Freenet is like bittorrent, in that the more people that use it, the faster it goes.
Although it doesn't like too much churn, when people come and go quite quickly, hopefully quite a few slashdotters will stick around, so there will be a long term net benefit to the network.
I am seeing a Freenet network size estimate of just under 4000 nodes here, after just over a day of uptime.
Do you have any references for privacy advocates unhappy with Freenet? I would be interested to see them.
I don't understand what you mean about Tor being anonymous and Freenet 0.7 not. Surely they are both anonymous?
Having used both Tor and Freenet, I would say that both are a similar speed. There will obviously be a performance hit over a non-anonymous connection - you will never get something for nothing. But over time, as bandwidth increases, the latency will reach the point where freesites feel as responsive as websites do today. People may remember the days of trying to download things over slow dialup modems, and a few years later we have near-instant responses. The same will happen with Freenet.
Tor is more suited to viewing data, whereas Freenet is more suited for people both creating and viewing data, as you don't require big servers to host a popular site.
Tor is more centralised - the main tor exit points can be trivially harvested and blocked by a government. Freenet operating in darknet mode would be very difficult to block.
I don't understand your point about encrypted bittorrents. The encryption used only stops an outside observer like your ISP identifying them. Anyone can join the torrent and see exactly who is part of it. That is useless for anonymity. Freenet is designed to be useful in far harsher environments than that.
My experience of Freenet has been that freesites (Freenet's equivalent of websites) stick around indefinitely. Larger files like music and video will be retrievable for a couple of months, depending on popularity. In that sense it is similar to bittorrents. And as more people use Freenet, the content will stick around for longer.
I think Freenet is ideal for places like China. Judging by the numbers of Americans who are saying they are too paranoid to run Freenet (unjustifiably, IMHO), it is the US that is worse off!
The idea of a darknet is that you connect directly to your regular friends, who you are just swapping music with or something equally innocuous.
Then you can speak to your political dissident friends indirectly and securely over the Freenet network, using your regular darknet friends as a kind of gateway.
I can understand your point, I have thought long over this point myself.
Like you, and most people, I think child porn is totally wrong. It is true that Freenet allows people to share this kind of thing without government censorship, and that encrypted pieces of these files are potentially held on your computer without your knowledge.
But unlike you, I continue to use Freenet. This is my reasoning:
Suppose you run a webhosting or filehosting service where people can store their files on your machines. They can store encrypted files on your machines. You don't know what they contain, so should you feel that the possibility they may contain things you disagree with is enough to stop you running your business, or to disallow files that you can't inspect?
The difference with Freenet is just that it isn't a central company providing the service to clients - it is p2p so everybody plays the part of both service provider and client.
So my rationale for running Freenet is that unless I object to web or filehosting companies hosting encrypted files in principle, then why should I object to myself taking that role?
In truth, the amount of this kind of objectionable material on Freenet is very small. Someone has over the last year been providing weekly statistics based on the number of posts to various boards in Freenet's forum software. Postings to boards which are clearly for people trading illegal images are tiny compared to the mainstream boards.
I would estimate that most Freenet users are geeks, file traders or political activists, in that order.
The main Freenet developer is even an evangelical Christian who is morally opposed to all pornography.
Opennet requires access to central seed nodes, to get you started. A national firewall can easily block these.
With darknet they have to monitor everyone.
If they are watching a subversive and you are a friend, the chances are that you will meet them in person or speak to them non anonymously as well, so having a Freenet connection with them is no extra danger.
There is some ad-hoc mirroring of Wikileaks onto Freenet. Recently, images from the protests in Tibet, and the leaked documents from the Julius Baer bank were put there.
No-one involved with the Freenet project knows exactly how it uses Freenet; it certainly doesn't seem to be an official partnership.
Freenet is ideally suited to this kind of thing: freesites (Freenet's equivalent of websites) are fairly quick to retrieve and tend to stay in the network long-term. And of course, creating and reading them is totally anonymous and uncensorable.
There has been a lot of work done recently into making the Freenet installation process as easy as possible, and an official release of Freenet 0.7 is due in the next few weeks, so watch this space.
Freenet hasn't required you to manually find and connect to people for a long time now. It just connects automatically using seednodes. This is called the OpenNet method of operation.
