does lead people to be more likely to molest children. Molesting children has pretty serious consequnces on their mental health throughout their life(partially because of the views of society towards molestation). This is something it's pretty tough to condone, I think Freenet is a good idea if we need to trade a small increase in pedophilia for a permanent venue for free speech I think that is a trade off we will need to accept.
If pedophilia grows out of hand we may need to curtail these dark nets but that too becomes a tricky proposition.
"Interesting logic: I must support Ian Clarke and his ideals of absolute freedom of speech, otherwise he might sue me for saying bad things about him?"
No, you won't get sued because you didn't support Ian Clarke. You might get sued for making libelous statements about him. It's the same as if I say: "bcrowell is a pedophile", I might get sued, not because I don't support you and your ideals of absoulte freedom of speech, but because I called you a pedophile.
I agree. Except that.. Without COMPLETE free speech, you have NO free speech (government not censoring speech).
If you read what Ian has said in the past, you'll notice that he does argue along this line of reasoning.
If you build a network that can stop child pornography, you've built a network that can censor your speech.
I'd like to take this moment to reming you that there are a coulpe of really old guys who built the ARPA net, which became the Internet, if I recall correctly. Are you as miffed with them as you with Ian? By your like of reasoning, you should "I turned off my node, deinstalled the software, and never messed with it again." since Internet (without Freenet) is used to swap child pornography (I'm going to assume this is the case; I don't have actual evidence).
Sorry for the rant; but your reasoning is very inconsistent, so I couldn't help myself.
Because he IS a pederast. I got the pictures right here from Freenet...
If it's distributed for free on FreeNet, that means fewer and fewer people paying for it, which hopefully means less child porn all-together.
Only if pornographers are motivated mainly for money.
As a Slashdot contributor, you know that some people are ready to work for no pay if they get other compensation.
I don't agree with this idea. We're not really dealing with a good here where the demand decreases as the supply decreases. The demand for pornography (of any type) is there, no matter if there is a supply or not. Without the demand for it, you'd hardly see the amount of pornography available on the internet today. If the "commercial" providers of child pornography in certain countries stop existing, pedophiles will continue swapping home made movies.
There are some who claim that pornography gives sexual gratification the user can't achieve, and there are others who claim it will make the user search for more material and perhaps (in the case of child pornography) turn the person into a predator. I'm not a psychologist, but I've read research papers where statistics indicate both. As far as I am concerned, both types of studies are usually doing statistical number juggling.
Thank god for free speech...
How about this hypothetical situation: an adult woman is raped, and the perpetrator videotapes it. About a month later over 100.000 people have downloaded that movie from the internet and "enjoyed" it. Don't you think there is something wrong with people that enjoy other peoples suffering? Don't you think people like that need (at the very least) some help to realise that what they're enjoying is just completely wrong? Now extend this hypothetical example, and replace "adult woman" with "10 year old girl".
As for freenet itself. The idea is a very sound one, however it's being abused for all sorts of purposes. Some people would argue that protecting freedom includes allowing any type of freedom, this is a filosophical matter I'll leave to anarchists and totalitarians to discuss with eachother until they turn blue. What is more interesting is the technological aspect. Freenet turns off a lot of people by the presence of child pornography, by the fact that anyone could be using any storage you add to it to store this kind of material. Technologically, such an open door policy sounds like the dream of any person who likes freedom, but legally it opens up a very large gray area I don't want to venture in.
No, Clarke isn't *actively* helping to spread this any more than any other material. That's just how the protocol work. The eMule devs aren't actively helping to spread pirated material, Pirate Bay isn't actively helping to spread the latest DVD-R movies.
Bram Cohen and BitTorrent might be a better example than Pirate Bay. The rest provide an application, and then users are responsible for how it is used. The Pirate Bay collects, sorts and verifies links to pirate material. What the Pirate Bay is doing would be illegal in many countries, what the others are doing is in general not, the Grokster case not withstanding.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Are you making the same claims [about] the creators and owners of usenet?
There is no cabal.
I give up. Yet anonther network reset. I gave up freenet a long time ago because it does nto give backwards compatibilty. The strenght of a p2p network is the number of users. This developer attitude network kills off all content reguraly and makes sure that the network stays small.
Since anonimy in freenet is archieved by hiding in the masses, by keeping the mass small, there is not as much anonimty as you would like or could archieve.
Um, wrong. To do that China or whoever would have to analyse the entropy of every packet every user sends / recieves and build up statistical correlations over time. This is not practical with current technology. The Great Firewall is sophisticated technologically yes, but does little more than filter a list of hosts and pages containing certain keywords, and doesn't even do that entirely consistently. E.g. sometimes foreign news sites that are normally banned become accessible for a while.
Freenet 0.7 uses UDP to/from random ports with no giveaway 'signature' bytes and is designed to look like streaming or network game traffic. There is still a lot of work to do before it's "dissident ready" (version 1.0+) but already it's much harder to detect than you claim. Tor and i2p are *a lot* easier to find and take action against.
