It's going to take someone writing an essay to try to connect all the dots as to what may or may not be going on behind the scenes, but it seems obvious that a lot of people don't like the internet, or perhaps the internet is just too free and a lot of people want to stop the internet revolution and cable TV the net. I'm sure it has something to do with net-neutrality.
This looks to me, to be a move by the current head of the fbi to either attack the internet, or control it.
First we saw wikileaks get shut down by the courts, something completely unheard of, but it happened.
Then we see the story of the illegal hyperlinks and fbi stings.
Now we have the story of the fbi claiming that the terrorists are also software pirates.
I'm waiting for them to say the terrorists run linux and post on Slashdot. Also combine this with the battle over network neutrality.
Can someone piece together the big picture? Am I seeing a conspiracy where there is no conspiracy? Is this just about the fbi trying to increase it's power? Is this part of a strategy to attack the net? What exactly is going on?
I'm not smart enough to connect the dots, if there are any dots to connect, but I figured I'd post these links and let you connect the dots or at least discuss the dots.
I'm not a fan of Java and I never was a fan. This is a personal preference. I know how Java works, I've played with Java, and if you like Java thats fine, but I'm not a fan.
It's going to take a lot of bullets, and a lot of technologies, but I think the way to fight these people is by creating superior technologies, not by trying to ban or restrict the growth of the technology just because some evil people want to abuse it with kiddie porn.
I would like to see the technology ban kiddie porn from the net, I would like to see the technology filter the internet and protect children from the net, and also keep children and adults seperate if children do get on the net. We need better parenting technology, and we need better technology to track pictures back to the original distributors if they use formats like JPG, GIF or whatever.
And I'm not saying we can depend just on watermarking and DRM as the answer, I'm saying it's part of a series of technologies which should make up the solution. I understand the technology well enough to know that while it's not going to work all the time, it's better than what we do now. I also know that RFID allows us to do similar things in the offline world, and there are a range of technologies which could be developed just to go after child pornographers.
The point is, if we are just going to wait until AFTER the files have been uploaded for years, it's going to be very difficult and perhaps too late. But if we can identify the victim in the video, the room they were in, maybe you can get a name, maybe in the picture theres information about the camera model and computer it came from, I'm talking about using forensic technologies to track down both the predators and the victim so that the predator can be locked away in prison, that way they can't harm any children in the future. And the children can be found and rescued perhaps before the predator kills them.
I don't see how we can catch these people if we just ban websites, or push them deep underground. I think if we push them deep underground they'll just be harder to catch. In theory, if someone is a pedophile, then you can expect Google and other search engines to have at least some search records proving they have a history of looking for and trying to download child pornography.
If we know they have a history of looking for it, then they should be contacted by the police and forced to help track down the producers. However, if we just arrest EVERYONE who looked up child porn on Google, and throw them all in prison, how exactly are we supposed to get to the producers?
It seems to me that yes technology can help us get to the producers, but it's not as simple as just shutting down the entire internet, or freenet, and or restricting the growth of entire industries just because there might be child pornography somewhere on the net. And I'm concerned that more often than not, child pornography can and probably is being used by people who want to attack the internet in general, or by people who want to ban encryption, or by people who want to have a way to ban P2P, basically people who don't like the technology that child pornographers are abusing.
Anyone who uses Linux is a computer hacker/cyber terrorist.
Anyone who supports the GPL,or anything related to Open Source has an agenda.
Anyone who runs any P2P app is a warez pirate.
I'm sorry but I don't see how just by having encryption, or having the ability to write code in C, or running Linux and using encryption, makes a person a hacker, cyber terrorist, or anything else. To be honest, it's just another type of discrimination.
I guess racial profiling isn't good enough, now anyone who goes to certain websites, like this site, and happens to be using linux, and happens to know C or C++, is assumed to be guilty of hacking, cracking, writing viruses, and being a member of anonymous, or some other cyber terrorist gang.
I think it's this stupid thinking that caused and prolongs the war on drugs. People who think groups like these are real linux using hackers Anonymous hacker cult are the kinda people who would think that just because you know how to do something, or just because you go to a website, or download some software, that you are guilty of a crime. How is this any different from pre-crime? You look guilty so you're guilty.
