I got it all along was just trying to clarify for those who didn't.
Thanks for doing that! It appears that sanity was in short supply today on this thread and so every bit helps. I was just agreeing with you enthusiastically (not sure if it somehow came accross differently).
The best one beeing face to face. Networks are NOT safe, don't give people the false impression they can be if you don't want to put them into a dangerous position.
You got it. This is what annoys me about all these Freenet believers.. their fascination with technology blinded them to the basic facts of life... and some of them are being disingenuous by pretending to care about dissidents in danger while really only being occupied with ways to construct a facade to hide their true reasons for using Freenet. I would not mind this nonsesnse as much, if it were not for the fact that all their arm-waving is causing some less tech-savvy people in dangerous places attempt to use this thing and subsequently put themselves in grave danger, all so that someone else half a globe away can watch dirty photographs while sitting on his lard-ass while gorging himself on donuts.
As I mentioned somewhere else, far more mundane methods of just tossing leaflets from rooftops or painting slogans on walls are orders of magnitude more effective and safer for dissidents then Freenet.
Maybe though, it wouldn't be a bad idea to line up some channels of communication before it becomes difficult to do so?
My personal opinion (untested) is that something similiar to painting grafitti or throwing leaflets from rooftops would be much more practical then all the current models.
I was thinking along the lines of storing contents steganographically in innocuous public places, such as random public forums, as images cached by Google with hidden data, etc. Something that a) does not require any special tools to access (other then to decode off-line) and the patterns of use of the regular tools are impossible to distinguish from normal use, b) the secret contents is split up among various seemingly unrelated items, posting of which can be done in various times and until the final piece is posted, the whole contents is undeciphreable. This allows for composing slowly a large file out of small chunks posted from internet caffes and what not.
The whole idea is to re-create the relative security of someone painting a slogan on a wall, people looking at it are just going about their regular business and the poster can evade the authorities by composing the message while invisible.
If you're outside the USA, send me an email. Maybe we should talk...
I live in Canada and so far our need for underground, secret channels of communication is not pressing (knock wood). I am subjecting myself to angry troll ratings and what not here for the purpose of warning people to stay away from Freenet as it is a deeply flawed (and getting worse) "solution" to a problem of secure and anonymous communications.
In fact, I am not sure that a solution which fullfills all of these requirements is even possible on a public network, all of the things people propose are subject to most of the flaws of Freenet and a simple slogan painted on a public wall in the dark of the night defeats most of them handsomly in all important political aspects (and bonus, it requires no computer to access).
Couldn't agree more. If you are indeed a political dissident that is. For kiddie porn, the "dark-net" model seems more useful because it allows to form networks with people whom you "trust" to have the porn but whom you do not trust to actually make a ssh link to. Of course, if you are a dissident, the whole idea of Freenet is prepostrous and you are far safer and much more effective posting allegory and witty poems on art (wink-wink) boards, passing messages hidden in birthday wishes to fellow dissidents or tossing leaflets from hiding onto a busy market. By having a Freenet client on your computer, you make yourself an immediate target for investigation, and the way Freenet stands today, an investigation under quite plausible auspices of looking for kiddie porn. Useless is too weak a word to describe the utility of Freenet to dissident political movements.
Re:maybe you should sit quietly...
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This looks like one of those times that you have a lot more to learn than you have to teach.
Not really, it is merely one of those times when people who have absolutely no idea what this is all about but feel obligated to defend the noble idea of "freedom" are out in force. Should they spend more time looking at the problem and at the "Freenet" non-solution, they would not be around running amok troll-rating anyone who tries to inject some sanity into this.
Any dissidents will, by now, have recognised your trolls for what they are. In a darknet you connect to people you trust, you form those trust relationships independently of Freenet.
... which makes Freenet utterly redundant and exposes you to danger by its needles use. Trade your messages embedded steganographically in images, post allegoric poems on art boards, write witty satire and do all of these other things many a dissident did before you: because they work. Do not trust these clowns with their techno-babble, Freenet will get you imprisoned or killed, its new version is aptly called "dark-net" to describe the brightness of the minds that conceived it.
It is a recognised mathematical fact that networks of human relationships have a small diameter.
Again, dissidents, pay attention. These clowns believe that life-or-death trust equals a "relationship", like say, being together at the same bus stop on Tuesday. This is probably why matematicians do not lead underground political movements. They would get everyone killed in no time. Their argument goes something like this: "I breath air, you breath air, the dude in Uganda does too... ergo we trust each other! Voila! A globe-spanning dark-net!". These people would be laughable if they werent so dangerous. Excercise for the reader: If Bob trusts Alice and Alice trusts Joe but Bob and Joe are mortal enemies, what happens if both Bob and Joe join a network via Alice? Write your answers to the "Uber K3wl DaRk-NeT GaNG", c/o Sanity@Slashdot.
lots of accusations and insults, with not a shred of evidence.