The problem is that seednodes are a centralised point that can be easily censored.
As Freenet is designed for combating government censorship in very harsh conditions, not just as a plaything for bored immature geeks, it also operates in a DarkNet mode. This is where you have to manually connect to other Freenet users that you know and trust, and yes, it is more hassle than the OpenNet mode, but it is also more secure and censorship-resistant. You choose which mode to use: they both connect to the same network, and you can you a mixture of the two, or change from the OpenNet mode to the DarkNet mode at any time.
I would urge you to try Freenet again. It has improved a massive amount recently. It is now very easy to install and use.
The reference version is written in Java for reasons of portability. The JVM does have some overheads but I don't think they are significant in this case. It runs fine for me on a relatively old machine, using minimal resources: the system load and CPU usage barely registers, although it is understandable that using a lot of crypto will take some work. Maybe it was a whole since you last tried it? Performance has increased a lot over the past year or two, although I must say that I never experienced your problems over the past few years.
The latency is not as good as the internet, but that is the price you have to pay for anonymity and lack of censorship. For things like filesharing the latency isn't that important anyway: you just queue it up overnight and pick it up in the morning.
Freenet *is* catching on. I estimate a ten-fold increase in size over the past year, from 500 to 5000 users.
For me it is light and unobtrusive - I run a lot of other programs and Freenet just does its thing in the background without me even noticing it.
It's true there are bugs, like any software, but nothing has ever compromised anyone, and I find it very polished for its stage of development. The installer has been made very simple this year, and an OpenNet method of connecting to the network has been implemented, with seednodes, that makes the initial connection very easy. But there is still the DarkNet method of connection that can be used if things like seednodes are censored in the future or in your country.
If WikiLeaks hosted content on Freenet, a lot more people *would* use it.
These things can be a chicken and egg situation. Sometimes you have to be first instead of just following the crowd.
Re:This is What Freenet Was Made For
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WikiLeaks Under Fire
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Freenet has a built-in web proxy called FProxy that you use to browse freesites. These are just regular HTML webpages but without dynamic content. FProxy has filters that strip out anything that could compromise your anonymity, such as links to the regular internet.
You visit sites by using a standard web browser and visiting an address like this:
where the dots are a string of characters that provide keys to the location of the site within Freenet and the decryption keys for the content. The number 23 is the version of the site; Freenet will automatically fetch updates as they are inserted.
It is trivial to expose FProxy so that it is visible to the whole internet. The reason people don't is that you could find yourself in legal trouble if forbidden content is accessed from your IP address. To browse anonymously you have to run a Freenet node yourself, I don't think there is any way round this.
Re:This is What Freenet Was Made For
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WikiLeaks Under Fire
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· Score: 3, Informative
Have you tried Freenet recently?
1. It's slower than the regular internet, sure, but that is to be expected. Anonymity and encryption isn't totally free. But it is perfectly usable for things like this.
2. An rapidly increasing number of people are using it. About a year ago, numbers were estimated at about 500. Today it is more like 5000. Due to the anonymity, numbers aren't definite, by design, but there are mechanisms to guess the network size.
3. I don't think Freenet's slowness is the main reason for people to not use it. It is easily fast enough for websites (known as freesites), forums (using the Frost message board software) and filesharing of songs, movies and ebooks.
4. I don't think the network size makes it particularly slow. The routing algorithm is designed to scale to millions of users. With a larger network, popular files will possibly be faster to download if your peers are also downloading them but I don't think it will have a massive effect. At the moment you can see that popular Freesites and content are very fast to retrieve.
5. No p2p software is installed on all computers, but millions of people still use it. I realize you are comparing this to website where a web browser is pre-installed on all computers, but I think this will only be a barrier to the casual user.
6. The installation process for Freenet is very simple and getting easier all the time. It's just a few clicks on an installation wizard and you are ready to go. It is designed to work through firewalls so they shouldn't be too much of an issue.
I agree that at this moment in time it isn't feasible to move wikileaks wholesale onto Freenet, but I predict that what will start happening more is that sites such as this will move contentious sections off their main site and provide links to a Freenet site that can't be censored.
It already happens to some extent now, content that is at risk of being censored gets uploaded to Freenet fairly rapidly. I see that trend continuing and Freenet becoming more mainstream.
