Freenet Releases 0.7.0rc2

evanbd writes "The Freenet Project has announced Freenet 0.7.0rc2. From the announcement: 'Freenet is a global peer-to-peer network designed to allow users to publish and consume information without fear of censorship. 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.' Of course, for those of us who don't know anyone else running Freenet, or simply prefer it, there's also a non-darknet mode available."

Comments

Re:And here's why it's doomed to failure:

[CogDissident]

The TOR network http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network) has been around forever, and doing something rather similar, without being successfully shut down.

Re:Freenet vs Bittorrent

[mrogers]

If your in darknet mode isnt that the same as a private tracker?

Not really - with a private tracker, the other users (including the tracker) know what you're uploading and downloading. That's not the case in Freenet. Also, any user of a private tracker can invite their friends, who can also see what you're uploading and downloading, so the network becomes less private as it grows. Freenet becomes more private as it grows, because there are more users who might have initiated any given request.

If your not in darknet mode arnt you just as exposed as BT?

No, requests travel for multiple hops through the network, so if you receive a request from an opennet peer it doesn't mean that peer initiated the request - it might be forwarding the request on behalf of another peer.

If you want to carry out conversations, then i suppose BT isnt a good medium, But isnt that what public/private mailing lists are for?

Mailing lists aren't much good if you need to be anonymous. You could use Tor to set up a webmail account, but then the webmail provider can read your email, so you have anonymity but not privacy. You could use Tor and GnuPG and webmail, but by that point it's probably easier to install Freenet.

Another disadvantage of Tor is that even though your traffic is encrypted, it's easy for someone monitoring your network connection to tell when you're using Tor. If they can correlate the times you connect to Tor with the times a certain webmail account is active then your anonymity is broken. By running a Freenet node 24/7 you make it much harder for an eavesdropper to link your activity patterns to anonymous or pseudonymous messages, because your node is always sending and receiving encrypted packets regardless of whether you're active.

Re:And here's why it's doomed to failure:

[Kjella]

The government is never going to allow a method of communication it can't eavesdrop upon. Either your allegedly "secure" communication will be clandestinely monitored, or the technology itself will be outlawed, on the grounds that it enables terrorists and pedophiles to evade the law. Funny that, would you care to tell me where the government backdoor is in firefox, openssh, openpgp and all the millions of other secure ways to communicate? And in closed source, I doubt everyone would silently bend over to the government and every police agency around the world shut up about it, particularly not outside the US. The only new thing here is anonymity, not security...

Re:terrorists and kiddy fiddlers ...

[evanbd]

Has it ever occurred to you to try, you know, moving to someplace with a better normal:kiddielover ratio? Someplace less like Freenet, in other words?

There's plenty of abhorrent material on any P2P network. In my experience, Freenet is not particularly different, for better or for worse.

What Freenet does have more than its fair share of are conspiracy theorists and related weirdos. But I count that as neither surprising nor particularly problematic.