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After 3 Years, Freenet 0.7 Released
evanbd writes "After over 3 years of work, the Freenet Project has announced the release of Freenet 0.7. 'Freenet is software designed to allow the free exchange of information over the Internet without fear of censorship, or reprisal. To achieve this Freenet makes it very difficult for adversaries to reveal the identity, either of the person publishing, or downloading content' ... 'The journey towards Freenet 0.7 began in 2005 with the realization that some of Freenet's most vulnerable users needed to hide the fact that they were using Freenet, not just what they were doing with it. The result of this realization was a ground-up redesign and rewrite of Freenet, adding a "darknet" capability, allowing users to limit who their Freenet software would communicate with to trusted friends.'"
because it was uploaded via freenet?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Now if they will just get a decent GUI and searching it will wipe the floor with Bittorrent.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
All I got was - Access to this site has been blocked by your system administrator (i'm at work).
If you don't have many real-life friends how are you ever going to find the darknets, and the content on them? If you only connect with a few people, that's not going to help you find very much content is it? Is there a big "greynet" where everyone has somehow established a level of trust (proved they are not gov't agents or lawyers), and at the same time there are enough people that there is likely to be some content worth finding?
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Is that the only use you can think of for this? Is this just a hopeless attempt at trolling? Is your world view so ethnocentric that you don't realize how censorship affects people?
Here's a quick list of situations or people off the top of my head that could benefit from this:
- Citizens of a government which controls information flow (China, Kuwait, etc)
- Investigative journalists releasing stories (Judith Miller, anyone?)
- Leaking protected or damaging information (Wikileaks has been shown to be vulnerable)
If all you can think about is "OmG teh CHILDRENS!!111", then something is seriously wrong with you.
...without disclosing the fact that I want to hide the fact that I'm hiding something?
Because, of course, if I haven't got anything to hide, why would I want to hide the fact that I'm hiding something?
Maybe Freenet 0.8 will provide a way to hide the fact that I'm hiding the fact that I'm hiding something.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
They have managed to convince a large segment of the population that the only consequence of anonymous communication on the internet is the proliferation of child porn.
Have you actually seen Freenet? The only purpose it's pretty much used for is the exchange of the worst crimes of humanity. When it's actually proven to be used for a legitimate purpose that needs anonymity, then you can criticize people's perception of it.
If you somehow limit who you can connect to, if one of those nodes is compromised doesn't that provide a vector to identify other members/systems/whatever that have exchanged information with? Seem like that would defeat the purpose of untraceable communication
It's a signal-to-noise ratio problem, and what constitutes signal (or noise) is a function of what the authorities are looking for.
In China, Freenet is a tool used by traitors to pass destabilizing messages (to the PRC, that's signal) back and forth, hiding in a sea of American child porn (to the PRC, that's noise).
In the USA, Freenet is a tool used by pedophiles to pass disgusting images back and forth (to the FBI, that's signal), hiding in a sea of "Free Tibet" and "Falun Gong" emails (to the FBI, that's noise).
Unfortunately, since the network is designed that you can't host one without hosting the other, neither is a particularly advisable thing to have on your network, no matter where you live.
Have you actually seen Freenet? The only purpose it's pretty much used for is the exchange of the worst crimes of humanity.
With Freenet you have to actively look for what you want. If you found "the worst crimes of humanity" it's because you were looking for them in the first place.
Trolling is a art,
With Freenet you have to actively look for what you want. If you found "the worst crimes of humanity" it's because you were looking for them in the first place.
Again, have you actually used Freenet? Apparently not. There are tons of index pages that point you to this stuff. The people who maintain the index pages take a firm "who am I to judge?" stand on including the child porn stuff.
The result of this realization was a ground-up redesign
;)
They ground up the redesign?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I've been reading through their site and like the straight-forward writing style:
"Hopefully the installer will open the page for you, so you won't be reading this."
"Insecure mode should work automatically once enabled, so the rest of this page is about connecting to Friends."
Or how about the java error message:
"The JVM you are using is known to be buggy. It may produce OutOfMemoryError's when there is plenty of memory available. Please upgrade..."
The last time I used Freenet, in the 0.4? days, there were sites that would index whatever was submitted, without regard to content, and it was these index sites that were most heavily promoted for "finding" anything in Freenet. It was hard NOT to notice "the worst crimes of humanity", so to speak, when they're sitting there with a full description. Whether the descriptions were accurate, I have no idea, as the novelty of Freenet wore off as soon as I realized I could get better speed from a tape-carrying tortoise.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Child Necrophilia is where it's at. Plain old Child pornography has lost its edge since Michael Jackson has made it acceptable.
The term "Aborted Love" isn't a bad thing now.
