Hmmm, interesting given that a number of P2P file-sharing applications are using Sourceforge, including Freenet.
OTOH, I don't think anyone really expected Sourceforge to stand up to the RIAA should they attempt to bully them into shutting-off web access to a project like Freenet anyway (although looking at page views, Freenet is three-times more popular than SF's next most viewed project).
This is a wake-up call though, I will definitely start thinking about alternatives now should I ever wake up to discover that SF has shut down Freenet's account under threat from the RIAA.
BTW, I've been scarcely less critical of Gnutella than of Freenet in the past. Just yesterday, in fact, I posted a comment on this very site referring to Gnutella as an "unusually naive" protocol.
Do you want me to thank you for stating the obvious?
Nice to know that I have so much of your attention, but that wasn't me.
You don't, but I noticed you posting elsewhere in this story. Guess I will never really know who posted that;-)
BTW, you never did get back to me regarding my Freenet FIQ like you said you would. Guess you got "too busy" eh?
I didn't get back to you because we went into a complete redesign of the site, as you may have noticed. Anyone, you included, can now make any changes which you think are warrented, see here.
In the 1999 paper "A Distributed Decentralized Information Storage and Retrieval System" which formed the basis for the Freenet project, the following future direction is suggested:
Generalisation of Adaptive Network for data processing
A longer term and more ambitious goal would be to determine whether a distributed decentralised data processing system could be constructed using the information distribution Adaptive Network [Freenet] as a starting point. Such a development would allow the creation of a complete distributed decentralised computer
...you can only license it. That is why they call them "End User *License* Agreements". It is a legal hack to get around the obligations the software companies might normally have when one sells something to someone.
If cars had this kind of EULA...
on
Read the Fine Print
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
...we wouldn't own the car we had just purchased. We wouldn't have any rights against the manufacturer if there was a problem with the car. The manufacturer would have control over where we could drive with the car (and have the capability to arbitrarily add new restrictions without our knowledge). The manufacturer would be able to control where we purchase gas for our car, and arbitrarily increase the fuel consumption of our car without our knowledge just so their "preferred" oil company could make more money from us.
So, here is the question: We in the software industry have quite a high opinion of ourselves, so why have we allowed things to get to this point?
This is an excellent point. Packet switching really is an obvious idea, it is just the postal system done electronically. Watching these computer scientists squabble over these crumbs of creativity is embarrasing.
This is a generic reply that could be written in response to any Slashdot article describing a new scientific advance - honestly, read it again. I have often thought that it would be fun to do this, create a small number of pre-canned responses designed to get moderated up but which actually don't say anything - looks like someone else got there first.
Whichever idiot moderated it up deserves eternal ridicule.
In freenet you have to do an exact "search" to find a key. really, the search function is not really a search function at all. it is the "get me the data assiated with this key" function. If you did your research you would have found this out.
I assure you, I am very familiar with Freenet. It is true that Freenet doesn't do keyword searching right now, although there is no reason that its searching algorithm couldn't be generalized in future to achieve this.
Gnutella is indeed evolving, towards a Napster-style centralized architecture, and we all know what that gets us.
I assume you are trolling and so will ignore most of your ill-informed comments, save this one.
The idea that Gnutella is more scalable than Freenet is laughable. Gnutella employs a broadcast search meaning that every time you search for content in a proper Gnutella network your request can hit thousands of other peers in the network, in Freenet each request will hit at most 25 other nodes.
If you genuinely believe the drivel you have spouted here, I strongly suggest that you do some research before you demonstrate your stupidity again.
Requires you to download a newer JVM. Not a big deal.
This isn't really the fault of the Freenet developers, they actually target Java 1.1, but have discovered bugs in many of the currently available JVMs, including the release version of Kaffe (it is fixed in the CVS version), IBM's Linux JRE is also screwy, Sun's seems to work fine though.
Hard as hell to get connected to another client, because there's no central server.
Freenet has improved dramatically in this regard over the past two or three days (with some recent bug-fixes), you may want to try it again.
It's not turnkey. You must search and find peers to put in your hosts file. It doesn't work 'out of the box'.
Both the Linux and Windows releases come with up to thirty recently tested node references now (again, just in the last few days). You can also download fresh references here (the Windows installer now does this automatically on node-startup).
