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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.'"
I tried using Freenet a few years ago... chances are if I hadn't given up or gotten rid of the machine, i'd still be trying to fetch something -- anything -- off of it.
Has anyone used it recently to testify to any speed/reliability increase?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
By just downloading it anyway, and not hiding that. The way to hide hiddenness is to hide in the open.
First, look at the situation with crypto in general: if everyone encrypts by default, then use of encryption doesn't mean you're hiding anything. Some of the people who are encrypting, maybe are hiding something "juicy", but which ones are they? Nobody knows, unless they can break the crypto and actually examine the speech in question.
That's why every website should support https (and link that way by default), not just the "gray" ones.
Freenet is the same way. There are two reason to download it: 1) to hide something 2) to provide chaff, cover, and plausible deniability for the people who are hiding something.
The chaff and cover work retroactively, too, and he people you protect, might be you. Today you might just be reading things that aren't really secrets; maybe you're looking at the Freenet equivalent of Slashdot or something. Tomorrow, you publish some samizdat. Nobody who is watching your connection, knows which thing you were doing on which day. Maybe you never hid anything at any time, and maybe you were helping Falun Gong all along, and maybe you were usually just screwing around looking for the perfect oatmeal cookie receipt, but with an occasional peek at some porn. Whatever.
Teh f3dz see you using Freenet all the time, sneak into your house, put in a camera, and find out you're looking at Garfield cartoons. They do this to a million people, and everyone is looking at Garfield cartoons. The "suspicious activity" no longer indicates anything because it provides too many false positives.
Running Freenet doesn't mean you're hiding something; it just means that you support hiding.
Encrypt by default! Everything, all the time. Make them spend thousands of dollars of supercomputer cluster time, to get your grandmother's oatmeal cookie recipe. She'll thank you in the afterlife. Free cookies!
Do you know that you can use the 0.7 open net?
Statistical analysis is probably easier with a larger number of nodes, if you're talking about your direct peers monitoring you. Also, Freenet 0.7 supports opennet. And "same darknet"? What's the same darknet? There is only one 0.7 network as far as I know, although there maybe secret ones. If there are secret networks of 15 nodes, the NSA would probably not be on them. The long-term objective is to have a globally scalable darknet, which means that it might have a million nodes in it, but it's all going friend to friend to friend to friend. Read up on small world networks. Frost works better on 0.5 because the spammer has been attacking 0.7's Frost with constant denial of service attacks, not 0.5's Frost. They are both just as vulnerable. FMS is the solution. Darknet came up well before the collaborative censorship ideas you refer to, and that wouldn't be Freenet, it would be a different network. There is absolutely no intention for Freenet to provide any sort of censorship mechanism, and it doesn't provide any.
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
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.