Wikileaks has been mirrored to Freenet more than once. I don't know of an up to date link, or a single regularly updated source, but it's there.
A large number of photos from Tibet are available, and there is at least one highly active user posting them and keeping them up to date, with commentary.
Sure. And why is Google supporting terrorism by providing Google Earth, which provides all sorts of information about secure sites?
If you started eliminating or restricting everything that could be used for terrorism and/or for child pornography there wouldn't be many modern conveniences left.
They were asking for it all along.
Great points, I think that this is a really important and positive service.
But I'm scared to use it. It's obvious that people will upload vile things. And I really don't want authorities to find (which "is hard, but not impossible") somebody else's trash on my PC. Something tells me that the explanation will sound really lame to DA Tuffoncrime and Judge Hangemhigh.
Cars kill the enviornment
Retention of individual sovereignty/responsibility/money kills "fairness".
So, I'm thinkin': a government program can fix all of these woes.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Freenet is an important concept. On it you get complete freedom of speech: the ability to discuss and spread your ideas, with full anonymity and freedom from censorship. Of course, this means that you will probably come across things on it that will go against your beliefs. While nothing forces you to actually visit these freesites, you will have to come to terms that this might be cached on your computer even without you visiting them. But this is important to freedom of speech: if people where able to censor anything, the system just wouldn't work.
So why does Freenet fail? Lack of documentation. I don't mean ease of use in the interface - I mean for the protocols and network design. A system as important as Freenet -- one that people expect unfaltering anonymity and security from -- should be rigorously and meticulously documented.
But it's not. In fact, if you bring it up with the Freenet developers they will gladly tell you this is intentional -- that they use security through obscurity to guard against someone finding a way to break the system.
So -- do you trust your freedom with the competency of a handful of developers to make a good design? I don't. I want as many people looking at the system as possible. I want people to really bash on it, to try to break it. This gives me confidence, not worry, because problems will be solved sooner than later.
This would also open up the possibility of more than one client to access the network. If you have two separate clients that implement the same strict protocol and one of them messes up, it's likely to be caught far sooner than with just one. An immediate example of where this would have helped is with a bug that existed in 0.7's AES implementation for a very long time, where the data wasn't being encrypted properly.
The Freenet developers don't want multiple clients either -- again, they worry that one might break the network. This line of thought is incomprehensible to me, because as a developer I would want things that could break my network to be discovered as soon as possible so I could fix the design.
Sure, you could look at the source code. It is Open Source, after all. But what if you don't know Java? I don't particularly want to learn Java just so I can review Freenet's code. As a C++ developer I might be able to read and understand most of it, but I don't trust myself to review something so important without years of prior Java experience -- the chance that I'd miss something is just too great.
There are plenty of morally righteous reasons to want to communicate anonymously and invisibly.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If I'm not mistaken, you could always load up freenet and use a Truecrypt drive as your "swap" space.
Since when was looking at this stuff bad? Parents look at their children on a daily basis... just cause the person feels differently about what their looking at, its considered bad (remember: forcing the child is the problem)
Better not go to a 2girls1cup/goatse/etc. site and get any "good" feelings about it, otherwise you are a criminal too.
That's like saying an ISP is responsible for all the child porn their users download. Nobody has been busted for posession of anything merely for running a Freenet node as far as we know, and in any sane jurisdiction hopefully nobody ever will be. The EFF's legal advice to p2p devs may be of interest here: http://www.eff.org/wp/iaal-what-peer-peer-developers-need-know-about-copyright-law
On the grand scale of things, and even on a per-criminal-act basis, killing someone for their religion is a lot worse than raping them. Killing 6 million people for their religion is a lot worse than 6 million incidences of photographed child molestation.
To put it another way: If you asked whether I'd rather have me as a kid or a kid I knew raped and the picture circulated around the Internet, or killed, it's obvious which one I'd pick. I think 99.99% of parents would say the same thing.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
When's the last time you used TOR and went to core.onion?
There's 3 links to pro-pedophilia images and discussion sites and 1/3 of the talk threads on the page about pedophilia.
When the people *using* these service stop being convinced that they're good for sharing child porn, then I think we can fairly categorize that as hysteria. In the mean time, I think it's a pretty justified accusation.
