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."

Comments

Pedophiles

[Anonymous Coward]

The sad fact is that freenet has historically been full of pedophiles. This will only further enable pedophiles to hide from the FBI.

Re:Pedophiles

[paganizer]

It is a fabrication.
I've been using freenet for a long, long, log time, since 0.3 was freshly released.
The truth is that Pedophiles do NOT use Freenet 0.7; it's insecure, and their identity would be too easily compromised.
This means it's also not smart for whistle blowers, activists, freedom fighters, or anyone else to trust it's anonymity & privacy. You seize the computer of one Darknet user, and all the members of that darknet are compromised. other insecurities abound.
A good rule of thumb; if Pedophiles can use a system with impunity, it's probably safe to talk about your boss ripping off the government.
Freenet 0.5 is still active, still has thousands (at least) of users, and is still private and anonymous; the only thing anyone can say about a user without using a keylogger is that they are, indeed, a user. and thats not necessarily easy to say with total certainty.
Freenet is either going to have Pedo's and other sick farks, or it's anonymous & private; you can't have both.

Re:Pedophiles

[paganizer]

"Freenet is either going to have Pedo's and other sick farks, or it's anonymous & private; you can't have both."

note to self: use the frakking preview button!!

try "Freenet is either going to have Pedo's and other sick farks, or it's NOT anonymous or private; you can't have it both ways"

Re:Pedophiles

[evanbd]

What makes you say 0.5 is more secure than 0.7? There have been a large number of improvements, especially security ones. Not to mention it's faster...

Re:Pedophiles

[Jugalator]

Yes, we could do all these things, but we won't, because this thread is about Freenet, and therefore it will be heavily modded by people who are fans of Freenet. Ironically enough, Freenet users on Slashdot have shown unlimited willingness to use moderation to silence opposing points of view. How do I know? Because this isn't the first time I've sacrificed karma by trying to make a skeptical post about Freenet in slashdot comments on a Freenet story. It's usually not about what you post, but how you post.

Anyway, yes, obviously there are a number of pedophiles around there. After all, Freenet is a fairly successful anonymizing network. But thanks to this property, it can be immensely useful to other people as well. I'm not sure what can be done about that problem, if anything. Once it starts being monitored to screen the child porn, everything else will be screened too, and those doing the screening will likely only be mere humans that may choose to censor other material as well. And then everything is lost. Anonymizing properly seem to be a bit of an all or nothing deal, just like there is no such thing as a "little" freedom. Either you have it, or you don't.

I guess in the end, it is a fairly simply philosophical matter. A question on whether a person is willing to risk supporting something that's criminal in most parts of the world for other things the person believes in or not.

Re:Pedophiles

[westlake]

A good rule of thumb; if Pedophiles can use a system with impunity, it's probably safe to talk about your boss ripping off the government.

It would also seem to be a good rule of thumb to assume that the system used by the most dangerous elements in society is the system that is going to be under systematic attack by the agencies most likely to have the resources to defeat it.

Re:Pedophiles

[Kamokazi]

Nonsense. There are plenty of freenet sites on how to make explosive devices as well as the locations of animal testing labs.

On a serious note, yes it will. But the world is full of tradeoffs. Nothing is perfect. High anomnity allows the scumballs to hide just as much as the legitimite users. Althogh scumballs and legitimate users are a matter of perspective. You may share copyrighted files on there, and think the pedophile is bad for sharing kiddie porn, while he thinks the terrorist is bad for sharing bomb making instructions, while the terrorist thinks you're both scum.

But yes, generally, most people, myself included, would agree pedophiles are scum and deserve a fate worse than the death penalty. I was just playing devil's advocate.

Re:Pedophiles

[hairyfeet]

The problem I have with Freenet(and why I don't run it anymore) is that it hasn't been tested in US court yet. For those not from here, the US is currently having a "save the childrens from them evil pedos!" witch hunt that makes the red scare look tame. And while I know that Freenet encrypts the cache, I also now that someone with the unlimited funds of the FBI can throw some serious iron at cracking that crypto.

