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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."
Seems like Freenet is really pursuing their namesake, and setting themselves up specifically to provide a means of communication within otherwise locked down and totalitarian environments. A commendable goal I think. I have to wonder though, if this level of security is actually necessary, who CAN you really trust to use this new "darknet" with? Seems like the sort of place you'd use it would also be the sort of place where you could trust no one.
I'm not surprised that the grandparent decided to post anonymously. The only thing worse for your slashdot karma than criticizing Apple in a comment on an Apple story is to criticize BSD or Freenet in a comment on a BSD or Freenet story. The grandparent (who has now been modded down to -1, Troll) is factually correct. I tried out freenet several years ago, and poking around in the content that existed, it was extremely heavily weighted toward child pornography. Based on that observation, I made a personal decision that I didn't want to run a freenet node, because having my computer running as a freenet node meant I was contributing to that. Now we could have a reasoned debate about the issues. We could ask whether the individual has a responsibility not to contribute to this, or whether the individual is more like a common carrier. We could ask whether any government restrictions on free speech are morally and philosophically acceptable. We could talk about whether concern about child sexual abuse has turned into hysteria, and has resulted in bad legislation. We could make careful distinctions between government and private action against speech we disapprove of. 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.
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Now that everyone (and given current eavesdropping policy in the US and laws recently passed in various EU countries, I really mean everyone) has to use it to maintain their privacy, everyone will be considered a pedophile at first.
The people (DoJ especially) pushing the pedophilia boogie man already think you are a pedophile. It doesn't matter if you are or not. Download the wrong file from some random person (honey pot) on a p2p network and you are fucked. I have a buddy doing 3 months in a work furlough program to prove it. (I've known him for years, he is not into children).
On a side note, last week he was fitted with a GPS anklet. His lawyer is fighting to have it removed after the 3 months. If he loses, he gets to wear that god damned thing for 3 years of probation. Justice is hiding spoon marks under that blindfold.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
When it comes to speed Freenet has still a few problems:
1) Freenet tries to keep downstream and upstream bandwidth equal, this means that it gets hard to tell if your node is downloading or uploading anything, which is good for anonymity, but it also means that you are limited to your upstream bandwidth, which with most DSL providers isn't all that great and often a tenth of your normal downstream bandwidth. There is basically no chance that this ever gets fixed.
2) Freenets datastore/cache is extremely slow, it doesn't really matter how often you already already visited a page, revisiting it again takes often a long long while, while it really should be instantaneous, after all the data is already on your machine. Tweaking a few settings in Firefox helps a bit, but the performance is still so bad that it is basically unusable for actual browsing, even if things are in your cache. This pretty much sucks, but luckily isn't by design and should be fixable.
3) KSK redirect downloads are slow, which in turns means that message systems like Frost, that are based on KSKs, are very easily spammed up to a level where you can't even download all the spam, i.e. it isn't just an annoyance but completly blocks both download and upload of messages. There is another messaging system in development and that KSK problem might also be fixable from what I understand.
Other then that Freenet works for most parts as expected. It won't win any speed records anytime soon, but it works for uploading and downloading even larger ones when you have the time.
it's a darknet.
The big draw of the Darknet system, to the best of my knowledge, is that it makes you less likely to be noticed in the first place, and you can sort of "pick & choose" which nodes your computer talks to.
Lets put this in a real world situation:
You are A tibetan, living in the U.S.; you have a Darknet made up of other Tibetans, some of them living in China, some in Tibet. You use Freenet 0.7 to plan protests.
If one of your darknet members gets caught by the chinese government, for whatever reason, they will take that persons computer and analyze it. assuming the person did not put the Freenet 0.7 files in a encrypted volume, they then have the IP address of each computer that persons Freenet 0.7 node talked to; since it's a Darknet, they know that those computers are probably involved with the same thing the person they caught was involved in.
In a Open Net (Freenet 0.5), no matter how they analyze the persons computer, they can't say anything about the other nodes the examined computer talked to except that they are running Freenet 0.5; they are still most likely screwed if they live in China or Tibet, but they could conceivably be a little less screwed.
There are some other security improvements in 0.7; nothing is stopping the Freenet developers from putting those improvements on the 0.5 system.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
You mean, like having packet sniffers on all major chokepoints that log which IPs are talking to which other IPs, in order to build up a suitably-large database for purposes of traffic analysis?
Freenet was an interesting political statement: Since inception, every statement about its security model has been prefaced by "in any sane/democratic/free country...", followed by a list of assumptions about the integrity of the telecommunications system. For example, when Freenet was first designed, NSA couldn't legally monitor domestic traffic, nor could it legally share what it found with the FBI, and FBI needed a warrant.
The political implications of the project were supposed to motivate people to lobby for stronger telecom privacy laws, lest we become as non-sane, non-democratic, and non-free as the countries in systems such as Freenet are illegal/hazardous to use.
That experiment has run its course: In post-9/11 America, of course, none of those assumptions about the telecom system are true. Although it's arguably lamentable that Post-9/11 America telecom policy is every bit as not-sane, not-free, and not-democratic as China, it's indisputable that the experiment has ended. The privacy wars are over; the Freenet guys lost.
If you were interested in Freenet because of its implications for free political speech, it's time to give up: for better or worse, anonymous political speech is dead. The only justification that I can see for its continued development is that it gives enough of the illusion of anonymity to be a fantastic self-selecting honeypot for sleazeballs, and as far as I'm concerned, said sleazeballs deserve what they get.