Shouldn't they also know how to track down pedophiles who exchange in cleartext?
As far as a small fraction of torrents being encrypted, thats going to change soon mainly because of the MPAA and RIAA cracking down on people using bit-torrent. In a way, they are helping civil liberties by attacking it, because all it's doing is making people move to more secure protocols.
Bit torrent usage will go down in the same way Napster use went down. The reason is because the more they crack down on it, the more likely that encryption will become standard. The more they do traffic analysis, the more they'll try to mask the traffic.
And this stuff where they slow a persons connection when they use bit torrent is only going to make matters worse. So I just don't see the point, and I don't think outlawing encryption is a good idea either because if you did that then it would be even harder to catch the real criminals.
All this is doing is making the masses move onto smarter protocols. And plenty of smart people have been transfering with encryption for a while over software like hotline, and IRC. I think overall, all this surveillance is helping the internet become more secure, and the more they attack it the more intelligent the internet becomes and the more resistant to attack.
I'm not a criminal and I use encryption whenever I can, not because I want to commit a crime, but because I don't like nameless/faceless individuals watching everything I say and do.
Just because you want privacy it does not mean you are doing something criminal. If governments and corporations can have encryption to protect their privacy, should we assume they only want it because they are doing something criminal? Should it work both ways? Should we assume that corporations and governments only keep secrets because theres criminals they are trying to protect?
Not saying that. Just that as a practical matter those uses get lost in the noise. Widespread crypto would be a big win from a civil liberties standpoint, but it ain't current reality and it probably ain't happening anytime soon.
So you are saying in the environment where everyone is under constant surveillance by corporations, governments, and mafias, we aren't supposed to use encryption for ourselves because if we do then these groups will assume we are mafia, or governments, or corporations, or criminals?
I think most people just want their privacy. I know the myspace generation may be dumb, but seriously, everything you do online will come back to haunt you someday because corporations, governments and mafias are datamining everything. And while I doubt the masses will ever use encryption unless it's built in, I do think we tech savvy types should use it and promote it.
Just as the masses don't currently use linux, we got them to switch to firefox and thats a start.
Just a month or so ago wikileaks was nearly shut down. We are in an era where they are trying to ban websites like wikileaks which have nothing to do with pedophiles.
I think it's insane to think that just because people use encryption that it's grounds for a warrant. If it's like that then I guess we can't use off the record with gaim anymore, and I guess we can't use SSL anymore, or SSH for that matter.
Yes encryption can be used to do bad stuff, but it can also be used to do good stuff, or innocent stuff. So making the use of encryption as grounds for a warrant is just plain stupid. Most people probably SHOULD use encryption more.
If it's truly a terrorist type situation, I'm sure the NSA has the computing resources to crack all the standard encryption algorithms. Also there are bugs in the pseudo random number generator, they can exploit that. Also the feds probably could get hackers to hack a server if it's Al Qaeda's web server.
Also, try using PGP with Thunderbird, Enigmail works just fine, and there's also Firefox extensions. I don't think the powers that be are concerned with the weak encryption used on most PCs, especially when these computers don't even use real random numbers but PSEUDO-Random, which means the numbers used to make the keys are predictable.
Why wouldn't the kiddie porn people use Bit Torrent and just encrypt their kiddie porn and rename it as an piratedsoftware.iso ?
Of course the people who burn it without the key won't be able to decrypt it, but there is no reason to believe that kiddie porn couldn't be traded over bit-torrent just as easily as it could be traded over Freenet. The difference is, Freenet allows them to trade it in a way in which the world, including the authorities, can see what they are trading and how.
Yes the person you "trust" face to face could and probably will be a government agent, but what if it's a person you grew up with, like your brother? If the government can turn brother against brother, brother against sister, and children against their parents, then that country is already about to collapse, because whoever is at the top of a government like that probably can't trust the people closest to them either and is the most paranoid individual in the country.
I can imagine it being like that in the Soviet Union under Stalin, or in Nazi Germany under Hitler. If it's so bad in a country that resistance is futile, then you are either an agent or an enemy and need to get out of there if you aren't an agent.