If I and my fight-Beijing dissidents run a collection of Freenet nodes and we don't get on the "non-dark" part of FreeNet, our risk of getting k1dd13 pr0n on our systems isn't any higher than it would be without FreeNet.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Freenet 0.7 is vastly faster than 0.4, though not as fast as bittorrent (obviously). Currently, all the good index sites have anti-CP policies. They'll happily link photos from Tibet, though, or wikileaks mirrors (both present). The current crop of index sites also tends to do a good job indexing things. Also, much of the content is centered around FMS and the (less functional) Frost messaging systems (broadly similar to usenet; FMS even operates as an NNTP gateway, allowing you to use your favorite newsreader). You'll get content posted to boards you subscribe to, which tends to be at least somewhat relevant (ie, the signal to noise ratio is probably better than /. ;) ). I'd encourage you to try it out again, if you're interested in privacy and an anonymous network, but not if all you're looking for is the next bittorrent (though you can find music, movies, etc on Freenet if you want).
In theory, you could use a device that only had a RAMdisk, and an encrypted one at that. Of course you'd need to rig it so the encryption keys were kept in the CPU cache and not in RAM, as RAM can be recovered after power-off if done quickly.
You'd also need to rig up an accelerometer and case-tampering switch so that if the unit was moved or the case opened the encryption keys would be over-written.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
They want the satellites to be able to zoom in on the Freenet servers!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The problem actually comes down to this :
The are 2 ways to regard spread of information
Either it should be possible to stop the spread of certain information , and that will put a stop to the abuses , but it will also make it possible for an authoritarian regime to silence any criticism , and will basically stop freedom of speech .
The other way is to make it impossible to stop information from spreading , and that way you wil ensure freedom of speech , and anonymity to whistle blowers and criticism , but at the same time , abuses will be unstoppable .
There is no midway to this , as it's about technical capabilities .
Slipping shoelaces ?
Yes, but look on the bright side - by the time the file arrives they will be all grown up.
The previous version of Freenet had security which consisted of nothing more than "if we're not clever enough to infer the internal data of remote nodes from traffic then neither is The Plod". Has this improved at all in the latest version ?
Actually, I've been trialling the release candidates of this version of Freenet (like you I lost interest in earlier versions) and it's very good.
While I'm sure there must be kiddie porn there somewhere I didn't notice it or stumble across it accidentally.
As for the speed, it's much better than previous versions. I would go so far as to say early DSL speeds (1Mb) once it's up and running for an hour or two.
D.
THIS is /., not www.whitehouse.com.
I am impressed by Freenet's devotion to freedom of speech, but if my computer is hosting content, I should have the freedom to choose what that content is. Freedom of speech does not mean I should have to provide any resources to help you. This is where Freenet goes overboard. Freedom of speech is not an absolute.
Many bad thing may be going on around there , but there's no need to spread FUD . In fact , that's exactly what caused this to happen in the fist place :
The system freenet uses ensures that the content is hosted by popularity . So if a lot of good people put their legal stuff on it , the illegal stuff would simply be crushed . But because of the FUD , it actually attracts bad people , while repelling good people , thus creating a self fulfilling prophecy .
Slipping shoelaces ?
That stuff is in the minority though and can be ignored easily. The majority of the stuff on freenet is political in nature or things people were otherwise afraid to say on the public net.
That old study about the content of freenet found most of it was text files anyway, perhaps this has changed but it seems likely to be true still.
I would mod you as insightful if I had points. While Freenet has legitimate uses, everyone knows that it's also used to trade things like child porn. I won't pontificate about the latter other than to say that I would choose to *not* serve up any chunks of children getting abused. Nor would I want to transmit any pieces of a bunch of other illegal or immoral or dangerous things.
Freenet is a non-starter for me for that very reason. Thank you for elucidating it so nicely.
So which is it? Pick one:
* Your average murder is more immoral than your average rape.
* Your average rape is more immoral than your average murder.
* Your average murder and average rape are both so immoral as to be "infinitely immoral." This implies of course that 2 rapes or 2 murders or for that matter 6 million murders is practically no more immoral than 1.
* Your average murder and average rape have identical but finite levels of immorality.
For the sake of argument, let's stay away from "all immorality is of the same level," as that sidetracks the debate.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I see where you are going and in principal I agree. The problem is the consequences of rape and other unspeakably inappropriate sexual behavior generally play out over a lifetime and _generally_ speaking lead to more inappropriate sexual behavior at an early age to more children.
It very quickly turns into a "grand scale" social problem due to geometric growth of inappropriate behavior.
Again, I generally agree with the principal of what you are saying, but it's very important to point out the deeply corrosive effect inappropriate sexual anything has in a society.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Apparently the op I was talking to in #freenet wasn't a developer, so practicing security through obscurity isn't intentional.
Actually, I'm pretty sure you can find that stuff on the regular world wide web if you start looking for it. When the people *using* illegal web sites stop being convinced that they're good for sharing illegal images, then I think we can fairly categorize that as hysteria. In the mean time, I think we have to shut down the internet.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
The corrosive effect you mention can be countered by putting the child or now-adult grown child in a safe, warm environment and providing the necessary education/de-programming. It does take a society willing to throw resources at the problem though. That means money and higher taxes. I for one would gladly pay higher taxes to keep the next generation and the generation after that safer.
