You left out the rest of the quote. M-W went on to say, "It is still used primarily in speech, although it can be found from time to time in edited prose. Its reputation has not risen over the years, and it is still a long way from general acceptance. Use regardless instead." Yeah, "irregardless" is a word, but it's not commonly accepted, and shouldn't be used.
Ever tried to get a Bluetooth adapter to work on a PC? Pfeh. If those were my only choices, I'd rather get on the Internet by calling a friend and having him describe it to me over the phone.
Now, you're implying that expression of criticism is of no value unless you know who wrote it.
When it's impossible to confirm the truthfulness of the criticism, it is essentially of no value. Particularly so when for every piece of legitimate criticism, there are ten lies that look like legitimate criticism.
Imagine what would happen if the police never investigated anonymous tips.
Despite what you see on television, they hardly ever do. Police resources are limited. They can't investigate every tip that comes in. They have to start with the ones that appear plausible, and those are usually the ones that come from people who identify themselves and who are available for follow-up interviews. Virtually all anonymous tips get filed away and never investigated.
You've just described the entire world -- books, magazines, newspapers, television shows, radio shows, world wide web sites, Freenet sites, slashdot. All of it.
Wrong. It's impossible to publish a book anonymously. You can publish under a pseudonym, but you agent and your editor know exactly who you are, and can verify that you're not just making stuff up for fun. The same is true of magazines and newspapers, television shows, and radio. It's impossible to participate in those types of media outlets anonymously. Somebody will have to verify your identity and your truthfulness somewhere down the road before you ever get your message out via that outlet.
Web sites, Freenet sites, and Slashdot are different, and they're the exceptions that prove the rule. Anonymous publications through these types of outlets are widely ignored. Nobody reads your web page, or your Slashdot postings, until you've created a reputation for yourself, or offered some kind of proof of your credibility. If every web page were anonymous, and the only way to link the authorship of one page to the authorship of another were to take somebody's word for it, the web would be completely useless as a source of reliable information or opinion.
That's what Freenet is. Completely useless as a source of information or opinion.
If you can't handle the burden of analyzing written material yourself to see whether it's of value to you
But that's just the point, dude. If everything is published in completely and perfect anonymity, there is no way at all to verify it. If I said, "Kennedy was killed by Fidel Castro, John D. Rockefeller, and the Queen of England," nobody would listen. The only way to get them to listen would be to provide some kind of credibility, like saying that I was the press secretary to the executive assistant to John D. Rockefeller in 1963, and I heard them plan the whole thing. Which pretty much eliminates anonymity from the equation.
Anonymous information is worthless because it is impossible-- or, at best, extremely difficult-- to separate the truth from the lies.
Your comment reminds me of the old joke about the optimist and the pessimist who visited California. They heard that there hadn't been a major earthquake in California in however-many years. The optimist thought to himself, "We're safe!" The pessimist though, "We're due!"
Security-minded folks are more likely to be pessimists than optimists.
It's not about speed, friend. It's about what you can do with it. I'd like to see you play a game with FreeBSD, or run a decent word processor (Open Office, AbiWord, and Lyx need not apply), or run an accounting package, or run Photoshop. As I said before, FreeBSD is an exceptional server operating system. It is an unacceptable desktop operating system, unless your needs as a desktop user are so trivial as to be virtually nonexistent.
Ever tried to read a "good old ASCII" text file? If you try to read it on screen, you'll suffer annoyance and fatigue after mere minutes. If you try to print it out, you'll end up with page after page after page of unformatted text, probably wrapped to 80 characters.
ASCII is a fine format for email and config files. It's not an acceptable document format. PDF is, despite what some people seem to think, the best digital document format available today.
I think you need to adjust your idea of "secure" a little bit. Sendmail is ancient-- in Internet terms-- and it is widely known. Everybody knows where Sendmail's bones are buried. Qmail, on the other hand, is newer and less widely used. The fact that Qmail has had fewer known security flaws can be interpreted as a sign that there are more left to be discovered.