See my homepage link to download and try out Freenet.
Web Sheriff are part of a group called Entertainment Law Associates that includes Web Sheriff and Wild West Management.
You can see mugshots of the gang, including ringleader John Giacobbi on this page.
Looks like "Big Jeff" is the heavy mob they send in when all else fails!
Wild West Management manage such titans of the music world as Eyes Wide Open, The Hot Puppies, Mirima / Sloman, The Korgis, and... that seems to be it.
(I don't think this is a troll - it's a valid point)
Encryption may be a bad solution but it's possibly our only one in the forseeable future. If goverments do outlaw encrytion, or at least make it illegal to withhold your keys (as they do already in some countries), then steganography will be the next step.
Standard encryption should be enough to stay one step ahead in the arms race for now, though.
Agreed: if you want to fileshare with true anonymity, you need a fully encrypted network such as Freenet, which is already very functional and has a large filesharing community.
Torrents have no anonymity by design, even if the traffic is encrypted.
The Freenet 0.5 network is only populated by a few diehards now, but Freenet 0.7 has seen numbers increase from about 500 to 5000 over the last year. That is probably partly due to the activities of the RIAA and MPAA, but also due to major advances in Freenet's ease of use and speed recently.
I would say it is a slight exaggeration to say that speeds can be as fast as regular p2p, due to the encryption and anonymity overheads, but a well-connected node can transfer a 700MB file in a day. And as you say, if your direct peers are also downloading the same file, it has the potential to be even faster.
Definitely worth checking out if you are at all concerned about protecting your anonymity whilst filesharing.
And it should be noted that it isn't just about filesharing, it has a more serious role to play in combating government censorship.
With all these stories in the news recently, it is no surprise that anonymous networks such as Freenet are growing rapidly. This time last year the estimated network size at any one time was about 500 - now it is about 5000.
Freenet is easy to install and set up, and all traffic is sent in encrypted UDP packets that are difficult for ISPs to fingerprint.
Files can be uploaded or downloaded completely anonymously. Even a malicious Freenet peers you are directly connected to can only guess what you are doing, since they can't be sure if you are requesting parts of files yourself or just routing them for someone else. If even this is too much risk for you, you can restrict your direct peers to people you know and trust (darknet) - you only need 10-20 peers.
If you don't know anyone else on Freenet, you can just set it to connect to random people (opennet) - both methods are part of the same Freenet.
Yes, it's an arms race. But the RIAA etc. will go for the low hanging fruit so it is wise to stay one step ahead of the crowd. Encrypted torrents will stop the ISPs snooping on you, but not RIAA investigators who can just join the torrents themselves.
Speeds are obviously slower than a fast torrent, but you can download a 700MB file in a day with a good connection. And as more people join Freenet, speeds should increase as popular files get cached in more places.
I agree that darknets such as Freenet aren't an ideal solution to the problem of authoritarian government - the ideal solution is to get rid of the authoritarian government!
But realistically, increased surveillance and more intrusive government controls over our lives are a reality that isn't going to go away anytime soon.
So Freenet is a pragmatic workaround for the time being. It could even be used as a tool to covertly coordinate campaigns against authoritarian governments.
On a technical level, the idea is that Freenet traffic is very hard to fingerprint - it is UDP packets on random ports and there should be no obvious patterns in the traffic. So ISPs will find it hard to block without also blocking legitimate encrypted traffic such as VoIP.
Freenet is taking off already. This time last year, the number of nodes in the network was measured in the hundreds - now it is an order of magnitude larger, in the thousands.
There is an active filesharing community there for movies, music, software and e-books.
A 700MB file can be uploaded or downloaded in a day or two, providing you dedicate enough bandwidth to Freenet and have a set of peers with good bandwidth.
It is well worth trying it out if you never have before, or if you tried it out a few years ago and found it slow.
The next generation of filesharing is already here and working well: Freenet.
Freenet has totally encryption connections between peers, and although your direct peers can see the data packets going between them and you, they don't know if you are initiating them yourself, or just routing for another node in the network. And if even that is too risky for you, you can restrict your direct peers to a list of people you know and trust (aka: darknet).
