Freenet 0.5.2 Released 711
FurbyXL writes "With the RIAA roaring to grab peer-to-peer users by their IP addresses, Freenet - fully anonymized production and consumption of content - is gaining renewed attention. Articles in New Scientist, ZDNet UK, Wired and CNET (and here) set a somewhat typical context for Freenets major release 0.52. Significant performance improvements through NIO-based messaging, probabilistic caching etc. should provide increased rest to Chinese dissidents, but may finally wake-up the RIAA's Matt Oppenheim..." The announcement on the Freenet home page lists several improvements found in the new version: "a new NIO technology that brings improved performance using less CPU and system resources," "Individual nodes are now more efficient," "the speed and routing of the entire network have significantly improved," probabilistic caching, user interface improvements, and more.
Excellent build (Score:3, Informative)
Looking forward to trying it (Score:5, Informative)
Lack of Content (Score:4, Informative)
Mark my words: (Score:2, Informative)
Its simply not efficient. I want to download music, new releases, and movies -- I don't need encryption. I don't need to store unknown files in an encrypted cache. I don't need the rediculously slow speed Freenet offers.
Enter China. They have TriangleBoy. An array of proxies available not behind the Great Firewall. Chinese dissidents can use these anonymous proxies to do publish and consume information. Freenet only inhibits this. Freenet's lack of performance is a major flaw. US proxies are fast, even when trans-Atlantic. Its tried and true tested technology; innovation is welcome, but Freenet is nothing.
Many P2P programs have been developed in shorter timeframes than since all the hype about Freenet began to now. EarthStation5. Piolet. Blubster. RockItNet. Heck, even Kazaa K++'s modifications to Kazaa. Although many of these are not totally anonymous, ES5 is. Check out the ES5 forums [es5.com] (warning: registration required), you'll find a list of tons of anonymous and transparent proxies to use with ES5.
AIM can use proxies too. So can ICQ. SOCKS5, HTTP. Even FTP, HTTP, Internet Explorer, etc. Many proxies also support SSL. For chatting dissident, one can do SSL over IRC.
Freenet is dead.
Re:Question (Score:2, Informative)
If you're wearing a tinfoil hat, find a friend on freenet (via iip [invisiblenet.net] or some other mechanism) and download from them. (not to mention the absurdity of suing someone for just *using* freenet... that'd get tossed even in a patriot act america)
Re:Searching on freenet? (Score:4, Informative)
NIO (Score:3, Informative)
These include:
There's also a transparently obvious move to appeal to the
Re:Searching on freenet? (Score:1, Informative)
Freenet is more like special HTTP / FTP transport than a gnutella or similar p2p networks.
How can you find anything in web? Can you find warez-ftp servers?
There's no seach for HTTP
Because freenet is a platform and can store any data, you can use special programs (like frost - http://jtcfrost.sf.net) to create 'newsgroups' and share files. You can search the files in that program. Every file that has been shared with that program can be searched, if you have joined the approppriate groups.
Freenet is like a net in the net. You have to provide similar services to the freenet and you can use it (more or less) the same way you use Internet today - with internet-enabled applications.
Re:Questions About Freenet (Score:5, Informative)
So there's no difference between passing on a request, and making one yourself. Requesting a file becomes an anonymous activity, because you don't really have any idea how far this web goes. All you know is the requested "depth" cut off, so requests don't go more than N requests deep. And individual clients can (and do) rewrite this value. SO there's no way to tell if the client you've exploited is the first or a member on a chain of requests.
In fact, the best exploit for freenet would be a "sting," where you control all of the clients except for a handful. Then you know that these clients are doing all the dread. But it'd be really hard to establish this kind of "web of mistrust," considering that most freenet users populate their initial nodes either through the freenet website or through friends of theres. At that point, it's probably easier to get one of those friends to blab on you then it is to get evidence through technical means.
Data insertion works similar. If you have information in your datastore, there's no way to prove that you put it there. In fact, since you can explicitly exclude your own datastore from insertions, it's less likely that you'll have it if you inserted it. So if you have data in your store, it's equally likely that it was "pushed" to you to serve as it is that you downloaded it yourself. In fact, it's probably more likely, as freenet is receiving insert requests (more or less "uploads") all day, but only downloading when you're interacting with it.
Freenet's about PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY, which in a free (as in, bill of rights and supreme court) society should be enough to keep you out of prison. The difficulty of identifying computers is no different from regular peer to peer...the difficulty lies in IDENTIFYING them.
And as for buffer overflows...you don't know much about Java, do you? Individual applications can't become overfull due to automatic checking by the VM. So the unless the VM has bugs, the client is about as invulnerable as you can hope for. Plus, lots of us have looked at the key code for Freenet. I didn't trust it until I built it myself.
Re:+Funny moderation is skewing /. (Score:2, Informative)
key indexes are a thing of the past (Score:1, Informative)
A little tip on priority numbers (Score:2, Informative)
Freenet in C (Score:2, Informative)
Re:If all content could be encrypted .... (Score:2, Informative)
That would require everything from the read/write head of a disk to a DNS server to a java app to communicate with each other. If there is any error in implementation, nothing will be able to talk to anything else. If there are any weak security links, well, you know how chains work.
I'm not saying it can't be done, it would just require no less than a full overhaul of pretty much all computing hardware and software to conform to a complex set of security protocols. Anything less would be insecure.
Re:Question (Score:2, Informative)
If you've narrowed down the suspect to five thousand people, that's not going to get you very far in a court. When a shoplifter hides in a crowded shopping centre, you can hardly prosecute every person in the place as accessories.