Secure doesn't mean invulnerable. It means trusted. You can trust something with known flaws if you know where those flaws, how to avoid them when necessary, and how to fix them when possible.
A desktop OS is supposed to be a general-purpose environment for running user-interactive software. Linux, even with eye-candy from such outfits as Ximian and Red Hat, is not an acceptable desktop OS. FreeBSD is not an acceptable desktop OS. Solaris is not an acceptable desktop OS. HP-UX is not an acceptable desktop OS. IRIX is not an acceptable desktop OS.
The only acceptable desktop OS's currently available are Windows XP-- or, equally well, Windows 2000 if you can find somebody to sell it to you-- and Mac OS X. Earlier versions of Windows and Mac OS are acceptable to varying degrees.
Anybody who thinks FreeBSD (or Linux, or Solaris, or et cetera) is an acceptable desktop OS is either not doing very many things with his computer, or is happy using substandard tools and employing workarounds.
First things first: the DMCA is not contrary to the founding principles on which our country was built. Freedom of speech-- which is what this is really about-- is a founding principle, but so are reasonable limitations on that freedom. The old cliche goes, "Freedom of speech does not give a person the right to shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theater." In other words, some speech is dangerous to the individual or to society and is not permitted. Freedom of speech does not give you the right to reveal secrets indiscriminately. National secrets, trade secrets, personal secrets, these are all recognized by the law and our legal tradition. If an access control device is based on a secret-- be it a secret algorithm, or a secret encryption key, or any other secret-- then you don't automatically have the right to reveal that secret in a public forum. The DMCA is, as I said before, imperfect. But it does not violate any high principles upon which our country stands.
Now, that said, you can learn everything you need to know about the DMCA, or any other law, at http://thomas.loc.gov. All the laws-- including bills not yet signed into law-- are available there in handy cross-referenced forms. I guess you could say that ours is an "open source" country. The laws that define our government are freely available, and pretty easy to understand if you take the time. To read the DMCA, search for bill HR 2281 in the 105th Congress.
Same thing applies here. If you make known a flaw in an access control system or device, then you're free and clear under the DMCA. You can even discuss the flaw in great detail if you're so inclined... although there's no good reason for you to. The point at which you violate the DMCA is when you distribute either a mechanism for circumventing the access control device (and that includes handing out source code, algorithms, or pseudocode that could easily be turned into source code), or when you distribute instructions on how to circumvent the access control device.
If I said, "CSS is flawed because one widely available implementation stores the decryption key in plaintext," that'd be fine. If I said, "The Xing decoder includes the CSS decryption key in plaintext at such-and-such byte offset, and here's how you can extract it," that'd be going too far in the face of the DMCA.
The DMCA is obviously flawed-- it may, in fact, be unconstitutional-- but I think it's going too far to say that it's evil. Read the legislation itself before you jump to conclusions on that point. A lot of the commentary on the law is exaggeration, misinterpretation, rumor, or innuendo, and shouldn't be used as a basis for evaluation.
I don't see how you can come to the conclusion that the GPL requires the licensor to "waive rights" where the BSD does not.
The GPL requires all parties, including the author, to agree not to distribute derivative works under a different license. That's waiving a fundamental right of authorship-- the right to distribute one's works. The BSD license requires no such waiver.
No. They're included with new computers that come with Mac OS X, and they're included in the retail Mac OS X box. The only time you have to download the tools is when new releases of them become available.
And signing up for the Apple developer program is about as tricky as signing up for Slashdot. If you want to do it anonymously, get yourself a free email account and go for it.
That's exactly right. People under 18 (in the US; varies in other jurisdictions) can't legally waive their copyright-derived rights over their works. In order to release software under a license like the APSL or the GPL requires that the licensor waive certain rights that would ordinarily be protected by copyright. (I'm not sure if this is true of the BSD license, but I don't believe it is. The BSD license doesn't require the licensor to give up any rights, as far as I know.)
