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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."
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.
Thank you freenet team! The ability to remain anonymous is the only way to ensure complete freedom of speech.
Well, it is not a foolproof solution, but you can try using TOR: The Onion Router (http://tor.eff.org/). It will act as a random daisy-chain of proxies that pass all the information (except for the final hop) encrypted.
Failing that, you could always buy a laptop/PDA/etc. and a cheap wifi card and connect to random WAPs using a spoofed MAC address.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
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.
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 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.
>I wish there was a way that I could view websites without giving any IP or client information
Anonymizer.com, cotse, and many others.
There's some loss of functionality. For example if you have Java turned on then a remote web site can grab your IP even through a proxy. So you have to turn off Java, and Anonymizer disables Javascript as well.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
"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).
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.
- Ian (Founder, Freenet Project)
welcome the idea that our overlords will have a harder time censoring and surveilling us.
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
"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.
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
Yeah... just like watching "normal" pornography makes you more likely to rape random women on the street. Just like playing video games turn innocent teenagers into criminals who shoot cops and hookers. Just like reading Stephen King makes you a psychotic murderer. Just like watching Spongebob makes children gay.
I find child pornography as disgusting and horrible as everyone else, but I think your reasoning is more than far-fetched. At best, you're making a cum hoc ergo propter hoc mistake - it might be that people who view child pornography are more likely to abuse children (i.e., the claim makes sense, a priori - it'd still have to be investigated, though, of course), but even if it is true, I don't see why there would be a causal connection. It's much more likely that there would be another reason that led people to see children as sex objects - which in turn would lead to both an interest in child pornography and actual abuse. But someone who isn't already predisposed towards children wouldn't turn into a child abuser merely because he's exposed to child pornography.
If I looked you up and kept on showing you child pornography, would you ultimately emerge as a child abuser? Of course not. And the same is true for everyone else, too.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Yeah, cross-platform coding sucks. When are these companies going to learn that we want proprietary binaries that need to be recompiled on each platform?
Or planning political demonstrations in a dictatorship. Same thing as kiddie porn, really. You're either with us or the child pornographers, after all. Why do you hate Country X?
So... Your posting on /. with a C64 then?
.50 a month from your Freenet server. You don't need a monitor (that draws the most watts) for this setup, And if your really worried about it you need to wonder why your reading /. in the first place...
Seriously, what platform are you using that doesn't have a Java implementation on it?
And, even more to the point... Just have a Freenet server running in the basement someplace and use it as a proxy out to the Freenet. Buy/find/build a computer (don't spend more than one Benjamin on it) and put Any flavor of Linux on it, then load the Freenet proxy. Don't forget to load up the RAM, as Freenet eats RAM like the passengers of a Las Vegas tour bus eat at Circus Circus.
Not only is this good for the network (permanent nodes == good nodes) but the upshot is that you don't have to locate the server anywhere near your main computer. So you can get a low-speed computer, slap a giant copper HSF on it, and remove the fans. Less fans == less points of H/W failure down the road. Since it's Linux, it never needs to reboot. Since it's only doing Freenet (and only has that port open to the world) then you don't need to update the kernel.
And yes, I know what I'm talking about. I've got a E-PC in my basement that's been running along happily for over 3 years now, and the only thing that I've ever changed on it was the Freenet install. Unload, upgrade, and restart the Freenet proxy. Done in 5min. Whenever i want to use the Freenet i just change my proxy in my browser to my Freenet server in the basement. Takes me 20 seconds.
So I want all these excuses of NOT running Freenet to stop. Anybody can find a 'junk' computer and put Freenet on it, no excuses! Get those nodes up and running--the more nodes that stay online 24/7 the better. And trust me... Once you see the amount of creativity that true total anonymity brings, you'll be glad you at least saw it. You might not like it but at least you know it's there and what it's about. And like GI Joe said--Knowing is half the battle.
And if your really worried about your electric bill--don't. Your bill will jump up at most