Freenet makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to identify the real sender of a message, even if you have a complete overview of all traffic on the network.
In other words, it has anonymity as well as privacy.
I would recommend trying out Freenet again - it has been improving massively over the past few years. Estimates suggest it has about 10,000 nodes at the moment and increasing steadily, especially in places like France where ISP spying laws have come in recently.
A 700MB file can easily be downloaded overnight.
I was under the impression that I2P had stagnated recently because a main developer had left, but I may give it another try to see how it compares to Freenet.
I've used both I2P and Freenet, and I've found Freenet to be the best in terms of speed, useful content, and community. There is certainly a constant flow of new music, movies and TV shows on there.
I may give I2P another try though, to see how it has progressed.
You can run Freenet on an encrypted disk. Then it's just the same as storing any data on an encrypted disk, which people do all the time. Some countries have laws to force you to turn over private keys, but this kind of thing has been tested in court often.
Freenet's very structure works like Bittorrent, so there is no need to support it explicitly. If you upload a file, you can advertise it openly, and the more people downloading it, the faster it goes and the more widely it will be spread on the network.
There is an experimental IRC over Freenet. The main problem is the latency that gives you the security doesn't work so well with IRC.
As another poster said, the main different between Freenet and I2P is that Freenet contains its own data storage. So you can connect, upload something, and disconnect (not that this is recommended for general users, but it's an option). With I2P, you have to have a webserver (or whatever) online for the resource to be available. That is a bit of a privacy risk if they knock out your server and can see instantly the "eepsite" go offline.
Freenet really is working quite well these days - people share movies, music, TV shows on it all the time, and there are a lot of interesting freesites.
Maybe you tried Freenet several years ago? It works pretty well now - people are uploading and downloading films from it all the time. It is slower than normal downloads, it's true, but you don't get something for nothing, and the anonymity and privacy have a price. But it is certainly very usable. A 700MB file can come through in a day or two, depending on how much bandwidth you allocate to Freenet.
And torrents aren't really applicable to Freenet, since the whole network works in a distributed way kind of like a bittorrent. You just upload your music or video file and announce it on your "freesite" or on one of the forums, and people download it directly. Like torrents, the more popular a file is, the more available it is and the more quickly you can download it.
These kind of actions will see an arms race to encrypted p2p networks like Freenet.
After French laws changed to crack down on filesharers, there was a lot more French people on Freenet.
It's worth trying Freenet out if you haven't recently - it's a lot faster than a year or two ago, and music and movies are shared there regularly. It's also good for hosting websites that have political censorship on the regular internet.
Freenet's traffic is designed specifically to be difficult to fingerprint. It is all UDP traffic and there are no specific headers to identify it. The UDP part is for firewall-friendliness.
Perhaps in the long run it will need to disguise itself as some other form of traffic like VoIP or VPN but the basic problem is you are always going to have large amounts of constant traffic between yourself and several other IP addresses. Hey, you could be on the phone 24/7 to 10 other people, right?
Freenet has an estimated several thousand nodes - it's difficult to say exactly, and there is quite a bit of p2p trading of music and films there. Speeds are much better than they used to be - an album of mp3 can take an hour and a film less than a day. It depends on demand - if more people are downloading it can be even faster.
And Freenet is designed for security so it is virtually impossible for a third party or even your own ISP to see what you are uploading or downloading. The only attacks are statistical ones based on someone being able to control a large percentage of Freenet nodes and connect them to your node.
It's true that porn of various types is present on Freenet, but it's quite low-key and often exaggerated by Freenet's detractors. You can easily avoid it. I'm sure there is a lot more on the normal internet.
It sounds like you aren't very familiar with how Freenet works. There is no "outside" in Freenet - everything is internal. It's not like Tor where you have content hosted in a specific place and Tor just handles the transport - Freenet hosts all the content too.
A file in Freenet won't be stored in one place, it is split into chunks of 32kB and those will be stored all over Freenet, usually highly redundantly.
Freenet is designed so that even if a large minority of nodes are compromised by law enforcement or whoever, it should still be secure.
There are theoretical statistical attacks on Freenet in some circumstances, but Freenet has stronger modes of protection if you are worried about these, and they don't sound like the ones you are describing.
Freenet has already thought of those problems you describe!
Usenet was fairly centralized, but Freenet works in a similar way to Bittorrents in that the more people that use it, the faster it goes. And it is totally decentralized so there are no costs other than your computer and internet connection, which you have already. You can configure how much bandwidth to allocate to Freenet, and it doesn't require excessive amounts.