Even in Hell, Satan should be able to trust his demons. I don't think a society can exist if no one trusts ANYONE. I'm not sure a society like that ever has existed anywhere.
What you mean to say is, people can't trust anyone they don't already know very well. But newsflash, you can't trust people you don't know in any society, and the few people you can trust in any society are people you know very well, well enough to know they won't get you killed.
The problem is, even when anonymity does not exist, fraud, stock scams, threats, medical records or any kinda records, still get passed around and accessed. So it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the internet or anonymity.
Information SHOULD be secured, we all agree on that. The question is what to do with the information once it's encoded into bits. I think in specific, the when information is put on the internet in unencrypted form, it's already as free as air. It's impossible to put the genie back in the bottle once it gets on the net.
So why fight the net and potentially destroy it, when we can design the net to handle anonymous traffic? Just because the traffic is anonymous doesn't mean we don't know it's there, and can't find out where it came from. They already have watermarks in stuff like mp3s.
Now, there are problems, big security risks, but it's not because it's anonymous or even on the net. The security risks come from how Freenet COULD potentially be abused. Does that mean the Freenet project should be scrapped? I don't think it should be scrapped. The reason it shoudn't be scrapped is because you can't learn anything if you AVOID dangerous ideas.
The bad people, if they are serious bad, could develop their own Freenet in secret, and we wouldn't even have known such software existed, but because there IS a Freenet we can actually discuss what is currently possible and what may be possible in the future, so Freenet exists for research purposes.
In the future, anonymous communication will not only be possible but it will probably be common.
If theres so many pedophiles on the net searching for kiddie porn, wouldn't they use Google?
I'm not saying they wont use freenet, but there are ways to catch them. Google probably has a record of their search history, and likely flags the people who have pedophile search patterns. These people should get watched.
If it's filled with pedophiles, show us some proof. Stop fear mongering.
People like to say the internet is filled with pedophiles too, and it's usually the people who never seriously use the internet who think this way.
The pedophiles exist EVERYWHERE, they aren't on the internet, or on Freenet, they are your neighbors, and a lot of them like to be gym teachers and priests, and other suspicious jobs. I guess lately we like to think that the internet is a haven for pedophiles, as if the pedophiles didn't exist until after the internet was created, or as if the pedophiles didn't exist until after Freenet was created and now the pedophiles are going to corrupt the internet, and Freenet.
The FBI will watch the pedophiles, and thats because there will be plenty of people willing to alert the FBI if we see a pedophile, or even if someone has pedophile behavior, and it has nothing to do with the internet.
In that case, Freenet won't really work in places like China.
They will KNOW who is using Freenet through traffic analysis, and they'll know whether or not Freenet is capable of Steganography and use Steganalysis. In theory on paper it could work, but Freenet would have to be perfectly designed, meaning it would have to be designed much better than it is designed now, and it would probably be harder to scale. It might be that something like Mute will end up being better than Freenet from a design perspective even if it's not as scaleable.
You are right about the fact that in any open format the data can be edited. But the point is simply to convince a jury that the picture cam from a certain source, and in most cases the jury is not going to be sophisticated enough to consider every single possibility.
So the jury has to weigh which situation is most likely, as it's nearly impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Now if the picture just happens to match the camera and computer you have, thats as good as the bullets coming from your gun that you had to register. If a camera can be as damaging as a gun, and all cameras are registered and licensed as guns are, then yes you'll have to register every camera you buy and connect every camera with a name, but this is a better solution than waiting for people to abuse their cameras and the children they film, and upload their virusware to the internet to abuse our computers and eyes.
And it makes more sense to focus on the actual child pornographer than to shut down the entire internet by chasing after the evidence, and by creating illegal hyperlinks and raiding people. So while you might say my solution is ridiculous, if your solution is to censor the entire internet as a solution, then my ridiculous solution is less ridiculous than yours and worth considering.
And of course if you have no solution at all, then you have no right to call any potential solution ridiculous. Whats your solution?
If you want a bug proof program, you aren't going to find that using Java or C, or C++. At least C and C++ is fast. Java is slow as hell and it's still buggy. If you like Java thats your preference, but C is my preference and you aren't such an authority where you can say one language is objectively better than another.