The important side-note to this is that any GPL'd software that includes contributions by persons who are or were under 18 at the time is being distributed illegally. By the letter of the law, anyway.
Boring....hmm....try FreeBSD on a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop
Why in the world would you do something like that? FreeBSD is an exceptional server OS, and an absolute bottom-of-the-barrel desktop OS. You'd be better off-- much, much better off-- with Windows XP.
You have a flawed understanding of the DMCA. Under the DMCA, you will only be criminally liable if you distribute code that takes advantage of the flaw you've discovered, or if you describe a method for taking advantage of the flaw. If you merely describe the flaw itself, without giving the public detailed information on how to leverage it to gain unauthorized access to a secured system, you're free and clear.
No offense, but your post basically amounts to DMCA FUD.
You said "free" three times. Where do you get that idea? Where is the hardware going to come from to build these Freenet archives? Is it just going to fall out of the sky?
Then you said "uncensorable" twice. But you failed to notice that writings in these categories published anonymously would be basically of no value to anyone. On matters of fact, a well-written teenager with a spell-checker could be just as credible and authoritative as a nuclear scientist, even though he makes things up just for the fun of fooling people. And on matters of opinion, how could you trust what you read with no information about who wrote it? That very compelling piece you just read could have been written by a psychotic mass murderer, or the leader of a hate group, or a well-written teenager with a spell-checker.
In colonial days, the Federalist Papers were published under a pseudonym. They developed a certain degree of credibility, over time, because not just anybody could publish things. There wasn't much anonymously published bullshit floating around. But in a Freenet world, where anybody with a computer could publish anything, the lies would soon vastly outnumber the truths. Freenet would be a vast collection of bullshit with a few pearls buried in it. Who'd bother to sift through it all to look for pearls, especially when a lot of the shit looks, feels, and smells just like a pearl?
What makes you think anonymously published and distributed documents could have made any difference in any of those cases? Would a widely circulated copy of "Hitler is a jerk" have prevented his rise to power? Would it have brought the war to an end any sooner?
Freenet is irrelevant to the sorts of examples you named. If the people working on it think they're going to prevent the next Hitler, they've got delusions of grandeur.
But that sword cuts both ways. It'd be easy for an anonymous whistle-blower to publish confidential information for noble purposes, but it'd also be impossible to verify the authenticity of that information. In a Freenet world, I could construct a detailed and damning fiction about SunnyElLoco and publish it anonymously, and it would have exactly the same credibility as everything else. Freenet would make it impossible to separate the truth from the lies.
To trivialize the example, imagine a Slashdot where every poster was an Anonymous Coward. How could you separate the truth from the bullshit? The signal-to-noise ratio would plummet.
Anonymously published documents would, in all likelihood, simply be ignored. Like most ACs are here.
How about the right to carry out my private business without it being logged somewhere?
I just would like to point out that you have no such right. You may wish you did-- it's a perfectly reasonably thing to want-- but you don't. The right to privacy essentially ends at the walls of your house, or other enclosed place where you can reasonably expect to be alone. When you step outside, you have no right to privacy whatsoever. If I wanted to videotape you walking down the street and distribute the footage to my friends, I'd be completely within my rights. The government-- whichever government-- is likewise free to keep track of your movements when you're in public, and to watch your interactions with other people-- again, in public-- as closely as they like.
It has to be that way. How can you reasonably restrict my freedom to watch, in public, whomever or whatever I want? You just have to accept that what you do in public is public knowledge.
"Publishing is different now?" Not really. I dare say it's a lot easier today for a person to write, print, and distribute something like the Federalist Papers than it was 250 years ago. In a place like China, North Korea, or Iraq, you can reach a lot more people by printing off a thousand copies of your document and handing them out like a chain letter than you can by posting your document on the Internet. In those places, the Internet is a vast billboard that nobody reads, and that many people don't even know is there.
All I'm saying here is that the Freenet project is probably a waste of time and effort. In any situation where it would actually be useful for a legitimate purpose, it's not going to be practical! Internet access in the free world is hardly ubiquitous, and access in places with oppressive governments is unheard of. Freenet would therefore be absolutely useless to people in those situations, who are incidentally the people that the Freenet guys claim the work is for.