Sure:
Freenet does not protect your identity, you are easilly found by an opressive government based on simple traffic analysis, "free speech" defense only works where there is "free speech" in the first place
Because of the majority of its contents being kiddie porn, it allows opressive governments to equate its users with pedophiles
It does not protect its usesrs from attribution of contents because the so-called "fixed nodes" are subject to takeover
Attempts at converting it to "darknet" mode result from failure to understand that people are not connected with ever expanding network of "trust" links. People in dangerous circumstances tend to form small, dis-contiguous groups where members know each other personally. In such circumstances, other much safer methods of transmission exist. The only groups whcih would undertake to use Freenet despide the risk are poeple who have a lot of large files to trade and no other safer means to do so: kiddie porn users. People forget that a political manifesto is less then 5 kilobytes, a novel is 200k of text.
Well, if you don't know anyone that you actually trust, then I'm afraid you have some pretty serious issues to deal with. I suggest you stop wasting time on/. and see a therapist.
Any dissident reading this should imeediately be able to ascertain the utter stupidity of Freenet. Pay attention because your freedom and life might depend on it: these clowns are telling you that finding people to trust with your life is something as easy as going to some "l33t" forum and typing "let me in d00des". I am not sure if there was ever a more to the point commentary on how dangerous and useless Freenet really is.
You have missed the point, which is that its a scalable darknet. You might only be connected to a few trusted people, but you are indirectly connected, through those people, to a global network.
No it is you who missed the point. There is no such thing as scaleable darknet. By definition, under dangerous conditions, the dissident cells are dis-separate and very weary of making any sort of connections. The inane arguments about who we are all only 2-3 people away from each other are the same kind of fallacy as the various "get-rich-quick" network marketing schemes which claim you can become millionaire if you onlu convince 3 people to buy your soap and each of them convinces other 3 etc. Idiotic schemes like this have been with us for a looong time and one would think that by now supposedly educated people would no longer fall for them.
Ah, I see, Freenet is a "kiddy porn" network, at least we know where you stand on freedom of communication.
From the "free speech" pont of view Freenet is dangerous and counter-productive to its main stated purpose: protecting dissident voices. While at the same time it seems to be much friendler to kiddie porn. One simply draws conclusions from what is happening. If the political dissent from extremely dangerous and repressed places out-weighted the porn even by 10%, I would say that putting up with the vicious smut might be a neccessary evil. But Freenet is near useless for politics and marginally useful for kiddie porn. From there one has to draw conclusions.
Re:Newsbyte is a well known troll
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How so? If I'm connected to 3-5 trusted friends, each of whom is also connected to 3-5 friends, that can turn into a globe-spanning network given a reasonable number of hops. Where is the contradiction? The idea is not independent cells of small groups of friends, but rather an interconnected mesh. Think Kevin Bacon game.
Because its a fallacy. This is how Amway builds its pie-in-the sky "network marketing" pyramide scams. The way it works in the real-life is that the "trust" networks are very fragmented and dis-continuous. A small number of people to a cell, dis-separate from all other cells. More oppressive the conditions, smaller cells. Attempting to establish a new link is the greatest risk action in such a network and thus taken very rarely and with paranoid precautions. People who equate "random forum posters who know secret l33t handshake" with establishing trust in a life-or-death situation are laughable.
That's exactly the point of trusted links. If the node addresses aren't published, and the links are relatively stable, then those links can be camouflaged as other traffic. If you don't have trusted links, then you can spider the network to find nodes.
I dont care for either model, they are both useless. In the first case, steganographic email is far more efficient and safe as it involves no suspect software such as Freenet client and in the second case... the churning and other nonsense are artifacts of useless design. Whichever way you look at it Freenet brings nothing positive to the world of dissidency. Worse, it needlessly exposes naive people to additional danger by persuading them that it is somehow "safer" while being the exact oposite.
Oh, now I know you're trolling. Never mind.
Oh far from it, although the users of the questionable contents of Freenet seem determined to troll rate me off this discussion. The main reason the "darknet" is more suitable for criminals is because contrary to the claims of the developers, no large-scale network can be made of dissident cells in this manner. Only small criminal gangs can find use of this system, hoping to bamboozle authorities by hiding behind "free speech".
Thanks for setting the tone, you don't like the project leader. I am sure we can expect this view to be carefully justified and supported in the rest of your post...