What bugs me is that the only place to download this is slashdotted because its directly linked from the FreeNet page instead of proper SF mirroring.
My ability to pass on free speech is part of my free speech. Let me ntroduce you to the two things Freenet understands: 0 and 1. Please express in those terms what constitutes free speech, and what constitutes child pornography.
Freenet could not possibly make that distinction, you would have to ban it outright. But that would be prior restraint of speech. Let me quote you the Supreme Courts position on that matter in Nebraska Press Assn. v. Stuart:What else could you do? Well, you could outlaw anonymity. Here's the Supreme Court's opinion on that in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission:So in short, if you want to outlaw Freenet you had better revoke the First Amendment first. The Supreme Court has repetedly upheld the free and anonymous exchange of speech. In online terms, that translates to free and anonymous exchange of 0s and 1s. Not happy about it? Move to China.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
well with mail the sender is anonymous and the recipiant can deny all knowlage that he requested the mail...............
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Communist propaganda of course being so evil that the only possible comparison is child pornography. Goddamned fucking Yankees.
If you don't want to participate, then that's fine with me, but make sure that you remember that convincing others not to use Freenet provides no viable benefit to children under abuse and harms legitimate attempts to exercise free speech.
If Freenet works as advertised, it will make it easier for abusers to swap stories, images, techniques, etc. without being caught.
You say: Certain people are going to do unsavory things to children regardless of whether or not they have an audience. [...] Would you rather that no evidence be distributed, so that the children suffer in silence?
Suppose you are correct that the amount of child abusers does not depend on the internet being available. Then the internet has been a great thing, since it has allowed the capture of many disturbed people who post evidence of their own crimes.
Freenet would reverse this effect. It would make it harder to catch and convinct child abusers.
I didn't say child porn would stop existing entirely. I said the sheer ammount of it would decrease, as the profit motive decreases/disappears.
Yes, and yet American Idol viewers continue to walk free, and elude justice.
You're making a LOT of asumptions there. First, you're assuming they can be helped at all. Second, you're assuming they would be caught if not for Freenet (very, very unlikely, as they've done fine with low-tech means for several centuries). Finally, you're assuming that allowing sick people to watch a sick video is somehow significantly harmful to society... This has not been where the law has stood on similar issues, like pornography.
All of this not-withstanding... It's not as if freenet is making this possible for the first time. The trackable internet file-sharing of child porn hasn't lead to people getting caught, so I don't really see freenet as a change at all, except to make it more visible.
The same low-tech methods that lead to people getting caught, will continue to function. When they take in their PC to get serviced, they'll be found-out by the technichian, not by some ultra-advanced Carnivore, or other system run by the FBI.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Ain't no technological solution to a social problem.
Blaming the network for the entropy in the human soul makes all the sense of gun control laws, and every other law attempting to use external force to achieve a normative behavior.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Very... very well said.
I'm getting tired of people ignorantly giving up their rights in the name of "catching the evil doers". And of course the all mighty reasoning... "If your not doing anything illegal/evil, you should have nothing to hide."
When and why did this become acceptable logic? Do people not think ahead and picture the outcome if we as a society were able to catch anyone the second they commit a crime? The same system put in place to protect you from harm, now prevents you from ever being able to make a "mistake". A mistake defined by a governments idea of right and wrong.
Human beings evolve, grow, and better themselves by learning from their past mistakes. With complete and total freedom comes immense happiness and the birth of real tragedy. But must we all sit in detention because one kid threw something at the teacher?
Darknets is another reason why EU passed the much debated data retention act. All TCP connections (in EU) has to be logged together with the timestamps and amount of data transferred. Darknets will show upp pretty clear on such connection graphs. When some illegal information is found on a box, it is easy to trace up who the neighbouring nodes are -- and go there to search their boxes.
...
One should also note that there are much more illegal information in some of EU countries than kiddie prn:
- possession of pirated software/music/movies is illegal in some countries
- political/historical discussions like contesting the accepted extent of WWII holocaust
-
Any entity which can tap your ISP's next-hop router can tell if you're running Freenet due to the large quantity of encrypted traffic flowing in and out.
If we're talking about, say, a citizen of an oppressive regime attempting to communicate secretly over the internet, it is a fair assumption that the said regime can tap all the citizen's traffic through their ISP (who will co-operate, or they will lose their ISP licence).
nt
But if no one pays for it the likelyhood of it being produced is a lot less. People won't make it if it won't sell. Well... normally that's how things work... I guess for child pornography that line of reasoning may fly out the window cause you're dealing with people who get off on abusing children.
Bungo!
Great. We're already paying cops to sit on their ass in a cube all day pretending to be 13-year-old girls. Now we're going to pay for them to brag about their dynamite movie/music/program libraries? Sounds like a painfully banal job all day every day.
