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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."
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.
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.
Java is "heavier" than a native language/platform but for something like Freenet where privacy can be extremely important, reducing the possibility of stack smashing/bufer overrun type vulnerabilities to near zero - which Java helps do very well - is more than worth the execution overhead.
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.
Actually this is the exact OPPOSITE of what anonymity does for freedom of speech. Let's think about this for a minute. The claim that anonymity is required for true freedom of speech (I'll leave the debate as to whether this is actually the case to someone else, and assume that it is true) is so that you can make any allegations you want publicly, without fear of reprisal for what you have said (USSR, anyone?).
What these darknets do (in this context) is allow speech to be distributed only among a select few people. Furthermore, you can exclude those you are making allegations against, allowing you to say whatever you like, true or false, and they have no access to this information (PATRIOT Act, anyone?). In other words, you've crushed their ability to respond to allegations like the Gestapo. But I guess that's okay in your mind, because it's individuals doing so, and not the government. Might I suggest you read up on factory life in the US before the government started regulating the factories, especially with regard to unions and blacklists?
As for myself, I shall always be a proponent of true freedom of speech (and I might add that do not require anonymity for that purpose).
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
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
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
"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
Okay then, I'll support his remarks.
I've run Freenet for ages. It is an excellent idea with a not so excellent implementation. Freenet is currently taking up over 300MB of RAM, and is eating a lot of CPU.
I'm not saying Java is always less efficient. Maybe this could be improved in their codebase. I don't code Java - but I do write C/C++, and I'm certain that Freenet in native code could be orders of magnitude better than what it is now.
You could get halfway there by posting torrents on Freenet and then downloading them with Torrentopia.
/. bug #926803 - Why I can post.
While the government can't destroy this sort of technology, It could, if it set its mind about it, make thinks rather difficult. For example:
*They could make all filesharing _programs_ illegal, then attempting to shut down distrobution of those programs (shutdown bittorrent.com, azereus, etc).
*They could shut down proxy sites.
*Really attempt to track down people in other countries who use this technology and provide outlets for it (piratebay, etc).
*Require ISPs to keep logs on traffic for much longer than they do now.
Being anonymous is not cowardice.
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.
The first one is based on a presumption that Freenet scales superlinearly. My impression is that with a larger network, the average path length goes up, and it doesn't get any better. Yes, data retention *might* improve (assuming you have more non-unique content = more copies/data) but that again requires accurate routing. My impression is that Freenet's routing is not accurate enough.
As for speed, no anonymous network will reach neither the bandwidth nor latency of direct connections, but in Freenet's case it is the latency. The speed can actually be fairly decent on a large file with 200 threads, but waiting for one link can take ages.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"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.
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?
Does the bible belt think that pornography will lead to promiscous sex acts? Do people in Europe think hate speech leads to hate crime? Do people in China think anti-communist information will lead to anti-communist movements?
That's not the issue, the issue is what you're doing when you're building infrastructure, communication networks. Let me play the devil's advocate: The pedo down the street probably has a lot more use for broadband than I do. Without it, I could still head over to the nearest CD/DVD/game store rental, he couldn't. Should we just roll back time?
Whenever I pay for that infrastructure, I contribute to his as well. It's just that I pay an ISP to build bandwidth, rather than donate it directly. That doesn't mean I support or condone it, but that when you build a common resource somone might misuse it.
I think the concept of a server-less repository where you publish some information and have it distributed by a global net of cache-servers (which is all Freenet is, in a sense) has lots of interesting and valuable possibilities. Potential for misuse? Certainly. But I'm not going to take a larger blame for that than that the pedo down the street now has broadband, i.e. none.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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.
Java is "heavier" than a native language/platform but for something like Freenet where privacy can be extremely important, reducing the possibility of stack smashing/bufer overrun type vulnerabilities to near zero - which Java helps do very well - is more than worth the execution overhead.
But there are plenty of natively compiled portable languages that have exactly the same stack and buffer safety, but less overhead than Java.
