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.
Questions About Freenet (Score:2, Interesting)
why can't freenet be more like bit-torrent (Score:1, Interesting)
RIAA (Score:2, Interesting)
Question (Score:3, Interesting)
guns dont kill people ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, let me have my new anonymous data transfer protocol already!!!
NIO - the buggiest api ever. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm one of the main developers for freenet (see zab_ on the opn irc logs the cvs logs)
When 60% of the code (measured in locs) is workarounds for jvm bugs, you know you have problems.
If the sun QA dept. had pulled their act together, this release would have happend at least a month ago.
zab
New upgrades work well (Score:5, Interesting)
No longer is my CPU at 100% all the time - before when I got put in seednodes I was flatlined, even with the thing niced to -18. Now it's not even noticable.
Bandwidth usage also seems to be more steady, rather than spiking every now and again it holds steady at one number. (~85-90% of allocation.)
Responsiveness has increased slightly - it's about what you would expect from a 56k modem connection.
Run one in the background for a few days - you won't notice it, really. The more people running these things the better, even if they have no use for the system yet and throttle it right back. (10/5 on DSL adds less than 1ms to my ping on ut2k3.)
Did anyone else notice how many cookies RIAA sends (Score:5, Interesting)
pfft.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Summary of my experience: I found it nearly impossible to use and it was giving me massive Gopher flashbacks.
Re:guns dont kill people ... (Score:5, Interesting)
As an earlier poster pointed out, the problem with this is that a user's home computer could be providing kiddie porn. It's one thing to steal songs and software, but it's another thing to host pictures of some 7 year old getting raped. I don't want to even have the possibility of that happening, so I think I'll stick with another distributed client.
Legally, would host computers be analogous to the phone company -- a common carrier? If you use a telephone to plot to kill the president, the feds don't bust the phone company as part of the conspiracy. Just like they don't bust AOL for providing chat rooms for 35 year olds to pick up 12 year old English girls. Are people hosting files or parts of files like the phone company in the eyes of the law?
IP GO BYE BYE (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure none of you would have a problem with that, because you're not all about double standards, right?
Re:Questions About Freenet (Score:1, Interesting)
Freenet can only given true privacy if the code has been audited to guarantee security.
The problem is not insurmountable, but it sure isn't trivial either.
Support Chinese dissidents (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, while freenet might be somewhat secure and private, it would be pretty clear by monitoring a link to an ISP that you were using Freenet. If the Chinese government were to do this they could easily identify and round up the Freenet dissidents. What can we do to help protect freedom behind the bamboo curtain? You can do your part by making sure that Freenet is also used for downloading music! Everyone knows the Chinese like to download and pirate copyrighted material. The Chinese gub'mint will not give it a second look as long as they believe it's being used for piracy and not for dissident speech. We can all do our part for freedom by making sure that Freenet becomes a popular tool for file sharing.
Re:Hrm... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
The people who use it are still liable, of course.
I have no idea how this is going to turn out. Freenet sounds like a great idea, but it's so obviously useful for such horrible uses, and there are other tools that handle most of the useful uses... I don't see it surviving legally (I mean that it'll be outlawed anywhere it'll be useful).
-Billy
6/4 is out the door (Score:2, Interesting)
Download here [hacktivismo.com]
Please note these restrictions:
1. You cannot download this software from us if you are a national of Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan or Syria. Sorry. That's the rule and we cannot let you copy it if you are a national of one of these countries.
2. You cannot download this software from us if you are located in Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan or Syria (or you are located in an embassy, consulate, or other facility that belongs to one of these countries). Again, that's not our rule but it applies to us and we intend to obey it.
3. You cannot download this software from us if you are an entity on the "Denied Persons List" published by the U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Industry and Security. The Denied Persons List is published here or here [text file]. The most recent changes to the Denied Persons List are published here.