It performs well and is actually pretty usable for downloading files. Oh, and it's had this particular feature for at least 6 months. http://www.gnunet.org/.
I am trolling
There is no such thing as a 'hidden' network. Not to your ISP, not to your legal system, and not to your government. Packets are packets and that is that. Routers see them, switches see them and traffic sniffing sees them. This whole 'dark' sup3rs3ckr3t n3tw0rk sounds like a bunch of baloney to me. The only way you can possibly get around any problems with getting busted for pirating music/software on p2p is to meet in a dark alley somewhere and swap cds. Even then, you'll probably IM on yahoo to meet and get busted anyway.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Everything on Freenet has a timestamp. If a wiretap shows your node pushing an original key with a timestamp newer than when the wiretap started, you're the source.
Say again? Bulk data keys (CHK) come directly from a hash of the source, no timestamp involved. Some Freesites have a rotating key system (really stupid) which means new keys must be inserted to keep a site alive which could sorta be what you're talking about. but I think these have pretty much died out and even so the timestamps could be forged. All current Freesites I know of use static SSKs. These are signed (unlike CHKs) but don't contain a timestamp. "Userspace" timestamps like those in Frost are meaningless. I could set my computer's clock to next week and post "in next week".
As for the rest, your basic wiretap would show an encrypted connection, nothing more. Maybe if you're talking about some wiretap/poison node combination you could get somewhere. In fact, forget the wiretap. If I got a node talking to your node, I have a lot better chance of making a statistical case (enough for "reasonable suspicion and a search warrant) than a wiretap.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Um, China and other nations (not "Western Liberal Democracies (sic)") are the only ones that have a need for Freenet?
a nscript&dte=2005-06-22&headlineid=981
http://news.sbs.com.au/dateline/index.php?page=tr
What Australians put up with lately. No, it's not "communist literature." It's about illegal war-mongering and the distortion of intelligence to justify the whole Iraq thing.
The government's PSYOP crews have done a spectacular job brainwashing sheep as well as slashbots that "if you've got nothing to hide then you don't need Freenet" and "if you like Freenet, you're a child pr0n consumer" or whatever. Good work, dickheads.
We need actually have a need for Freenet _now_, and it doesn't involve hiding our stashes of kiddy pr0n or terrorist plots.
Does anyone else get that "gut reaction" from Freenet? I don't mean that it's the first thing you see. I can't even back this up with evidence (admittedly, I haven't been trying), but for some reason, p2p seems like an illegitimate way of getting stuff you would find at best buy, or a legitimate way of getting Linux distros...While Freenet, with all its talk of freedom, privacy, and the measures taken to ensure it, somehow comes off as a place you go for stuff too obsene for p2p.
Please don't mod me flamebait on this...It's a serious question. Does anyone else have the initial instinct that Freenet is a place to go for things that the FBI would arrest you for, if you did them on bittorrent? Something about the network...I think it's that it performs poorly (due to encryption), makes content difficult to search for (when searching by name), and that anonimity is the only selling point...but something about the network creeps me out.
It's much more efficient to perform a man-in-the-middle attack. The you can let the paedophiles and terrorists brag to each other while you sit quietly in the middle and collect evidence. ;-)
You can send your $50 to the Croquet project...a P2P, fully interactive, 3D metaverse written in Squeak Smalltalk with an opensource license and a working prototype.
I have a solution. I think it would be great to start posting snuff films on freenet. I really really want to watch people being murdered. I've gotten my fill of 2 year olds sucking cock. Now I want to see people getting killed. Freedom of speach is so much more important then the freedom of others to live.
This place our dungeon, not our safe retreat
Beyond his potent arm, to live exempt
From Heaven's high jurisdiction, in new league
Banded against his throne, but to remain
In strictest bondage, though thus far removed,
Under th' inevitable curb, reserved
His captive multitude.
Paradise Lost, Book II, Lines 317-323
Fighting from our dark places isn't really going to win this battle for Freedom. I appreciate what Freenet is doing. It's securing our fallback position. We need that, but we need more a willingness on the part of our citizenry to take the fight to the day-lit streets of the Mall in Washington D.C.
I'd rather be free by liberty and than free by obscurity.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/linux.html
-Tom
In this new Freenet, network connections only pass through a select few friends, but the routing layer hides this - files are globally available, as they used to be. You've misunderstood the protocol design.
Also, you've even misunderstood the "select few friends" thing. It's not that you can exclude people. It's that you have to actively include people - and you have to have their permission first.
An analogy would be: passing messages between people by telling a trusted friend, he tells his trusted friend, and so on until it reaches the destination.
There's child pornography on the internet. PEOPLE STOP USING INTERNET!
At what point does something stop being speech? If I say I want to gas a bus full of college kids that is free speech. If I film myself gasing a bus full of college kids that is also free speech? Yelling fire in a theater free speech? I think there are some things more important then freedom of speech. Like the right to not grow up with a man's cock in your ass.