If you tried Freenet a year or two ago and found it slow or difficult to use, try it out again. There are thousands of users now and a lot more filesharing, and speeds, memory usage and user-friendliness have improved dramatically.
It sounds like what you are describing is pretty close to Freenet. The only major difference is that the size of the data fragments is 32kB, so it is unlikely that they will belong to multiple files.
Freenet is very useable now, it is well worth trying out.
The next stage in filesharing will be totally encrypted and anonymous networks like Freenet.
Freenet has increased dramatically in performance, size and user-friendliness over the past year and there are now several thousand regular users. Movies, software and music albums are regularly shared and there is a good filesharing community there. Speeds are slower than a direct download but comparable to a slow torrent. With a good set of peers and a high amount of bandwidth dedicated to Freenet you can transfer 100MB albums in a couple of hours.
All Freenet traffic is over UDP and is encrypted, and it is virtually impossible for an observer to know who is uploading or downloading a file from the network. The content is stored in a distributed and encrypted fashion on the disks of the people in Freenet. Uploads and downloads are routed through several nodes so it is unfeasible to work out if one of your peers is requesting a file themselves or just routing it for someone else.
An outside observer like an ISP will just see encrypted UDP traffic.
An attacker with multiple nodes on Freenet can see the information flowing to and from their direct peers but they can't tell if it is just being routed, so you have plausible deniability.
Freenet operates in two modes: Opennet and Darknet. Opennet is like traditional p2p networks in that you connect automatically to random people, who are possibly malicious, and can see your traffic to and from them. Darknet is where you restrict your direct peers to only people you trust. This is slightly more secure but less convenient. You choose which one suits you: they are both part of the same network, and you can even use a hybrid if you want.
Freenet has many copyrighted works being distributed illegally on it, (many legal things too), but I don't think you fully understand how Freenet works.
It is specifically designed so that it is virtually impossible for anyone on or observing the network to know who inserted a file, who downloads a file, or who is storing parts of a file. You even don't know most of what data is stored in your own Freenet data store.
Basically, when you insert a file to Freenet, is get split up into 32kB pieces which are encrypted. Each piece has a deterministic hash value between 0 and 1. Likewise, each node on the network has a (slowly changing) value between 0 and 1 (called its "location"). You pass the encrypted pieces to your peers, and they pass it on to their peers, each time trying to move it closer to a peer whose "location" matches the hash. Your peers don't know what is passed to them (it is encrypted) or if you are the original inserter or are just routing it along from someone else.
For people to retrieve the file, they need to know both the "location" and the decryption key. They request it from their peers, who request it from their peers they think are "closer" to the data if they don't have it, and so on. Each peer doesn't know if the peer requesting the data from them wants it for themselves or is just routing it for someone else.
In theory you could compile a big list of the keys to every single file on Freenet and then you would be able to decrypt everything in your node's data store. But in practice you can't obtain such a list - it is changing all the time, there are too many files, and not all files are publicly advertised. Also, you deliberately wouldn't want to compile such a list, because it reduces your plausible deniability.
Freenet uses UDP for all its traffic rather than TCP since it is more firewall-friendly. It also tries to keep its UDP packets as indistinguishable as possible so they can't be reliably blocked. ISPs usually classify the traffic as VOIP. And all data and messages transmitted between nodes are encrypted.
Freenet has been a hybrid opennet and darknet for about 6 months now.
The darknet is when you choose your peers: this is the most secure option but also means you need to know several other Freenet users, which may not be realistic.
The opennet is when your Freenet node finds peers automatically. This is much more convenient but slightly less secure - for one thing it makes it much easier to map out the IP addresses of everyone who uses Freenet.
Both the opennet and darknet versions of Freenet are part of the same network. In practice you can start with a full opennet and slowly add trusted peers until you eventually become fully on the darknet.
If anyone has tried it a few years ago it is definitely worth having another look as it is way more user-friendly, faster and bigger than it was before.
Slashdot Mirror
Freenet is running fine here.
Freenet is like bittorrent, in that the more people that use it, the faster it goes.
Although it doesn't like too much churn, when people come and go quite quickly, hopefully quite a few slashdotters will stick around, so there will be a long term net benefit to the network.