4. You must be a Certified Patriot! In our view, it is exceptionally patriotic to be a member of Hacktivismo and to advocate civil liberties all over the world. And we don't view people who agree with George Bush, John Poindexter, John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney, or Don Rumsfeld as very patriotic at all. It is patriotic to disagree with Mr. Bush and other friends of Big Oil. But neither we nor George Bush can decide unilaterally whether you are a Certified Patriot merely based on your politics or point of view. A "Certified Patriot" has come to mean anybody (even communists, militia members, muslim extremists, animal-rights activists, tree-huggers, vocal critics of John Ashcroft, and card-carrying members of the ACLU) not listed as a "Specially Designated National" or "Blocked Person" by the U.S. Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control ("OFAC"). The OFAC list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons [PDF] is located here [PDF] or here [text file]. The most recent changes [PDF] to the SDN and Blocked Persons List are published here [PDF]. IF YOU ARE NOT ON THE TREASURY DEPARTMENT LIST, THEN YOU, TOO, ARE A CERTIFIED PATRIOT! Congratulations!
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:1, Interesting)
When your knee stops jerking, perhaps you should learn to read:
"I love the idea of freenet, but after reading how it works, I have to agree with a few complains I've heard. I'm not really happy about the idea of "anything" being able to be shared on my computer. Kiddie Porn comes to mind as one thing I want nothing to do with, and I have no controll over this being shared on my computer or not."
Where did the poster raise any freedom of speech issues? This post is about local control of one's computer, and being able to say what and what's not allowed to be stored there - ESPECIALLY in cases where the content is illegal *and* repugnant to the owner of the PC.
If all content could be encrypted .... (Score:2, Interesting)
then
All web servers would serve encrypted content..
All you mails would be encrypted...
All filesharing would be encrypted...
Perhaps this could be done if the modem/network interface had encryption built in. (Just that I wish they were standard)
Then we wont have to look at freenets and peek-a-booties for freedom.
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact that someone may have produced kiddie porn and shoved it onto Freenet does not mean that it is sitting on your machine. Since the content on your machine is encrypted, you'll never know for sure anyways.
The problem is not with the storage mechanism, it is with the sick person creating the content. That's where the problem lies, not in the bits and bytes on your hard drive.
Re:Guess I won't worry until the BSA kicks in my d (Score:3, Interesting)
And since the BSA will never know what anyone is downloading or uploading, they really have no-one to send their stupid letters to.
Freenet, saving trees one BSA letter at a time
Re:Question (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Question (Score:4, Interesting)
You know, freenet isn't just a file sharing network. First and foremost it's a medium which guarantees your anonymity, which makes it great for organizing a political movement in an oppressive regime and other things. But it's equally "useful" for doing things coveretly which most of us are disgusted by.
And child pornography is well beyond horrible, don't you think?
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Interesting)
Suppose someone takes a KP image and XORs it with online copies of the U.S. Constitution, an image of Julie Andrews, and a PDF file of U.S. census data. They then take the result and put it up on the net, labeled as "white noise". Then they delete the original KP image. Where is the kiddie porn now? It can be reconstructed by XORing all the remaining files together, but none of those files by itself is kiddie porn. Is the kiddie porn really in the instructions on how to assemble the files to recreate the original KP image? Or does the KP image not exist until someone actually XORs the files and recreates it?
bittorrent within freenet? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Searching on freenet? (Score:5, Interesting)
In freenet, you are ALWAYS searching. You're searching for a KEY, that LOOKS like a URL but doesn't have any information about where it's stored, that translates to a piece of data. When you make a request, you tell your fellow clients what you're looking for, and they either return it, or keep looking for you.
The problem with "keyword" searching over freenet is that somebody, somewhere has to index everything -- make a list of keywords, associate them by "URL," etc. On the internet, the indexing is performed by spiders that work for massive database engines. On Freenet, there's not really any way to perform indexing without exposing the data inside keys being passed back and forth.
To get around this, applications have been written to publish indexes of the data to common KEYs (like "INDEX07162003"), so you can download them and maintain a search engine on your own PC. One such application is Frost. They work pretty damned well.
In the early days of freenet, OFF freenet spiders created search engines, but these are by nature not anonymous -- and they were kind of crap. There was also some experimentation with english language keys -- eg, KSK@GPL.txt -- but the problem was that people were uploading FALSE data on top of what was supposed to be there. So most freenet content is now published using a private/public key system, so only change requests from the initial producer are honored.