Now I'll admit that I haven't studied Freenet's algorithm for encryption, so I have no idea how much iron it would take to crack it, but considering that a single thumbs.db file can net you ten years in PMITA prison, not to mention destroying any future you may have had before conviction, means that until a US court rules on whether the cache from Freenet is considered an illegal download or not I simply cannot risk my families future on it. Perhaps it is safer to run such software in Europe, I don't know how big a witch hunt there is for pedos there. But here in the US until there is a ruling on the cache any users of Freenet are taking some life destroying risks running it IMHO. But that is just my 02c,YMMV. And personally I think we should all sit down as an international community and work out a common ground on child porn laws. Because the USA has long left sanity behind if the words child porn or terrorist are contained in a law.

Re:Pedophiles

[PopeRatzo]

Unfortunately, a secure, private, anonymous network will draw people doing nasty things.

That does not make it any less necessary for our future freedom.

Remember, privacy does the same thing: it allows people to do bad things. That doesn't mean we give up our privacy, just because people will do bad things privately.

At some point, pedophiles (and other bad actors) have to stick their heads above ground in order to satisfy their urges. That's where they should be met and stopped.

I think it's safe to say that any communication medium that is secure, private and anonymous will be accused of harboring the "bad guy du jour" whether it's terrorists, pedophiles or soon, file sharers. It doesn't matter whether this accusation is true or not, because those with power are going to make the accusations regardless. If our world is to be governed by a tiny group of rich and powerful people, preventing personal security, privacy and anonymity is a matter of survival.

That's why we have to support Freenet and other such tools. Plus, it's a great way of flushing out the tyrants: Just look at whomever is originating the claim that such a tool is full of "pedophiles, terrorists, gay priests, etc etc".

Remember, child pornography can be sent in a sealed envelope. Should we abolish the sealing of envelopes? It's been tried elsewhere. You can bet that shutting down Freenet or any other secure anonymous mode of communication will do absolutely nothing to eliminate pedophilia and other perversions from the face of the Earth.

You'd have better luck locking up all the priests (and Republicans). [note: I'm just kidding... .. about the priests.]

Re:Pedophiles

[QCompson]

The problem I have with Freenet(and why I don't run it anymore) is that it hasn't been tested in US court yet. For those not from here, the US is currently having a "save the childrens from them evil pedos!" witch hunt that makes the red scare look tame. And while I know that Freenet encrypts the cache, I also now that someone with the unlimited funds of the FBI can throw some serious iron at cracking that crypto. Now I'll admit that I haven't studied Freenet's algorithm for encryption, so I have no idea how much iron it would take to crack it, but considering that a single thumbs.db file can net you ten years in PMITA prison, not to mention destroying any future you may have had before conviction, means that until a US court rules on whether the cache from Freenet is considered an illegal download or not I simply cannot risk my families future on it. Agreed. The current atmosphere in the US towards anything even suspected of being child pr0n is too hysterical and kneejerk to take any risk. Happen to run across a picture of a naked child 3 years ago and immediately delete it? That could cost you five years in federal prison and a lifetime of sex-offender registration.

The penalties for child pr0n possession have become insane, and the threshold is very, very low. The definition of what constitutes child pr0n also becomes broader every year. I don't even trust having a picture of anyone 18 on my computer, no matter how innocuous it may appear, or how many layers of clothing they may have on.

Re:Pedophiles

[amRadioHed]

I guess in the end, it is a fairly simply philosophical matter. A question on whether a person is willing to risk supporting something that's criminal in most parts of the world for other things the person believes in or not. Speaking for myself, my opposition to child pornography has nothing to do with its legal status. I support some things that are currently illegal and I oppose some things that are currently legal. My personal morals are not linked to the whims of lawmakers.

I am not interested in running a freenet node because despite its potential for good the reality is that the chances that my actions will actually accomplish any good are vanishingly small while it's almost a certainty that I would be aiding the distribution of harmful material. There are other ways to support free speech without also compromising my belief in not causing harm to others.

Re:Pedophiles

[hairyfeet]

The worst part IMHO, is the way they have pretty much left it to the discretion of the prosecutors and judges. If some dirty minded judge thinks that 23 year old on your pc "looks lolita" she might as well be ten as far as the law is concerned since an adult posing as a child is child porn according to the law. Your 15 year old takes a picture of his willy to send to his 14 year old girlfriend who sent him a tit shot? Now all three of you are child pornographers-you for having the computer, and they for taking pictures of their own bodies.