I am seeing a Freenet network size estimate of just under 4000 nodes here, after just over a day of uptime.
Do you have any references for privacy advocates unhappy with Freenet? I would be interested to see them.
I don't understand what you mean about Tor being anonymous and Freenet 0.7 not. Surely they are both anonymous?
Having used both Tor and Freenet, I would say that both are a similar speed. There will obviously be a performance hit over a non-anonymous connection - you will never get something for nothing. But over time, as bandwidth increases, the latency will reach the point where freesites feel as responsive as websites do today. People may remember the days of trying to download things over slow dialup modems, and a few years later we have near-instant responses. The same will happen with Freenet.
Tor is more suited to viewing data, whereas Freenet is more suited for people both creating and viewing data, as you don't require big servers to host a popular site.
Tor is more centralised - the main tor exit points can be trivially harvested and blocked by a government. Freenet operating in darknet mode would be very difficult to block.
I don't understand your point about encrypted bittorrents. The encryption used only stops an outside observer like your ISP identifying them. Anyone can join the torrent and see exactly who is part of it. That is useless for anonymity. Freenet is designed to be useful in far harsher environments than that.
My experience of Freenet has been that freesites (Freenet's equivalent of websites) stick around indefinitely. Larger files like music and video will be retrievable for a couple of months, depending on popularity. In that sense it is similar to bittorrents. And as more people use Freenet, the content will stick around for longer.
I think Freenet is ideal for places like China. Judging by the numbers of Americans who are saying they are too paranoid to run Freenet (unjustifiably, IMHO), it is the US that is worse off!
The idea of a darknet is that you connect directly to your regular friends, who you are just swapping music with or something equally innocuous.
Then you can speak to your political dissident friends indirectly and securely over the Freenet network, using your regular darknet friends as a kind of gateway.
I can understand your point, I have thought long over this point myself.
Like you, and most people, I think child porn is totally wrong. It is true that Freenet allows people to share this kind of thing without government censorship, and that encrypted pieces of these files are potentially held on your computer without your knowledge.
But unlike you, I continue to use Freenet. This is my reasoning:
Suppose you run a webhosting or filehosting service where people can store their files on your machines. They can store encrypted files on your machines. You don't know what they contain, so should you feel that the possibility they may contain things you disagree with is enough to stop you running your business, or to disallow files that you can't inspect?
The difference with Freenet is just that it isn't a central company providing the service to clients - it is p2p so everybody plays the part of both service provider and client.
So my rationale for running Freenet is that unless I object to web or filehosting companies hosting encrypted files in principle, then why should I object to myself taking that role?
In truth, the amount of this kind of objectionable material on Freenet is very small. Someone has over the last year been providing weekly statistics based on the number of posts to various boards in Freenet's forum software. Postings to boards which are clearly for people trading illegal images are tiny compared to the mainstream boards.
I would estimate that most Freenet users are geeks, file traders or political activists, in that order.
The main Freenet developer is even an evangelical Christian who is morally opposed to all pornography.
Opennet requires access to central seed nodes, to get you started. A national firewall can easily block these.
With darknet they have to monitor everyone.
If they are watching a subversive and you are a friend, the chances are that you will meet them in person or speak to them non anonymously as well, so having a Freenet connection with them is no extra danger.
People transfer encrypted data all the time!
If using encryption will flag you as subversive, then what is the answer?
To meekly stop using encryption and be a good obedient citizen?
Or for even more people to use more encryption more often, even for things that don't need it?
I'm sure the future for things like Freenet will include steganography, but I think the current system works well enough for now.
There is some ad-hoc mirroring of Wikileaks onto Freenet. Recently, images from the protests in Tibet, and the leaked documents from the Julius Baer bank were put there.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#Technology :
"Wikileaks is based on several software packages, including MediaWiki, Freenet, Tor, and PGP."
No-one involved with the Freenet project knows exactly how it uses Freenet; it certainly doesn't seem to be an official partnership.
Freenet is ideally suited to this kind of thing: freesites (Freenet's equivalent of websites) are fairly quick to retrieve and tend to stay in the network long-term. And of course, creating and reading them is totally anonymous and uncensorable.
There has been a lot of work done recently into making the Freenet installation process as easy as possible, and an official release of Freenet 0.7 is due in the next few weeks, so watch this space.