And there are spam-resistant forums on Freenet. Instead of messages going to a central place, users publish their own messages to their own place, and other users pick them up from there. So if someone spams, you just don't bother picking up their messages. There is also a web of trust so spammers can be identified collaboratively rather than each person having to flag spammers separately. There are some extra tricks to speed it up and enable it to scale, but it seems to work pretty well in practice.
Freenet's old message forum (Frost) is spammable, but the new ones are called Freenet Message System (FMS) and Freetalk, and they are highly spam resistant.
Freenet is designed from the ground up to assume a minority of its users will be malicious, and takes steps to allow for that. Data flows around in encrypted chunks of 32kB and these could be small messages or large binaries. You really should try out Freenet, it covers all the objections you made.
The only real threat to Freenet is a legal one, of governments making it illegal or blocking its traffic. But even then it has a Darknet mode, where you only connect to trusted friends, and the UDP traffic is designed to be difficult to fingerprint. If it comes to it, the next step would be steganography, where Freenet traffic is disguised as some other form of traffic.
Freenet is where the next generation of filesharing will happen. It's working very well at the moment, Speeds are pretty good and there is a lot of content. Files of 1GB can be easily downloaded in a day, just queue them up. And of course there is a lot of chat on the forums, just like Usenet used to be.
It is a lot more user friendly than it used to be, although the Slashdot crowd are the kind of people who will be the early adopters.
COFEE is available on Freenet, as are most things like this.
Freenet is very usable at the moment. Speeds are pretty good considering the constraints of encryption and anonymity, and there is a lot of filesharing going on.
Freenet works very well for sharing large files. For example an mp3 album only takes a few hours, and a 700MB movie can be easily downloaded in a day.
It does depend on how popular the files are, and how much bandwidth you allow Freenet to use, but these figures are realistic even for a minimal bandwidth setup.
And the more people that are downloading something, the faster it will go, as it gets cached around the network.
I2P only encrypts and anonymises the transport. It's up to you to host the services on your machine. I2P just means people can use those services (e.g. a webserver) without knowing who is hosting them, and without you knowing who is accessing them. IF you go off-line, your service goes offline too.
Freenet, on the other hand, does have an encrypted and distributed data storage layer. You can go off-line and your website will remain available.
Freenet is pretty much the only anonymous P2P system that includes an integrated, encrypted, and distributed data storage layer. The others like Tor and I2P all require that you host your data on a specific machine and it is just access to this data that is anonymised.
A weakness of this approach is downtime of your secret site can be correlated with downtime of your server e.g. during power cuts, etc. A benefit is that dynamic sites are possible using server-side languages.
It's true, if you are a Tor "exit node" that proxies to the regular internet, you will be at risk of having your IP address associated with illegal websites. But most people don't do this.
Standard use of I2P or Tor will put you at virtually no risk whatsoever. You are just routing encrypted traffic of which you have no idea of the content.
The Freenet anonymous forum software "Frost" is spammable, and has been under prolonged repeated attacks for some time, so it is fairly unusable.
Use the Freenet Messaging System (FMS) instead. It is a decentralised and highly spam-resistant anonymous forum system, using a web of trust. It has an NNTP interface, so you can use a regular newsreader to read and write messages.
(That is another Freenet link, you need to have Freenet installed for it to work.)
Freenet is quite usable at the moment, and there is a fair amount of file trading going on. It can easily handle whole albums in a few hours and DivX rips of movies in a day or so, depending on popularity.
Once you install it, download the FMS (Freenet Messaging System) application, which is like anonymous Usenet, and make requests or offer uploads.
The benefit is that no-one, not even your ISP or government agencies can see what you are uploading or downloading.
It is also designed to be very difficult to censor. Currently it uses UDP for communication between Freenet nodes, with no real fingerprint to the traffic, so it is difficult for ISPs to filter without affecting things like VoIP or gaming.
Should UDP filtering become more prevalent, it will move to another form of transport, ultimately ending up as steganography, where it disguises itself as some other encrypted protocol.
Freenet uses similar techniques against spam on the Freenet Messaging System (FMS).
Two things are mentioned in the article: many eyeballs, and moving to a pull technology from a push one.
FMS uses a web of trust, similar to PGP's to rate the trustworthiness of users, and this makes it simple to do collaborative filtering of spammmers (many eyeballs).