I dont like his attitude based on his posts in the projects mailing list, simple as that.
guess you are too busy making further unsubstianted claims to actually justify those you have made so far. Exactly where is this "proof"? Have you told the real life dissidents that are actually using Freenet today?
I am sure there are some trained pandas using it too. The point remains that the network features ten times more of kiddie porn then anything else. In addition to its major flaws such as being totally vulnerable to a mere traffic analysis at the ISP, being vulnerable to a fixed-node takeover, having abysmal performance, being useless for the main purpose it was designed for, etc, it also allows for the opressive government to create a plausible equation of Freenet user = Pedophile.
And let me guess, you are just the person to do it. I look forward to reading your paper.
An all-time classic of mis-direction: if someone can prove that something does not work, you claim his point is invalid because he did not volunteer to fix it! I already stated the problem might be unsolvable in the first place.
Re:Great, here come the CP trolls
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Personally, I see Freenet as an experiment in what's possible.
Personally I see Freenet as an experiment in hubris gone badly wrong. Leaving the morality of porn aside, the design of the network is so attrocious from the point of view of its supposed target audience and so obviously inadequate to what is supposedly its main task, that anyone looking at it in depth can only conclude that it was designed for kiddie porn. Any lingering doubts have been removed when the project leaders decided to take this turn to a "darknet" system whose attributes are even more geared towards pedophile networks and far less towards free speech political dissidents.
Re:Newsbyte is a well known troll
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Matthew has indeed indicated that he believes it is essential that we support "trusted links" in Freenet, and the other core Freenet developers, myself included, agree with him - so Newsbyte's attempt to stir that up into some kind of controversy is just another example of his trolling.
The whole idea of "trusted" links is beyond stupid. I will skip the obvious question of a reliable method of obtaining "trust" and proceed to this: the stated purpose of Freenet is to protect free speech of dissidents in places such as China. As in allowing them to access a global, protected network to express their views and obtain "restricted" infromation. Turning Freenet into an equvalent of a terrorist cell system, where members are introduced to each other based on their membership in the same group defeats this purpose. Furthermore, other much more mature and effective systems exsist to exchange data in such cells, such as email involving encryption and steganography. To add an insult to injury, Freenet is useless in places where mere use of the system is equivalent to hanging a sign "Dissidents live here" outside a window.
In short, the "darknet" is a last-ditch, desperate attempt at making the... kiddy porn network survive, because the only people to whom this model is suitable are... pedofiles.
When a self-absorbed "project leader" encounters a problem which is far beyond his skills. The requirements of a system such as Freenet are so demanding (from the theoretical standpoint) that they might be wholly intractable. In this case the OSS mantra of "release early, release often" might have been self-defeating.
The existing system is basically unworkable and was proven to be completely useless for its main stated purpose: protecting dissidents. Hence the flailing and panicked thrashing of its lead developer.
This project neeeds a serious theoretical discussion and research to determine if it is even feasible.
That my comment was modded as such is a very, very, mild version of the same logic. folks say something you don't like: call them a troll.
You got modded "troll" because of the way you expressed your opinion. Should you say "Assuming DDOS actually occured.." and "Those of/. readers who engage in such tactics.." or "The minority of FOSS members.." or used some similiar qualifier, your point might have been vaild. Instead, your diatribe read as if it were addressed to all FOSS community members, indirectly equating us all to "cyber terrorists". Furthermore, your assumption of "probability" of a pre-meditated DDOS being launched by some members of the FOSS community being near 1 is patronizing and in actuality, given the wide interest in this story combined with prolific linking to its source, quite baseless. Taking the self-serving word of the community's foe at its face value while issuing patronizing decrees to us is not likely to produce an "Insightful" ranking.
As others already pointed out, "terrorist" is a description of a combatant who uses a very specific tactics and whose psychological warfare actions are aimed at clouding the other side's thinking and creating irrational responses based on brainless, animalistic, instinctive, panic of the populace.
The term is also a darling of hypocrites and usurpers who use it to strike fear in their own side of the conflict in order to gain power. For example, the Nazis used the term "terrorists" (as well as "bandits", "criminals" and "dead enders") to describe Polish and French partisans during the occupation of these countries in WWII. Which should sound familiar to those watching CNN these days.
Unfortunately, your reasoning is invalidated by the GPL's clause that requires you to provide source code. This goes far beyond what abolishment of copyright would bring.
Nothing of the sort. If you are faced with an attack by an enemy, you fight back by counter-attacking forcibly not by laying down and moaning. GPL forces people who choose to use GPL (most anti-GPL wackos seem to forget that GPL is not mandatory) to counter-act efforts by corporatists to use copyright as a restrictive device. That is, you restrict the restriction in order to negate it. In that sense, GPL does force things which go beyond "copyright-free" scenario, but they would no longer be needed should copyright be abolished.