To be technical about it, freenet guarantees common carrier status, simply through not knowing the content it's hosting. A freenet node is no more suspicious than any of millions of email servers which allow encrypted messages.
Asking freenet for people who've downloaded the client is hardly going to be a roaring success either, as you try to track down dynamic IPs that're months old and in different timezones. It's also pretty damned stupid, the equivalent of asking for the names of everyone who was given Internet Explorer on their computer, then suing them all. The AOL transparent proxy will be getting a lot of court-orders...
Not that anybody needs reveal an IP address to download something nowadays. What else is BitTorrent for?
Not a critisism of the thought, just that freenet is legally pretty safe. It's been directly taunting $cientology for years, and if there were a legal attack against it, it would long-since have been discovered.
Re:Looking forward to trying it (Score:2, Informative)
Donate 200 megabytes to the cause of Freedom of Speech, and the fight against the RIAA and its ilk.
Re:Correct me if i'm wrong, why not FreeNet-Napste (Score:3, Informative)
look in the "tools" section of the freenet site.
Excuse me? Lack of index? (Score:4, Informative)
Why would you want an index outside of freenet anyway? Holding such a thing on a regular web server means your access can be tracked and logged, which defeats the purpose!
There's plenty to look at in Freenet. I'd bet a significant sum that you haven't tried it recently.
How to make Freenet suck less: Leave it running! (Score:5, Informative)
When you start up Freenet, you give it some disk space to use as a "datastore". This starts empty, and fills itself up over time as your node participates in the network.
When you click a link in Freenet, your web browser requests the key (sort of like a url) from your local node. Assuming your node doesn't have the key, it asks another node for it, which then asks another and another until the key is located. The data is then passed back up the chain to your node, and along the way some of the intermediate nodes keep a copy.
In this manner, popular content propagates in Freenet. By leaving your node running (and making sure it's actively participating in the network, serving requests) you'll allow it to store some of the keys that make up Freenet's content. When you use your node, it's likely that some of the keys you want are already stored there.
Routing is similar. When you first install Freenet, it has knowledge of a few "seed nodes", and that's all it knows about. As your node talks to the seed nodes, they tell it about other nodes, and your routing table grows. This makes you less dependent on the seed nodes (which are probably melting today).
A new system in Freenet called "probabilistic caching" results in a certain amount of specialization, and a significant performance improvement. It's based on keys (which are cryptographic hashes of content) and node IDs (which are crypto keys). Both are fairly randomly distributed, numerically. Here's how PCaching works:
If your node ID ends in 0x3F, then when your node participates in the chain for a piece of data whose key ends in 0x3F, it's very likely to keep a copy. When your node handles other keys, it might still keep a copy but it's not as likely. Likewise when you request a key that ends in 0xD3, that request will be passed, if possible, to a node whose ID also ends in 0xD3. This is a simplified explanation and I'm not a Freenet coder, but that's how it's been explained to me.
Obviously, the larger and more up-to-date your routing table is, the more easily your node can find the pages you request. Being an active part of the network is the best way for your node to keep a healthy routing table and a relevant datastore.
Freenet is unique among p2p apps in that your user experience actually improves if you contribute more bandwidth and space. (Bandwidth is much more important than drive space. 100 nodes with datastores of 1 gig each will make a much bigger impact on the network than 1 node with a 100 gig datastore!)
Re:Bandwidth usage... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Question (Score:3, Informative)
Considering the fact that you can't narrow down what any single node has or has not done to aid in the download, you would pretty much have to launch a lawsuit against each user. Problem with that? Well, first of all, you'd have to find all the users of Freenet, and many are not in the US. You could start doing interner-wide port scans, but you're still going to run into a lot of walls, what with proxy servers, non-standard ports, etc. Assuming they managed to get a court order for the people who run the Freenet project to turn over the ips of those who have downloaded the software, they still will have only the records that the folks who run the Freenet project have. Who here keeps server logs for every single download of every single file, and maps all those downloads to individual ip addresses for any significant length of time?
Then you'd have to go about suing all of these people. Assuming we're only talking about say around 20,000 US-based users whose ip addresses can be identified as Freenet nodes, you're still looking at thousands of lawsuits. Thousands of lawsuits means thousands of lawyers, and tens of thousands of paralegals. If someone would like to try doing the math on this one, feel free, but I'd venture to guess that the amount of money invested in this kind of thing would run into the billions. The trick is, you can't selectively sue a few Freenet users, as you can't prove they had anything to do with the infringement you're claiming took place. We get up there in court and they start babbling off about piracy, my response is simply, "what proof do you have that I, specifically, infringed your copyrights?" The simple answer is, "we have none"; that's the way the network works. So they can either sue every single Freenet user en masse, knowing that they cannot prove a single case of infringement against any given individual, or they can pick off a few individuals and hope that they judges they get are so technically inept as to ignore the law and assume guilt without evidence.
That's the trick of it, really. Can you really win a lawsuit against someone without a single shred of evidence? If the RIAA can, it may hurt them far more than Freenet ever could, as they would be seen as an out-of-control lobby group which has managed to penetrate deep into the judicial system; completely disregarding the rule of law and forcing judges to do the same. It would prove once, and for all, that the RIAA is a ferocious beast which abuses copyright laws and manipulates the legal system to its own ends, and that it does so quite successfully.
Re:Dynamic IP, router... (Score:3, Informative)