There's no way to search for files.
Freenet isn't intended to be used in the same way as Napster or Gnutella, none-the-less, you may be interested in trying Frost which not only allows you to do keyword searching for files, but also has a Usenet-like discussion board system over Freenet.
Download speeds are poor, due to encryption and other factors relating to anonymity, I believe
Download speeds will improve as data becomes more popular, but you are right, the crypto does impose an overhead.
Frequently, files will download partially or with zero length, but have their correct name, implying it is complete. (Morpheus/KaZaA use temp names until a file completes, which is nice.)
This is a client issue, Frost (mentioned above) uses.tmp files just like Morpheus and KaZaA (and without the spyware!).
Freenet runs a small web server for configuration and retrieval. The web interface is 'programmer friendly', but not user friendly.
Again, try Frost, it is much more user-friendly than the bear-bones web interface to Freenet.
Files must be 'inserted' into the network. This is a pain if you're trying to share 40gb of mp3 files, or change what is shared daily.
Again, Frost makes insertion of files much less painful, and once you insert your files you don't need to keep your node running for them to remain on the network.
Frost is a Freenet client which supports discussion boards and keyword-searching. It requires that you have already installed Freenet, but works well. It has an active community of users, and continues to be improved on a daily basis.
...when our planet is constantly bombarded by more energy than we could ever need? The radiation (heat, light, and other forms) that hits our planet daily from our Sun could, when captured, easily satisfy our energy needs. In effect, we are already using that energy since most natural resources that we consume are simply stored energy from the Sun, locked up millions of years ago by biological organisms.
Hobbex posted a very interesting comment a few days ago to a related story, you can find the original comment here, I have copied it here for your convenience:
Please don't compare someone who has killed members of his own species to someone who is trying to run a profitable business (no matter what you think of that business.)
I agree that you cannot really compare Rosen, Valenti & Co. to the likes of Bin Laden, certainly the urgency of stopping the latter is much greater do to the immediate threat his evil poses to peoples lives - but we still need to be aware that they to represent a deep evil, and a long term threat to the our freedom as a people that is in many ways more scary then that of religious fundamentalists for the simple reason that is is not as certain to fail.
It is easy to paint these people as simply being the ugly side of capitalism - after all it is at the nature of our system that people, and corporations, act in their own best interest, even when they are everything but utilitarian - but it is not that simple. They are not just ruthless capitalists trying to squeeze some money out of us - and what they are attacking is not just our wallets, but our fundamental freedom and self determination in the digital age.
The future that the corporate overlords from whoom our friends Rosen, Valenti and Co. are lackeys have dreamed up a is one where all the information that people access and process is completely controlled by machines loyal not to their users - but to those very corporations. They are working toward establishing a world where the machines which will continue to grow more and more intimately integrated into our very identity and existance are not tools for freedom but chains of bondage - where the promise of unlimited communication becomes instead a reality where our lives have been invaded by machines that control every word we say and hear. And in the name of "security" and "anti-piracy" they are hijacking the governments that are supposed to guard our freedom to force this world down our throats whether we want it or not.
The threat of an information age where the machines we use to access information are not controlled by ourselves, but rather control us, is a distopia beyond the imaginations of the most paranoid technophobes. The road they are trying to lead us down, and for which the resistance is small, is one of the most profoundly dangerous threats to the very meaning of being human that we have every faced - in very real terms, these are people who are selling out humanity to an unholy union of corporations and machines.
With the recent advent of the "motor car", the horse and cart industry is seeing a new and fundamental threat. Our industry is responsible for a significant portion of US exports to our neighbours, and if the government does not take some measures to protect us, that revenue will be lost. We also employ thousands of skilled trades-people who will also lose their jobs if action is not taken to prevent these "motor cars" from destroying our industry.
We propose that all motor cars be limited to 5 mph, redesigned to eat horse-nuts, and regularly drop excrement on the road where others might slip on it. Only through this can our industry, essential to the American economy, be protected from these new dangers.
you might notice no criticism in my contribution
in fact I didn't claim anything or even make any suggestion of improprietry or otherwise
I simply observed a phenomena
Well, I won't argue with you as to what your intention was, since only you know that, but most readers would reasonably conclude that you were implying some form of improprietry even if it was not explicitely stated.