Think a freedom fighter who picks up his opressor's gun to fight back. Should the occupying force withdraw, the violence of the gun is no longer needed and he can go back to growing rice in peace.
If copyright were obliterated, (as it should be) then anyone (even microsoft) would be able to distribute proprietary (closed source) versions of Linux.
Thats true but then anyone would be entitled to copy it to their heart's content. In essence, proprietary software could only survive as a service performed by a company in the course of a larger, more comprehensive working relationship.
I do not view it as a loss.
Indeed.
I do not believe that people have a right to place restrictions on others the way that the GPL does, but I understand it's utility
Restrictions on thought and exchange of information are immoral, save perheaps very extreme cases such as military espionage, actions such as crying "fire" in a crowded theatre etc. Think of GPL as a freedom fighter who picks up the occupier's gun to shoot back with. If they weren't trying to pillage his home and imprison his children, he would have been happily farming corn instead.
I'd like to see someone try to press charges against someone for seeking a lawyer. That would go over really well in the judicial system.
No need. You simply disappear the "enemy combatant" to a gulag in, say, Guantanamo where you keep him incommunicado. Judicial system is then simply bypassed. That is the whole point of Patriot Act and similiar totalitarian devices.
I grow tired of repeating this to nimrods: GPL would not be needed if copyright didnt exist. It is a purely defensive construct, cleverly using the enemy's own most potent weapon by turning it against him. Abolish copyright and GPL will go away having done its work.
There are PLENTY of times when 911 service doesn't work.
Are you suggesting that this is a reason to not regulate 911 service? To allow some providers to route to, say, a veterinary clinic when you dial 911? I am not sure what are you proposing.
Honestly, where do you people get this idea from
Observation coupled with logical reasoning. In my reply to your other post I indicated several mechanisms by which these things happen. There are many many more. Simply put, in an "efficient" free market, you would be right. But unfortunately, the markets (even with no government interference) are far from efficient. Consumers fall far short of being "educated and informed" as the theory demands and make irrational decisions en-masse. Companies are able to control the flow of information to the buyers. There are physical limitations of certain segments of the markets which result in naturally forming "choke points" controlled by few individuals and used as launching pads to control of much larger segments in other areas, and so on.
Let me give you just one (exaggerated to emphasize the point) example: A town in a valley can only be accessed by a singular road or air. A company owns the road and demands arbitrary toll, just short of the cost of air travel. In theory the citizens of the city have a free-market choice but in practice the only option left is to abandon their property (and let it devalue to $0) and leave or put up with the predation. The owner of the road has the ability to control demand by adjusting his price just to the breaking point and is also in a position to virtually tax all of the industries in town since they all depend on the access road to some degree. The demand in this case is unable to produce competition because the barrier to entry is made very very steep by physcial (i.e. outside the market) condition. This example (although exaggerated) is actually what happens in practice with the toll roads in places where only one feasible path to build them is available. This type of restriction of the market occurs in many, many places and in so many forms that it is beyond me why people claiming to believe in "free market" fail to see these obvious problems with the application of the abstract theory to real life.
Corporations have to be profitable. Those which cannot convince customers to buy their product will go out of business.
Again, an assumption. In practice this reads: "those which cannot make the consumer buy their product will go out of business".
There is nothing but wishful thinking involved in the assumption that companies will restrict themselves to pleading with consumers and attempting to satisfy their every whim. Alternate, easier to implement strategies of monopolization, vendor-lock-in, branding, brain-washing, media saturation etc etc exist to make life easier for the CEOs. This of course in addition to physical conditions which make some monopolies downright inevietable, such as inability to run competing wiring in a city or a requirement to own certain unique real estate in order to enter the market.
Back in reality, it turns out that companies that try to maintain a monopoly in this manner (predatory pricing) usually never make money on this tactic. It costs them more to maintain their monopoly than they can ever recoup through higher prices.
This is a common mis-conception. It would be true if the markets truly operated as Adam Smith envisioned. But they dont. In a true, "efficient", market, the well-informed and educated (ha!) consumers would always choose based on price/performance ratio and barriers to market entry would be insignificant. Unfortunately, consumers can be successfully bamboozled with brain-washing tactics such as "branding" and can be locked in into vendor-specific solutions which increase cost of opting out. Thus a large, predatory company can successfully establish a locked-in market and create excessive barriers to entry for small competitors as well as discourage consumers from opting out if it is given enough time to exclusively control and manipulate that market segment.
