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)

terrorists and kiddy fiddlers ...

[ThirdPrize]

start your downloads.

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: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.

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: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

[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: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:

[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.