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Freenet Version 0.7 Release Candidate 1 Available
apostle5406 writes to mention that the "Freenet" project (a global peer-to-peer publishing network) has unveiled their first release candidate. "Freenet 0.7 is a ground-up rewrite of Freenet. The key user-facing feature in Freenet 0.7 is the ability to operate Freenet in a "darknet" mode, where your Freenet node will only talk to other Freenet users that you trust. This makes it much more difficult for an adversary to discover that you are using Freenet, let alone what you are doing with it. 0.7 also includes significant improvements to both security and performance."
But is it faster? Please?
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
Only the primary design goal of Freenet: make the people uploading and downloading the content anonymous! If you're using bittorrent, it's easy for the Bad People (government, isp, mafiaa) to tell what you're uploading and downloading. Not so with Freenet (it probably can be done, but it would take a *lot* of effort).
It is easy to tell that someone is running Freenet (still harder than bittorrent, though -- with everything encrypted and ports randomized, it requires traffic analysis). But it's hard to tell who's downloading or uploading what.
Browsing the svn (trunk) reveals that the answer is: yes it is still written in Java.
> Seems like the sort of place you'd use it would also be the sort of place where you could trust no one.
It's worse. There ain't no such thing as a 'darknet' to your ISP. If you are in the sort of place that needs Freenet you can be certain your ISP will report you to the government for using freenet. In the sort of places that need Freenet, possession of Freenet will get you shot. In places that having freenet won't get you shot the only people who will bother setting it up is pedophiles and others who are doing things that would get them imprisoned or shot.
These are hard facts. Yes it would be great if a critical mass of non illegal activity could get on Freenet to provide the chaff to provide cover for the occasional whistleblower who really needs it, but getting from here to there is all but impossible. Freenet will, by design, underperform a normal straight connection so there is a strong disincentive for legit content to use it. The only possible hope is if the *IAA goons drive piracy[1] far enough underground that the file traders adopt Freenet. But I really doubt Freenet in it's current form will be able to scale anywhere near large enough to handle the warez scene, especially in the age of full HD ripping we are hurtling towards. The limited size of the local data cache and cable/DSL upload speeds just won't suffer the inefficiencies involved.
[1] Yes, 'pirated' movies are illegal just like kiddieporn but as a practical matter they differ in one vital aspect. 90+% of Internet users currently trade movies, songs, etc. and thus would likely trade them on Freenet if Bittorrent becomes too dangerous, whereas few will currently install a freenet node due to the popular perception is that having one currently is tantamount to admitting being into, or at least a willing faciliator of kiddieporn.
Democrat delenda est
I don't know what index pages you managed to find, but the ones that are preconfigured in Freenet (as of about 6 months ago when I last tried it) were packed with links to government criticisms and a mix of stuff from Wikileaks and Project Gutenberg. The reason you keep getting modded down is that your claim is factually incorrect based on what I've seen.
I'll take your word for it that the nastier stuff is available, even if you have to go digging for it. That doesn't mean that Freenet's not potentially very useful, in exactly the same way the Internet itself is useful even when considering the bad elements.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
If you don't like darknet mode, don't use it. 0.7 has both darknet and opennet available.
There are lots of reasons why darknets are better, but if you'd rather use an opennet instead no one is stopping you. You can get to the network either way.
That's one of the stupidest post on the Slashdot for a while.
First of all, most of the security bugs ARE FOUND IN THE C/C++ CODE. Java is MUCH MUCH MUCH more secure than C/C++ in practice. To remotely exploit FreeNode, you'll need quite an exotic combination of bugs in JVM _and_ in the FreeNet.
And Java works just fine on PDAs, and FreeNet doesn't use anything fancy and non-portable like cool SWING GUIs.
... except that 0.7 can operate in opennet mode just like 0.5 or a mix of the two. Troll harder.
Freenet is intended to eventually run in truly hostile environments like China, using steganographic transports, sneakernet etcetera. The ability to run as a pure darknet is ESSENTIAL for this. Systems like Tor are little use since public networks are so easy to harvest and illegal to run at all.
Your closest peers will always be in a better position to do correlation attacks etc against you in any network. With 0.7's darknet you get to choose who they are, preferably making them people you know and trust IRL. In 0.5 most of your peers could be a government sybil attack and you'd be none the wiser.
Is 0.7 perfect? No and the devs freely point out possible attacks on it, but it *is* an improvement security-wise.
you miss one point... it is BOTH dark AND open net - with a setting to disable open net at all.
... not slightly trustworthy... but REALLY trustworthy.
So... 0.7 isn't less secure than 0.5. You are suggested to get TRUSTWORTHY darknet peers anyway!
It's annoying how some self-proclaimed experts say freenet 0.7 is insecure based on wrong assumptions:
1. Open net requires you to have a FIXED PORT OPEN TO THE WORLD -> this is easily detectable as one could set up a node just for scanning, a real node would have to answer the request if the open net wants to work at all.
2. It is much harder to detect freenet darknet, because it will DROP any packets that don't match their peers
2b. And since it is using UDP, the forge attempt will not gain any information about the node (no detectable reply). Also the port is NO LONGER FIXED.
3. freenet 0.5 used fixed strings in their pakets that made it VERY easy to use string matching firewalls (ip2p/layer7) to simply drop/reject the pakets and or inject another malicious node.
4. statistical freaks are probably right that it's more dangerous to have few(!) peers (darknet mode) - if you don't use a high enough level of trust for chosing. That's why it makes sense to run in hybrid mode.
Summary: 0.7 offers both open and darknet. darknet is meant to be used with really trustworthy peers. open net is way easier to detect by simple port scanning.
It is really funny and annoying at the same time when some pseudo-informed trolls from 0.5 throw around false information constantly. These people maybe want to get some technical knowledge on networking prior to spreading bullshit.
Freenet is more like a distributed, anonymous document store. You upload a document to it, and it then lives in the distributed ether of freenet. Tor is used more for person-to-site, or person-to-person communications.