Simple - because it isn't ready for public consumption yet. 2 years isn't long for a project like Freenet - look at how long it took Linux to reach wide acceptance, in many ways Freenet is a more complex project since, unlike Linux, it isn't just a reimplementation of code that is already out there, it is a completely new concept.
Secondly, Freenet isn't really a file-sharing app, despite receiving much inaccurate publicity as "the next Napster". It isn't well adapted to sharing mp3s, nor should it be given its goals.
We will be releasing 0.5 soon, it will be a huge improvement.
The scalability issues with Gnutella are clear to anyone who understands how it works. From day one, Freenet was designed with scalability as a core goal. In Freenet, the number of nodes involved, and the time required to retrieve a piece of information, scales logarithmically as the size of the network increases.
A good analogy might be a detective trying to find a suspect for a crime. The Gnutella approach is akin to going on TV and asking everyone in the area to let you know if they know who did it. It may work once, but the more you do it, the less effective it is. Freenet works as detectives do normally, they gradually home in on their suspect by gathering information, and using that information to refine their search.
Some say that Freenet only achieves this scalability because it doesn't do the type of "fuzzy" search Gnutella does. You need to know exactly what you are looking for in Freenet to find it. This isn't true, the Freenet searching algorithm can be generalised to allow fuzzy searching. While this has not yet been demonstrated in practice, it is definitely possible in theory.
It always amazes me that people continue to lament flaws in many current P2P architectures when Freenet has incorporated solutions to those problems almost from its inception.
Disclaimer: I am Freenet's architect and project coordinator, so you could be forgiven for thinking I am biased, but you are free to review our papers and research to decide for yourself.
If you are going to criticize a paper, do so on the basis of what they are claiming (there is no shortage of support for the claims he is making), not with conspiracy theories about the author's motivation.
..I would have phrased it differently to make sure there is no room for misinterpretation.
Companies where their core business model is to sell support for Open Source software seem to be dropping like flies. While it is clear that Open Source can be a good way to support another business model (such as Open Sourcing software for hardware that you are selling), do you agree that selling or supporting Open Source software, as a business model in itself, has been a failure?
The right to freedom of speech is alienable, meaning that people can sign away their right to freedom of speech in a contract. For example, many employers now consider it standard practice to ask employees to sign non-disclosure agreements. Personally I see nothing wrong with this - it is certainly better than more intrusive measures such as patents and someone should be able to promise someone that they won't tell someone something else, and the law should be used to punish that person if they go back on their promise (as it does with any other contract). I would be rather pissed off if someone couldn't tell me a secret because I couldn't sign an enforcable NDA.
The danger is when employees are forced to sign documents which they otherwise might not, simply because the other three guys who interviewed for the job were willing to sign it. This is increasingly common, the only good solution to this problem is either to prevent employers from discriminating against those who won't sign certain types of NDA (just as they can't discriminate against people on the basis of their sex or race), or to educate people such that nobody will accept signing an over-broad NDA (the former is more realistic).
The right to freedom of speech is alienable, meaning that people can sign away their right to freedom of speech in a contract. For example, many employers now consider it standard practice to ask employees to sign non-disclosure agreements. Personally I see nothing wrong with this - it is certainly better than more intrusive measures such as patents and someone should be able to promise someone that they won't tell someone something else, and the law should be used to punish that person if they go back on their promise (as it does with any other contract). I would be rather pissed off if someone couldn't tell me a secret because I couldn't sign an enforcable NDA.
The danger is when employees are forced to sign documents which they otherwise might not, simply because the other three guys who interviewed for the job were willing to sign it. This is increasingly common, the only good solution to this problem is either to prevent employers from discriminating against those who won't sign certain types of NDA (just as they can't discriminate against people on the basis of their sex or race), or to educate people such that nobody will accept signing an over-broad NDA (the former is more realistic).
Slashdot Mirror
OTOH, I don't think anyone really expected Sourceforge to stand up to the RIAA should they attempt to bully them into shutting-off web access to a project like Freenet anyway (although looking at page views, Freenet is three-times more popular than SF's next most viewed project).