There's the ML family, for example - fast implementations like OCaml and MLton are usually more efficient and more concise than C++. OCaml has already been used to implement other P2P applications (MLDonkey). And if you absolutely must have braces, there are things like D and Felix, which bring the same benefits to a familiar C++/Java-style syntax.
Judging all compiled languages by C++ is like judging all interpreted languages by Python. Deciding to use an interpreted language because compiled languages "suffer from buffer overflows" is exactly like deciding to use a compiled language because interpreted languages "have significant whitespace", i.e. it's complete and utter bullshit.
Regarding your second point, it's true that private communication can exclude the people who are being discussed. Allegations (and conspiracies) are usually made behind closed doors. But the powerful will always have access to private communication. The question posed by Freenet and similar networks is whether the less-powerful should also be able to communicate privately. Comparing Freenet to the Gestapo (although required by Godwin's Law) misses the point: the secret police don't need to use Freenet, because they already have overwhelming power. It's the citizens of a police state who need private communication.
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
Beep, you just lost the discussion by means of Godwin.
Well, just kidding - but you should be careful with comparisons like that. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Gestapo and similar institutions is their (near) unlimited power and the sheer amount of influence, money etc. they have at their disposal.
Your argument is just as absurd as it would be if - for example - China claimed that dissidents who don't openly talk about their opinions, ideas etc. take away the Chinese government's freedom to prosecute and kill them.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
I like this idea a lot, but the problem is that you need to build a model of a protocol in order to imitate it, and the eavesdropper can probably use the same model to determine that your traffic is fake. Let's say you want to make your darknet traffic look like HTTP. You observe a few thousand HTTP sessions and build a statistical model in the form of a state machine, with a distribution function for the number of bytes sent and received in each state, and a probability for each state transition. But there will always be a small gap between the behaviour of your model and the behaviour of real HTTP sessions, and given enough observations, the eavesdropper will be able to distinguish your model from reality.
How about changing protocols before the eavesdropper collects enough data to distinguish your traffic from real HTTP traffic? Unfortunately, constantly hopping protocols is suspicious in its own right: as well as perfectly modelling each protocol, you'd have to perfectly model the distribution of different protocols entering/leaving a typical host. This just re-creates the problem at a higher level. Fundamentally, you're trying to hide information in plain sight, and the problem with steganography is that it only works when people aren't looking for it.
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.
The speed problem is partly unavoidable. To overcome one threat model - that requests can be linked to replies statistically, based on traffic patterns or packet sizes - replies have added random latencies. Thus you could get a response quicker but you risk being identified because of your impatience. Systems like I2P that allow each user to choose their own level of anonymity allow you to trade efficiency for anonymity. By their very nature, anonymous P2P systems will always be slow, or bandwidth hungry, relative to other communication systems.
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.
Java isn't the reason it is slow, being poorly written in java is the reason it is slow.
There are many java programs that are larger and do more intense work that run just fine.
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.
"As far as child pornography and mitigating circumstances, exposure to child pornography does lead people to be more likely to molest children."
Bing-bing-bing... Timeout. I have seen one or two studies quoted on this (and related) issues, and I have also seen them torn down for their methodology. The core problem? Correlation does not establish causality, no matter how much academic language you cloak your paper in.
A disproportionate number of suicides prefer country music. Therefore, country music makes one suicidal (well, it does me, but that's a different phenomenan at work). Or is it just possible that someone in a state of depression identifies with songs about losing their job at the factory only to find their spouse ran off with their truck and dog?
Your argument is dangerously close to arguments the moral majorinuts use to legislate temptation out of our lives. Yet bizarrely, something is not working. Amsterdam, for example, with it's liberal drug and prostitution laws has a lower incidence of drug use and sex crimes. Go figure.
Do pedos seek out juvenile erotica? Duh. But have you seen any real study where actual control groups were randomly "exposed" to different types of stimulus with a followup on the amount and type of victimization perpetrated by the study group?
There is also a school of thought that the ability to act out certain unacceptable fantasies may provide a sort of safety valve for some individuals. Escalating behavior is a pattern in many sex crimes, and certainly seeking out reinforcing material is a part of that pattern. But it is by no means clear that it is causative.