The result is this system which works in the exact opposite way of the regular internet. On the regular internet, the client can only handle static content, so manipulation is handled by the server. On Freenet, the content on the server is static, so manipulation is handled by the client. You don't get the full understanding of how strange this is until you've used some of the funkee freenet messaging systems.
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:3, Interesting)
IMHO, Freenet users are going to run into this problem: if you can't pass the buck, then the buck stops with you. Freenet users are going to try to claim they are carriers who are not responsible for the information that passes through their nodes, but they will be responsible, because they won't be able to pin it on someone else.
When someone breaks a law using Freenet and it is shown that they got their packet full of Evil Bits from your computer, the men with badges and guns are going to knock on your door. Then you'll either have to show in your log where you got that packet (so that the men with guns can leave you and go visit someone else), or they are going to have nowhere to go, so they'll stay interested in you.
That is undesirable, and it's why I won't run a Freenet node. I don't want LEOs bothering me because I assisted in someone else downloading their kiddie porn or sending a death threat to the president, or whatever. I hate bein' marked to take the fall. [inlyrics.com]
Re:Questions About Freenet (Score:4, Interesting)
But the whole point is that the information is encrypted, so neither you, nor the "predator" would know that the images were stored on your computer. You might as well say "wouldn't it be ironic if a drunk driver someday used a car I sold to a used car dealer years ago to run my children down?"
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes.
The government should also prosecute those who use speech to incite a riot (yelling "fire" in a crowded theater), or amplify their speech over 80 db in a quiet neighborhood at 3:00 AM, or constantly sexually harass, over the telephone women who live by themselves.
You also do not have the right to commit slander or libel. You may not publish my credit card number or medical records. You may not redistribute copies of my novel, or bootlegs of my movie, or, as unpopular as it is to say here, an MP3 file of my musical performance.
Get over it.
Re:Question (Score:3, Interesting)
The idea is, that it should (and is) be forbidden to speak against the principles of free speech and democracy, because they are the very ground you base your speech on. So if you praise hitler's dictatorship here, you will be punished for working against democracy.
I think it works well here and I also think it's not hurting freedom of speech too much.
Freedom is *NOT* absolute, even if some posts here suggest such a thing.
Freedom ends where the Freedom of others begins.
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:2, Interesting)
Freedom of speach is the ability to have and discuss ideas freely.
Freedom of express is the ability to express your ideas in anyway you choose.
For example, it is okay to say I don't like George W Bush for reason X. That is freedom of speach in action.
An example of Freedom of expression would be burning an effigy of George Bush. Although I would view this particular example of freedom of expression as okay, others are not.
Allowing an individual to share their views on child pornography falls under Freedom of speach and is acceptable. But Allowing an individual to create or distribute child pornography falls under freedom of expression and is not acceptable.
In short:
freedom of speach = good.
freedom of expression = shady area.
I can not support freenet because it allows freedom of expression and hence child pornography.
So to be clear I SUPPORT FREE SPEACH.
When you say "freedom of speech, but only when I agree," is a strawman falicy (you are twisting our ideas). You are lumping things into free speach which should not be there. Not being able to distribute certain content does not place restrictions of freedom of speach (although it may put stipulations on freedom of expression).
The Child Pornographer: "Hey man, I took pictures of your 12 year old daughter naked. It is my right to freedom of expression."
Wrong reaction to kiddy porn possibility . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
I always thought the reason that kiddy porn was illegal was in order to destroy a market for a good that was created through an atrocious crime. However, as with the illegal drug market, simply making something illegal does not make demand go away and can create a lucrative black market. So it seems to me that if you really wanted the market to be destroyed for such a good, you would not give it the same protection that the RIAA and MPAA are trying to give their products.
Futhermore, it seems that as a society we might need to accept that child abuse is a problem that will not go away by agency enforcement alone. Maybe we should be giving parents and guardians less legal control over their children and investing money in alternative places for children to grow up?
I don't know . . . the kiddy porn issue always seems to be a scape goat for a more fundamental flaw in our society.
Bandwidth usage... (Score:3, Interesting)
The biggest factor that keeps me from using Freenet comes from the bandwidth requirement. I have a nice fat cablemodem connection, on a non-saturated segment, so I get GREAT rates, both up- and down-stream.