This is a wake-up call though, I will definitely start thinking about alternatives now should I ever wake up to discover that SF has shut down Freenet's account under threat from the RIAA.
Ok, point taken, i didn't follow the link in the original post.
Sorry, but I don't see your logic.
Jeff, always nice to hear from you.
Guess there is nothing new under the sun.
...you can only license it. That is why they call them "End User *License* Agreements". It is a legal hack to get around the obligations the software companies might normally have when one sells something to someone.
So, here is the question: We in the software industry have quite a high opinion of ourselves, so why have we allowed things to get to this point?
This is an excellent point. Packet switching really is an obvious idea, it is just the postal system done electronically. Watching these computer scientists squabble over these crumbs of creativity is embarrasing.
Whichever idiot moderated it up deserves eternal ridicule.
Gnutella is indeed evolving, towards a Napster-style centralized architecture, and we all know what that gets us.
The idea that Gnutella is more scalable than Freenet is laughable. Gnutella employs a broadcast search meaning that every time you search for content in a proper Gnutella network your request can hit thousands of other peers in the network, in Freenet each request will hit at most 25 other nodes.
If you genuinely believe the drivel you have spouted here, I strongly suggest that you do some research before you demonstrate your stupidity again.
Frost is a Freenet client which supports discussion boards and keyword-searching. It requires that you have already installed Freenet, but works well. It has an active community of users, and continues to be improved on a daily basis.
...when our planet is constantly bombarded by more energy than we could ever need? The radiation (heat, light, and other forms) that hits our planet daily from our Sun could, when captured, easily satisfy our energy needs. In effect, we are already using that energy since most natural resources that we consume are simply stored energy from the Sun, locked up millions of years ago by biological organisms.
We propose that all motor cars be limited to 5 mph, redesigned to eat horse-nuts, and regularly drop excrement on the road where others might slip on it. Only through this can our industry, essential to the American economy, be protected from these new dangers.
Secondly, Freenet isn't really a file-sharing app, despite receiving much inaccurate publicity as "the next Napster". It isn't well adapted to sharing mp3s, nor should it be given its goals.
We will be releasing 0.5 soon, it will be a huge improvement.
A good analogy might be a detective trying to find a suspect for a crime. The Gnutella approach is akin to going on TV and asking everyone in the area to let you know if they know who did it. It may work once, but the more you do it, the less effective it is. Freenet works as detectives do normally, they gradually home in on their suspect by gathering information, and using that information to refine their search.
Some say that Freenet only achieves this scalability because it doesn't do the type of "fuzzy" search Gnutella does. You need to know exactly what you are looking for in Freenet to find it. This isn't true, the Freenet searching algorithm can be generalised to allow fuzzy searching. While this has not yet been demonstrated in practice, it is definitely possible in theory.
It always amazes me that people continue to lament flaws in many current P2P architectures when Freenet has incorporated solutions to those problems almost from its inception.
Disclaimer: I am Freenet's architect and project coordinator, so you could be forgiven for thinking I am biased, but you are free to review our papers and research to decide for yourself.
If you are going to criticize a paper, do so on the basis of what they are claiming (there is no shortage of support for the claims he is making), not with conspiracy theories about the author's motivation.
Companies where their core business model is to sell support for Open Source software seem to be dropping like flies. While it is clear that Open Source can be a good way to support another business model (such as Open Sourcing software for hardware that you are selling), do you agree that selling or supporting Open Source software, as a business model in itself, has been a failure?
The danger is when employees are forced to sign documents which they otherwise might not, simply because the other three guys who interviewed for the job were willing to sign it. This is increasingly common, the only good solution to this problem is either to prevent employers from discriminating against those who won't sign certain types of NDA (just as they can't discriminate against people on the basis of their sex or race), or to educate people such that nobody will accept signing an over-broad NDA (the former is more realistic).
The danger is when employees are forced to sign documents which they otherwise might not, simply because the other three guys who interviewed for the job were willing to sign it. This is increasingly common, the only good solution to this problem is either to prevent employers from discriminating against those who won't sign certain types of NDA (just as they can't discriminate against people on the basis of their sex or race), or to educate people such that nobody will accept signing an over-broad NDA (the former is more realistic).