Are you going to say, that if GNUPG, or GNU-Net is written in C, that it's inferior to Freenet JUST because it's written in C and can fall for a buffer overflow exploit?
If you have remote exploits, it's as much due to bad coding as it is to the language, and using Java is not a solution to a bad design. But hey it's your preference, and a lot of people disagree with you and think your preference is equally as stupid as mine.
It's the same technology we use to protect money and trace that. It's the same technology they use to have DRM.
I'm not a big fan of DRM, but you could easily use an open source watermarking technology. The fact that it's already done for copyright purposes, proves it can be done for anything else if we choose.
Tell us more about this friend of yours who has 3 years of probation for downloading a file on a P2P network.
I'm not saying it's impossible given the current laws, but I figured it was only hundreds of people who got caught up in this, and I only read about that one guy so far.
The darknet idea is about the only big new idea I like in Freenet 0.7
but ideally, Freenet is moving towards becoming a Sneakernet, and if it's going to be like that, where we friends trade with friends and only our friends, then we won't have to worry about kiddie porn because we just wont have those kinds of friends who trade that.
Sneakernet would simply be something where you have your encrypted CDrom or DVD, and thats your harddrive. You have your Freenet installed on your wifi router or cellphone and thats your software. You call your friend, and then you trade files over your cellphone, or skypephone, or vodaphone, and then you transfer the files from your smartcard to your DVD burner to your DVD harddrive.
Freenet would have to be the software running on the PDA, the phone, or the sidekick, and not the PC application that it is now. And it shouldn't depend on buggy slow closed source Java.
I'm sorry but I don't really like Java for security or anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
You have this FBI Posts Fake Hyperlinks To Trap Downloaders of Illegal Porn
And this Feds lie about link between software piracy and terrorism
And this Wikileaks shut down
And this Anonymous
And this Net Neutrality Blasted by MPAA Bosses
And this (note, this may be conspiracy theory BS, but I'm posting it anyway) Pentagon: The internet needs to be dealt with as if it were an enemy "weapons system".
It's going to take someone writing an essay to try to connect all the dots as to what may or may not be going on behind the scenes, but it seems obvious that a lot of people don't like the internet, or perhaps the internet is just too free and a lot of people want to stop the internet revolution and cable TV the net. I'm sure it has something to do with net-neutrality.
This looks to me, to be a move by the current head of the fbi to either attack the internet, or control it.
First we saw wikileaks get shut down by the courts, something completely unheard of, but it happened.
Then we see the story of the illegal hyperlinks and fbi stings.
Now we have the story of the fbi claiming that the terrorists are also software pirates.
I'm waiting for them to say the terrorists run linux and post on Slashdot. Also combine this with the battle over network neutrality.
Can someone piece together the big picture? Am I seeing a conspiracy where there is no conspiracy? Is this just about the fbi trying to increase it's power? Is this part of a strategy to attack the net? What exactly is going on?
Now, Piracy+Terrorist+Illegal Hyperlinks = ?
Illegal Hyperlinks
Anonymous
I'm not smart enough to connect the dots, if there are any dots to connect, but I figured I'd post these links and let you connect the dots or at least discuss the dots.
I'm not a fan of Java and I never was a fan. This is a personal preference. I know how Java works, I've played with Java, and if you like Java thats fine, but I'm not a fan.
I'd sooner use C# than use Java.
It's going to take a lot of bullets, and a lot of technologies, but I think the way to fight these people is by creating superior technologies, not by trying to ban or restrict the growth of the technology just because some evil people want to abuse it with kiddie porn.
I would like to see the technology ban kiddie porn from the net, I would like to see the technology filter the internet and protect children from the net, and also keep children and adults seperate if children do get on the net. We need better parenting technology, and we need better technology to track pictures back to the original distributors if they use formats like JPG, GIF or whatever.
And I'm not saying we can depend just on watermarking and DRM as the answer, I'm saying it's part of a series of technologies which should make up the solution. I understand the technology well enough to know that while it's not going to work all the time, it's better than what we do now. I also know that RFID allows us to do similar things in the offline world, and there are a range of technologies which could be developed just to go after child pornographers.