It also uses a pull technology, where each user has their own message queue, and you poll the queues of people you trust. There are tricks to make this scale up, so you don't have to be polling millions of people all of the time.
Initial entry to the web of trust is done mainly through a captcha system, although it can be done through any out-of-band method. Even if the captchas are defeated, which they will be regularly since this is an arms race, the first two steps should mitigate the damage done, by rapidly spreading bad trust values for the spammer to other users before they get to downloading their messages.
It works well in practice on a small scale, but obviously there are neither the numbers nor the dedicated spammers to test it out properly.
If anyone wants a challenge, please come on Freenet and try to spam the Freenet Messaging System!
People who say Freenet is about porn are either trolling or have a vested interest in stopping people from having a network free of centralised government censorship.
There is someone on Freenet who publishes weekly statistics on messages posted to the new spam-resistant Freenet Message System aka FMS, which replaces the old Frost message system that is being spammed. The most recent list doesn't actually include ANY pornographic boards, child or not, so the percentage here is actually zero.
Note that these stats are for a new experimental message forum which is still gaining momentum - there are still a lot of people using the existing Frost message forum, although a lot of the boards are being spammed. But it still gives an illustration of the things being discussed on Freenet.
There have been several point releases of Freenet, this is just the latest one.
I think most people run Freenet on Linux, so I'm not sure why you had problems there - it has always been very simple to install and use for me on Linux.
Freenet does prefer Sun Java, but I assume that is just a development decision to focus on one JVM. It is supposed to be a reference implementation, and once Freenet stabilises a bit more I am sure people will create versions in other languages.
If you haven't tried it recently, maybe it has changed a lot since you last tried it?
I think this is definitely the case. Freenet is very difficult to debug, especially considering that its very design makes it impossible to know what the other nodes are doing, or even exactly how many of them there are.
Slashdot Mirror
Freenet makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to identify the real sender of a message, even if you have a complete overview of all traffic on the network.
In other words, it has anonymity as well as privacy.
We are seeing a similar thing on Freenet: increasing popularity in places such as France with HADOPI laws.
I would recommend trying out Freenet again - it has been improving massively over the past few years. Estimates suggest it has about 10,000 nodes at the moment and increasing steadily, especially in places like France where ISP spying laws have come in recently.
A 700MB file can easily be downloaded overnight.
I was under the impression that I2P had stagnated recently because a main developer had left, but I may give it another try to see how it compares to Freenet.
I've used both I2P and Freenet, and I've found Freenet to be the best in terms of speed, useful content, and community. There is certainly a constant flow of new music, movies and TV shows on there.
I may give I2P another try though, to see how it has progressed.
You can run Freenet on an encrypted disk. Then it's just the same as storing any data on an encrypted disk, which people do all the time. Some countries have laws to force you to turn over private keys, but this kind of thing has been tested in court often.
Freenet's very structure works like Bittorrent, so there is no need to support it explicitly. If you upload a file, you can advertise it openly, and the more people downloading it, the faster it goes and the more widely it will be spread on the network.
There is an experimental IRC over Freenet. The main problem is the latency that gives you the security doesn't work so well with IRC.
As another poster said, the main different between Freenet and I2P is that Freenet contains its own data storage. So you can connect, upload something, and disconnect (not that this is recommended for general users, but it's an option). With I2P, you have to have a webserver (or whatever) online for the resource to be available. That is a bit of a privacy risk if they knock out your server and can see instantly the "eepsite" go offline.
Freenet really is working quite well these days - people share movies, music, TV shows on it all the time, and there are a lot of interesting freesites.
Maybe you tried Freenet several years ago? It works pretty well now - people are uploading and downloading films from it all the time. It is slower than normal downloads, it's true, but you don't get something for nothing, and the anonymity and privacy have a price. But it is certainly very usable. A 700MB file can come through in a day or two, depending on how much bandwidth you allocate to Freenet.
And torrents aren't really applicable to Freenet, since the whole network works in a distributed way kind of like a bittorrent. You just upload your music or video file and announce it on your "freesite" or on one of the forums, and people download it directly. Like torrents, the more popular a file is, the more available it is and the more quickly you can download it.
These kind of actions will see an arms race to encrypted p2p networks like Freenet.
After French laws changed to crack down on filesharers, there was a lot more French people on Freenet.
It's worth trying Freenet out if you haven't recently - it's a lot faster than a year or two ago, and music and movies are shared there regularly. It's also good for hosting websites that have political censorship on the regular internet.
