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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.
Great, but how fast is it? I've used it in the past and supported it for a while, but it was horrifically slow.
"This makes it much more difficult for an adversary to discover that you are using Freenet, let alone what you are doing with it."
... but what about us stalkers and snoopers ? Where does that leave us ?
:(
Sure, that's all fine and dandy for the person who wants to conceal that he's using Freenet
The humanity!
The sad fact is that freenet has historically been full of pedophiles. This will only further enable pedophiles to hide from the FBI.
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.
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.
Umm thats not new, and for a while that is ALL it would do. For a time they removed the concept of 'opennet'. Id say the key feature is opennet is back.. .
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yes, but why would that be a problem? The really CPU-intensive stuff is handled in native code anyway on most platforms (with Java fallbacks). I'm running it on a 1.4GHz Athlon (not exactly modern...) and it's using typically 10-20% of the CPU (though that number will rise on a faster connection).
Performance is limited by network connections, mostly. The real performance question is how quickly the developers can improve it and find and fix bugs, and if they say Java helps in that regard, then Java is a good choice.
Its not really about downloading/uploading files like BT is, its more about information content. The fact you can safely up/down files like your average p2p app is sort of a nice side effect.
Don't forget your local data store is also encrypted.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Maybe the performance improvements they speak of are related to old-fashioned language-agnostic algorithm bottlenecks?
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
I don't think Java could have made it as slow as it was. Is it better now?
Also: It's supposedly an open standard, and should be implementable in things other than Java. However, the implementation is complex enough that I'm glad to have at least one guaranteed-portable implementation.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
> 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
how solid a foundation is that in the real world? the relationships you build in face-to-face contact are fragile enough. as a darknet expands how do you maintain confidence that it is still secure?
Guaranteed portable implementation? Where? The only implementation I see is in Java...
Java's portability promises and $5 will get you a cuppa at Starbucks.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
Performance is limited by network connections; true. It goes deeper, however, in the fact that performance is also limited by the cpu and storage of your peers, and their peers, etc....
The network should eventually level demand across nodes. If one node for some reason gets saturated, peers will eventually find data faster elsewhere, reducing its load. Lower performance machine/network nodes may end up slightly less popular and those equipped will move more traffic. Freenet has a number of ways to optimize and can be quite robust via various ways to self-heal.
They yet have to invent a net that survives the slashdot effect...
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
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.
No, traffic monitoring at the ISP level wouldn't be sufficient to de-anonymize freenet (in theory; there may be bugs etc, but that's the idea). However, that combined with a large number of nodes operated by the attacker probably would, at least if the target is running opennet or can be convinced to create a darknet connection to the attacker.
The assumptions about ISPs and telecoms required for Freenet to guarantee anonymity are far fewer than you seem to think they are. The major one is that use of encryption needs to be legal, and given the prevalence of SSL for web browsing that seems likely to remain the case.
Future versions of Freenet will include steganographic transport layers, which should make it even harder to attack.
This is not to say Freenet is useless, or even that the allegations are entirely fair, but it would seem sensible to expect a higher level of proof when faced with a higher quality of challenge.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
So let's make the database useless. If everyone's connecting, no one can be found. Set up daemons to connect to random hosts.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So what happens if someone sneaks into some Joe's computer, sets up an OpenNet FreeNet node running invisibly, then calls the cops on him?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Shouldn't that be e-chan?
"All your natural base desires are belong to us. NO! WAIT! I don't want all your natural base desires!"
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Let's suppose there is 100GB of KP floating around FreeNet every day and 100,000 GB of material floating around the public Internet per day. These numbers are probably way off but let's assume it's a 1000-to-1 ratio.
The trick is to multiply the total Freenet traffic by 1000 by copying random legit traffic then hiding your secret data in it.
The reality is that in order to do so, Freenet's capacity will have to increase by 1000 or its effective bandwidth will be cut by 1000.
I could be wrong about the 1000x factor, but the stenography-overhead is probably well over 10x.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
At one point there was a list of known objectionable material that one could use to purge their local store, so that people who don't want to participate in things they don't agree with can simply not host it.