The point is, if we are just going to wait until AFTER the files have been uploaded for years, it's going to be very difficult and perhaps too late. But if we can identify the victim in the video, the room they were in, maybe you can get a name, maybe in the picture theres information about the camera model and computer it came from, I'm talking about using forensic technologies to track down both the predators and the victim so that the predator can be locked away in prison, that way they can't harm any children in the future. And the children can be found and rescued perhaps before the predator kills them.
I don't see how we can catch these people if we just ban websites, or push them deep underground. I think if we push them deep underground they'll just be harder to catch. In theory, if someone is a pedophile, then you can expect Google and other search engines to have at least some search records proving they have a history of looking for and trying to download child pornography.
If we know they have a history of looking for it, then they should be contacted by the police and forced to help track down the producers. However, if we just arrest EVERYONE who looked up child porn on Google, and throw them all in prison, how exactly are we supposed to get to the producers?
It seems to me that yes technology can help us get to the producers, but it's not as simple as just shutting down the entire internet, or freenet, and or restricting the growth of entire industries just because there might be child pornography somewhere on the net. And I'm concerned that more often than not, child pornography can and probably is being used by people who want to attack the internet in general, or by people who want to ban encryption, or by people who want to have a way to ban P2P, basically people who don't like the technology that child pornographers are abusing.
Anonymous on FOX11
Anyone who uses Linux is a computer hacker/cyber terrorist.
Anyone who supports the GPL,or anything related to Open Source has an agenda.
Anyone who runs any P2P app is a warez pirate.
I'm sorry but I don't see how just by having encryption, or having the ability to write code in C, or running Linux and using encryption, makes a person a hacker, cyber terrorist, or anything else. To be honest, it's just another type of discrimination.
I guess racial profiling isn't good enough, now anyone who goes to certain websites, like this site, and happens to be using linux, and happens to know C or C++, is assumed to be guilty of hacking, cracking, writing viruses, and being a member of anonymous, or some other cyber terrorist gang.
I think it's this stupid thinking that caused and prolongs the war on drugs. People who think groups like these are real linux using hackers Anonymous hacker cult are the kinda people who would think that just because you know how to do something, or just because you go to a website, or download some software, that you are guilty of a crime. How is this any different from pre-crime? You look guilty so you're guilty.
Shouldn't they also know how to track down pedophiles who exchange in cleartext?
As far as a small fraction of torrents being encrypted, thats going to change soon mainly because of the MPAA and RIAA cracking down on people using bit-torrent. In a way, they are helping civil liberties by attacking it, because all it's doing is making people move to more secure protocols.
Bit torrent usage will go down in the same way Napster use went down. The reason is because the more they crack down on it, the more likely that encryption will become standard. The more they do traffic analysis, the more they'll try to mask the traffic.
And this stuff where they slow a persons connection when they use bit torrent is only going to make matters worse. So I just don't see the point, and I don't think outlawing encryption is a good idea either because if you did that then it would be even harder to catch the real criminals.
All this is doing is making the masses move onto smarter protocols. And plenty of smart people have been transfering with encryption for a while over software like hotline, and IRC. I think overall, all this surveillance is helping the internet become more secure, and the more they attack it the more intelligent the internet becomes and the more resistant to attack.
I'm not a criminal and I use encryption whenever I can, not because I want to commit a crime, but because I don't like nameless/faceless individuals watching everything I say and do.
Just because you want privacy it does not mean you are doing something criminal. If governments and corporations can have encryption to protect their privacy, should we assume they only want it because they are doing something criminal? Should it work both ways? Should we assume that corporations and governments only keep secrets because theres criminals they are trying to protect?
Not saying that. Just that as a practical matter those uses get lost in the noise. Widespread crypto would be a big win from a civil liberties standpoint, but it ain't current reality and it probably ain't happening anytime soon.
So you are saying in the environment where everyone is under constant surveillance by corporations, governments, and mafias, we aren't supposed to use encryption for ourselves because if we do then these groups will assume we are mafia, or governments, or corporations, or criminals?
I think most people just want their privacy. I know the myspace generation may be dumb, but seriously, everything you do online will come back to haunt you someday because corporations, governments and mafias are datamining everything. And while I doubt the masses will ever use encryption unless it's built in, I do think we tech savvy types should use it and promote it.