Freenet hasn't required you to manually find and connect to people for a long time now. It just connects automatically using seednodes. This is called the OpenNet method of operation.
The problem is that seednodes are a centralised point that can be easily censored.
As Freenet is designed for combating government censorship in very harsh conditions, not just as a plaything for bored immature geeks, it also operates in a DarkNet mode. This is where you have to manually connect to other Freenet users that you know and trust, and yes, it is more hassle than the OpenNet mode, but it is also more secure and censorship-resistant. You choose which mode to use: they both connect to the same network, and you can you a mixture of the two, or change from the OpenNet mode to the DarkNet mode at any time.
I would urge you to try Freenet again. It has improved a massive amount recently. It is now very easy to install and use.
The reference version is written in Java for reasons of portability. The JVM does have some overheads but I don't think they are significant in this case. It runs fine for me on a relatively old machine, using minimal resources: the system load and CPU usage barely registers, although it is understandable that using a lot of crypto will take some work. Maybe it was a whole since you last tried it? Performance has increased a lot over the past year or two, although I must say that I never experienced your problems over the past few years.
The latency is not as good as the internet, but that is the price you have to pay for anonymity and lack of censorship. For things like filesharing the latency isn't that important anyway: you just queue it up overnight and pick it up in the morning.
Freenet *is* catching on. I estimate a ten-fold increase in size over the past year, from 500 to 5000 users.
For me it is light and unobtrusive - I run a lot of other programs and Freenet just does its thing in the background without me even noticing it.
It's true there are bugs, like any software, but nothing has ever compromised anyone, and I find it very polished for its stage of development. The installer has been made very simple this year, and an OpenNet method of connecting to the network has been implemented, with seednodes, that makes the initial connection very easy. But there is still the DarkNet method of connection that can be used if things like seednodes are censored in the future or in your country.
If WikiLeaks hosted content on Freenet, a lot more people *would* use it.
These things can be a chicken and egg situation. Sometimes you have to be first instead of just following the crowd.
Freenet has a built-in web proxy called FProxy that you use to browse freesites. These are just regular HTML webpages but without dynamic content. FProxy has filters that strip out anything that could compromise your anonymity, such as links to the regular internet.
You visit sites by using a standard web browser and visiting an address like this:
http://localhost:8888/USK@....../wikileaks/23/
where the dots are a string of characters that provide keys to the location of the site within Freenet and the decryption keys for the content. The number 23 is the version of the site; Freenet will automatically fetch updates as they are inserted.
It is trivial to expose FProxy so that it is visible to the whole internet. The reason people don't is that you could find yourself in legal trouble if forbidden content is accessed from your IP address. To browse anonymously you have to run a Freenet node yourself, I don't think there is any way round this.
Have you tried Freenet recently?
1. It's slower than the regular internet, sure, but that is to be expected. Anonymity and encryption isn't totally free. But it is perfectly usable for things like this.
2. An rapidly increasing number of people are using it. About a year ago, numbers were estimated at about 500. Today it is more like 5000. Due to the anonymity, numbers aren't definite, by design, but there are mechanisms to guess the network size.
3. I don't think Freenet's slowness is the main reason for people to not use it. It is easily fast enough for websites (known as freesites), forums (using the Frost message board software) and filesharing of songs, movies and ebooks.
4. I don't think the network size makes it particularly slow. The routing algorithm is designed to scale to millions of users. With a larger network, popular files will possibly be faster to download if your peers are also downloading them but I don't think it will have a massive effect. At the moment you can see that popular Freesites and content are very fast to retrieve.
5. No p2p software is installed on all computers, but millions of people still use it. I realize you are comparing this to website where a web browser is pre-installed on all computers, but I think this will only be a barrier to the casual user.
6. The installation process for Freenet is very simple and getting easier all the time. It's just a few clicks on an installation wizard and you are ready to go. It is designed to work through firewalls so they shouldn't be too much of an issue.
I agree that at this moment in time it isn't feasible to move wikileaks wholesale onto Freenet, but I predict that what will start happening more is that sites such as this will move contentious sections off their main site and provide links to a Freenet site that can't be censored.