This is obviously cat and mouse to some extent but at least it isn't a step back from anonymity, more of a way for people to opt out of hosting stuff they don't want to.
In any case i quit running mine for the same reason, for me its not worth it.
Can anyone give us numbers on the precise percentage of Freenet traffic that kiddie porn makes up?
I'm concerned about the kiddie porn problem, but why the hell would people even go through the trouble of using Freenet just to trade kiddie porn?
It's sick, but sometimes I wonder if the individuals who do upload that shit to Freenet do it precisely to get Freenet shut down.
What better way to get something shut down than to upload kiddie porn? Any serious users wont want to use it anymore and then it will ONLY be filled with kiddie porn, which gives the authorities every reason to ban the entire network as a kiddie porn network.
So the Freenet people should keep precise percentages of the traffic and keep the traffic data public. As long as the majority of the traffic is not kiddie porn, Freenet has a chance at being useful.
I support the freenet project. But I refuse to run a freenet node.
Tell us more about this friend of yours who has 3 years of probation for downloading a file on a P2P network.
I'm not saying it's impossible given the current laws, but I figured it was only hundreds of people who got caught up in this, and I only read about that one guy so far.
Why wouldn't Steganography work?
In theory, steganography would work. The main problem however is that Freenet isn't as secure as it could be.
Treat your node like you treat your social security number or telephone number. You don't give it to complete strangers right?
But if you know a person and trust them, then it makes sense. You should be able to trust your friends at least alittle bit.
So how will my camera know which pictures are illegal and when to put this information in, so I can be traced, and which are perfectly legitimate images that I may not want anyone who sees it to be able to trace it back to me?
oh... I see, you mean, this data will be on every image ever? I see...
And how on earth can that kind of data be kept valid in any kind of open format, there isn't any way for it to be possible to make this data non-editable.
This is the most ridiculous solution to the problem ever proposed.
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.
It's the same technology we use to protect money and trace that. It's the same technology they use to have DRM.
I'm not a big fan of DRM, but you could easily use an open source watermarking technology. The fact that it's already done for copyright purposes, proves it can be done for anything else if we choose.
What would be better? .NET? Surely, you jest.
If I remember, the main reason Java portability sucked was Microsoft's broken implementation. Anyone knowledgeable enough to be implementing a Freenet node should know how to install an actual Sun Java.
Certainly, I'd never want to actually write Java myself -- it's a hideously ugly language -- but as a VM, it's not bad. And I honestly don't get why the AC is deciding not to use a program because of the language it's implemented in.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
Which would suggest that Freenet is leaking memory, not Java.
Which is impressive, given that Java uses garbage collection. You kind of have to work at it to leak memory in a Java program.
Why is it that everyone assumes Freenet sucks because of Java? Sure, Java isn't helping matters, but if it sped up this much, and it's still using Java, what does that tell you about how much Freenet used to suck?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
This was my same reaction: Slow as fuck (think AOL at peak on Saturday), EATS RAM and HDD space, and uses relatively complicated FF hacks (Freenet should just use a modified version of FF, and keep it separate. FF doesn't like the profile thing... and considering the size of Freenet, I thought it would do just that -- or even be like Tor, which had an addon that set up everything for it with the push of a button and turned it off just the same)
I thought that this would be promising, but 0.7 is not close to even half of what I thought.
Also, it seemed to have 50%+ of the stranger nodes it connected to be busy, which meant that this connection was not getting any faster any time soon.
Granted, there aren't that many users really yet, so this is [relatively] acceptable.
However, mod parent troll, he seems to want to bash Java in, for no good reason.
Reading Slashdot for the vulnerability announcements is like buying Playboy for the articles --A.C.
If child porn were legal, there probably wouldn't be very much of it on Freenet. Problem solved.
If it's filled with pedophiles, show us some proof. Stop fear mongering.
People like to say the internet is filled with pedophiles too, and it's usually the people who never seriously use the internet who think this way.
The pedophiles exist EVERYWHERE, they aren't on the internet, or on Freenet, they are your neighbors, and a lot of them like to be gym teachers and priests, and other suspicious jobs. I guess lately we like to think that the internet is a haven for pedophiles, as if the pedophiles didn't exist until after the internet was created, or as if the pedophiles didn't exist until after Freenet was created and now the pedophiles are going to corrupt the internet, and Freenet.