Let's say that they lower their prices by ten cents for a year, and drive somebody out of the business. In order to make back that money, they need to raise their prices by ten cents over their original monopoly price. But the party that they put out of business went into business precisely because they saw a way to suck off excess profits by competing with the monopoly. Now the market price is ten cents higher, and the profits are even more attractive to a new entrant. So somebody else goes into the business, and the monopoly can't even go back to their old price. They have to go back to the old "lose ten cents per" price, because that's what's necessary to drive the competition out of business.
See above. Once the market is locked into their proprietary technology, all users have their IP phone numbers listed in a company specific web/email/phone/fax combo pages, the company name is synonimous in the minds of uneducated and uninformed with "IP telephony" a small newcomer has to mount a massive uphill battle even with superior pricing and product. This is the true mechanism behind the monopolization, not mere price dumping. Price dumping is only a component (but a critical one) in multi-pronged attack to monopolize a market. The strategy is never 100% successful but it allows for marginalization of all competitors who cannot afford such battle. For practical example on a grand scale see under Microsoft.
Predatory pricing doesn't work the way you've been taught. Oh, I'm not saying that companies never do it. I'm just saying that it's not profitable for them to do so.
This is not a question of what I have been taught. It is based on observation of the behaviour of companies in the last 200 years. Simply put, a simplistic market theory falls short in accounting for a miriad of real-life conditions, most of them outside economics, which conspire to upset the "efficiency" of the free market and result in a natural predisposition to form large-scale monopolies/oligarchies. This happens before governments get involved with their (sometimes well meaning, sometimes not) meddling.
Slashdot Mirror
In that case your post misfired ... as did mine, it seems.
Yea I know, talk about a misnomer! The Happy Fun Ball comes to mind...
Thanks for doing that! It appears that sanity was in short supply today on this thread and so every bit helps. I was just agreeing with you enthusiastically (not sure if it somehow came accross differently).
You got it. This is what annoys me about all these Freenet believers .. their fascination with technology blinded them to the basic facts of life ... and some of them are being disingenuous by pretending to care about dissidents in danger while really only being occupied with ways to construct a facade to hide their true reasons for using Freenet. I would not mind this nonsesnse as much, if it were not for the fact that all their arm-waving is causing some less tech-savvy people in dangerous places attempt to use this thing and subsequently put themselves in grave danger, all so that someone else half a globe away can watch dirty photographs while sitting on his lard-ass while gorging himself on donuts.
As I mentioned somewhere else, far more mundane methods of just tossing leaflets from rooftops or painting slogans on walls are orders of magnitude more effective and safer for dissidents then Freenet.
My personal opinion (untested) is that something similiar to painting grafitti or throwing leaflets from rooftops would be much more practical then all the current models.
I was thinking along the lines of storing contents steganographically in innocuous public places, such as random public forums, as images cached by Google with hidden data, etc. Something that a) does not require any special tools to access (other then to decode off-line) and the patterns of use of the regular tools are impossible to distinguish from normal use, b) the secret contents is split up among various seemingly unrelated items, posting of which can be done in various times and until the final piece is posted, the whole contents is undeciphreable. This allows for composing slowly a large file out of small chunks posted from internet caffes and what not.
The whole idea is to re-create the relative security of someone painting a slogan on a wall, people looking at it are just going about their regular business and the poster can evade the authorities by composing the message while invisible.
I live in Canada and so far our need for underground, secret channels of communication is not pressing (knock wood). I am subjecting myself to angry troll ratings and what not here for the purpose of warning people to stay away from Freenet as it is a deeply flawed (and getting worse) "solution" to a problem of secure and anonymous communications.
In fact, I am not sure that a solution which fullfills all of these requirements is even possible on a public network, all of the things people propose are subject to most of the flaws of Freenet and a simple slogan painted on a public wall in the dark of the night defeats most of them handsomly in all important political aspects (and bonus, it requires no computer to access).
Couldn't agree more. If you are indeed a political dissident that is. For kiddie porn, the "dark-net" model seems more useful because it allows to form networks with people whom you "trust" to have the porn but whom you do not trust to actually make a ssh link to. Of course, if you are a dissident, the whole idea of Freenet is prepostrous and you are far safer and much more effective posting allegory and witty poems on art (wink-wink) boards, passing messages hidden in birthday wishes to fellow dissidents or tossing leaflets from hiding onto a busy market. By having a Freenet client on your computer, you make yourself an immediate target for investigation, and the way Freenet stands today, an investigation under quite plausible auspices of looking for kiddie porn. Useless is too weak a word to describe the utility of Freenet to dissident political movements.
