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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
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?
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!
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
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
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.
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).
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 ?
You know, I never thought about it before... but why is it necessary to compare "rape" and "murder" and decide which of the two are worse?
Both are supremely unacceptable acts, full stop. The hypothetical question asked doesn't seem very realistic. "I would choose neither." "NO! What if you had to choose... because you're on a bus! And a madman would blow up the bus if you didn't choose, or it slowed down!" I'm not feeling it.
I'm not prepared to agree that killing N people is better or worse than raping N people, and that's before I even GET to the part where we bring up the religion thing. What if you *raped* N people for religion, but then killed N others just because you're a jerk? How does that stack up? And what if you double-parked because you wanted to make it harder for someone to drive away, thereby increasing the energy they expended and hastening, ever so slightly, the end of the universe? And you just raped N people to produce delicious candy? Hard to call that one, I tell you.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
Exactly. And if you *do* connect to the rest of the network in a few places, but not much, and none of you request CP -- then you can spread your message to the rest of Freenet, but routing won't take the long circuitous path that goes through your somewhat disconnected subnetwork when it comes time to route other people's requests. Or, looked at another way: the stuff on your node will be what you're requesting, to a lesser extent what your friends are requesting, to an even lesser extent what their friends are requesting... If your friends are requesting things you don't object to, you shouldn't be storing much if any objectionable content.
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.
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.
"So you don't mind if your ISP blocks your access to websites they don't like, or drop emails they disagree with? Freenet users choose to give up the right to control your speech on Freenet. In doing so, they protect themselves from responsibility for what you say."
Talk about a strawman arguement! ISP's do not have the same rights as individuals.
"Yes, but what measures are tolerable to prevent it? Do you mind if all your mail is read by the government just in-case it contains child porn?"
No, I just don't want to serve bits of child porn JPG's from my computer, in the context of this discussion.
"Common misconception, this is perfectly legal in the US ever since the Brandenburg v Ohio case in 1969."
Fair enough, but you still understood the intent of the example.
"That is a Strawman argument. Just because I believe that governments shouldn't be permitted to monitor and control communication doesn't mean you believe we shouldn't have governments at all."
I never said that you didn't. I was pointing out that rights can be moderated by goverment, by design. That was at the heart of the debate leading up to the US Constitution. Just how much can Government control rights, and what rights does Government have? Your claim that I was making a strawman arguement was in fact a strawman arguement itself.
Thanks for the civil debate though. It's often lacking these days. I have to go to dinner now so if I don't reply again you'll know why. Be well.
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
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.