On the other hand, being killed is kind of permanent.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So what you're saying is that Freenet is basically the home for the /. first-post trolls?
On the one hand, 'censorship = bad'. On the other, I really feel like I have no fear of any reprisals using my current internet technologies.
So, short of content I could publish and/or access without Freenet, what am I missing? And more to the point, is it worthwhile to fire up a node to find out?
It seems like the sort of thing I'd be in favor of, and would like to support, but at the same time I can't imagine a worthwhile use for it in my own life.
Am I alone here?
What main index pages? All the default bookmarks have anti-CP policies. This is not even a result of editing by the freenet devs; it's a result of community standards -- all the well-maintained and usable indexes have such policies. The devs have explicitly taken a content-agnostic approach to the default bookmarks, and said that anything useful and regularly updated is a candidate. The result is a set of indexes free of child pornography.
I may not agree with what you want to say, but as American (once upon a time, a long time ago, in a land far far away) you should be willing to die for that right.
Whether what you say causes a fight and then a lawsuit, or if it obstructs someone else's inalienable rights and causes your arrest is one thing. Preventing you from saying it is another.
Alas, America today is "Give me the liberty to buy shit, or at least try not to bother me while I watch TV." True freedom is a forgotten and probably lost dream.
I'm interesting but i heard Gnunet was better.
Can someone explain the pro & con of each ?
When the Freenet Project started, wasn't that the original political point it was intended to demonstrate? That any jurisdiction in which Freenet was not anonymous (due to government-sponsored compromises on the security of the telecom system) was, by definition, no longer sane?
Well, guess what? The guy was right -- but he didn't anticipate 9/11 and the ensuing acquiescence of the population to the rise of the modern security/surveillance state. There are no sane jurisdictions left anywhere on the planet.
Freenet exists only as a tool by which authoritarian regimes can detect and track dissidents. In an age where everyone from NSA to China Telecom has taps on all the big fiber nodes, even if we can't tell what the nodes are saying to each other, we know which nodes are talking to which other nodes, and we can correlate that to the comings-and-goings of real people at ISPs, cybercafes, and homes. The political point's been made, the experiment's over, and it's time to wind this thing down before users in China (who, at least from my American perspective, are actually using the network for a "good" cause) start to disappear from public view, only to reappear as livers and corneas in the transplant market.
No, he said you can say what you want to say, just don't make HIM repeat it if he doesn't want to.
So before you go off ranting about eeeevuuulll child porn you should consider that people get the Abu Ghraib treatment every day all over the world for simply attempting to HIDE their communications.
You'd think after putting three years into something they'd come out with a _better_ product, not a worse one. Freenet 0.7 isn't safe anymore. And they probably lost a good number of potential users by claiming it was the stable and current release for the past year or so, long before it actually was usable...not that it is now.
Meanwhile, Freenet 0.5 is still being developed a bit, some security flaws have been fixed, and we've still got a pretty large community.
Be more specific. Are they going out to West Africa and getting a bunch of people and shipping them en masse to America over Freenet? Or are they invading Manchuria and performing exotic biological and chemical experiments on the locals there over Freenet? Perhaps they are rounding up millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and opponents of the regime and gassing them over Freenet? Or as it might be are they riding out on ponies over the steppe with composite shortbows and razing to the ground any city that dares resist their rule over Freenet?
Or are they exchanging crimes which are pretty nasty but which are actually nowhere near the worst?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Legitimate use for anonymity? What i'm doing is not anyones business, even if i'm just trying to see how to cook bread.
Its a basic human right. You don't 'need' another reason.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You mean there are websites on the internet openly and proudly sharing child porn without attempting to cover their tracks to avoid legal troubles?
Pix or it didn't happen.
Freenet is better than most of the other options available to them. And if they already know who your friends are from your phone records, then it doesn't matter if you also have a darknet connection to them.
Freenet is really really bad, I tried to retreive a ksk version of the gpl v2 and it returned me a version of bsd. There are bad people out there.
Lots of people crying for more anonimity on filesharing networks makes clear that free speech is a VERY long way from free internet. Contract your repesentative to get more free speech.
It is the efforts of the RIAA that drive people in the hand of anonymous networks.
You are wicked funny. And scary.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Many bad thing may be going on around there , but there's no need to spread FUD . In fact , that's exactly what caused this to happen in the fist place Wrong, wrong, wrong. Freenet will cache anything that happens to pass through your node. That means that if someone requests something and freenet happens to route it over your node (and hint: it doesn't determine that by qualities like being "free tibet" content) then it'll be in your node's store. It will be encrypted, so the only ones who could tell what it is would be someone with the decryption key, but it'll be there. Lies are a pretty lousy way to promote freenet.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
... is you do not talk about Freenet.