Arguably, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was the most oppressive, repressive place in the world. Do you know how many Internet cafes there were in Afghanistan under the Taliban? Zero. The first Internet cafe in Afghanistan ever opened this past August. If the world had had a vast and extensive Freenet network in 1999, nobody in Afghanistan would have known about it.
That's why I say there's basically no legitimate use for this technology. The people who have access to the Freenet network don't need it. The people who need it won't have access to it. So it's pointless.
I know I'm going to get moderated back to the stone age for saying this, but I suspect that I'm not the only one thinking it. I'm having a very hard time imagining any nontrivial legitimate use for this technology.
Consider for just a minute that given a situation in which one individual distributes material to which another individual or group objects, most of the time there's a good reason for the objection. Maybe the material being distributed is copyrighted (like movies or music), maybe it's dangerous (like blueprints to a nuclear reactor), maybe it's offensive (like child pornography). Most of the time when the distribution of material is opposed, there's a good-- or at least understandable-- reason for it.
Now, it's possible to imagine a scenario in which it might be justifiable, or even imperative, to distribute certain pieces of information. "Soylent Green is people" is a silly example, but a more realistic one might be distributing news of the outside world to a society whose media is heavily controlled. But in that sort of scenario, is the Internet really going to be a useful communication pathway? Assuming the people who need the media have access to the Internet at all, what are the chances that they're going to have unrestricted access to the network of Freenet servers? If you think about it, I think you'll agree that it sounds pretty unlikely.
What I'm saying is this: it sounds to me like there's no realistic, nontrivial, legitimate use for this software. The idea sounds cool on the surface, but I have some serious doubts about its practicality.
Slashdot Mirror
You left out the rest of the quote. M-W went on to say, "It is still used primarily in speech, although it can be found from time to time in edited prose. Its reputation has not risen over the years, and it is still a long way from general acceptance. Use regardless instead." Yeah, "irregardless" is a word, but it's not commonly accepted, and shouldn't be used.
(Curious? Look here.)
Ever tried to get a Bluetooth adapter to work on a PC? Pfeh. If those were my only choices, I'd rather get on the Internet by calling a friend and having him describe it to me over the phone.
Now, you're implying that expression of criticism is of no value unless you know who wrote it.
When it's impossible to confirm the truthfulness of the criticism, it is essentially of no value. Particularly so when for every piece of legitimate criticism, there are ten lies that look like legitimate criticism.
Imagine what would happen if the police never investigated anonymous tips.
Despite what you see on television, they hardly ever do. Police resources are limited. They can't investigate every tip that comes in. They have to start with the ones that appear plausible, and those are usually the ones that come from people who identify themselves and who are available for follow-up interviews. Virtually all anonymous tips get filed away and never investigated.
You've just described the entire world -- books, magazines, newspapers, television shows, radio shows, world wide web sites, Freenet sites, slashdot. All of it.
Wrong. It's impossible to publish a book anonymously. You can publish under a pseudonym, but you agent and your editor know exactly who you are, and can verify that you're not just making stuff up for fun. The same is true of magazines and newspapers, television shows, and radio. It's impossible to participate in those types of media outlets anonymously. Somebody will have to verify your identity and your truthfulness somewhere down the road before you ever get your message out via that outlet.
Web sites, Freenet sites, and Slashdot are different, and they're the exceptions that prove the rule. Anonymous publications through these types of outlets are widely ignored. Nobody reads your web page, or your Slashdot postings, until you've created a reputation for yourself, or offered some kind of proof of your credibility. If every web page were anonymous, and the only way to link the authorship of one page to the authorship of another were to take somebody's word for it, the web would be completely useless as a source of reliable information or opinion.
That's what Freenet is. Completely useless as a source of information or opinion.
