Ok, so the FBI has to go to court and explain that it was actually their investigations which placed the data on the node whose owner they are now trying to prosecute! Also recall that in-order to do this, the FBI has actually helped propogate the offending data further throughout Freenet.
This is kind-of a computerised version of the liable issue. When people download stuff from the Internet and install it as root, they are taking a big risk. It is just the same with Freenet, except perhaps the threat is more obvious since you know that the person who created the file is untracable. This issue is, however, easily addressed using digital signatures. You could build up a trusted reputation by signing all of your output with the same signature, while remaining anonymous.
In addition to this, we are working on ways to give Freenet a more accurate impression of the quality of data stored in it (as determined purely by popularity).
I suggest you read our F.A.Q where we address the issue of DOS attacks. Basically DOS is something which can affect any computer on the Internet, not just Freenet nodes (as we have clearly seen). Freenet is more robust than most systems since it doesn't make much difference if you bring down a small number of Freenet nodes using DOS or DDOS because Freenet is quite robust. As for inserting bogus information, the worth of information in Freenet is determined by the number of people who request it. Random data will only displace other data in Freenet if people actually request it (and it is not really possible to simulate requests for the data due to the dynamic caching mechanism).
...so I guess I will. Can Netscape 6/Mozilla allow Netscape to claw back the huge amount of ground it has lost to Microsoft. To those of you who use Linux or Unix exclusively this may not be apparent, but in the real world almost everybody is standardising on IE 5, not because Microsoft has stuffed it down their throats, but because Netscape 4 sucks. I would love to see a Netscape that I can use again without it crashing every five minutes, and hopefully Netscape 6 / Mozilla will be such a browser, but the real question is - is it too late?
Well, Freenet won't cause as serious a problem due to its dynamic caching - in fact, if more and more information is stored on Freenet, you may find your internet connection speeding up since it is more efficient than the WWW!
Certainly in the case of Freenet (and as I understand it, Gnutella too) the law is somewhat helpless since there isn't any central organisation to sue as is the case with Napster which has had legal problems. The hope with Freenet is that it will not be possible to sue every Freenet node operator a) Because there will be too many and B) because it is difficult to prove any given node is storing any given data.
Surely the natural conclusion of the no-anonymity law in France has much wider implications than this article suggests, since a variety of Internet services permit "publishing" in a potentially anonymous manner. For example, Usenet, email (if you consider mailing-lists and spam as publishing, which I do), FTP uploads, IRC, almost every Internet communication technology permits anonymous publishing of one form or another.
This is mind-bogglingly stupid, it makes the Aussie censorship laws look almost progressive!
Thanks for your outline of how Gnutella locates information. I have spent over 18 months working on a system called Freenet which seems to have similar aims to Gnutella (peer-to-peer, no centralised server) but is much more sophisticated. It does scale well (in fact, the bigger the network, the faster it is!), and it incorporates intelligent caching and mirroring. It is also designed to make it difficult to find out who is doing what on the system. Feel free to take a look at our homepage.
As an old Atari-fan I can understand the loyalty which Amiga, Atari, Acorn and other "alternative" computer manufacturers enjoyed in the late 80s and early 90s - however I personally feel that Linux is a much more deserving, and a much more promising, focus for my loyalty than any such computer now. I felt a sense of loyalty towards Atari because I felt that since they were the underdog, we [Atari users] felt a sense of community and comradeship, but the Linux community offers these and more. Linux users don't have to tolerate our chosen platform's destiny being in the hands of an ultimately self-interested company. Linux truly is the platform of the people, and now that we have Linux I can't see a place for Amiga (or Atari, or Acorn) other than for their nostalgia value.
Obviously the next step is to place the code up under CVS so that anybody will be able to make modifications. No longer will the future of the human race be decided by strangers alone in their bedrooms, now we will be able to open up evolution to public scrutiny so that all hackers (not just the lucky few with girlfriends) will be able to contribute to the future advancement of the human race.
The point here (at least the point for me) is that the UK has been collaborating with the US in this against its European neighbours. Although those on the right in the UK might hope to be closer to the US than to the more left-wing EU, this does not excuse this Judas behaviour.
While I am not an expert on the issue, one of the primary things that Linux still lags behind windows in is the quality of font-display. Windows seems to anti-alias fonts, where as Linux doesn't, this can make things look rather crap in some situations. Does this release address this? If not, are there any efforts being made to improve font-rendering in Linux?
These students are maintaining Webservers, learning Perl and rebuilding machines.
Hmmm, this will probably be moderated down as Flame Bait, but it needs to be said anyway. I really must question the wisdom of teaching kids perl as their first programming language. Yes Perl is extremely powerful in the right hands, but it can also be a breeding ground for poor programming practice (even among experienced programmers). Perl encourages an attitude of "if it works, use it" - this is not good programming practice. I did hear that Python was going to become the standard teaching language in American schools and this seems much more sensible to me.