The FBI will watch the pedophiles, and thats because there will be plenty of people willing to alert the FBI if we see a pedophile, or even if someone has pedophile behavior, and it has nothing to do with the internet.
If theres so many pedophiles on the net searching for kiddie porn, wouldn't they use Google?
I'm not saying they wont use freenet, but there are ways to catch them. Google probably has a record of their search history, and likely flags the people who have pedophile search patterns. These people should get watched.
The problem is, even when anonymity does not exist, fraud, stock scams, threats, medical records or any kinda records, still get passed around and accessed. So it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the internet or anonymity.
Information SHOULD be secured, we all agree on that. The question is what to do with the information once it's encoded into bits. I think in specific, the when information is put on the internet in unencrypted form, it's already as free as air. It's impossible to put the genie back in the bottle once it gets on the net.
So why fight the net and potentially destroy it, when we can design the net to handle anonymous traffic? Just because the traffic is anonymous doesn't mean we don't know it's there, and can't find out where it came from. They already have watermarks in stuff like mp3s.
Now, there are problems, big security risks, but it's not because it's anonymous or even on the net. The security risks come from how Freenet COULD potentially be abused. Does that mean the Freenet project should be scrapped? I don't think it should be scrapped. The reason it shoudn't be scrapped is because you can't learn anything if you AVOID dangerous ideas.
The bad people, if they are serious bad, could develop their own Freenet in secret, and we wouldn't even have known such software existed, but because there IS a Freenet we can actually discuss what is currently possible and what may be possible in the future, so Freenet exists for research purposes.
In the future, anonymous communication will not only be possible but it will probably be common.
Even in Hell, Satan should be able to trust his demons. I don't think a society can exist if no one trusts ANYONE. I'm not sure a society like that ever has existed anywhere.
What you mean to say is, people can't trust anyone they don't already know very well. But newsflash, you can't trust people you don't know in any society, and the few people you can trust in any society are people you know very well, well enough to know they won't get you killed.
You should be know at least one person like this.
Yes the person you "trust" face to face could and probably will be a government agent, but what if it's a person you grew up with, like your brother? If the government can turn brother against brother, brother against sister, and children against their parents, then that country is already about to collapse, because whoever is at the top of a government like that probably can't trust the people closest to them either and is the most paranoid individual in the country.
I can imagine it being like that in the Soviet Union under Stalin, or in Nazi Germany under Hitler. If it's so bad in a country that resistance is futile, then you are either an agent or an enemy and need to get out of there if you aren't an agent.
Why wouldn't the kiddie porn people use Bit Torrent and just encrypt their kiddie porn and rename it as an piratedsoftware.iso ?
Of course the people who burn it without the key won't be able to decrypt it, but there is no reason to believe that kiddie porn couldn't be traded over bit-torrent just as easily as it could be traded over Freenet. The difference is, Freenet allows them to trade it in a way in which the world, including the authorities, can see what they are trading and how.
I think it's insane to think that just because people use encryption that it's grounds for a warrant. If it's like that then I guess we can't use off the record with gaim anymore, and I guess we can't use SSL anymore, or SSH for that matter.
Yes encryption can be used to do bad stuff, but it can also be used to do good stuff, or innocent stuff. So making the use of encryption as grounds for a warrant is just plain stupid. Most people probably SHOULD use encryption more.
If it's truly a terrorist type situation, I'm sure the NSA has the computing resources to crack all the standard encryption algorithms. Also there are bugs in the pseudo random number generator, they can exploit that. Also the feds probably could get hackers to hack a server if it's Al Qaeda's web server.
Also, try using PGP with Thunderbird, Enigmail works just fine, and there's also Firefox extensions. I don't think the powers that be are concerned with the weak encryption used on most PCs, especially when these computers don't even use real random numbers but PSEUDO-Random, which means the numbers used to make the keys are predictable.
I don't know of any studies, but, just on anecdotal evidence...I'd say the people that get their kicks out of watching simulated rape, or fake snuff films aren't going out in droves to commit the same acts in real life...I'd venture to guess that the same % of them that watch kiddie stuff that do not do it in real life is about the same.