Not really, it is merely one of those times when people who have absolutely no idea what this is all about but feel obligated to defend the noble idea of "freedom" are out in force. Should they spend more time looking at the problem and at the "Freenet" non-solution, they would not be around running amok troll-rating anyone who tries to inject some sanity into this.
... which makes Freenet utterly redundant and exposes you to danger by its needles use. Trade your messages embedded steganographically in images, post allegoric poems on art boards, write witty satire and do all of these other things many a dissident did before you: because they work. Do not trust these clowns with their techno-babble, Freenet will get you imprisoned or killed, its new version is aptly called "dark-net" to describe the brightness of the minds that conceived it.
It is a recognised mathematical fact that networks of human relationships have a small diameter.
Again, dissidents, pay attention. These clowns believe that life-or-death trust equals a "relationship", like say, being together at the same bus stop on Tuesday. This is probably why matematicians do not lead underground political movements. They would get everyone killed in no time. Their argument goes something like this: "I breath air, you breath air, the dude in Uganda does too ... ergo we trust each other! Voila! A globe-spanning dark-net!". These people would be laughable if they werent so dangerous. Excercise for the reader: If Bob trusts Alice and Alice trusts Joe but Bob and Joe are mortal enemies, what happens if both Bob and Joe join a network via Alice? Write your answers to the "Uber K3wl DaRk-NeT GaNG", c/o Sanity@Slashdot.
Sure:
Any dissident reading this should imeediately be able to ascertain the utter stupidity of Freenet. Pay attention because your freedom and life might depend on it: these clowns are telling you that finding people to trust with your life is something as easy as going to some "l33t" forum and typing "let me in d00des". I am not sure if there was ever a more to the point commentary on how dangerous and useless Freenet really is.
You have missed the point, which is that its a scalable darknet. You might only be connected to a few trusted people, but you are indirectly connected, through those people, to a global network.
No it is you who missed the point. There is no such thing as scaleable darknet. By definition, under dangerous conditions, the dissident cells are dis-separate and very weary of making any sort of connections. The inane arguments about who we are all only 2-3 people away from each other are the same kind of fallacy as the various "get-rich-quick" network marketing schemes which claim you can become millionaire if you onlu convince 3 people to buy your soap and each of them convinces other 3 etc. Idiotic schemes like this have been with us for a looong time and one would think that by now supposedly educated people would no longer fall for them.
Ah, I see, Freenet is a "kiddy porn" network, at least we know where you stand on freedom of communication.
From the "free speech" pont of view Freenet is dangerous and counter-productive to its main stated purpose: protecting dissident voices. While at the same time it seems to be much friendler to kiddie porn. One simply draws conclusions from what is happening. If the political dissent from extremely dangerous and repressed places out-weighted the porn even by 10%, I would say that putting up with the vicious smut might be a neccessary evil. But Freenet is near useless for politics and marginally useful for kiddie porn. From there one has to draw conclusions.
Because its a fallacy. This is how Amway builds its pie-in-the sky "network marketing" pyramide scams. The way it works in the real-life is that the "trust" networks are very fragmented and dis-continuous. A small number of people to a cell, dis-separate from all other cells. More oppressive the conditions, smaller cells. Attempting to establish a new link is the greatest risk action in such a network and thus taken very rarely and with paranoid precautions. People who equate "random forum posters who know secret l33t handshake" with establishing trust in a life-or-death situation are laughable.
That's exactly the point of trusted links. If the node addresses aren't published, and the links are relatively stable, then those links can be camouflaged as other traffic. If you don't have trusted links, then you can spider the network to find nodes.
I dont care for either model, they are both useless. In the first case, steganographic email is far more efficient and safe as it involves no suspect software such as Freenet client and in the second case... the churning and other nonsense are artifacts of useless design. Whichever way you look at it Freenet brings nothing positive to the world of dissidency. Worse, it needlessly exposes naive people to additional danger by persuading them that it is somehow "safer" while being the exact oposite.
Oh, now I know you're trolling. Never mind.
Oh far from it, although the users of the questionable contents of Freenet seem determined to troll rate me off this discussion. The main reason the "darknet" is more suitable for criminals is because contrary to the claims of the developers, no large-scale network can be made of dissident cells in this manner. Only small criminal gangs can find use of this system, hoping to bamboozle authorities by hiding behind "free speech".
I dont like his attitude based on his posts in the projects mailing list, simple as that.
guess you are too busy making further unsubstianted claims to actually justify those you have made so far. Exactly where is this "proof"? Have you told the real life dissidents that are actually using Freenet today?
