After 3 Years, Freenet 0.7 Released 365
evanbd writes "After over 3 years of work, the Freenet Project has announced the release of Freenet 0.7. 'Freenet is software designed to allow the free exchange of information over the Internet without fear of censorship, or reprisal. To achieve this Freenet makes it very difficult for adversaries to reveal the identity, either of the person publishing, or downloading content' ... 'The journey towards Freenet 0.7 began in 2005 with the realization that some of Freenet's most vulnerable users needed to hide the fact that they were using Freenet, not just what they were doing with it. The result of this realization was a ground-up redesign and rewrite of Freenet, adding a "darknet" capability, allowing users to limit who their Freenet software would communicate with to trusted friends.'"
Re:Are we just now getting this dupe (Score:1, Interesting)
Has anyone used it recently to testify to any speed/reliability increase?
How do you find trusted friends on a darknet? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Congratulations to all pedophiles. (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikileaks has been mirrored to Freenet more than once. I don't know of an up to date link, or a single regularly updated source, but it's there.
A large number of photos from Tibet are available, and there is at least one highly active user posting them and keeping them up to date, with commentary.
Re:Congratulations to all pedophiles. QWZX (Score:5, Interesting)
Cars kill the enviornment
Retention of individual sovereignty/responsibility/money kills "fairness".
So, I'm thinkin': a government program can fix all of these woes.
The failure of Freenet (Score:5, Interesting)
Freenet is an important concept. On it you get complete freedom of speech: the ability to discuss and spread your ideas, with full anonymity and freedom from censorship. Of course, this means that you will probably come across things on it that will go against your beliefs. While nothing forces you to actually visit these freesites, you will have to come to terms that this might be cached on your computer even without you visiting them. But this is important to freedom of speech: if people where able to censor anything, the system just wouldn't work.
So why does Freenet fail? Lack of documentation. I don't mean ease of use in the interface - I mean for the protocols and network design. A system as important as Freenet -- one that people expect unfaltering anonymity and security from -- should be rigorously and meticulously documented.
But it's not. In fact, if you bring it up with the Freenet developers they will gladly tell you this is intentional -- that they use security through obscurity [wikipedia.org] to guard against someone finding a way to break the system.
So -- do you trust your freedom with the competency of a handful of developers to make a good design? I don't. I want as many people looking at the system as possible. I want people to really bash on it, to try to break it. This gives me confidence, not worry, because problems will be solved sooner than later.
This would also open up the possibility of more than one client to access the network. If you have two separate clients that implement the same strict protocol and one of them messes up, it's likely to be caught far sooner than with just one. An immediate example of where this would have helped is with a bug that existed in 0.7's AES implementation for a very long time, where the data wasn't being encrypted properly.
The Freenet developers don't want multiple clients either -- again, they worry that one might break the network. This line of thought is incomprehensible to me, because as a developer I would want things that could break my network to be discovered as soon as possible so I could fix the design.
Sure, you could look at the source code. It is Open Source, after all. But what if you don't know Java? I don't particularly want to learn Java just so I can review Freenet's code. As a C++ developer I might be able to read and understand most of it, but I don't trust myself to review something so important without years of prior Java experience -- the chance that I'd miss something is just too great.
Re:Congratulations to all pedophiles. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Congratulations to all pedophiles. (Score:2, Interesting)
Better not go to a 2girls1cup/goatse/etc. site and get any "good" feelings about it, otherwise you are a criminal too.
Freedom of Speech vs. Freedom of Hosts (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The failure of Freenet (Score:3, Interesting)
Very insightful (Score:3, Interesting)
Freenet is a non-starter for me for that very reason. Thank you for elucidating it so nicely.
I'm officially conflicted... (Score:3, Interesting)
So, short of content I could publish and/or access without Freenet, what am I missing? And more to the point, is it worthwhile to fire up a node to find out?
It seems like the sort of thing I'd be in favor of, and would like to support, but at the same time I can't imagine a worthwhile use for it in my own life.
Am I alone here?
Re:Exchanging gas ovens? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How do you find trusted friends on a darknet? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Great! How do I download it... (Score:2, Interesting)
By just downloading it anyway, and not hiding that. The way to hide hiddenness is to hide in the open.
First, look at the situation with crypto in general: if everyone encrypts by default, then use of encryption doesn't mean you're hiding anything. Some of the people who are encrypting, maybe are hiding something "juicy", but which ones are they? Nobody knows, unless they can break the crypto and actually examine the speech in question.
That's why every website should support https (and link that way by default), not just the "gray" ones.
Freenet is the same way. There are two reason to download it: 1) to hide something 2) to provide chaff, cover, and plausible deniability for the people who are hiding something.
The chaff and cover work retroactively, too, and he people you protect, might be you. Today you might just be reading things that aren't really secrets; maybe you're looking at the Freenet equivalent of Slashdot or something. Tomorrow, you publish some samizdat. Nobody who is watching your connection, knows which thing you were doing on which day. Maybe you never hid anything at any time, and maybe you were helping Falun Gong all along, and maybe you were usually just screwing around looking for the perfect oatmeal cookie receipt, but with an occasional peek at some porn. Whatever.
Teh f3dz see you using Freenet all the time, sneak into your house, put in a camera, and find out you're looking at Garfield cartoons. They do this to a million people, and everyone is looking at Garfield cartoons. The "suspicious activity" no longer indicates anything because it provides too many false positives.
Running Freenet doesn't mean you're hiding something; it just means that you support hiding.
Encrypt by default! Everything, all the time. Make them spend thousands of dollars of supercomputer cluster time, to get your grandmother's oatmeal cookie recipe. She'll thank you in the afterlife. Free cookies!
Re:Are we just now getting this dupe (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Are we just now getting this dupe (Score:2, Interesting)
It's called "traffic analysis" (Score:2, Interesting)
Yep, from the description you're dead on: By trying to limit traffic to trusted partners the "darknet" opens the user to traffic analysis. Apparently they were trying to hide the encrypted data - and in doing so broke both plausible deniability and the needle-in-a-haystack resistance to identification of communication partners.
Not so fast (Score:3, Interesting)
Apparently you are not the target audience for freenet. Or the 1st amendment, for that matter.
Freedom of speech does not mean - nor has it ever meant - that I have to open my home to provide services for the pornographer.
I can support the Chinese dissident through other channels and other means and still give the boot to Freetnet - without apologizing to you or anyone for the choices I have made.
The 1st Amendment limited the state's power to regulate speech.
But it did no more than that.
The amendment's roots lie in the desire for unconstrained political debate among citizens. It did not repeal the law of libel and slander. It did not close the door to prosecution of criminal communication.