Freenet's traffic is designed specifically to be difficult to fingerprint. It is all UDP traffic and there are no specific headers to identify it. The UDP part is for firewall-friendliness.
Perhaps in the long run it will need to disguise itself as some other form of traffic like VoIP or VPN but the basic problem is you are always going to have large amounts of constant traffic between yourself and several other IP addresses. Hey, you could be on the phone 24/7 to 10 other people, right?
Freenet has an estimated several thousand nodes - it's difficult to say exactly, and there is quite a bit of p2p trading of music and films there. Speeds are much better than they used to be - an album of mp3 can take an hour and a film less than a day. It depends on demand - if more people are downloading it can be even faster.
And Freenet is designed for security so it is virtually impossible for a third party or even your own ISP to see what you are uploading or downloading. The only attacks are statistical ones based on someone being able to control a large percentage of Freenet nodes and connect them to your node.
It's true that porn of various types is present on Freenet, but it's quite low-key and often exaggerated by Freenet's detractors. You can easily avoid it. I'm sure there is a lot more on the normal internet.
I think they've already done it...
It sounds like you aren't very familiar with how Freenet works. There is no "outside" in Freenet - everything is internal. It's not like Tor where you have content hosted in a specific place and Tor just handles the transport - Freenet hosts all the content too.
A file in Freenet won't be stored in one place, it is split into chunks of 32kB and those will be stored all over Freenet, usually highly redundantly.
Freenet is designed so that even if a large minority of nodes are compromised by law enforcement or whoever, it should still be secure.
There are theoretical statistical attacks on Freenet in some circumstances, but Freenet has stronger modes of protection if you are worried about these, and they don't sound like the ones you are describing.
Freenet has already thought of those problems you describe!
Usenet was fairly centralized, but Freenet works in a similar way to Bittorrents in that the more people that use it, the faster it goes. And it is totally decentralized so there are no costs other than your computer and internet connection, which you have already. You can configure how much bandwidth to allocate to Freenet, and it doesn't require excessive amounts.
And there are spam-resistant forums on Freenet. Instead of messages going to a central place, users publish their own messages to their own place, and other users pick them up from there. So if someone spams, you just don't bother picking up their messages. There is also a web of trust so spammers can be identified collaboratively rather than each person having to flag spammers separately. There are some extra tricks to speed it up and enable it to scale, but it seems to work pretty well in practice.
Freenet's old message forum (Frost) is spammable, but the new ones are called Freenet Message System (FMS) and Freetalk, and they are highly spam resistant.
Freenet is designed from the ground up to assume a minority of its users will be malicious, and takes steps to allow for that. Data flows around in encrypted chunks of 32kB and these could be small messages or large binaries. You really should try out Freenet, it covers all the objections you made.
The only real threat to Freenet is a legal one, of governments making it illegal or blocking its traffic. But even then it has a Darknet mode, where you only connect to trusted friends, and the UDP traffic is designed to be difficult to fingerprint. If it comes to it, the next step would be steganography, where Freenet traffic is disguised as some other form of traffic.
Freenet is where the next generation of filesharing will happen. It's working very well at the moment, Speeds are pretty good and there is a lot of content. Files of 1GB can be easily downloaded in a day, just queue them up. And of course there is a lot of chat on the forums, just like Usenet used to be.
It is a lot more user friendly than it used to be, although the Slashdot crowd are the kind of people who will be the early adopters.
COFEE is available on Freenet, as are most things like this.
Freenet is very usable at the moment. Speeds are pretty good considering the constraints of encryption and anonymity, and there is a lot of filesharing going on.
Freenet works very well for sharing large files. For example an mp3 album only takes a few hours, and a 700MB movie can be easily downloaded in a day.
It does depend on how popular the files are, and how much bandwidth you allow Freenet to use, but these figures are realistic even for a minimal bandwidth setup.
And the more people that are downloading something, the faster it will go, as it gets cached around the network.
I2P doesn't do data storage like Freenet.
I2P only encrypts and anonymises the transport. It's up to you to host the services on your machine. I2P just means people can use those services (e.g. a webserver) without knowing who is hosting them, and without you knowing who is accessing them. IF you go off-line, your service goes offline too.
Freenet, on the other hand, does have an encrypted and distributed data storage layer. You can go off-line and your website will remain available.
What you describe sounds very similar to Freenet.