From McMartin to Little Rascals day care to the guy that just got 10 years for a thumbs.db file, hysteria and insanity have simply removed all common sense from our courts. And while I commend the idea of Freenet and wish them well in this climate it is simply too dangerous without a court ruling on the matter. After all, in today's climate they could say those encrypted files contain child porn and are "proof" that you are a pedo, and in this climate of hysteria it wouldn't be hard to get a jury to buy it.

While Freenet is a nice idea, I'm afraid with the USA witch hunt going on anyone running it here is flirting with disaster. I support freedom but the laws of my former great America has made the charge of child porn practically indefensible. But this is my opinion on the subject, which I developed watching way too many witch hunts unfold in my local community. And if you run Freenet in the USA I commend you for your big honking brass balls and hope that the feds don't come knocking down your door someday. For me it is just too big a risk.

Re:Pedophiles

[TempeTerra]

But yes, generally, most people, myself included, would agree pedophiles are scum and deserve a fate worse than the death penalty. I was just playing devil's advocate.

I suspect you were just being flippant, but in case you weren't...

A lot of people believe that the death penalty is never justified. Check out the wikipedia map. It strikes me as odd that the US constitution doesn't prohibit state-endorsed murder. I believe that the highest legal punishment should be life imprisonment, but that's a different rant.

You also conflated pedophilia with child molesting which I'm sure you didn't mean, but that's how you wrote it. I'm sure there are closet pedophiles who are quite unhappy to find children sexually attractive and never act on their feelings. I agree that any actual child abuse (sexual or otherwise) is a particularly heinous crime.

Re:Pedophiles

[QCompson]

The worst part IMHO, is the way they have pretty much left it to the discretion of the prosecutors and judges. I agree with your post, but the reason it is left to the discretion of the prosecutors and the judges is because of current public opinion. 99% of the time any jury in the usa will convict anyone and anything the instant they hear the words "child pornography". They convict people possessing thumbs.db files, they convict people for possessing images of clothed children, and they convict underage teenagers for taking nude pictures of themselves... The media and law enforcement have hyped up child pornography to such an extent that in the public eye, there is little or no difference between someone downloading an image file of a naked 16 year old and actually raping a small child. Common sense in this area of the law has long since disappeared.

Re:Pedophiles

[stdarg]

I am not interested in running a freenet node because despite its potential for good the reality is that the chances that my actions will actually accomplish any good are vanishingly small while it's almost a certainty that I would be aiding the distribution of harmful material. As decent people leave, the network has a higher percentage of bad content. I'm sure people would never have used email and the WWW if 90% of first adopters had been pedophiles, but think of what the world would have missed out on in that case.

It also reminds me a lot of plummeting real estate prices in newly desegregated inner-city neighborhoods. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. "If THEY move in, it'll all go to hell! I'm getting out of here!" then they pat themselves on the back when it indeed does go to hell.

There are other ways to support free speech without also compromising my belief in not causing harm to others. I doubt it. What do you support that doesn't also at least indirectly support NAMBLA? It's just that the proportion of your support that goes to organizations like NAMBLA is very small. The same thing would happen with Freenet if people gave it a chance.

Re:Well, that's good...

[Threni]

Probably easier to make a secure system faster than a fast system secure.

What's really needed is cities/countries covered by individual Wifi devices - ie outside of the reach of ISPs. You'd probably hate the speed of that until it reached critical mass, but it would be impossible in theory to prevent the spread of any `numbers` using that system.

Well you could...

[davidwr]

But that would require eliminating "Pedo's and other sick farks" from the Internet-using population, which is impossible without either eliminating the Internet or eliminating the human population.

To put it another way:
Before 1969 when Al Gore invented the tubular interwebs, there were no "Pedo's and other sick farks" on the Internet, and after the human race self-destructs, there won't be any either. In the meantime, it's unavoidable.

Re:The viscious circle of bootstrapping freenet

[Just Some Guy]

Freenet will, by design, underperform a normal straight connection so there is a strong disincentive for legit content to use it.

That's almost true. Your node caches all content that passes through it, even that which your neighbor nodes have requested. Once it's cached, retrieval is almost instantaneous since your browser is fetching it from your own server. Translation: peer with people who share your tastes, and let their browsing habits pre-cache the content that you might also find interesting.