If you can't handle the burden of analyzing written material yourself to see whether it's of value to you
But that's just the point, dude. If everything is published in completely and perfect anonymity, there is no way at all to verify it. If I said, "Kennedy was killed by Fidel Castro, John D. Rockefeller, and the Queen of England," nobody would listen. The only way to get them to listen would be to provide some kind of credibility, like saying that I was the press secretary to the executive assistant to John D. Rockefeller in 1963, and I heard them plan the whole thing. Which pretty much eliminates anonymity from the equation.
Anonymous information is worthless because it is impossible-- or, at best, extremely difficult-- to separate the truth from the lies.
Your comment reminds me of the old joke about the optimist and the pessimist who visited California. They heard that there hadn't been a major earthquake in California in however-many years. The optimist thought to himself, "We're safe!" The pessimist though, "We're due!"
Security-minded folks are more likely to be pessimists than optimists.
It's not about speed, friend. It's about what you can do with it. I'd like to see you play a game with FreeBSD, or run a decent word processor (Open Office, AbiWord, and Lyx need not apply), or run an accounting package, or run Photoshop. As I said before, FreeBSD is an exceptional server operating system. It is an unacceptable desktop operating system, unless your needs as a desktop user are so trivial as to be virtually nonexistent.
Ever tried to read a "good old ASCII" text file? If you try to read it on screen, you'll suffer annoyance and fatigue after mere minutes. If you try to print it out, you'll end up with page after page after page of unformatted text, probably wrapped to 80 characters.
ASCII is a fine format for email and config files. It's not an acceptable document format. PDF is, despite what some people seem to think, the best digital document format available today.
I think you need to adjust your idea of "secure" a little bit. Sendmail is ancient-- in Internet terms-- and it is widely known. Everybody knows where Sendmail's bones are buried. Qmail, on the other hand, is newer and less widely used. The fact that Qmail has had fewer known security flaws can be interpreted as a sign that there are more left to be discovered.
Secure doesn't mean invulnerable. It means trusted. You can trust something with known flaws if you know where those flaws, how to avoid them when necessary, and how to fix them when possible.
A desktop OS is supposed to be a general-purpose environment for running user-interactive software. Linux, even with eye-candy from such outfits as Ximian and Red Hat, is not an acceptable desktop OS. FreeBSD is not an acceptable desktop OS. Solaris is not an acceptable desktop OS. HP-UX is not an acceptable desktop OS. IRIX is not an acceptable desktop OS.
The only acceptable desktop OS's currently available are Windows XP-- or, equally well, Windows 2000 if you can find somebody to sell it to you-- and Mac OS X. Earlier versions of Windows and Mac OS are acceptable to varying degrees.
Anybody who thinks FreeBSD (or Linux, or Solaris, or et cetera) is an acceptable desktop OS is either not doing very many things with his computer, or is happy using substandard tools and employing workarounds.
First things first: the DMCA is not contrary to the founding principles on which our country was built. Freedom of speech-- which is what this is really about-- is a founding principle, but so are reasonable limitations on that freedom. The old cliche goes, "Freedom of speech does not give a person the right to shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theater." In other words, some speech is dangerous to the individual or to society and is not permitted. Freedom of speech does not give you the right to reveal secrets indiscriminately. National secrets, trade secrets, personal secrets, these are all recognized by the law and our legal tradition. If an access control device is based on a secret-- be it a secret algorithm, or a secret encryption key, or any other secret-- then you don't automatically have the right to reveal that secret in a public forum. The DMCA is, as I said before, imperfect. But it does not violate any high principles upon which our country stands.
Now, that said, you can learn everything you need to know about the DMCA, or any other law, at http://thomas.loc.gov. All the laws-- including bills not yet signed into law-- are available there in handy cross-referenced forms. I guess you could say that ours is an "open source" country. The laws that define our government are freely available, and pretty easy to understand if you take the time. To read the DMCA, search for bill HR 2281 in the 105th Congress.