This has been discussed to death on our mailing lists. Basically our view is that if Freenet is as popular as we hope it will be, then "Freenet" is the perfect term for it, it is possibly more deserving of the term than the other projects which currently use it. If, on the other hand, Freenet is not a success, then this won't affect anyone and it won't matter.
Obviously if you have found two files with the same hash - you would then investigate further to ensure that they actually are the same data (although with a decent hash the chances of an accidental collision is miniscule).
I am working on a project that will do something like this - and a whole lot more. The primary intention is to create an information publication system similar to the world wide web, but where censorship is much more difficult or impossible. However there is more to the system than that, it incorporates intelligent decentraised caching making it much more efficient than the world wide web, and also intelligent mirroring meaning that information on the system will never be slashdotted as this site appears to be! The homepage may be found at http://freenet.sourceforge.net/. We are looking for testers and developers right now in preparation for our first release which will happen in the next few weeks.
Yet again we see a sensationalised report in Slashdot.org. It took me 30 seconds of reading the article to discover that what the M$ guys had done was not just re-invent symbolic links, clearly "Scromp" was so keen to post this that he didn't even bother reading the article.
What actually happens is that when an object is stored in the system - the system checks to see whether it is identical to another object, and if so - just stores a reference to the other object. This is achieved using a "signature" or in non-M$ language - a hash.
It is actaully a reasonably good idea although I can't see how it could have taken so long to implement it. Now it is quite possible that this has been done before, but it certainly isn't just symbolic links!
Those interested in freedom on the Internet may be interested in a project I have been working on for over a year now. It is called Freenet and we are growing very close to the first release of our software.
Tierra is somewhat interesting, but it has been around for ages, and while interesting at first, it seems to have stagnated. Tierra is interesting because it leaves evolution to itself, the organisms are given an environment in which they can exist, and they breed and mutate as a result of this environment. In most genetic programming experiments the breeding and mutation is much more contrived - somewhat akin to breeding horses where they are deliberately selected according to certain criteria (although normally this "breeding" is performed by a computer which blurs the distinction). The problem is that I don't think experiments like Tierra scale very well, after a while they converge to a few different types of organism and then things stay more or less the same at a macro level (much as has happened with our biosphere!). I think there is a place for the more contrived G.P experiments as they permit a much wider variety of stuff to be evolved.
I am not sure that your suggestion would be completely in the interests of the political candidate - these guys want to be all things to all people, and often that means keeping hush hush about some of the opinions they hold or may have had in the past. This would be more appropriate functionality for an independant politics website.
I don't question the value of astronomy, but this is dealing with such an obscure area that I really doubt it will build up much interest. Now evolving a walking algorithm - that is something where everyone could visibly see the results and would likely build up much more interest and support.
At least Joe Public programmer can see why sorting algorithms are useful, I am not suggesting that a GA will come up with a better sorting algorithm, although it might come up with a sorting algorithm which is better in specific areas.
I am not saying that distributed computation is not a powerful tool, I am just saying that it is a shame that this tool has not been put to better use. Ok, so OGRs may have uses in some obscure field, but surely we should use this resource for something that will be of interest to more people. As for distributed.net proving the insecurity of encryption - this is meaningless. We can tell precicely how much computing power it will require to crack any given encryption algorithm (both worst case, and average case). We can even estimate how long a system such as distributed.net would take to do it, actually doing it adds nothing whatsoever to the debate, it is a waste of time and resources, and tells us nothing. Much more interesting to actually create something (such as a new sorting algorithm or A-life).
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In addition to this, we are working on ways to give Freenet a more accurate impression of the quality of data stored in it (as determined purely by popularity).
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This is mind-bogglingly stupid, it makes the Aussie censorship laws look almost progressive!
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Hmmm, this will probably be moderated down as Flame Bait, but it needs to be said anyway. I really must question the wisdom of teaching kids perl as their first programming language. Yes Perl is extremely powerful in the right hands, but it can also be a breeding ground for poor programming practice (even among experienced programmers).
Perl encourages an attitude of "if it works, use it" - this is not good programming practice. I did hear that Python was going to become the standard teaching language in American schools and this seems much more sensible to me.
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What actually happens is that when an object is stored in the system - the system checks to see whether it is identical to another object, and if so - just stores a reference to the other object. This is achieved using a "signature" or in non-M$ language - a hash.
It is actaully a reasonably good idea although I can't see how it could have taken so long to implement it. Now it is quite possible that this has been done before, but it certainly isn't just symbolic links!
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