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

Performance

[morgan_greywolf]

Yeah, but the question burning on everyone's minds is: is it stillas slow as pouring molasses outside in January in Michigan's Upper Peninsula?

Re:Performance

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll have you know our molasses-pouring operations have gotten much more efficient in recent years, you insensitive clod!

(which, ironically, may be the figurative answer to your question)

Re:Performance

[zappepcs]

In a word: yes. I suspect this is as much to do with the lack of peers as anything in the program itself. I think that if enough of us are using it, it will be much better as more peers are added.

I like the concept of this because it is about information being free; free of inspection by those who would search your home or ask for travel papers, and do so without legal authority or permission. Perhaps it might be thought of as Freedomnet. Sharing pics with the family, or organizing a group, say like anonymous via freenet helps to ensure the integrity of your communications and freedom from inspection of the same.

Sure, there will be nefarious groups and individuals who use it but there has been nothing to stop them from using something like it in the past either. In fact, given a bit of time, I can think of probably 100 different secure methods for those pesky terrorists to send coded messages over public infrastructure without needing engineers to accomplish it. So to say this is only for terrorists is defeatist and ignorant of the facts, and alarmist as well.

Re:Performance

[adavies42]

Remember, Freenet's really not that different from Bittorrent. How useful is Bittorrent when there's two peers serving some years-old file?

terrorists and kiddy fiddlers ...

[ThirdPrize]

start your downloads.

Re:terrorists and kiddy fiddlers ...

[Just Some Guy]

start your downloads.

New Freenet? "Here come the pedophiles!"

New online chat system? "Here come the pedophiles!"

New photo sharing site? "Here come the pedophiles!"

Exactly how many damn pedophiles live in the hellhole where you reside? Has it ever occurred to you to try, you know, moving to someplace with a better normal:kiddielover ratio?

I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.

I can tell.

Re:terrorists and kiddy fiddlers ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Give him a break, hes probably Britain. The country's filled with illegal immigrant terrorist paedophiles living in council houses. That's why we need more cameras. Pervasive surveillance is the answer to all of society's woes!

Re:terrorists and kiddy fiddlers ...

[Goaway]

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?

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.

Re:terrorists and kiddy fiddlers ...

[Just Some Guy]

Every six months or so I re-install Freenet to see if the performance has gotten any better. Every time, I look at each of the pre-configured index pages to see what people are posting these days. Not once - never - have I seen childporn in any of those indexes.

There's a simple explanation for all the people who talk about how Freenet is saturated with kiddy porn: they're either repeating a stupid meme that they know nothing about, or they've gone looking and found something. Which group are you in?

Re:terrorists and kiddy fiddlers ...

[Just Some Guy]

The point with Freenet, though, is that you may be responsible for hosting / serving abhorrent material and you'd never know.

Umm, so? I hate child porn as much as the next person, but the same is true for so many other activities. I used to work for an ISP, and I'm 99.999% sure that at least one user downloaded at least one naked kid picture during that time. I'm not going to lose sleep over it, though - I was neither the uploader nor downloader.

Re:terrorists and kiddy fiddlers ...

[tepples]

Has it ever occurred to you to try, you know, moving to someplace with a better normal:kiddielover ratio? Which planet might that be?

Re:terrorists and kiddy fiddlers ...

[Just Some Guy]

You are just as guilty as the uploader, the downloader, the photographer and the abuser.

Grow up. Are the people at Nokia responsible because the 9/11 hijackers used their phones? Or AT&T because some phone calls went over their network? What about Microsoft, because some of them likely used Windows.

The legal construct of "common carrier" applies only to telcos as far as I know, but the concept is pretty well ubiquitous in real life and for good reason. If you buy gasoline, then you're financing oppression of Saudi women and non-Muslims. See how quickly everyone can be shown to support bad things?

Freenet vs Bittorrent

[RiotingPacifist]

Whats the advantages of using freenet vs using bittorrent?
If your in darknet mode isnt that the same as a private tracker?
If your not in darknet mode arnt you just as exposed as BT?

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?

Im not saying Freenet is useless just asking how it compares.

Re:Freenet vs Bittorrent

[CSMatt]

If your in darknet mode isnt that the same as a private tracker? No, because malicious individuals can still sign up for private trackers. In darknets, no one, not even the person you are downloading from, knows who you are.

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:Freenet vs Bittorrent

[RiotingPacifist]

Another disadvantage of Tor is that even though your traffic is encrypted, it's easy for someone monitoring your network connection [wsj.com] 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 [freehaven.net]. 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. But if you can afford the bandwidth you can run a tor node. is running a Freenet node lighter on bandwidth?

