Freenet 0.5 Released

An anonymous reader submits "After over a year in the making, Freenet 0.5 stable has been released. This new version is far superior to previous versions of Freenet." The announcement specifically thanks Matthew Toseland, "without whom this release would still be vaporware," noting "On the 11th of November, Matthew will no longer be able to work full-time unless more people donate, so please give whatever you can spare at our Donations page."

Can someone educate me?

[chrisseaton]

Freenet is free software designed to ensure true freedom of communication over the Internet. It allows anybody to publish and read information with complete anonymity. Nobody controls Freenet, not even its creators, meaning that the system is not vulnerable to manipulation or shutdown.

Yeah.... but what is it? P2P? Blogger? Messenger?

Usability Engineering ...

[fleppir]

... is a little lacking. Having dl'ded and installed the program, I can't seem to connect to anything. Helpfiles are not helpful. Being a computer geek and not getting it running in 2 minutes flat annoys me to no end. Cool Idea thou.

uncontrollable network?

[krazyninja]

From the explorers area of the freenet pages [freenetproject.org]:
6. Isn't censorship sometimes necessary? ..Governments seek to prevent people from advocating ideas which are deemed damaging to society....The second argument is that this "good" censorship is counter-productive even when it does not leak into other areas. For example, it is generally more effective when trying to persuade someone of something to present them with the arguments against it, and then answer those arguments....

But what about questions that are not answerable? For instance, some anonymous person "places" a file containing the source codes for all the windows operating systems+MATHEMATICA source code+xyz corporations major software. The software companies attitude could be bad, and mainly oriented towards profit and monopoly. But do even such companies deserve such a death blow? At one stroke, their entire product goes down the drain.
While I am not against freenet, it is not without its disadvantages. Taken to its limits, nobody can control us, yah, but nobody can control this "network" either!

Why I don't use it

[wossName]

The idea of Freenet is really great, but there were two things in the implementation that really annoyed me:

1) I cannot control what is in my datastore. Free speech or not, I'm not going to cache your kiddieporn for you. So if I know that there's a file I don't want, give me a way to blacklist it. If it's encrypted then it's another story.

2) My files aren't shared permanently. If nobody requests the files I injected, they are thrown out after a while, even if my node is online 24/7. That's just plain stupid.

If I'm wrong or this has changed, please feel free to correct me.

DistribNet

[kevina]

Freenet is nice but it has some fundamental limitations. One of the biggest ones that it is all about the here and now. That is in freenet really popular documents are available quickly, not so popular ones may be available, and un-popular documents will just fall off the network. Freenet is nothing but a large cache and there is no real way to provide permanent storage of data. Freenet is also, in my view, overly concerned with anonymity, to the point where it hurts performance.

My network, DistribNet attempts to address these issues and more. It has been a while since I have worked on it but I plan on putting some serious effort into it in the next couple of months. You an check it out at DistribNet.sf.net [sourceforge.net].

Re:p2p alternative media?

[hispula]

Well, actually we will soon have a new law of publicity here in Finland. This law means that all discussion boards etc. should be monitored and there must in every case be a person (ie. editor) responsible for the discussion published on the board. So if somebody publishes some slander about somebody the "editor" of the discussion board would be personally responsible for it. This would naturally be disastrous for open publishing web sites like Indymedia.

Yes, you are right. Freedom of speech is seriously threatened. However I feel that this type of limitation to the freedom of speech will not work. If there should be a serious attack against freedom of speech we would just find a way to avoid it.

Re:Can someone educate me?

[grainofsand]

I am currently living in Beijing, China and just tried to access the freenet webpage. Blocked of course. Google searches for "freenet" return 404.

Advantages of freenet over the regular internet

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

-> it will make slashdotting an impossibility

-> it will make removing a webpage without approval of the webmaster an impossibility

-> it will prevent sniffing of your web traffic, rendering carnivore and others useless

-> it has the potential of giving these properties to a lot more protocols (think mail, instant messaging, ...)

it is the internet as it should be

Re:Freenet signs it's own death warrant

[duffbeer703]

That's a very naive view of the legal system. If a friend is sitting in your car with a pound of cocaine in his jacket, you will be arrested on a narcotics distribution charge if a policeman pulls you over and searches the vehicle.

Could you control what the guy had in his jacket? No.

Read about the law. The existance of child pornography in any form on a computer makes you a criminal. Whether you put it there or not, it is your responsibility.

The end result of Freenet will be regulation of encryption.

Re:Can someone educate me?

[sql*kitten]

Now, this is where the plausible deniability comes in: the data coming from Alice's node looks just like the data coming from all the other nodes she talked to during the request/insert process. There's no way to distinguish between the node that originated the request and a node that's simply passing the request along on someone else's behalf.

Uhh, yes there is. Just correlate requests going into and out from the node, if you're snooping all the traffic anyway. You can probably even do this by looking at the timings, if it's encrypted. If you see an outbound request with no inbound request in the n preceding milliseconds (established empirically) then it's pretty obvious that it was a request originating at that node. Want to know what the content is? Just replay the same request yourself, see what you get, and see which nodes talk to you.

Freenet might work if you only look at one-way traffic from one node at a time, but the people that it was built to circumvent - governments - have the resources to take a wider view.

Re:Can someone educate me?

[Anonymous Coward]

These details are handled by Freenet as well. First, all traffic is encrypted. Second, each node includes probabilistic elements in its behavior to foil traffic analysis. Finally, nodes talk to each other for more reasons than just queries and inserts at random times, which confuses traffic analysis even more.

If you want more information, I suggest you read the design document and the list archives. It's hard to give detailed technical critiques from a press release, as I'm sure you're aware.

for what?!

[Lavahead]

It's pretty bothersome to read comments that play out like the following:
-- BEGIN SUMMARY --
FreeNet can give anyone great anonymity.
FreeNet can give anyone a safe public forum.
FreeNet can help groups dodge oppressive governments/corporations.
Wow! FreeNet is great!
Oh wait. Did you say it might have child pornography? BAN/REGULATE/CENSOR IT.
-- END SUMMARY --
I can't believe people will use child pornography as a measuring stick for free speech. Does the magnitude of the problem even register here?

Pros: allows individuals, groups, and (god help us & china) even nations to retain their pursuit of knowledge without allowing iron-fisted governments to control their opinions and votes through censorship, misinformation, and isolation.
Cons: Allows a few deviants to propagate photo documentation of child abuse that hardly any normal person is interested in anyway.

Do these even compare? Does anyone here really want to overthrow this network because a small minority of established pedophiles have a new, very slow, and somewhat complicated way to get their jollies?
Speculation that it will be used to distribute nuclear bomb blueprints, etc, is just speculation. There's no evidence that this has been done on freenet, nor is there any good reason to believe these things couldn't be printed, put in a briefcase and walked over to the interested party.
As long as information flow becomes more automated and regulated through computers, and as long as this software does what it claims to do, the need for freenet will rise. Don't even think this should be thrown away to pretend we're sticking it to child pornographers.