The second rule of Freenet...
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
No, you do host things requested by your peers as well. However, since the process is content-neutral, in most jurisdictions (including the US) you should have safe harbor laws working in your favor as long as you aren't the requester.
Also, as far as I can tell, as a regular freenet user, the pedophiles are a very small minority, and you won't normally encounter them in your freenet activities.
They have reinvented the vpn. an encrypted link between trusted parties.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Yes there are. I won't go looking for them for you, but google will find them. I assume most are hosted outside the US.
Yes, there are -and the pix you are after would be found in the
Point taken, but calling Judith Miller an investigative journalist is, well, perhaps something of an exaggeration.
Note that *because* it doesn't care what the content is that it's routing through your node, your should be protected by the various safe harbor laws in most jurisdictions.
Why do you think its so slow and has also taken them 8 years to get to 0.7?
Seriously, 0.7? Duke Nukem will be out before Freenet hits 1.0.
It's good to know that it isn't just being used for dodgy stuff, though it's still hard to see the point in it unless you're living in China or something? Who actually needs that level of anonymity beyond just trying it out for the cool factor? I hope the whole thing doesn't end up proving useful for spammers and botnet herders.. *sniff* I'm not trying to say we should stop developing interesting tech, but I still don't see the incentive to even try it. Maybe in a few years my government will get all totalitarian and big brother style and then I get to be cool too.
which is totally what she said
1 ) Put spaces before all punctuation marks , or ,
2) Don't
You could simply categorise stuff and allow people to use filters? Kind of like the moderation system on /. . There are abuses of the system, but they get modded down and you can filter them if you so wish.. why act like you can only use a system in its most extreme incarnations?
which is totally what she said
Oops... modded funny, meant insightful. But funny too.
Yes, there are. I accidentally came across some disturbingly professional-looking cp a few weeks ago. Sadly, this came up when I was looking for something quite innocent on google images.
Writing this comment off as a troll is shortsighted. Not wanting to see this problem will not make it go away. It is similar to the belief that p2p should continue to exist because we "don't want it to be illegal. Therefore, it isn't." Unfortunately, that's not how it works.
This is an issue that needs to be adressed. P2P is here to stay, probably, but that doesn't mean we should allow this technology to be abused by others. But a fully anonymous and hidden variant -would- be a boon to people wanting to share content that would be illegal -everywhere-. Think of the possibilities for abuse! Is there a possible solution?
In normal P2P programs it would be easy to track down people using it to spread child pornography. Hell, if the RIAA can track down grandmothers downloading less than a dozen mp3's, then it will surely be possible to find the people who are -really- abusing p2p. But why not just install a filter, to ban at least a number of keywords, as a simple precaution. Would be the easiest thing to do, but so far, it hasn't been implemented yet.
Software like Freenet, however, presents an even bigger problem. If it's completely hidden, you can't police it and that's -exactly- how it was designed, for better or worse! Personally, I'd rather give up software like Freenet than give up regular p2p software. The possibilities for abuse are simply too obvious and I don't see how it can be avoided. I'd rather take my chances with the RIAA.
You and me don't really appreciate the freedom and personal integrity we benefit form because we both probably have had it for our whole lives. If you lived in a country there you didn't already had them you would probably indeed want to have them, and that's why they should be cared for so we don't lose them again.
Yeah, many of us don't think we have that much to hide, but then we also expect everyone else to play nice, but what if they don't? What if some political forces don't share your opinions and try to hide them / freeze you out / silent yourself / lose your connection with others which say the same thing or something similair.
But then one have to balance that with how much one want the "bad" people to get caught, but I expect the really bad ones to know how to and also do cover their communication and tracks anyway so who is it really stoping?
Please tell me how it would work "Oh, dude A? Nah, we have never talked about child molesting on the phone, you don't need to survilence him." "Dude B? Yeah once he said he would go to nuke the USA, better check him out!"
I used Freenet 10 years ago, and as time wore on, I gradually got more and more bored with it. It was interesting at first, but I don't have a 10 year attention span.
You use it because you're curious, or want to support free speech. Adding to the userbase and content available helps the network grow, and helps those who actually need it. There are plenty of people who need it or think they need it even though their government isn't out to get them -- for example, there's at least one freesite by a victim of abuse who doesn't appear to be particularly comfortable talking about it in other forums. There are also plenty of conspiracy theorists who seem to think they need it -- I think they're wrong, but who knows? Not for me to judge. I'm sure there are some people using it as a route for "normal" copyright infringement that's secure from the RIAA et al, though that usage is discouraged.