I personally dont see why we need the ability to host video and pictures. Text is enough to get 'dangerous' messages across. I would support a text only service like this where I can not control what content I store. I will not directly or indirectly store child porn on my computer. I do not fee that child porn is speech. I feel that it is a record of one person harming another person. They are not doing it to inform us or make a point. I belive it stops being speech when it affects people who have no ablity to defend themselves. You should be allowed to express yourself, but I personally feel there is a limit. That limit is when you PHYSICALLY harm other people. Then its not free speech in my eyes, its just a person being a sick sadistic dick. If thats free speech, I'm all in favor of censorship.
Not true. He also compared it to terrorism.
I believe that people who molest children are ill in their head, I mean, for the majority of us, if we look at a young girl, we are not attracted to them at all, its just one of those things...your just not at all. So if someone is, then surly their is something wrong with them. The majority of us are not, so if their is a small number who are, then I guess there must be something wrong with them.
So, that being said, if you do start looking at CP and if you do have this tendency in your head then I think this tendency will "come out" and not "be created" as some people are stating. If you look at CP to start with...then their must be something in your head urging you to. If any of us who are not like this come across a link for CP then we don't click on it do we...as we know what we will see the other side. So to start off, you need to have something in your head to push you to start looking at this material.
So all in all, I think its something that is their...Some people are molesters because it has happened to them, or some are (I think the term is circumstantial paedophiles) where they are not actually pedo's just a traumatic event pushes them to do this, or I believe its just something that's in their brain that only effects a small proportion of people. So in closing, I think that looking at CP is not making people be molesters or doing that kind of thing, just doing something that they like all along. Also if looking at CP makes people molesters, then what about people who do it without ever looking at CP. Think back to Shakespeare times, girls used to marry and such like at very young ages. I think it was in Hamlet the wife back then would have been 14 or something, I don't know enough about Shakespeare to be 100%, just something I remember my English teacher telling me
Visit My Blog at http://spaces.msn.com/members/chrisharries
No, the point is that dissidents can't be tracked. If they can't be read, it's as useless as if they didn't exist.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
he is actively helping people to distribute child pornography
For your next act you should rant about how Tim Berners-Lee is actually in league with the phishers and scam artists who run websites on the internet. Or how Bram Cohen is personally sharing every song, book, game, and movie ever created, all at the same time.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
It's not "they put in the ability to host video/images". It's "they put in the ability to host data." Bits are bits, and if Clarke built it Usenet-style, only explicitly supporting text, people would use some kind of yenc-type system to host whatever they wanted.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
That's the problem. From what I hear, Freenet has little to offer if you're not looking for ch!ld pr0n, or warez.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Like, gnarly, Dude!
Yes, thank you. :) I knew it was wrong, but I was tired and wanted to go to bed, so I was like, "eh, screw it."
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Since the rights of the unborn (read: abortion) has become the ultimate litmus-test in meatspace, has kiddy porn become the Internet equivalent?
Of course that is a rhetorical question, and the answer is obvously a resounding "yes". So, from this point forward, in the spirit of intellectual honesty, let us all agree that any discussion of privacy, freedom of speech or anonymity on the Internet shall descend into a polarized debate over the evils of child pornography. Terrorism and illicit file sharing came in second and third, respectively.
You have officially "gotten the memo".
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
The problem is, if everyone except the child pornographers do that, then you have handed them a more substantial percentage of Freenet than they might otherwise have. It's better to join Freenet and contribute non child pornography to it than it is to simply ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist. It's sort of like voting with your data and your preferences. If you don't like politicians and therefore do not participate in a democracy, you certainly can't effect any change, even changes you believe in. I'm not saying you can eradicate the child porn by being a Freenet node, but what you CAN do is decrease the percentage of child porn data that exists on Freenet as compared to the total overall data. Only by participating in a non child porn way can you hope to effect such change. You do have to accept the evil with the good when it comes to absolute freedom, but you have the power to make the AMOUNT of good greater in proportion to the amount of evil. Or you can stay disconnected and thereby help increase the proportion of evil.
I believe the entire user-base of child pornography gets off on abusing children. It's kind of the whole point.
If you'd take off your racist glasses (and trolling gloves) for a second you'd notice I didn't make a comparison. I used child porn, terrorist messages, and communist propaganda as examples of speech targeted for censorship in the past or present.
So, what do you have to hide, anonymous coward?
That is self-contradictory, game traffic by definition uses known signatures. All it takes to detect these "illicit" transmissions is to discard all known approved game/commercial packet types and traffic patterns and what remains must be the dissident communications.
There is still a lot of work to do before it's "dissident ready" (version 1.0+) but already it's much harder to detect than you claim.
Not really, you are simply banking on the Chinese/[insert your dictator here] being incompetent. That is not exactly a reliable strategy.