Re:The Stupidity of the pedo files hysteria

[davidwr]

When a pedophile is masturbating in front of his screen, he is not raping a real child in real life. Point taken. For some people, porn is an adequate substitute for real sex with a kid. However, for some people who would otherwise never molest a child, kiddie porn acts like a "gateway drug." The great unknown is whether on balance more or fewer kids are victimized when kiddie porn is available. Another unknown is the additional psychological harm it does to a child to know films of her are "out there" and will probably stay out there forever.

And I should add that logically, if we make pedo files very hard to get for pedophiles, a black market with high prices for those videos and a mafia ready to kidnap, rape and kill children are encouraged. There will be some of that. There will also be a large number of people who "opt out" of trying to fulfill their desires, either virtually or in real life, simply because the cost is too high. There will also be a number of pedophiles who instead of looking at videos will decide to molest their own children, because they think the odds of getting caught are lower.

To fight pedophiles, the easier way might be to educate teachers (and doctors, and nurses) to detect children victims of pedophiles, and to do much more to help children victims of abuses to diminish the number of suffering children who end up becoming sick adults. I think this is already being done in the United States. Doctors and teachers have been required to report suspected sex crimes for many years how. As far as good training and how to reliably determine if someone has been abuse, I can't speak to that.

Also, cracking down on production works fine if it's done globally. Otherwise you just push the k1dd13-porn-creation to countries where the police can be bought off, which these days is much of the 3rd world.

I'm not even going to get into the side-effect harm to society of either 1) ignoring the problem of child abuse and kiddie porn or 2) overreacting to the problem. I think it's pretty obvious that neither option is a good one.

Re:The Stupidity of the pedo files hysteria

[LiENUS]

When a pedophile is masturbating in front of his screen, he is not raping a real child in real life The problem lies not in the pedophile masturbating in front of his screen but in the pedophile who posts the porn to freenet for the other to see. While you normally hear about the one in front of his screen being caught thats simply because they are an easier catch. It is the other one that benefits most from freenode as the penalties for the poster are far greater than the penalties for the viewer. It is unfortunate but that guy is the reason most people I know (including myself) have shut down our freenodes for good. Unfortunately there is no satisfactory solution, I want freenet and i understand that it is necessary for freenet to function like this in order for it to function at all. But the price is too hard to justify for most people. It is sad that freenet is abused in such a way and i support the freenet project. But I refuse to run a freenet node.

Bugs exist either way

[elucido]

If you want a bug proof program, you aren't going to find that using Java or C, or C++. At least C and C++ is fast. Java is slow as hell and it's still buggy. If you like Java thats your preference, but C is my preference and you aren't such an authority where you can say one language is objectively better than another.

Are you going to say, that if GNUPG, or GNU-Net is written in C, that it's inferior to Freenet JUST because it's written in C and can fall for a buffer overflow exploit?

If you have remote exploits, it's as much due to bad coding as it is to the language, and using Java is not a solution to a bad design. But hey it's your preference, and a lot of people disagree with you and think your preference is equally as stupid as mine.

Re:Well, that's good...

[iminplaya]

You'll want to leave your node connected for a while; it will get faster over the first few minutes / hours it's installed, and somewhat even after that, especially as your node begins to cache popular data.

Staying connected to a single source for any great length of time is the last thing you want to do if you don't want to draw attention. And encrypted data will draw attention. Anything that can't be read will be flagged. Neither Freenet or Tor will protect you on today's heavily monitored wires.

New and Improved! No Warrant needed!

Re:The Stupidity of the pedo files hysteria

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, it is illegal to rape someone...but, you can freely watch a simulated rape on film...why not with with other creepy stuff like kiddie porn? Because it's creepy, and in the end it's not about the actual children involved, it's about punishing creepy pedophiles. "We're saving children!" is just a convenient excuse.

Re:It's called watermarking

[xappax]

It's the same technology they use to have DRM.

Exactly - and name a DRM software technology that's impossible to break. There are none - it's not possible to create a media file that will display on normal personal computers and still prevent it from being "ripped" or re-encoded in a non-DRM format.

Unless you strongly understand every aspect of a technology like DRM or watermarking, it's unwise to assume that it will magically solve a given problem, such as tracing photographs.