I am sure there are some trained pandas using it too. The point remains that the network features ten times more of kiddie porn then anything else. In addition to its major flaws such as being totally vulnerable to a mere traffic analysis at the ISP, being vulnerable to a fixed-node takeover, having abysmal performance, being useless for the main purpose it was designed for, etc, it also allows for the opressive government to create a plausible equation of Freenet user = Pedophile.
And let me guess, you are just the person to do it. I look forward to reading your paper.
An all-time classic of mis-direction: if someone can prove that something does not work, you claim his point is invalid because he did not volunteer to fix it! I already stated the problem might be unsolvable in the first place.
Personally I see Freenet as an experiment in hubris gone badly wrong. Leaving the morality of porn aside, the design of the network is so attrocious from the point of view of its supposed target audience and so obviously inadequate to what is supposedly its main task, that anyone looking at it in depth can only conclude that it was designed for kiddie porn. Any lingering doubts have been removed when the project leaders decided to take this turn to a "darknet" system whose attributes are even more geared towards pedophile networks and far less towards free speech political dissidents.
The whole idea of "trusted" links is beyond stupid. I will skip the obvious question of a reliable method of obtaining "trust" and proceed to this: the stated purpose of Freenet is to protect free speech of dissidents in places such as China. As in allowing them to access a global, protected network to express their views and obtain "restricted" infromation. Turning Freenet into an equvalent of a terrorist cell system, where members are introduced to each other based on their membership in the same group defeats this purpose. Furthermore, other much more mature and effective systems exsist to exchange data in such cells, such as email involving encryption and steganography. To add an insult to injury, Freenet is useless in places where mere use of the system is equivalent to hanging a sign "Dissidents live here" outside a window.
In short, the "darknet" is a last-ditch, desperate attempt at making the ... kiddy porn network survive, because the only people to whom this model is suitable are ... pedofiles.
The existing system is basically unworkable and was proven to be completely useless for its main stated purpose: protecting dissidents. Hence the flailing and panicked thrashing of its lead developer.
This project neeeds a serious theoretical discussion and research to determine if it is even feasible.
LOL. Rice was just a random crop I picked out of nowhere. I used "corn" in some other post. A figure of speech.
You got modded "troll" because of the way you expressed your opinion. Should you say "Assuming DDOS actually occured.." and "Those of /. readers who engage in such tactics.." or "The minority of FOSS members.." or used some similiar qualifier, your point might have been vaild. Instead, your diatribe read as if it were addressed to all FOSS community members, indirectly equating us all to "cyber terrorists". Furthermore, your assumption of "probability" of a pre-meditated DDOS being launched by some members of the FOSS community being near 1 is patronizing and in actuality, given the wide interest in this story combined with prolific linking to its source, quite baseless. Taking the self-serving word of the community's foe at its face value while issuing patronizing decrees to us is not likely to produce an "Insightful" ranking.
As others already pointed out, "terrorist" is a description of a combatant who uses a very specific tactics and whose psychological warfare actions are aimed at clouding the other side's thinking and creating irrational responses based on brainless, animalistic, instinctive, panic of the populace.
The term is also a darling of hypocrites and usurpers who use it to strike fear in their own side of the conflict in order to gain power. For example, the Nazis used the term "terrorists" (as well as "bandits", "criminals" and "dead enders") to describe Polish and French partisans during the occupation of these countries in WWII. Which should sound familiar to those watching CNN these days.
Nothing of the sort. If you are faced with an attack by an enemy, you fight back by counter-attacking forcibly not by laying down and moaning. GPL forces people who choose to use GPL (most anti-GPL wackos seem to forget that GPL is not mandatory) to counter-act efforts by corporatists to use copyright as a restrictive device. That is, you restrict the restriction in order to negate it. In that sense, GPL does force things which go beyond "copyright-free" scenario, but they would no longer be needed should copyright be abolished.
Think a freedom fighter who picks up his opressor's gun to fight back. Should the occupying force withdraw, the violence of the gun is no longer needed and he can go back to growing rice in peace.
Thats true but then anyone would be entitled to copy it to their heart's content. In essence, proprietary software could only survive as a service performed by a company in the course of a larger, more comprehensive working relationship.
I do not view it as a loss.
Indeed.
I do not believe that people have a right to place restrictions on others the way that the GPL does, but I understand it's utility
Restrictions on thought and exchange of information are immoral, save perheaps very extreme cases such as military espionage, actions such as crying "fire" in a crowded theatre etc. Think of GPL as a freedom fighter who picks up the occupier's gun to shoot back with. If they weren't trying to pillage his home and imprison his children, he would have been happily farming corn instead.
No need. You simply disappear the "enemy combatant" to a gulag in, say, Guantanamo where you keep him incommunicado. Judicial system is then simply bypassed. That is the whole point of Patriot Act and similiar totalitarian devices.