Same thing applies here. If you make known a flaw in an access control system or device, then you're free and clear under the DMCA. You can even discuss the flaw in great detail if you're so inclined... although there's no good reason for you to. The point at which you violate the DMCA is when you distribute either a mechanism for circumventing the access control device (and that includes handing out source code, algorithms, or pseudocode that could easily be turned into source code), or when you distribute instructions on how to circumvent the access control device.
If I said, "CSS is flawed because one widely available implementation stores the decryption key in plaintext," that'd be fine. If I said, "The Xing decoder includes the CSS decryption key in plaintext at such-and-such byte offset, and here's how you can extract it," that'd be going too far in the face of the DMCA.
The DMCA is obviously flawed-- it may, in fact, be unconstitutional-- but I think it's going too far to say that it's evil. Read the legislation itself before you jump to conclusions on that point. A lot of the commentary on the law is exaggeration, misinterpretation, rumor, or innuendo, and shouldn't be used as a basis for evaluation.
I don't see how you can come to the conclusion that the GPL requires the licensor to "waive rights" where the BSD does not.
The GPL requires all parties, including the author, to agree not to distribute derivative works under a different license. That's waiving a fundamental right of authorship-- the right to distribute one's works. The BSD license requires no such waiver.
No. They're included with new computers that come with Mac OS X, and they're included in the retail Mac OS X box. The only time you have to download the tools is when new releases of them become available.
And signing up for the Apple developer program is about as tricky as signing up for Slashdot. If you want to do it anonymously, get yourself a free email account and go for it.
That's exactly right. People under 18 (in the US; varies in other jurisdictions) can't legally waive their copyright-derived rights over their works. In order to release software under a license like the APSL or the GPL requires that the licensor waive certain rights that would ordinarily be protected by copyright. (I'm not sure if this is true of the BSD license, but I don't believe it is. The BSD license doesn't require the licensor to give up any rights, as far as I know.)
The important side-note to this is that any GPL'd software that includes contributions by persons who are or were under 18 at the time is being distributed illegally. By the letter of the law, anyway.
You are a liar.
Informative my ass.
Boring....hmm....try FreeBSD on a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop
Why in the world would you do something like that? FreeBSD is an exceptional server OS, and an absolute bottom-of-the-barrel desktop OS. You'd be better off-- much, much better off-- with Windows XP.
You have a flawed understanding of the DMCA. Under the DMCA, you will only be criminally liable if you distribute code that takes advantage of the flaw you've discovered, or if you describe a method for taking advantage of the flaw. If you merely describe the flaw itself, without giving the public detailed information on how to leverage it to gain unauthorized access to a secured system, you're free and clear.
No offense, but your post basically amounts to DMCA FUD.
Knock yourself out, friend. It'd be nice to get un-stuck from the karma cap once in a while.
You mean gaffer tape? Because that works, too. Lacks the impressive, skin-rippingly strong holding power of duct tape, though.
You said "free" three times. Where do you get that idea? Where is the hardware going to come from to build these Freenet archives? Is it just going to fall out of the sky?
Then you said "uncensorable" twice. But you failed to notice that writings in these categories published anonymously would be basically of no value to anyone. On matters of fact, a well-written teenager with a spell-checker could be just as credible and authoritative as a nuclear scientist, even though he makes things up just for the fun of fooling people. And on matters of opinion, how could you trust what you read with no information about who wrote it? That very compelling piece you just read could have been written by a psychotic mass murderer, or the leader of a hate group, or a well-written teenager with a spell-checker.
In colonial days, the Federalist Papers were published under a pseudonym. They developed a certain degree of credibility, over time, because not just anybody could publish things. There wasn't much anonymously published bullshit floating around. But in a Freenet world, where anybody with a computer could publish anything, the lies would soon vastly outnumber the truths. Freenet would be a vast collection of bullshit with a few pearls buried in it. Who'd bother to sift through it all to look for pearls, especially when a lot of the shit looks, feels, and smells just like a pearl?
What makes you think anonymously published and distributed documents could have made any difference in any of those cases? Would a widely circulated copy of "Hitler is a jerk" have prevented his rise to power? Would it have brought the war to an end any sooner?