It already happens to some extent now, content that is at risk of being censored gets uploaded to Freenet fairly rapidly. I see that trend continuing and Freenet becoming more mainstream.
See my homepage link to download and try out Freenet.
Web Sheriff are part of a group called Entertainment Law Associates that includes Web Sheriff and Wild West Management.
You can see mugshots of the gang, including ringleader John Giacobbi on this page.
Looks like "Big Jeff" is the heavy mob they send in when all else fails!
Wild West Management manage such titans of the music world as Eyes Wide Open, The Hot Puppies, Mirima / Sloman, The Korgis, and ... that seems to be it.
(I don't think this is a troll - it's a valid point)
Encryption may be a bad solution but it's possibly our only one in the forseeable future. If goverments do outlaw encrytion, or at least make it illegal to withhold your keys (as they do already in some countries), then steganography will be the next step.
Standard encryption should be enough to stay one step ahead in the arms race for now, though.
Agreed: if you want to fileshare with true anonymity, you need a fully encrypted network such as Freenet, which is already very functional and has a large filesharing community.
Torrents have no anonymity by design, even if the traffic is encrypted.
The Freenet 0.5 network is only populated by a few diehards now, but Freenet 0.7 has seen numbers increase from about 500 to 5000 over the last year. That is probably partly due to the activities of the RIAA and MPAA, but also due to major advances in Freenet's ease of use and speed recently.
I would say it is a slight exaggeration to say that speeds can be as fast as regular p2p, due to the encryption and anonymity overheads, but a well-connected node can transfer a 700MB file in a day. And as you say, if your direct peers are also downloading the same file, it has the potential to be even faster.
Definitely worth checking out if you are at all concerned about protecting your anonymity whilst filesharing.
And it should be noted that it isn't just about filesharing, it has a more serious role to play in combating government censorship.
With all these stories in the news recently, it is no surprise that anonymous networks such as Freenet are growing rapidly. This time last year the estimated network size at any one time was about 500 - now it is about 5000.
Freenet is easy to install and set up, and all traffic is sent in encrypted UDP packets that are difficult for ISPs to fingerprint.
Files can be uploaded or downloaded completely anonymously. Even a malicious Freenet peers you are directly connected to can only guess what you are doing, since they can't be sure if you are requesting parts of files yourself or just routing them for someone else. If even this is too much risk for you, you can restrict your direct peers to people you know and trust (darknet) - you only need 10-20 peers.
If you don't know anyone else on Freenet, you can just set it to connect to random people (opennet) - both methods are part of the same Freenet.
Yes, it's an arms race. But the RIAA etc. will go for the low hanging fruit so it is wise to stay one step ahead of the crowd. Encrypted torrents will stop the ISPs snooping on you, but not RIAA investigators who can just join the torrents themselves.
Speeds are obviously slower than a fast torrent, but you can download a 700MB file in a day with a good connection. And as more people join Freenet, speeds should increase as popular files get cached in more places.
I agree that darknets such as Freenet aren't an ideal solution to the problem of authoritarian government - the ideal solution is to get rid of the authoritarian government!
But realistically, increased surveillance and more intrusive government controls over our lives are a reality that isn't going to go away anytime soon.
So Freenet is a pragmatic workaround for the time being. It could even be used as a tool to covertly coordinate campaigns against authoritarian governments.
On a technical level, the idea is that Freenet traffic is very hard to fingerprint - it is UDP packets on random ports and there should be no obvious patterns in the traffic. So ISPs will find it hard to block without also blocking legitimate encrypted traffic such as VoIP.
Freenet has a lot of interesting stuff on it. Documents that are censored or hard to find on the regular internet.
Movies, albums, software, ebooks are posted all the time and there are thousands available for download.
If you have a specific request, just ask on the forum software that comes with Freenet (called Frost) and usually someone will be able to insert it.
Freenet is taking off already. This time last year, the number of nodes in the network was measured in the hundreds - now it is an order of magnitude larger, in the thousands.
There is an active filesharing community there for movies, music, software and e-books.
A 700MB file can be uploaded or downloaded in a day or two, providing you dedicate enough bandwidth to Freenet and have a set of peers with good bandwidth.
It is well worth trying it out if you never have before, or if you tried it out a few years ago and found it slow.
It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.