However, I officially have a 2GB/month cap (fortunately my ISP has yet to enforce it, since I use 5-6GB in a typical month). As slow as it sounds, 10Kbps, continuously used, would effectively consume slightly over my monthly cap. That strikes me as a SERIOUS problem. Realistically, I would need to set it to 1kbps up and down to leave room for my "normal" net use, and that just doesn't seem either fair to other users or convenient for me, IMO.
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, it's funny. I'm a bit fuzzy on the dates, but child pornography was only made illegal in the US about 40-or-so years ago.
Of course, you have to separate pornography into two categories: 1) a media work showing an explictly sexual act (masturbation, penetrative sex, oral sex, etc) 2) a media work of a prurient nature that does not explicitly show "sex."
The former was illegal (minor consent laws and all that), but the latter was kinda legal.
When I say "kinda" I'm not being wishy-washy, it's that we're coming up against anachronism: according to experts on this sort of thing[1] attitudes of the "man on the street" have shifted drastically concerning photographs/drawings of young children. What would be considered "cute" and "childlike" back in the 1950's would be considered "grotesque" and "unsuitable for public consumption" now. Most of this can be linked to the witchhunts regarding child pornography.
Even more amusing, since the enactment of child pornography laws the average age of actors involved in sex scenes and -- and this is very odd -- in just plain romantic kisses in movies has gone way down. Way, way down.
I think it was Ebert (or was it Stephen King? King wrote about this a bit as well) who commented that youngsters used to go to the movies to see oldsters in a sex scene. Now it's reversed.
Salon commented[2] that the rabid and far-reaching bans on child "pornography"[3] has caused us all to think like pedophiles. Reminds me of the joke about the sexaholic who goes into the psychiatrist, who gives him a rorschach test.
Ah well.
So my point is that it's tough to say what's child porn and what's not, with the fact that we've gotten hypersensitive about it recently. I don't really feel like having the morality police check out all of my mom's photo albums to see if they're kosher. Especially morality police from the MPC[4]. Though being a smart son who knows the power of embarassment blackmail from mothers, I have removed all of my naked baby pictures. Now if only I could get the picture of me hugging then penguin at Sea World when I was 12....
And to spare myself accusations: no. I'm not "into" kids. To be honest, only recently has my age group become somewhat appealing to me at all: I've always been after older women, which is a real drag as women are used to young guys being...well, young guys.
So, just something to think about.
[1] I'm thinking of the historians interviewed in Salon concerning the somewhat-recent Paul Ruebens case. Interesting article.
[2] Again, the Paul Ruebens case.
[3] bare-butt baby picture arrests, anyone? Traditional Brazilian breast feeding family photos getting your kids under the care of CPS, like just happened in Dallas about a year ago?
[4] Most Persnickity Country
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:3, Interesting)
God knows what goes on there. In fact, I do find out what goes on there when the police get involved. But it's not like I woke up one day and said I wanted to start a business that helps husbands cheat on their wives, and dealers sell their drugs.
Re:New upgrades work well (Score:3, Interesting)
I've mirrored some normal web content to Freenet . This freesite (only available if running Freenet) [127.0.0.1] is a mirror of http://www.operatingthetan.com [operatingthetan.com], my normal website on Keith Henson v. Scientology [xenu.net].
My major gripe with Freenet to this date is while it is marketed toward "weblike" applications, it often loses content more than a click or so in (note the front page of my freesite there works almost perfectly but if you click in the performance is significantly degraded).
I think its killer app might ultimately be the distribution of large 'splitfiles' with FEC encoding. I don't want to nuke Freenet right now by suggesting downloading huge pirate AVIs, but if you find one and try it, you'll see what I mean.
--
http://buttersquash.net [buttersquash.net] Home of the Buttersquash Conspiracy
Re:What concerns me about Freenet (Score:2, Interesting)
The fact that we're even debating this stupid kiddie porn argument at all is disgusting and it's really telling. Grow up, everyone.
Fucking political correctness will preserve my karma, right?
Re:Questions About Freenet (Score:2, Interesting)
No, it's more like saying "I won't deliver a truck full of goods across state lines without knowing what's in it, who sent it, or who's buying it."