Re:Freenet vs Bittorrent

[Neil]

Bittorrent doesn't allow you to publish and download anonymously. If you are seeding something (or downloading it) everyone who is allowed to connect to the tracker can find out your IP address.

A Freenet network ideally consists of a large number of nodes connected by sparse network of encrypted links. Many of the nodes have a big chunk of cache associated with them. The files in the network live in the caches. To request a file you ask your node to find a file with a specific hash signature. It passes the request to its peers in the network, they pass it on in turn, and hopefully it eventually it reaches a cache that has the file you asked for. Bits then start trickling back through the chain of caches. The important thing is that because your local node is an active part of the network and is sending and receiving stuff all the time, nobody knows whether a particular request or response that goes through your node relates to something that you asked for, or whether it is just something that you've been asked to "pass on" by a 3rd party.

If everything works as intended, even people who are fully connected to the network and participating shouldn't be able to identify the original publisher of a particular file, or identify who has downloaded a copy (though the fact that they've added the darknet mode suggests that that they aren't 100% confident about that!).

http://freenetproject.org/whatis.html

This has obvious anti-censorship, freedom of speech, freedom to whistle-blow type applications:

http://freenetproject.org/philosophy.html

It also has obvious undesirable applications (see the flood comments about child-porn and terrorism).

The other major practical difference to Bittorrent is that Bittorrent is designed to be fast. Freenet is definitely not the quickest way to get information from A to B ...

Re:Freenet vs Bittorrent

[mrogers]

Good point about running your own Tor node. Tor and Freenet both have configurable bandwidth limits, but if you're on a really slow connection I guess there comes a point where you're not contributing much value to the network...

Re:Freenet vs Bittorrent

[Kjella]

Whats the advantages of using freenet vs using bittorrent?
If your in darknet mode isnt that the same as a private tracker?
If your not in darknet mode arnt you just as exposed as BT? First of all, unless you got your torrents encrypted the ISP can see everything. With torrent connections encrypted, they can still see you downloading the .torrent file. With Freenet they can't see anything of meaning in either darknet or opennet mode, though it's not like the ISPs really care because they throttle by protocol and/or traffic volume anyway. I suppose it's if you think all your traffic gets routed by AT&T to the NSA.

A private tracker hides what you're downloading, but if the RIAA/MPAA get on your tracker you're busted. A darknet hides that you're part of the network at all (at least your IP isn't announced around), but even if your darknet is compromised, it acts not that differently from 0.5 (which despite the FUD isn't nearly as insecure as Toad has been trying to kill his own creation) which means you have to gather statistical evidence that it's you and not just your node peering with other nodes. It takes quite a lot of work and is probably much harder than your regular goons will bother to.

The biggest issue I have with the darknet is whether trust is a security or a liability. Assuming you are a Bad Guy[tm], peering with other bad guys would be a liability - if the cops bust all the friends in the contact list, they'll catch them too. If you're a good guy peering with a stranger, what if that stranger is a bad guy? Will cops knock down your door because you were listed as a friend of a terrorist/pedophile/whatever? Same if he's a guy you think you know that has a hidden dark side. If you think darknet is a fundamentally bad idea, Freenet has been standing still for a few years or maybe even regressed. I'd much rather see some form of premixing, to create better security without trust. Trust is a liability IMO.

Re:Freenet vs Bittorrent

[evanbd]

With or without the darknet mode, the anonymity is good but not 100%. Especially for large files (or groups of files) there are statistical attacks (eg, if I'm getting requests for a large fraction of file, I'm probably closer to the requester). They're nontrivial to implement, but they're much harder on a darknet. Perfect anonymity is either impossible or very close, but Freenet is doing pretty well for many purposes. Stronger anonymity guarantees, and resistance to attackers with more substantial resources, are among the goals for 0.8.

Re:Freenet vs Bittorrent

[gwern]

In my experience doing both, Tor can eat up as much as you give it - which since the default limit is something like 100 kb/s with bursts up to 1000 means you'll be donating ~200 kb/s in my experience. Freenet on the other hand has a more generous cap, but I don't think I've ever seen it upload more than 30 or 40 kb/s, even with a few gigs in my store.

Re:Freenet vs Bittorrent

[Superkind]

though the fact that they've added the darknet mode suggests that that they aren't 100% confident about that! That is completely and utterly wrong. The darknet mode was added to prevent harvesting of nodes simply by joining the network. In 0.5 (and in 0.7 with activated opennet) you can create a list of all Freenet nodes just by waiting. Nodes that do not have opennet activated are not found by this method (unless you are directly connected to them in which case you wouldnâ(TM)t need to search for them). That is the reason for darknet.