Tor and i2p are *a lot* easier to find and take action against.
Ah yes, when faced with criticism of potentially putting people in jail for depending on a half-assed "secure" communication method Ian has concocted, the only valid defense is "but the other guys will get your ass in front of the firing squad for sure!". It apparently never occured to you and those promoting Tor and i2p that the Internet, although "cool" and "awesome" and "l33t" is not a safe envrionment for political dissidency in totalitarian states, no matter what "neato" (but utterly and ludicrously dangerous) software you concoct to pretend otherwise.
I hope any and all "dissidents" consider carefully what the Freenet advocates are saying and stay away from this thing as far as away as possible. It's got "a visit to the re-education camp" written all over it.
However, if you are a pedophile, things look much more promising, as you are likely living in a western democracy, where no-one has the legal authority (save maybe Bush's anti-terrorist task forces) to spy on such traffic without a court order and you are not put in danger (at least yet) by mere presence of such traffic.
"Interesting logic: I must support Ian Clarke and his ideals of absolute freedom of speech, otherwise he might sue me for saying bad things about him?"
No, what I'm saying is if you are going to say that someone is trafficking in child pornography, which is what you said , you damn well better have proof. Otherwise, quit cavalierly claiming that someone is doing such. It just tells people that you don't take child porn seriously, if you are willing to willy-nilly claim that someone is traficking it.
Quit trying to ruin this man's life and reputation.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
You know, one way to generate more funds is to go back and actually email thank-yous to the people who sent you PayPal funds over the years.
*miffed*
Snuff films, i.e. filmed murders arranged for commercial distribution, are an urban legend thought up by authoritarians arguing for censorship -- like you.
Which reminds me, if the RIAA and MPAA claim that unrestricted p2p is depriving them of revenue and killing music and movies, then why wouldn't Freenet destroy the business model of child pornographers by removing the scarcity they rely on to stay in business?
I wish people realized how things are ordered on /. so when they look at the 7th comment, posted in the reply to the 5th comment, they don't already thing it's redundent because of the 150th through 180th.
Then again I used to work for the government, I know that they could program something like this, but it would be clunky, crash constantly, no one would use it, and only work running under ASAS-L or CHIMS, which is always the first thing to get deleted off the system by the local techs. (always loved that we would delete over half the cost of these overpriced computers the first day we got them).
YouStockIt - Education through Unorthodox Methods
For the stupid mods who didn't get it and modded parent -1 Troll, what parent did was showing that if you give someone the power to block out a certain kind of content you're aslo giving him the power to block anything else, like communist literature (of nazi literature or whatever). If you build a network that guarantees perfect freedom of speech you can't build into it any censorship mechanism.
I would think that you not being able to see the original poster's point suggests a huge deficit in imagination... however, I know that can't possibly be true because you managed to invent "racist glasses" for me whole-cloth.
This program is pretty much useless so long as it depends on the java vm which is non-free and closed source. You can only be as secure and anonymous as Sun wants you to be.
Hi, just a quick question. Does it consume 300 Mb of virtual memory or resident memory? Can you check ps or top? Or are you running freenet on windows? Oh, and which JVM do you use? Sun? IBM? GIJ?
Some VMs have a habbit of mmaping huge gobs of ram (Sun's JVM v1.5 for AMD64 linux takes up ~1.7gb of VIRTUAL memory). This memmory is not really consumed, it is just shown in various diagnostic tools.
I tried running java apps and checking how much free memory got decreased. An app with default memory settings uses ~80-120 mb RAM. Most of it is JVM overhead/libraries/etc. Apps run with 64 mb of heap maximum by default, so they should not be able to grow to 300 mb real usage, unless freenet does start java with -XmxLOTSmb switches.
--Coder
NO CARRIER
I agree with you, for the most part. However, I've thought about this particular point a bit and I think I might be able to shed some light on it.
Most programming languages are themselves written in C (or C++ in a few cases). Java, Perl, Python, and Tcl all fit this model. Thus, none of these languages can be ported to a platform until there is a working C compiler for the platform; as far as the basic functionality of the language is concerned, no other language is more portable than C for that reason. Furthermore, most of these languages (with the notable exception of Java) rely on the POSIX standards for the OS interface on most platforms. Porting them to another platform is trivial if that platform is POSIX-compliant. Thus, most of these language run on most UNIX platforms automatically. (Windows support is more difficult, but that's only one extra platform.)
Java, on the other hand, has its own "virtual machine" specification, separate from the POSIX standards, and in some places in conflict with them. Furthermore, the JIT features require that a complete machine-language optimizing compiler be created for each hardware architecture. Thus, the effort of porting the Java JIT runtime to a new platform, even a POSIX-compliant one, is greater than the effort of porting the C compiler itself. Add to that the cost of building new, optimized, low-level implementations of the system libraries and you have the perfect recipe for a porting nightmare. In short, on UNIX platforms, Java will never be as portable as C (or any POSIX/C interpreted language).