Re:Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Freenet may very well serve as the ultimate litmus test of America's continuing commitment to the tenets of freedom and liberty on which its founding was based. You simply cannot have a truly free society unless you allow a means for truly anonymous speech. In the days before the information age, it was easier to be anonymous. Now it's next to impossible. Something like freenet makes it possible to have that anonymity again.
Will Freenet be used for objectionable actions (this being relative to the perceiver of course)? Of course it will. I will have to accept the fact that it will be used for kiddie porn, and that it will be used for neo-nazi hate speech. Liberty is all or nothing. You cannot have degrees of liberty, for that is not liberty at all, it is privilege, and privileges by their very nature can be taken away.
Freenet is *not* risk-free. (Score:3, Interesting)
With Freenet, all I need to do is record the IP address of people who I got the data from. It doesn't matter if they were the ones who posted the key in the first place. If I can verify that you were serving my IP, you're liable for it.
Re:Questions About Freenet (Score:3, Interesting)
Same problem there. Let's say a truck driver doesn't know exactly what's in all of the boxes, and can't break them all open to look. The truck driver has to take somebody else's word for it that the goods to be delivered are OK.
Most of us are not truck drivers, so I propose yet another analogy, that might be easier for everyone to relate to:
You know your tax money is collected to be used for purposes that you don't even know about. You know that you would probably disagree with some of the uses for it, if you knew what all of them were. You don't. You can't. However, you still contribute your tax money, because overall, the positives seem to outweigh the negatives.
It is even worse than this. Even if you could agree with every last expenditure in every budget, this year's money helps to pay for next year's. Therefore, if you have ever paid taxes, you are implicitly agreeing to pay for any future decisions too, and you know some of them will eventually be wrong!
Not Anonymous, Not Deniable? (Score:3, Interesting)
One highly relevant quote about anonymity:
Freenet does not offer true anonymity in the way that the Mixmaster and cypherpunk remailers do. Most of the non-trivial attacks (advanced traffic analysis, compromising any given majority of the nodes, etc.) that these were designed to counter would probably be successful in identifying someone making requests on Freenet. On Freenet, whatever you do, your identity is still revealed to the first Freenet Node you talk to, and even if you limit yourself to talk only to trusted nodes (a feature that will be implemented in the future), they will have to talk to the rest of the network at some time or another. The anonymity that Freenet offers is really just obscurity in the fact that it is hard to prove that your node wasn't proxying the request for or insert of data on behalf of somebody else (who might also just have been proxying it).
And another quote highly relevant to plausible deniability (which is effectively what Freenet relies upon to store potentially controversial content on any connected node, hopefully without exposing that node's owner to prosecution for hosting that content):
Hashing the key and encrypting the data is not meant a method to keep Freenet Node operators from being able to figure out what type of information is in their nodes if they really want to (after all, they can just find the key in the same way as someone who requests the information would) but rather to keep operators from having to know what information is in their nodes if they don't want to. This distinction is more a legal one than a technical one. It is not realistic to expect a node operator to try to continually collect and/ or guess possible keys and then check them against the information in his node (even if such an attack is viable from a security perspective), so a sane society is less likely to hold an operator liable for such information on the network.
They are clearly moving in the right direction, but are they really there yet? Would it be possible, for example, for the RIAA to say, "Hey everybody, this free application will help you decrypt your Freenet node so that you can ensure you're not infringing," and then they're free to nail if you if you're "trafficking" in illegal files? Obviously there are other hurdles (such as identifying you and the content you're hosting), but I suspect the basic idea still describes a potentially unpleasant scenario.
Also, I saw a slashdot reply to another article recently (somebody help me here?) which quoted a legal decision (somehow involving Sony?) which pretty clearly stated that you're still considered guilty if the prosecution can prove that you were intentionally trying to avoid having knowledge of what you suspected was illegal activity for the sole purpose of using that as a defense later on. (At least, that's how I interpreted it... I wish I could find the citation.) Freenet seems to fall flat on it's face in this respect.
Don't get me wrong, I've been fascinated with Freenet and I think they're trying to do a Very Good Thing, but these are two points that I think are important which a lot of people overlook.
Heh, ironically, slashdot is currently showing me this quote: Be careful how you get yourself involved with persons or situations that can't bear inspection. :)