And your A/C post removes the mod point. Domo arigatoni withmeatsauce.
Or option three.... the government keeps its greasy mitts off the information which is kept my various companies and access it in a limited fashion through a legal system and warrants based on reasonable suspicion. It's a prisoner's dilemma game though, if they try for totalitarian control we can go for absolute anonymity and we both lose, but we lose less than just bending over. And it certainly doesn't take into account copyright holders playing interference so that a large fraction of the people want anonymity, authoritarian regime or not...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Well, I haven't used the system so I don't know the exact details you'd use on an implementation, but it wouldn't be that hard to setup a filter to remove stuff that you personally didn't want to see, or have a system like adblock that you can subscribe to to blacklist any known undesirable material. It's not along the same lines as the government getting to silence its foes, because you have the option to remove the filtering if you so wish? I wasn't saying you should stop people putting this stuff online or try to catch them (though it would be an interesting challenge given the whole concept of the system), just that if there's stuff you don't want to even see mentioned, you can limit your exposure to it if you wish.
which is totally what she said
This is why we were always meant to be ruled; because that is a dichotomy with two unacceptable outcomes.
The key is finding the one worthy of ruling.
But to be an efficient and effective dictator you must be all-knowing and all-discerning. Are any of us so? No.
Wikileaks has been mirrored to Freenet more than once. I don't know of an up to date link, or a single regularly updated source, but it's there.
A large number of photos from Tibet are available, and there is at least one highly active user posting them and keeping them up to date, with commentary.
Thanks for this informative post, that's encouraging.In China, if they can't see your traffic (IE it's encrypted), and you're Chinese, they don't bother finding out what it is you're sending. They assume it's something you shouldn't be sharing. So they just cart you away and you never appear again.
Maybe it's an American who's doing the uploading-- they seem to be accepting of our desire for privacy "just because" (they see us as protective and secretive, because we are used to having those rights and using them just because; especially in relation to business affairs). For instance they don't bother second guessing over why all your traffic, as an American in China, is traveling over a fully encrypted American proxy; however if they caught a Chinese citizen doing so, he'd never be seen again. Same with our religions, it's fine if you're over there with an English bible, but if you have an english-chinese bible like my friend (who is a missionary over there, and who is my source on all this), and they see that it's english-chinese, they'll ship you out of the country, never let you back in, and mine your cellphone for all the phone numbers of other people you're working with and track them down and ship them out as well. It's not this way for all religions, mainly Muslims (because some of them have extremist, militant intentions; on this the US and China have grown similar) and Christians (because in China, the government is your savior, they took the people out of poverty and look at all the wealth and growth they've had over the last 15 years. They see you practicing a religion that says, "no, you are not my god, there is another God who is greater than you and no matter what you do to my physical body, you cannot harm the real, true 'me' in my soul", and that scares them. They really have no reason to be afraid because the bible is very specific about obeying your authorities as long as it doesn't involve disobeying God directly, but at first glance, such an ideology that is so contrary to the PRC's mantra (on the surface) is bad and must be stamped out.) Buddhism is allowed, even encouraged, due to the complete pacifism is promotes.
So to bring it back on topic, that's good to hear
Yes, I agree, it's definitely good to hear. One of the medium-term goals for Freenet (0.8.0, hopefully) is steganographic transports that will hopefully make it much harder to see that you're running a (darknet) node.
If your answer has to do with copyright infringement, every single technological measure attempted to stop it has failed. Try adding value to where we have an incentive to buy your product.
If your answer has to do with child pornography, keep in mind that the creation of it is still a crime. Go after that first, then worry about what to do with the images. The mere proliferation of data isn't what's harming those children, it's people. The key is finding the one worthy of ruling. The problem is that power corrupts. While not absolutely true -- after all, I naively believe that I could be an effective ruler -- the real problem is that we can't know whether someone will abuse that power until they have it, and by then, it's too late. That, and most people are pretty pathetic judges of character -- otherwise, Bush would never have gotten a second term. But to be an efficient and effective dictator you must be all-knowing and all-discerning. First, no, you don't -- you just need to delegate.
And second, I really hope "efficient and effective" isn't the only goal.
No, I think the function of a leader is not actually to rule, but to lead as long as people will follow. Take Linux -- Linus is an effective leader. If he ceases to be one, we're only a fork away from having a new leader. Much easier than in the real world, where the leaders all have real power over limited resources.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
What is the significance of using a chalk outline of a left amputee as their logo?
Analyzing who talks to whom is called "traffic analysis". It's often all the spooks need to figure out who their enemies are and take them out.