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
unlike regular porn, child porn and abuse is intrinsecally tied up with real-life networks, so it's possible for someone to infiltrate them like they've been always doing. In this I see no difference between using a darknet and not using it. Before the internet the distribution channels were always private and secret. Plus, another reason it doesn't get distributed widely is that a price must be paid.
In any case, we should fight so that freedom of speech does NOT require darknets to work. Darknets should be necessary to work in opressive governments, but we need to get to the root, too.
This becomes a complex ethical problem - what must we do so that our actions to protect our freedom (of speech) won't benefit criminals, too?
You forget that child pornography is not just an ungodly perversion, it is also a fully commercialized illegal INDUSTRY.
In addition to the producers (those you are referring to) there are also consumers. It's a typical supply-demand scheme and providing means for secure distribution does one thing only - facilitates their trade.
If you were not running anonymizing node on your box, some asshole would've not been able to download more 'material' and this would've not caused the supplier to increase its volume. Ie to rape another child.
Comprende ?
3.243F6A8885A308D313
I _can_ kill a person.
I think you are confusing Freedom with impunity.
They are neither contingent nor corollary. Many very smart people would argue that they are often mutually exclusive...not least in so far as your freedom ends at my fist.
And don't forget those bodily fluids !
Actually my gut reaction to Freenet was fantastic - I don't want anyone monitoring my communications, other than the intended recipients.
I don't care to let them know what I'm reading, doing, looking at, or thinking. I don't want them to know who my friends, associates or business partners are.
Here in Canada we have the RCMP, CSIS and others. I don't worry about them in the Canadian legal context, but I do in an international legal context. There have been recent cases of the rendition of Canadians to some not so nice places, which appears to be as a result of helpful Canadian intelligence/police agencies notifying US counterparts that a traveller needed questioning because of someone they had met in passing - and off to Syria they were shipped.
Maybe it won't happen to you, but how well do you know your friends of friends of friends?
If I could browse, email, send and view files completely anonymously, I'd personally feel much safer.
Just my gut reaction, but I can appreciate yours as well.
I don't think you understand libel AT ALL. At the very least, the original poster would have to publish false information about someone which he knows is false (this is helpfully written in the Wikipedia link you posted). His assertion (which is an opinion, incidentally, and not a statement of fact) is that building an encrypted, anonymous network on which child pornography may or may not be distributed is tantamount to "actively helping people to distribute child pornography" - an assertion which you may or may not agree with, but not one which is, in my opinion, libelous in any remote sense.
I am kind of surprised and disgusted that you chose a forum that is essentially about FREEDOM OF SPEECH to label an opinion which disagrees with yours as LIBEL. Nice job, pal.
Would you go so far as allowing such text to be sent electronically, or would you hold us to using stone tablets brought down from mountains?
Ubuntu 5.04 Sun Java 5 rev 4 downloaded, sudo tar -xzf into /usr/local attempted the install under sudo and got
... in links or opera
Detected freenet-ext.jar
Detected freenet.jar
Starting Freenet now: Command line: java -Xmx128m freenet.node.Main
Done
and got
nice: java: No such file or director
no go to http:/// 127
I used Freenet for a couple of weeks, and ditched it specifically because of the pedophile issue. I am 100% on board with the theoretical arguments behind Freenet, and am willing to accept that the price of freedom may be existance of materials I find horrible. HOWEVER, the mere existance of kiddie porn on Freenot is not what I have a problem with. My problem is that the owners of the largest Freenet directory sites go out of their way to link to and promote kiddie porn freesites.
They seem to view this as being their "duty" to freedom... but I have yet to hear a REMOTELY credible argument for why acceptance of a negative thing requires you voluntarily going out of your way to promote that thing. The thought of data packets that I wouldn't like running through my computer? I can live with that. The thought of having my application direct you by default to sites which deliberately link to the stuff and make it easy to find? You're nuts.
If you read the wikipedia article carefully, you will read that:
" According to the American and English Encyclopedia of Law, a libel is a malicious defamation expressed either by writing or printing or by signs, pictures, effigies or the like; tending to blacken the memory of one who is dead, or to impeach the honesty, integrity, virtue or reputation, or to publish the natural or alleged defects of one who is alive, thereby exposing him to public hatred, contempt, ridicule or obloquy; or to cause him to be avoided or shunned or to injure him in his office, business or occupation. [Emphasis mine]
Notice that the above definition does not say anything about truthfulness or knowledge of truthfulness. The article goes on to say:
"In many, though not all, legal systems, statements presented as fact must be false to be defamatory."
So you are wrong. Libel need not be presented as fact.