Freenet is pretty much the only anonymous P2P system that includes an integrated, encrypted, and distributed data storage layer. The others like Tor and I2P all require that you host your data on a specific machine and it is just access to this data that is anonymised.
A weakness of this approach is downtime of your secret site can be correlated with downtime of your server e.g. during power cuts, etc. A benefit is that dynamic sites are possible using server-side languages.
I think you have your facts wrong. :D
It's true, if you are a Tor "exit node" that proxies to the regular internet, you will be at risk of having your IP address associated with illegal websites. But most people don't do this.
Standard use of I2P or Tor will put you at virtually no risk whatsoever. You are just routing encrypted traffic of which you have no idea of the content.
The Freenet anonymous forum software "Frost" is spammable, and has been under prolonged repeated attacks for some time, so it is fairly unusable.
Use the Freenet Messaging System (FMS) instead. It is a decentralised and highly spam-resistant anonymous forum system, using a web of trust. It has an NNTP interface, so you can use a regular newsreader to read and write messages.
(That is another Freenet link, you need to have Freenet installed for it to work.)
Freenet is quite usable at the moment, and there is a fair amount of file trading going on. It can easily handle whole albums in a few hours and DivX rips of movies in a day or so, depending on popularity.
Once you install it, download the FMS (Freenet Messaging System) application, which is like anonymous Usenet, and make requests or offer uploads.
The benefit is that no-one, not even your ISP or government agencies can see what you are uploading or downloading.
It is also designed to be very difficult to censor. Currently it uses UDP for communication between Freenet nodes, with no real fingerprint to the traffic, so it is difficult for ISPs to filter without affecting things like VoIP or gaming.
Should UDP filtering become more prevalent, it will move to another form of transport, ultimately ending up as steganography, where it disguises itself as some other encrypted protocol.
Freenet uses similar techniques against spam on the Freenet Messaging System (FMS).
Two things are mentioned in the article: many eyeballs, and moving to a pull technology from a push one.
FMS uses a web of trust, similar to PGP's to rate the trustworthiness of users, and this makes it simple to do collaborative filtering of spammmers (many eyeballs).
It also uses a pull technology, where each user has their own message queue, and you poll the queues of people you trust. There are tricks to make this scale up, so you don't have to be polling millions of people all of the time.
Initial entry to the web of trust is done mainly through a captcha system, although it can be done through any out-of-band method. Even if the captchas are defeated, which they will be regularly since this is an arms race, the first two steps should mitigate the damage done, by rapidly spreading bad trust values for the spammer to other users before they get to downloading their messages.
It works well in practice on a small scale, but obviously there are neither the numbers nor the dedicated spammers to test it out properly.
If anyone wants a challenge, please come on Freenet and try to spam the Freenet Messaging System!
People who say Freenet is about porn are either trolling or have a vested interest in stopping people from having a network free of centralised government censorship.
There is someone on Freenet who publishes weekly statistics on messages posted to the new spam-resistant Freenet Message System aka FMS, which replaces the old Frost message system that is being spammed. The most recent list doesn't actually include ANY pornographic boards, child or not, so the percentage here is actually zero.
Note that these stats are for a new experimental message forum which is still gaining momentum - there are still a lot of people using the existing Frost message forum, although a lot of the boards are being spammed. But it still gives an illustration of the things being discussed on Freenet.
Number of messages / Board
192 fms
63 test
43 fr.discussion
32 freemail
23 fr.tests
19 freenet
18 sites
15 frost
14 test.binaries
11 fr.fms
7 jokes
7 news
6 boards
6 science
6 video
5 fr.accueil
5 music
5 privacy
4 ebooks
3 religion
2 de.freenet
2 flbzx.test
2 politics
2 ru
1 jsite
1 macrumors
1 public
1 test.cptn_insano
1 test.d9gkwkab3
There have been several point releases of Freenet, this is just the latest one.
I think most people run Freenet on Linux, so I'm not sure why you had problems there - it has always been very simple to install and use for me on Linux.
Freenet does prefer Sun Java, but I assume that is just a development decision to focus on one JVM. It is supposed to be a reference implementation, and once Freenet stabilises a bit more I am sure people will create versions in other languages.
If you haven't tried it recently, maybe it has changed a lot since you last tried it?
I think this is definitely the case. Freenet is very difficult to debug, especially considering that its very
design makes it impossible to know what the other nodes are doing, or even exactly how many of them there are.