Freenet is irrelevant to the sorts of examples you named. If the people working on it think they're going to prevent the next Hitler, they've got delusions of grandeur.
But that sword cuts both ways. It'd be easy for an anonymous whistle-blower to publish confidential information for noble purposes, but it'd also be impossible to verify the authenticity of that information. In a Freenet world, I could construct a detailed and damning fiction about SunnyElLoco and publish it anonymously, and it would have exactly the same credibility as everything else. Freenet would make it impossible to separate the truth from the lies.
To trivialize the example, imagine a Slashdot where every poster was an Anonymous Coward. How could you separate the truth from the bullshit? The signal-to-noise ratio would plummet.
Anonymously published documents would, in all likelihood, simply be ignored. Like most ACs are here.
How about the right to carry out my private business without it being logged somewhere?
I just would like to point out that you have no such right. You may wish you did-- it's a perfectly reasonably thing to want-- but you don't. The right to privacy essentially ends at the walls of your house, or other enclosed place where you can reasonably expect to be alone. When you step outside, you have no right to privacy whatsoever. If I wanted to videotape you walking down the street and distribute the footage to my friends, I'd be completely within my rights. The government-- whichever government-- is likewise free to keep track of your movements when you're in public, and to watch your interactions with other people-- again, in public-- as closely as they like.
It has to be that way. How can you reasonably restrict my freedom to watch, in public, whomever or whatever I want? You just have to accept that what you do in public is public knowledge.
"Publishing is different now?" Not really. I dare say it's a lot easier today for a person to write, print, and distribute something like the Federalist Papers than it was 250 years ago. In a place like China, North Korea, or Iraq, you can reach a lot more people by printing off a thousand copies of your document and handing them out like a chain letter than you can by posting your document on the Internet. In those places, the Internet is a vast billboard that nobody reads, and that many people don't even know is there.
All I'm saying here is that the Freenet project is probably a waste of time and effort. In any situation where it would actually be useful for a legitimate purpose, it's not going to be practical! Internet access in the free world is hardly ubiquitous, and access in places with oppressive governments is unheard of. Freenet would therefore be absolutely useless to people in those situations, who are incidentally the people that the Freenet guys claim the work is for.
Arguably, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was the most oppressive, repressive place in the world. Do you know how many Internet cafes there were in Afghanistan under the Taliban? Zero. The first Internet cafe in Afghanistan ever opened this past August. If the world had had a vast and extensive Freenet network in 1999, nobody in Afghanistan would have known about it.
That's why I say there's basically no legitimate use for this technology. The people who have access to the Freenet network don't need it. The people who need it won't have access to it. So it's pointless.
I'm not too worried. People like you tend not to get mod points.
I know I'm going to get moderated back to the stone age for saying this, but I suspect that I'm not the only one thinking it. I'm having a very hard time imagining any nontrivial legitimate use for this technology.
Consider for just a minute that given a situation in which one individual distributes material to which another individual or group objects, most of the time there's a good reason for the objection. Maybe the material being distributed is copyrighted (like movies or music), maybe it's dangerous (like blueprints to a nuclear reactor), maybe it's offensive (like child pornography). Most of the time when the distribution of material is opposed, there's a good-- or at least understandable-- reason for it.
Now, it's possible to imagine a scenario in which it might be justifiable, or even imperative, to distribute certain pieces of information. "Soylent Green is people" is a silly example, but a more realistic one might be distributing news of the outside world to a society whose media is heavily controlled. But in that sort of scenario, is the Internet really going to be a useful communication pathway? Assuming the people who need the media have access to the Internet at all, what are the chances that they're going to have unrestricted access to the network of Freenet servers? If you think about it, I think you'll agree that it sounds pretty unlikely.
What I'm saying is this: it sounds to me like there's no realistic, nontrivial, legitimate use for this software. The idea sounds cool on the surface, but I have some serious doubts about its practicality.