Just as the masses don't currently use linux, we got them to switch to firefox and thats a start.
Wikileaks!
Just a month or so ago wikileaks was nearly shut down.
We are in an era where they are trying to ban websites like wikileaks which have nothing to do with pedophiles.
I think it's insane to think that just because people use encryption that it's grounds for a warrant. If it's like that then I guess we can't use off the record with gaim anymore, and I guess we can't use SSL anymore, or SSH for that matter.
Yes encryption can be used to do bad stuff, but it can also be used to do good stuff, or innocent stuff. So making the use of encryption as grounds for a warrant is just plain stupid. Most people probably SHOULD use encryption more.
If it's truly a terrorist type situation, I'm sure the NSA has the computing resources to crack all the standard encryption algorithms. Also there are bugs in the pseudo random number generator, they can exploit that. Also the feds probably could get hackers to hack a server if it's Al Qaeda's web server.
Also, try using PGP with Thunderbird, Enigmail works just fine, and there's also Firefox extensions. I don't think the powers that be are concerned with the weak encryption used on most PCs, especially when these computers don't even use real random numbers but PSEUDO-Random, which means the numbers used to make the keys are predictable.
Why wouldn't the kiddie porn people use Bit Torrent and just encrypt their kiddie porn and rename it as an piratedsoftware.iso ?
Of course the people who burn it without the key won't be able to decrypt it, but there is no reason to believe that kiddie porn couldn't be traded over bit-torrent just as easily as it could be traded over Freenet. The difference is, Freenet allows them to trade it in a way in which the world, including the authorities, can see what they are trading and how.
Yes the person you "trust" face to face could and probably will be a government agent, but what if it's a person you grew up with, like your brother? If the government can turn brother against brother, brother against sister, and children against their parents, then that country is already about to collapse, because whoever is at the top of a government like that probably can't trust the people closest to them either and is the most paranoid individual in the country.
I can imagine it being like that in the Soviet Union under Stalin, or in Nazi Germany under Hitler. If it's so bad in a country that resistance is futile, then you are either an agent or an enemy and need to get out of there if you aren't an agent.
Even in Hell, Satan should be able to trust his demons. I don't think a society can exist if no one trusts ANYONE. I'm not sure a society like that ever has existed anywhere.
What you mean to say is, people can't trust anyone they don't already know very well. But newsflash, you can't trust people you don't know in any society, and the few people you can trust in any society are people you know very well, well enough to know they won't get you killed.
You should be know at least one person like this.
The problem is, even when anonymity does not exist, fraud, stock scams, threats, medical records or any kinda records, still get passed around and accessed. So it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the internet or anonymity.
Information SHOULD be secured, we all agree on that. The question is what to do with the information once it's encoded into bits. I think in specific, the when information is put on the internet in unencrypted form, it's already as free as air. It's impossible to put the genie back in the bottle once it gets on the net.
So why fight the net and potentially destroy it, when we can design the net to handle anonymous traffic? Just because the traffic is anonymous doesn't mean we don't know it's there, and can't find out where it came from. They already have watermarks in stuff like mp3s.
Now, there are problems, big security risks, but it's not because it's anonymous or even on the net. The security risks come from how Freenet COULD potentially be abused. Does that mean the Freenet project should be scrapped? I don't think it should be scrapped. The reason it shoudn't be scrapped is because you can't learn anything if you AVOID dangerous ideas.
The bad people, if they are serious bad, could develop their own Freenet in secret, and we wouldn't even have known such software existed, but because there IS a Freenet we can actually discuss what is currently possible and what may be possible in the future, so Freenet exists for research purposes.
In the future, anonymous communication will not only be possible but it will probably be common.
If theres so many pedophiles on the net searching for kiddie porn, wouldn't they use Google?
I'm not saying they wont use freenet, but there are ways to catch them. Google probably has a record of their search history, and likely flags the people who have pedophile search patterns. These people should get watched.
If it's filled with pedophiles, show us some proof. Stop fear mongering.
People like to say the internet is filled with pedophiles too, and it's usually the people who never seriously use the internet who think this way.