Leaving the above point aside, let's look at what the original poster said:
"[Ian Clarke] is actively helping people to distribute child pornography"
This is a statement of fact. A statement of opinion is "Ian Clarke is a dork" or "I hate Ian Clarke". Saying that Ian Clarke is actually doing something is a statement of fact.
Parent said that Ian Clarke was helping people distribute child porn; this was presented as fact. He didn't say "In my opinion..." or "It seems to me that..." or even "I think". He simply said "He is actively helping people to distribute child pornography". This is a statement of fact.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Also similar to Internet vs. Web, you can write your own clients for Freenet (for the Freenet protocol). You're not limited to what the developers have provided for you out of the box.
0.7 will, if I understand things correctly, support almost exactly the scenario you describe (queuing downloads within the main Freenet program itself). The spidering part you'll have to write yourself though. Or...
(And parent got modded "Insightful" for what amounts to "Internet == Web"? Yikes.)
Please finish reading your link:
Almost all legal systems, including those of the United States, Scotland, and England and Wales, require in some situations that the subject of the communication prove, in a civil court, that the defendant made the statement with "malice", meaning either believing it was false or with "reckless disregard" for whether it was false.
The original poster made a connection between creating a system on which it is possible to distribute child pornography and actively aiding the distribution of child pornography. He made this statement believing the entire time that it is true. It is a statement of opinion because others may feel that the two are not analagous; however THIS GUY DOES and is allowed to say so under reasonable definitions of libel.
People have the right to be left alone.
More power to the FreeNet
More power to the People
"The original poster made a connection between creating a system on which it is possible to distribute child pornography and actively aiding the distribution of child pornography. "
Okay, I will grant you that that's what the original poster said. Let me show you why it's ridiculous:
If creating a system on which it is possible to distribute child pornography is the same as actively aiding the distribution of child pornography, then the creators of usenet, AOL, and MySpace -- heck, even the rest of the internet and the post office -- are actively aiding the distribution of child pornography. After all, it is possible in all of the systems I listed above to distribute child pornography. And we said ealier that if you create such as system, doing so is the same as actively aiding the distribution of child pornography.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Just a note:
I was part of a WASTE darknet for two years. We regularly had up to 250 users and over 8 terabytes being shared without any problems, so it is scalable at least to some extent.
You know what? I re-read the original posts and nowhere does the original poster "ma[k]e a connection between creating a system on which it is possible to distribute child pornography and actively aiding the distribution of child pornography". You are misrepresenting the convesation.
The post that stared the thread from Heinous Jay simply says that "Now I can propogate my terrorism plans more efficiently, all while finding exciting new sources of kiddy porn."
In reply, bcromwell made this post. Nowhere in either of these posts do the posters mention Ian Clarke as the creator or developer of the freenet. The first and only reference to Ian Clarke is this:
"Let's all be totally clear on this: Clarke has an absolute belief in free speech, including child pornography. Not only does he believe that government shouldn't be able to regulate any kind of speech, including child pornography, but he is actively helping people to distribute child pornography, and so are you if you run a Freenet node, whether you know it or not."
Also, contrary this post of yours, nowhere is the connection made "between creating a system on which it is possible to distribute child pornography and actively aiding the distribution of child pornography." It simply doesn't appear anywhere in this thread.
So all we hear from bcromwell about Ian Clarke is that
- Clarke has an absolute belief in free speech, including child pornography.
- he believes that government shouldn't be able to regulate any kind of speech, including child pornography,
- "he is actively helping people to distribute child pornography"
Bcromwell does not say anywhere, in any post in this thread that Ian Clarke is creating a network. Neither does the root post. Bcromwell doesn't make any connection between creating a system which can be used to distribute illegal material and actively supporting it. All that bcromwell says about Ian Clarke is that Ian believes child porn is protected speech and "he is actively helping people to distribute child pornography".So nobody who is new to this conversation leans this is about networks or Ian Clarke as the developer of a network protocol. All they hear from bcromwell is that "he is actively helping people to distribute child pornography", and nothing else. No connection between network development and content distribution. If I didn't know already that Ian Clarke is the developer of the freenet, all I know about Ian Clarke from bcromwell is that "he is actively helping people to distribute child pornography".
Bcromwell simply makes Ian out to be a a free speech extremist and a trafficker of chlid pornography.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Just my gut reaction, but I can appreciate yours as well.
The problem is that the sex trade guarantees that the FBI. RCMP, CSIS, INTERPOL and God alone knows who else, will be maintaining a presence on Freenet.
You want privacy, you don't hit the bars that everyone knows are under around-the-clock surveillance.
If this is true, the obvious question to ask is "Why?" Because this doesn't read like the description of a healthy and viable network.
Well, it doesn't matter if sites stay in Freenet, that is a good thing.
.7) and I used the Freenet mail server at one point (forget the name), but I don't know the state of it right now (I think it was abandoned at one point).