I grow tired of repeating this to nimrods: GPL would not be needed if copyright didnt exist. It is a purely defensive construct, cleverly using the enemy's own most potent weapon by turning it against him. Abolish copyright and GPL will go away having done its work.
Are you suggesting that this is a reason to not regulate 911 service? To allow some providers to route to, say, a veterinary clinic when you dial 911? I am not sure what are you proposing.
Honestly, where do you people get this idea from
Observation coupled with logical reasoning. In my reply to your other post I indicated several mechanisms by which these things happen. There are many many more. Simply put, in an "efficient" free market, you would be right. But unfortunately, the markets (even with no government interference) are far from efficient. Consumers fall far short of being "educated and informed" as the theory demands and make irrational decisions en-masse. Companies are able to control the flow of information to the buyers. There are physical limitations of certain segments of the markets which result in naturally forming "choke points" controlled by few individuals and used as launching pads to control of much larger segments in other areas, and so on.
Let me give you just one (exaggerated to emphasize the point) example: A town in a valley can only be accessed by a singular road or air. A company owns the road and demands arbitrary toll, just short of the cost of air travel. In theory the citizens of the city have a free-market choice but in practice the only option left is to abandon their property (and let it devalue to $0) and leave or put up with the predation. The owner of the road has the ability to control demand by adjusting his price just to the breaking point and is also in a position to virtually tax all of the industries in town since they all depend on the access road to some degree. The demand in this case is unable to produce competition because the barrier to entry is made very very steep by physcial (i.e. outside the market) condition. This example (although exaggerated) is actually what happens in practice with the toll roads in places where only one feasible path to build them is available. This type of restriction of the market occurs in many, many places and in so many forms that it is beyond me why people claiming to believe in "free market" fail to see these obvious problems with the application of the abstract theory to real life.
Corporations have to be profitable. Those which cannot convince customers to buy their product will go out of business.
Again, an assumption. In practice this reads: "those which cannot make the consumer buy their product will go out of business".
There is nothing but wishful thinking involved in the assumption that companies will restrict themselves to pleading with consumers and attempting to satisfy their every whim. Alternate, easier to implement strategies of monopolization, vendor-lock-in, branding, brain-washing, media saturation etc etc exist to make life easier for the CEOs. This of course in addition to physical conditions which make some monopolies downright inevietable, such as inability to run competing wiring in a city or a requirement to own certain unique real estate in order to enter the market.
This is a common mis-conception. It would be true if the markets truly operated as Adam Smith envisioned. But they dont. In a true, "efficient", market, the well-informed and educated (ha!) consumers would always choose based on price/performance ratio and barriers to market entry would be insignificant. Unfortunately, consumers can be successfully bamboozled with brain-washing tactics such as "branding" and can be locked in into vendor-specific solutions which increase cost of opting out. Thus a large, predatory company can successfully establish a locked-in market and create excessive barriers to entry for small competitors as well as discourage consumers from opting out if it is given enough time to exclusively control and manipulate that market segment.
Let's say that they lower their prices by ten cents for a year, and drive somebody out of the business. In order to make back that money, they need to raise their prices by ten cents over their original monopoly price. But the party that they put out of business went into business precisely because they saw a way to suck off excess profits by competing with the monopoly. Now the market price is ten cents higher, and the profits are even more attractive to a new entrant. So somebody else goes into the business, and the monopoly can't even go back to their old price. They have to go back to the old "lose ten cents per" price, because that's what's necessary to drive the competition out of business.
See above. Once the market is locked into their proprietary technology, all users have their IP phone numbers listed in a company specific web/email/phone/fax combo pages, the company name is synonimous in the minds of uneducated and uninformed with "IP telephony" a small newcomer has to mount a massive uphill battle even with superior pricing and product. This is the true mechanism behind the monopolization, not mere price dumping. Price dumping is only a component (but a critical one) in multi-pronged attack to monopolize a market. The strategy is never 100% successful but it allows for marginalization of all competitors who cannot afford such battle. For practical example on a grand scale see under Microsoft.
Predatory pricing doesn't work the way you've been taught. Oh, I'm not saying that companies never do it. I'm just saying that it's not profitable for them to do so.
This is not a question of what I have been taught. It is based on observation of the behaviour of companies in the last 200 years. Simply put, a simplistic market theory falls short in accounting for a miriad of real-life conditions, most of them outside economics, which conspire to upset the "efficiency" of the free market and result in a natural predisposition to form large-scale monopolies/oligarchies. This happens before governments get involved with their (sometimes well meaning, sometimes not) meddling.