The next generation of filesharing is already here and working well: Freenet.
Freenet has totally encryption connections between peers, and although your direct peers can see the data packets going between them and you, they don't know if you are initiating them yourself, or just routing for another node in the network. And if even that is too risky for you, you can restrict your direct peers to a list of people you know and trust (aka: darknet).
If you tried Freenet a year or two ago and found it slow or difficult to use, try it out again. There are thousands of users now and a lot more filesharing, and speeds, memory usage and user-friendliness have improved dramatically.
It sounds like what you are describing is pretty close to Freenet. The only major difference is that the size of the data fragments is 32kB, so it is unlikely that they will belong to multiple files.
Freenet is very useable now, it is well worth trying out.
The next stage in filesharing will be totally encrypted and anonymous networks like Freenet.
Freenet has increased dramatically in performance, size and user-friendliness over the past year and there are now several thousand regular users. Movies, software and music albums are regularly shared and there is a good filesharing community there. Speeds are slower than a direct download but comparable to a slow torrent. With a good set of peers and a high amount of bandwidth dedicated to Freenet you can transfer 100MB albums in a couple of hours.
All Freenet traffic is over UDP and is encrypted, and it is virtually impossible for an observer to know who is uploading or downloading a file from the network. The content is stored in a distributed and encrypted fashion on the disks of the people in Freenet. Uploads and downloads are routed through several nodes so it is unfeasible to work out if one of your peers is requesting a file themselves or just routing it for someone else.
An outside observer like an ISP will just see encrypted UDP traffic.
An attacker with multiple nodes on Freenet can see the information flowing to and from their direct peers but they can't tell if it is just being routed, so you have plausible deniability.
Freenet operates in two modes: Opennet and Darknet. Opennet is like traditional p2p networks in that you connect automatically to random people, who are possibly malicious, and can see your traffic to and from them. Darknet is where you restrict your direct peers to only people you trust. This is slightly more secure but less convenient. You choose which one suits you: they are both part of the same network, and you can even use a hybrid if you want.
Freenet has many copyrighted works being distributed illegally on it, (many legal things too), but I don't think you fully understand how Freenet works.
It is specifically designed so that it is virtually impossible for anyone on or observing the network to know who inserted a file, who downloads a file, or who is storing parts of a file. You even don't know most of what data is stored in your own Freenet data store.
Basically, when you insert a file to Freenet, is get split up into 32kB pieces which are encrypted. Each piece has a deterministic hash value between 0 and 1. Likewise, each node on the network has a (slowly changing) value between 0 and 1 (called its "location"). You pass the encrypted pieces to your peers, and they pass it on to their peers, each time trying to move it closer to a peer whose "location" matches the hash. Your peers don't know what is passed to them (it is encrypted) or if you are the original inserter or are just routing it along from someone else.
For people to retrieve the file, they need to know both the "location" and the decryption key. They request it from their peers, who request it from their peers they think are "closer" to the data if they don't have it, and so on. Each peer doesn't know if the peer requesting the data from them wants it for themselves or is just routing it for someone else.
In theory you could compile a big list of the keys to every single file on Freenet and then you would be able to decrypt everything in your node's data store. But in practice you can't obtain such a list - it is changing all the time, there are too many files, and not all files are publicly advertised. Also, you deliberately wouldn't want to compile such a list, because it reduces your plausible deniability.
Freenet uses UDP for all its traffic rather than TCP since it is more firewall-friendly. It also tries to keep its UDP packets as indistinguishable as possible so they can't be reliably blocked. ISPs usually classify the traffic as VOIP. And all data and messages transmitted between nodes are encrypted.
Freenet has been a hybrid opennet and darknet for about 6 months now.
The darknet is when you choose your peers: this is the most secure option but also means you need to know several other Freenet users, which may not be realistic.
The opennet is when your Freenet node finds peers automatically. This is much more convenient but slightly less secure - for one thing it makes it much easier to map out the IP addresses of everyone who uses Freenet.
Both the opennet and darknet versions of Freenet are part of the same network. In practice you can start with a full opennet and slowly add trusted peers until you eventually become fully on the darknet.
If anyone has tried it a few years ago it is definitely worth having another look as it is way more user-friendly, faster and bigger than it was before.