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

[CSMatt]

I believe Tor is still around.

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

[TripMaster Monkey]

In the case of TOR, my money's on the first possibility I mentioned.

Expected Level of Public Discourse

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Pedophiles! Pedophiles, pedophiles, pedophiles!! Obscenity!! Pedophiles! Terrorists!! Filth!! Pedophiles, pedophiles, pedophiles!! Terrorists! Terrorist pedophiles!! Pedophile terrorists? Pedophiles! Terrorists! Criminals!! Islamofacists!! Think of the children!!

If You Have Nothing To Hide Then You Have Nothing To Fear.

</newscoverage>

Re:Expected Level of Public Discourse

[archeopterix]

Pedophiles! Pedophiles, pedophiles, pedophiles!!

No, this is the level of Slashdot discourse. The expected level of public discourse will involve pitchforks, torches and public executions of freenet users, pediatricians and pedicurists.

Re:Expected Level of Public Discourse

[enoz]

And vandalism.

Re:Expected Level of Public Discourse

[samael]

Surely the problem with Pedophiles is that they _do_ think of the children?

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

[The Anarchist Avenge]

I'd be disinclined to trust TOR on its own. I've heard speculation that the NSA is in control of enough nodes that they can identify the origin of a message.

Have they fixed FROST?

[AlexMax2742]

I gave RC1 a try, but then gave up when I found out that the potentially most interesting feature, the FROST message board, had several exploits in it and was being DoS'ed to oblivion and back. The FMS system is an interesting replacement, but it's still not widely used and without the ability to search for new newsgroups.

Re:Have they fixed FROST?

[evanbd]

FMS is much more widely used these days; Toad did a (very cursory, I believe) code review and is now using it. There's a list of all newsgroups that people you know of have posted to; it's not very long, generally, so searching isn't particularly required (and is your newsreader's problem anyway).

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

[arevos]

The government is never going to allow a method of communication it can't eavesdrop upon. Welcome! Welcome to the year 2008! Park your De Lorean over there, good sir, and let me fill you in on communications technology in the 21st century.

1024 bit asymmetric encryption is the norm in 2008. The governments of the world can't eavesdrop on Joe Average's web browser, let alone Freenet. The encryption battle was lost in 1993, and a good thing too, or internet commerce would be impossible.

So you can put away that tin-foil hat, and relax in the knowledge that the internet has not become a panopticon, and likely never will be.

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

[CogDissident]

Then that just means we need more people on TOR, to out-flood them. They need a "lot" of computers to determine origin locations, at least 1/2 the network to do it reliably.

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

[MikeBabcock]

Tor doesn't allow publishers to create content anonymously at all. It just allows you to fetch it anonymously.

Incidentally, running a tor node at home got my IP banned from Slashdot from users spamming said geek news site via tor and my machine inadvertently being a part of it.

Freenet allows you to create anonymous or pseudonymous identities to communicate with others or post content in such a way that others are unlikely to ever determine the source of said content. This is a very useful feature for various persons, including whistle blowers.

Certain recently discussed websites accepting submissions anonymously would do well to configure a FreeMail account for users to communicate to them with so they can receive tips and information from those wishing not to be identified.

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

[JesseMcDonald]

Tor doesn't allow publishers to create content anonymously at all.

Yes it does. One can set up a server at an anonymous public address under a TLD (.onion) only accessible via the Tor network. The clients never see the server's real IP address. Tor Hidden Services.

What can I do with Freenet?

[synthespian]

My country has a problem that I perceive as a big issue: although, in theory, freedom of expression is guaranteed by law, in practice, you will get your ass seriously sued if you touch on some flaming issue (which can be anything the person on the other end of the screen thinks).

Journalists that work for big media outlets don't have this problem so much here in Brazil because they have teams of lawyers to fight the legal battles. But any blogger can get in serious trouble. Having to sell your furniture because of debt due to legal bills sucks.

Just this week I read about one such "intimidation attempt" (as I like to call it). The journalist, wisely, had hosted hist site on a US provider. According to him, the offended party could do nothing to him (meaning, couldn't take the content off line).

What can Freenet do for those cases? Do you access web pages, are there forums, or do you just download/upload stuff/files? And can content be hosted on Freenet but be seen by non-Freenet users (which I think would be the ideal thing for bloggers and journalists and other whistle-blowers)?

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

[manwithmanyquestions]

What about CALEA requirements - which have already been extended to IP traffic - once it goes out into the network its fair game right - regardless of protocol?