That brings to mind...the reason kiddie porn is banned, is that it indeed harms children, it has to be filmed with abused kids. However, why don't they do away with the ban on artificial stuff....computer generated stuff. That way, those that would be satisfied getting their jollies by viewing that kind of stuff would be satisfied, and no real human children are harmed? 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?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Your theory incorrectly assumes that such a concerted attack is both reasonably possible and deemed a worthwhile expenditure of the time, effort, and money necessary to succeed. While it's entirely true that government agencies have the power to tap and record all kinds of communications, it's far from true that all communications *are* listened to and analyzed. Not all of the organizations combined have nearly the capacity to handle even a fraction of that data, they don't have the software necessary to analyze it, and they don't have the computing power necessary to run that software if it existed.
It's the distinction between "if the NSA suspects you of being a terrorist, they can listen to your conversations" and "the NSA is listening to all our conversations".
In a post-9/11 state, everyone should run something like FreeNet so when they day comes that you want to do a music review of that new album "Da Bomb!" by that up and coming rapper Jonny Hussain, you won't get put on a terrorist watch list.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Now that Tor exists, is popular and quite fast, what do we need freenet for ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Well you've proved one thing: the truth is sometimes pretty unpopular.
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.
I've been following I2P for a long time but progress is awfully slow. I2P is an encrypted, anonymous IP-layer on top of IP. This means that standard IP protocols like IRC, http and others can be ported to use I2P. The amount of work is similar to porting to IPv6. You can also tunnel IPv4 over I2P to connect your clients to anonymous servers. You can browse dynamic websites running PHP/RoR/etc and have absolutely no idea where the webserver is located, and the webserver have no idea where you are located.
I2P doesn't have a distributed storage area/cache though, Freenet's biggest feature. The developers also say that it would be outside the scope of I2P...
Would it be possible to have "live traffic" over Freenet like I2P? Would its architecture allow such a thing in a future version or would that require a complete redesign?
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/
Anyway, please reconsider, keeping in mind that as good people like you give up and leave, the percentage of bad people simply increases and you get to pat yourself on the back (self-fulfilling prophecy), but if you had stayed and more good people had come, the percentage of bad people would sink down until it became noise (like they are everywhere in society).
I'm not a criminal and I use encryption whenever I can, not because I want to commit a crime, but because I don't like nameless/faceless individuals watching everything I say and do.
Just because you want privacy it does not mean you are doing something criminal. If governments and corporations can have encryption to protect their privacy, should we assume they only want it because they are doing something criminal? Should it work both ways? Should we assume that corporations and governments only keep secrets because theres criminals they are trying to protect?
Not saying that. Just that as a practical matter those uses get lost in the noise. Widespread crypto would be a big win from a civil liberties standpoint, but it ain't current reality and it probably ain't happening anytime soon.
So you are saying in the environment where everyone is under constant surveillance by corporations, governments, and mafias, we aren't supposed to use encryption for ourselves because if we do then these groups will assume we are mafia, or governments, or corporations, or criminals?
I think most people just want their privacy. I know the myspace generation may be dumb, but seriously, everything you do online will come back to haunt you someday because corporations, governments and mafias are datamining everything. And while I doubt the masses will ever use encryption unless it's built in, I do think we tech savvy types should use it and promote it.
Just as the masses don't currently use linux, we got them to switch to firefox and thats a start.
Shouldn't they also know how to track down pedophiles who exchange in cleartext?
As far as a small fraction of torrents being encrypted, thats going to change soon mainly because of the MPAA and RIAA cracking down on people using bit-torrent. In a way, they are helping civil liberties by attacking it, because all it's doing is making people move to more secure protocols.
Bit torrent usage will go down in the same way Napster use went down. The reason is because the more they crack down on it, the more likely that encryption will become standard. The more they do traffic analysis, the more they'll try to mask the traffic.
And this stuff where they slow a persons connection when they use bit torrent is only going to make matters worse. So I just don't see the point, and I don't think outlawing encryption is a good idea either because if you did that then it would be even harder to catch the real criminals.