The pedophiles exist EVERYWHERE, they aren't on the internet, or on Freenet, they are your neighbors, and a lot of them like to be gym teachers and priests, and other suspicious jobs. I guess lately we like to think that the internet is a haven for pedophiles, as if the pedophiles didn't exist until after the internet was created, or as if the pedophiles didn't exist until after Freenet was created and now the pedophiles are going to corrupt the internet, and Freenet.
The FBI will watch the pedophiles, and thats because there will be plenty of people willing to alert the FBI if we see a pedophile, or even if someone has pedophile behavior, and it has nothing to do with the internet.
In that case, Freenet won't really work in places like China.
They will KNOW who is using Freenet through traffic analysis, and they'll know whether or not Freenet is capable of Steganography and use Steganalysis. In theory on paper it could work, but Freenet would have to be perfectly designed, meaning it would have to be designed much better than it is designed now, and it would probably be harder to scale. It might be that something like Mute will end up being better than Freenet from a design perspective even if it's not as scaleable.
You are right about the fact that in any open format the data can be edited. But the point is simply to convince a jury that the picture cam from a certain source, and in most cases the jury is not going to be sophisticated enough to consider every single possibility.
So the jury has to weigh which situation is most likely, as it's nearly impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Now if the picture just happens to match the camera and computer you have, thats as good as the bullets coming from your gun that you had to register. If a camera can be as damaging as a gun, and all cameras are registered and licensed as guns are, then yes you'll have to register every camera you buy and connect every camera with a name, but this is a better solution than waiting for people to abuse their cameras and the children they film, and upload their virusware to the internet to abuse our computers and eyes.
And it makes more sense to focus on the actual child pornographer than to shut down the entire internet by chasing after the evidence, and by creating illegal hyperlinks and raiding people. So while you might say my solution is ridiculous, if your solution is to censor the entire internet as a solution, then my ridiculous solution is less ridiculous than yours and worth considering.
And of course if you have no solution at all, then you have no right to call any potential solution ridiculous. Whats your solution?
If you want a bug proof program, you aren't going to find that using Java or C, or C++. At least C and C++ is fast. Java is slow as hell and it's still buggy. If you like Java thats your preference, but C is my preference and you aren't such an authority where you can say one language is objectively better than another.
Are you going to say, that if GNUPG, or GNU-Net is written in C, that it's inferior to Freenet JUST because it's written in C and can fall for a buffer overflow exploit?
If you have remote exploits, it's as much due to bad coding as it is to the language, and using Java is not a solution to a bad design. But hey it's your preference, and a lot of people disagree with you and think your preference is equally as stupid as mine.
It's the same technology we use to protect money and trace that. It's the same technology they use to have DRM.
I'm not a big fan of DRM, but you could easily use an open source watermarking technology. The fact that it's already done for copyright purposes, proves it can be done for anything else if we choose.
Treat your node like you treat your social security number or telephone number. You don't give it to complete strangers right?
But if you know a person and trust them, then it makes sense. You should be able to trust your friends at least alittle bit.
Why wouldn't Steganography work?
In theory, steganography would work. The main problem however is that Freenet isn't as secure as it could be.
Tell us more about this friend of yours who has 3 years of probation for downloading a file on a P2P network.
I'm not saying it's impossible given the current laws, but I figured it was only hundreds of people who got caught up in this, and I only read about that one guy so far.
The darknet idea is about the only big new idea I like in Freenet 0.7
but ideally, Freenet is moving towards becoming a Sneakernet, and if it's going to be like that, where we friends trade with friends and only our friends, then we won't have to worry about kiddie porn because we just wont have those kinds of friends who trade that.
Sneakernet would simply be something where you have your encrypted CDrom or DVD, and thats your harddrive. You have your Freenet installed on your wifi router or cellphone and thats your software. You call your friend, and then you trade files over your cellphone, or skypephone, or vodaphone, and then you transfer the files from your smartcard to your DVD burner to your DVD harddrive.
Freenet would have to be the software running on the PDA, the phone, or the sidekick, and not the PC application that it is now. And it shouldn't depend on buggy slow closed source Java.
I'm sorry but I don't really like Java for security or anything else.