It takes a bit of work to insert and maintain a free site. First you design it, and then you have to worry about getting it inserted. Insertion can take a while and isn't guaranteed to work. It helps if you have a node that runs 24/7, but that isn't an option for everyone. It is even worse with a DBR page, because then you have to insert it every day or every week.
The Freenet community is relatively small. Also, the learning curve for publishing is much higher than with the normal internet. This is why their is relatively little new content. Also, there could be a lot more content in Freenet than you realize, but people might not be sharing the keys to it. Right now, most content is found through one of the index pages, but they have to learn about the new content somehow. Frost is fairly active (at least on
There is always new content being added, but if you go away for a while, it doesn't take a super long time to read it all. Some of the floggers were fairly active when I last used Freenet regularly. Also, it is popular to mirror internet content like the Diebold files or things from websites that have been taking down.
Andrew
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"Give a man a fire, he's warm for a day, set a man on fire, he's warm for life."
Random packet-filler before encryption and interval randomization of packets both incoming and outgoing. On top of that, steganography.
The Internet is the most efficient method dissidents currently possess of communicating, if they have good software tools. Phones can be run through a listening bank, mail can be opened and read, and Internet packets can be parsed... all these things become equally secure, however, using the above time-tested methods of covert communication.
However, transmitting by reading your secured message over a phone line is very low bandwidth, and will usually only communicate text (unless one speaks for several hours, which is in itself very suspicious... then again, you could always apply a vocal cipher to JPEG data, and read that). Mail containing magnetic/optical media may already be under very heavy suspicion, and may never get through at all because of this factor, so all that can usually be sent is paper (Microdot-sized data storage aside, as we're assuming it would be very hard to sneak this kind of printing technology into [the majority of] the dissidents' hands. If it were easy, they would just exchange information "by hand" as well.)
The Internet can be very efficient at sending huge amounts of data, and has the amazing advantage that proxies can be created almost at will (networks/PCs can be hijacked very quickly to act as new ones, for example.)
I think thats because you (and many others) live in places where the child porn people and suchlike are the only ones with anything to fear from the authorities. Some people live in places where the authorities are not so nice. They are the ones who need things like freenet. Other people want it now because they fear that the authorities in their jurisdiction will become nasty een if they have not yet done so. Examples include athiests fearing evangelical dominance of politics and evangelicals fearing athiest domination. I personally doubt either will happen, and don't think its likely that the US will get that bad that quickly in any direction of badness; but some do have such fears and thats what they want something like freenet for.
I think toad (the full-time coder involved in this project) said it best when he replied to a message posted on Frost...
The message, was asking where all the child porn was at.
toad's response was.. "We don't NEED to have childporn on freenet."
I think that's the best you can do with a (mostly) completely anonymous network like this. There is no NEED to have vile things such as child pornography, but inevitably somebody will cross that line and do it because they can. But don't shoot the messenger just because this particular messenger dresses in all black and only makes deliveries at night, at a new location every time, from a new source each time. (Okay, so my stealthy encryption analogy didn't work out as well as I'd hoped.)
If you decide to say "No Childporn" for this "freenet", then it's no longer a freenet. It's a mostly-freenet. That ruins the entire concept right at the start. Freenet means free-as-in-beer, including freedom of speech, no strings attached. Yeah, some people are gonna get hurt. Some people are gonna claim that this anonymous service is evil and allows propagation of horribly nasty things. But a lot MORE people are going to feel safer posting their blogs, their criticisms of the government, criticisms of the companies they work for, and even plain old person-to-person messages.
Personally I'm not big on paranoia. I'm not paranoid that they're out to get me, I don't encrypt everything I send, and the freenet is just a neat hobby I'm interested in... but it's still a USEFUL service to many people who ARE afraid. And when it becomes a true darknet, those people will feel safe. That's the goal I intend to work towards.
"Pi is exactly 3!" *gasp*
About a month later over 100.000 people have downloaded that movie from the internet and "enjoyed" it.
And if nobody downloaded it, the girl would be magically unraped?
Fact is, whoever raped the woman probably would have raped her anyway, even if the internet didn't exist and he could only play the video back on his own VCR. He'd probably even have raped her had video cameras not been invented yet. Certain people are sick, everything else is just a tool to play out their desires.
"I think it was in Hamlet the wife back then would have been 14 or something, I don't know enough about Shakespeare to be 100%, just something I remember my English teacher telling me"
:)
Maybe your english teacher was dropping a hankie
Matthew
hey, she is very good looking and always bent over with her low cut tops, it was a win win situation as a teenager, I deffently wasnt going to disagree with what she had to say :)
Visit My Blog at http://spaces.msn.com/members/chrisharries
I am kind of surprised and disgusted that you chose a forum that is essentially about FREEDOM OF SPEECH to label an opinion which disagrees with yours as LIBEL.
This is not a free speech issue. Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. The original poster claimed that Clark was "actively" aiding child molesters. Were someone to say that about me, I'd have their ass.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.