All this is doing is making the masses move onto smarter protocols. And plenty of smart people have been transfering with encryption for a while over software like hotline, and IRC. I think overall, all this surveillance is helping the internet become more secure, and the more they attack it the more intelligent the internet becomes and the more resistant to attack.
Which is almost certain more secure than C in the hands of the average programmer. Please also understand that Freenet is a research project which often releases several new builds per week. Finally, you can compile Java into native binaries, with gcj for example.
Besides, don't most cellphones already support Java, if only the micro edition ?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Opennet requires access to central seed nodes, to get you started. A national firewall can easily block these.
With darknet they have to monitor everyone.
If they are watching a subversive and you are a friend, the chances are that you will meet them in person or speak to them non anonymously as well, so having a Freenet connection with them is no extra danger.
I can understand your point, I have thought long over this point myself.
Like you, and most people, I think child porn is totally wrong. It is true that Freenet allows people to share this kind of thing without government censorship, and that encrypted pieces of these files are potentially held on your computer without your knowledge.
But unlike you, I continue to use Freenet. This is my reasoning:
Suppose you run a webhosting or filehosting service where people can store their files on your machines. They can store encrypted files on your machines. You don't know what they contain, so should you feel that the possibility they may contain things you disagree with is enough to stop you running your business, or to disallow files that you can't inspect?
The difference with Freenet is just that it isn't a central company providing the service to clients - it is p2p so everybody plays the part of both service provider and client.
So my rationale for running Freenet is that unless I object to web or filehosting companies hosting encrypted files in principle, then why should I object to myself taking that role?
In truth, the amount of this kind of objectionable material on Freenet is very small. Someone has over the last year been providing weekly statistics based on the number of posts to various boards in Freenet's forum software. Postings to boards which are clearly for people trading illegal images are tiny compared to the mainstream boards.
I would estimate that most Freenet users are geeks, file traders or political activists, in that order.
The main Freenet developer is even an evangelical Christian who is morally opposed to all pornography.
I think this is definitely the case. Freenet is very difficult to debug, especially considering that its very
design makes it impossible to know what the other nodes are doing, or even exactly how many of them there are.
There have been several point releases of Freenet, this is just the latest one.
I think most people run Freenet on Linux, so I'm not sure why you had problems there - it has always been very simple to install and use for me on Linux.
Freenet does prefer Sun Java, but I assume that is just a development decision to focus on one JVM. It is supposed to be a reference implementation, and once Freenet stabilises a bit more I am sure people will create versions in other languages.
If you haven't tried it recently, maybe it has changed a lot since you last tried it?
Until freenet is an accepted distribution channel for legal content, having freenet on your hard drive will be considered a sign of guilt. When the main channel for linux distributions becomes freenet, then maybe it will be considered acceptable to have it installed. Before then, it's guilt by association.
For that to happen freenet will need to compete with P2P software that runs faster.
Support SETI@home
But unlike you, I continue to use Freenet. Just to be clear when I say I support Freenet I do support people operating Freenet nodes as well. Your choice to run Freenet is your choice and it is a good one. Should Freenet get tested in a trial against someone accused of child pornography for running a Freenet node and Freenet pass. I would probably start a Freenet node right away. But until that time I choose not to run a Freenet node.
You take a pedophile who is 1 step away from molesting a kid but thankfully his moral compass is intact - for now.
One day, his curiosity gets the best of him, his moral compass falters, and he seeks out kiddie porn and finds it.
He finds it turns him on more than looking at kids at the local McDonalds or on TV.
Later, when he is babysitting his niece, whose parents have no idea he is a pedophile, he gets aroused and decides to go for broke, breaking his niece in the process.
In this case, the porn is one step along the way, but removing any one step would have prevented the child abuse.
The best step of course would be to not let him alone around children until after he's had a chance to talk to a shrink and gotten his moral compass nailed down solid enough so he would know, understand, and respect society's rules. It would be even better if we lived in a society where youth and adults who had those desires were encouraged to see a shrink to help them not violate the rules of society.
Unfortunately, today's society puts a lot of pressure on known-only-to-themselves pedophiles to avoid seeking psychological help.