Yep, from the description you're dead on: By trying to limit traffic to trusted partners the "darknet" opens the user to traffic analysis. Apparently they were trying to hide the encrypted data - and in doing so broke both plausible deniability and the needle-in-a-haystack resistance to identification of communication partners.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ah, ok. Yeah, I guess you could block the kind-of-urlish-addresses they have, for whatever reason you would want to do that. I haven't blocked child porn in my regular browser and well, it doesn't bother me. Neither does murder videos or whatever someone was talking about either. And back when I tested freenet I don't remember that I strumpled upon any child porn either.
(And in the end I don't know what are worse, if they can live it out in fantasy or if they can't, not thinking about the people in the photos and videos.)
Apparently you are not the target audience for freenet. Or the 1st amendment, for that matter.
Freedom of speech does not mean - nor has it ever meant - that I have to open my home to provide services for the pornographer.
I can support the Chinese dissident through other channels and other means and still give the boot to Freetnet - without apologizing to you or anyone for the choices I have made.
The 1st Amendment limited the state's power to regulate speech.
But it did no more than that.
The amendment's roots lie in the desire for unconstrained political debate among citizens. It did not repeal the law of libel and slander. It did not close the door to prosecution of criminal communication.
If you are so concerned with the level of CP on freenet, why aren't you using it?
The quickest way to reduce the CP is to increase the amount of non-CP traffic on freenet, everyone has limited datastore sizes, so start trading music and movies, etc and encourage everyone you know to get their movies and music from freenet. You will eventually crowd out the CP.
AnotherIndex's spider occasionally picks some up, but he generally edits it out of the index rather quickly. Most of the other indexes aren't spider-based, and so choose what to put up manually. Then again, Google picks up CP all the time. Google+I2P or Tor is far, far faster than Freenet and has tons more CP.
Not a sentence!
AnotherIndex is no longer in the default bookmark set. It wasn't updated all that often, it provided no site descriptions for the vast majority of sites, and it did a crappy job categorizing things (ie, putting things in completely absurd categories, not just failing to categorize them).
First, network setup without content sharing:
When you create your node, you generate a random number between 0 and 1. This is your "Location" in the the circular 1-dimensional space of freenet. Circular because when you go forward along the location space, you start over at 0 instead of ever actually reaching 1. 1-dimensional because a single floating point number determines your position on the outer edge of the circle.
Now, when you connect to other nodes, they tell you their location, and at first you won't be very close to many of your peers. To get closer to them location-wise, you send out swap requests. The swap request finds a random node who replies with their location and the locations of all their peers. Using this you decide if by swapping locations with this person, you will both end up closer to more peers. If so swap, if not abort.
This process happens continually to try and optimize the routing topology of the network. It also means that for a while your location will be fairly unstable while you swap locations to get better situated among your peers.
The location is crucial to routing.:
In Freenet0.7, data is encrypted and given hash keys. When inserting or requesting, the key for a particular data chunk is divided by the total size of the Keyspace and translated into location space for the purpose of routing.
Unlike 0.5 which constantly tried to guess at which nodes were better at routing what keys, 0,7 routes as directly as possible by sending data to the peer who's location is closest to the 'location' of the data chunk. This is known as Greedy Routing, and means that data will (try to) always be routed toward the node with location that most closely matches the data.
Routing directly impacts storage:
The node has two primary repositories of keys; the Cache and the Store. Both are Least Recently Used (LRU) type databases, meaning that when they are full, and something new wants to be added, they eject the record that has the oldest access time.
The Cache adds everything that passes through the node. Very popular content may end up existing in everyone's cache for a while, making it very quick to access. Due to the volume of traffic through the node, the cache fills up pretty quickly and churns a lot, so content that loses its popularity after a couple days will be replaced by newly popular content. (like new FMS releases)
The Store looks at the key of a block of data as it pases through the node and sees if any of your peers are closer to the data than you are. If not, then you store the data. As such, most of what is in the store will be very close to your node's location (assuming the location has stabilized)
I think insert and download chunks are kept in the cache, but are not put in the store. I should probably get less fuzzy on this area, but maybe someone else who follows the project will chime in (and correct any errors I'VE made too)
How data is managed:
Unlike Freenet 0.5 with its variable block sizes that made monolithic data-stores impossible to deal with, all data chunks that zip around in 0.7 are 32K. So 0.7 can use a few large files instead of countless small ones. 32K was chosen for various reasons like median file size and speed of encryption on various dataset sizes and others I can't remember well off the top of my head.