Off-topic rant: The same can be said for anyone who desires to engage in sociopathic behavior. Society should encourage these people to see a shrink. However, with the stigma, the cost of care, the poor payments from insurance companies, and mandatory-reporting laws of "dangerous individuals," there is a very strong dis-incentive to seek help. Thankfully, the stigma of seeing shrink isn't what it once was, and the feds are acting like they are going to force insurance companies to pay for mental health on the same terms as physical health.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Anyone who uses Linux is a computer hacker/cyber terrorist.
Anyone who supports the GPL,or anything related to Open Source has an agenda.
Anyone who runs any P2P app is a warez pirate.
I'm sorry but I don't see how just by having encryption, or having the ability to write code in C, or running Linux and using encryption, makes a person a hacker, cyber terrorist, or anything else. To be honest, it's just another type of discrimination.
I guess racial profiling isn't good enough, now anyone who goes to certain websites, like this site, and happens to be using linux, and happens to know C or C++, is assumed to be guilty of hacking, cracking, writing viruses, and being a member of anonymous, or some other cyber terrorist gang.
I think it's this stupid thinking that caused and prolongs the war on drugs. People who think groups like these are real linux using hackers Anonymous hacker cult are the kinda people who would think that just because you know how to do something, or just because you go to a website, or download some software, that you are guilty of a crime. How is this any different from pre-crime? You look guilty so you're guilty.
Anonymous on FOX11
It's going to take a lot of bullets, and a lot of technologies, but I think the way to fight these people is by creating superior technologies, not by trying to ban or restrict the growth of the technology just because some evil people want to abuse it with kiddie porn.
I would like to see the technology ban kiddie porn from the net, I would like to see the technology filter the internet and protect children from the net, and also keep children and adults seperate if children do get on the net. We need better parenting technology, and we need better technology to track pictures back to the original distributors if they use formats like JPG, GIF or whatever.
And I'm not saying we can depend just on watermarking and DRM as the answer, I'm saying it's part of a series of technologies which should make up the solution. I understand the technology well enough to know that while it's not going to work all the time, it's better than what we do now. I also know that RFID allows us to do similar things in the offline world, and there are a range of technologies which could be developed just to go after child pornographers.
The point is, if we are just going to wait until AFTER the files have been uploaded for years, it's going to be very difficult and perhaps too late. But if we can identify the victim in the video, the room they were in, maybe you can get a name, maybe in the picture theres information about the camera model and computer it came from, I'm talking about using forensic technologies to track down both the predators and the victim so that the predator can be locked away in prison, that way they can't harm any children in the future. And the children can be found and rescued perhaps before the predator kills them.
I don't see how we can catch these people if we just ban websites, or push them deep underground. I think if we push them deep underground they'll just be harder to catch. In theory, if someone is a pedophile, then you can expect Google and other search engines to have at least some search records proving they have a history of looking for and trying to download child pornography.
If we know they have a history of looking for it, then they should be contacted by the police and forced to help track down the producers. However, if we just arrest EVERYONE who looked up child porn on Google, and throw them all in prison, how exactly are we supposed to get to the producers?
It seems to me that yes technology can help us get to the producers, but it's not as simple as just shutting down the entire internet, or freenet, and or restricting the growth of entire industries just because there might be child pornography somewhere on the net. And I'm concerned that more often than not, child pornography can and probably is being used by people who want to attack the internet in general, or by people who want to ban encryption, or by people who want to have a way to ban P2P, basically people who don't like the technology that child pornographers are abusing.
I'm not a fan of Java and I never was a fan. This is a personal preference. I know how Java works, I've played with Java, and if you like Java thats fine, but I'm not a fan.
I'd sooner use C# than use Java.
um, no.
OpenNet requires that you have access to one other node. thats it. the "Spread Freenet" utility bundled with 0.5 distro's makes use of this.
Most people get lazy and just use a seeds.ref file downloaded from one of the distribution sites, but you only need one ref, and you can get that for the asking on IRC or I2p or TOR or USENET or wherever.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
I'm not 100% certain, but I believe the Entropy Network was an attempt to rewrite Freenet in C.
That might not be the truth this week, though. Pretty sure it was a couple years ago.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.