The insert process is something like:
1) Split file up into 32K chunks, pad the last block to 32K
2) Use Forward Error Encoding at 100% redundancy to create an equal number of check blocks. FEC is just like PAR on usenet, if any of the original data blocks can't be fetched, then any one of the check blocks can be used to replace it.
3) Get the simple hash keys for each data block and check block.
4) Insert all blocks in random order.
5) Compile the list of block keys, and put them a manifest block along with the file name, size, and mime type.
6) calculate key of manifest block and insert that as well. (if the manifest is larger than 3
*Knock knock*
4chan party van!
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
Seriously. I tried Freenet like 3 years ago, and I was disgusted at the speed and the fact that all I could find in any index I tried was CP (Captain Picard).
I'd love to have a truly anonymous network of information exchange, but it seems damned pedos are going to ruin it every time. I hope I'm proven wrong in the future.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
This is an issue that needs to be adressed. Not wanting to see child pornography will not make it go away. You are just hiding behind the belief that if you don't like something (for whatever reason) and you bury any evidence of it, that it never happened, and will never happen again. Unfortunately, that's not how it works.
This is an issue that needs to be addressed through education, not suppression of information.
I have heard that argument often. I agree that looking at CP should not really get compared to actual abuse -- and in many countries the law actually does make that distinction (dont know about your country).
But imagine for a moment you are the now grown up boy or girl whose picture depicting your rape has been taken against your will and you know fat creepy guys all over the globe are exchanging your picture and wanking off to it all the time. You know a picture of you showing you in a traumatizing, degrading, humiliating situation gets exchanged and is in the possession of other people. Would you care?
There are other arguments like the de-sensibilization of viewers which require more expert knowledge about psyche and sexuality which I do not have. But I think those actually do argue that viewing those pictures can increase the likelihood of the viewer to actually do something.
Yep you're right - though I doubt those who are 'really bad' necessarily are also smart enough to cover their tracks. I guess it would only take moving to a physically anonymous location like an internet cafe, then using a public proxy with some form of encryption? Countries like China would try to blacklist those types of proxies though. I've been using computers as a 'power user' and sysadmin for a long time, but I haven't really looked into any fancy security tech beyond firewalls!
which is totally what she said
Well, some 'teen' porn sites have looked a bit dubious with regards to age to me in the past, I just closed them down. If using freenet is quite analagous to browsing the web then it does sound worth a gander just for interest's sake.
which is totally what she said
I felt like trying something with more anonymization than Torrent a few months ago, and gave Gnunet 0.8 a try. I was not that impressed. Is Freenet better, more relevant, more mature?
I think it has good intentions. Myspace, Facebook, hi5 etc..is more risky to your children imo.
Not really, almost all (all?) web hosting companies have similar policies.
Trolling is a art,
The question of whether .7 may be more insecure from a traffic analysis attack than .5 because there is a smaller number of default nodes has been asked multiple times so far on this Slashdot post, yet the Freenet devs have ignored it (although they have addressed many other criticisms). Is this because it is true?
A policeman just came as I was reading this page.
I don't use freenet but I almost shit...
Well he was at the wrong house, he wanted our lovely friendly neighbour (not spiderman!).
Eric Lichtblau and Jim Risen, then?
No, they have blanket policies against illegal content.
but Freenet looks exactly like volunteering your machine for use in a Bot Net.
No control over content?
The problem is, if you ban and hide all the evidence of the crimes being committed, then it's as if no crime has been committed at all.
This isn't really about child porn. But if you can keep child porn off of Freenet, then there is no point in even having a Freenet that wont work.
That being said, Freenet is not the only way to do it. In fact Freenet is not even a good way to do what they are trying to do, because it's far too complicated and the governments can simply kill anyone who runs Freenet, or deliberately plant Kiddie Porn on Freenet so they can make the case to ban it in their country.
And by doing this, they can force the world to ban and shun freenet. No more freenet.
And it's not out of the range of possibility that the developers of Freenet can be targetted by hostile governments as well.
that is typical out of sight is non existent thinking, which is very dangerous.
Why use Freenet at all if this is the case? Mute is good enough, or even a sneakernet.
How do you know these Tor sites aren't being run by governments hostile to Tor as a concept/technology?
It seems that the best anti Tor strategy for a governnment that hates Tor, would be to upload as much pro child porn sites as humanely possible.
Use a Freenet LiveCD and have it run in encrypted in ram.
I could tell you how to find darknets, but the problem is, if you tell people where to find them, then all the governments will plant moles and it doesnt work anymore.
It's not about being popular. It's about having people you can trust, and honestly most of us don't have more than 3 of those sorts of people.
What if the governments simply fund the development of a trojan which infects your machine and sees you are running Freenet?
They need to make a Freenet LiveCD.
It's all fun and games untill it is outside your house.