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Freenet 0.5 Released
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Oct 28, 2002 03:53 AM
from the makes-node-difference dept.
from the makes-node-difference dept.
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."
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Just some info (Score:1, Informative)
Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds.
Freenet is:Highly survivable: All internal processes are completely anonymized and decentralized across the global network, making it virtually impossible for an attacker to destroy information or take control of the system.
Private: Freenet makes it extremely difficult for anyone to spy on the information that you are viewing, publishing, or storing.
Secure: Information stored in Freenet is protected by strong cryptography against malicious tampering or counterfeiting.
Efficient: Freenet dynamically replicates and relocates information in response to demand to provide efficient service and minimal bandwidth usage regardless of load. Significantly, Freenet generally requires log(n) time to retrieve a piece of information in a network of size n.
Re:Just some info (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just some info (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not like Kazza! This is because it is not spyware and has/will never be accused of being. It is an open source (GPLed) reaction to the growing restrictions of the on-line rights of expression. The point is not that you can copy your warez and p0rn, the point is that you can express yourself anonymously.
Dear moderators, if you haven't read the article and followed at least some of the link, do not moderate! Does "...some kind of a cross between Kazza..." and "...provide efficient service and minimal bandwidth..." sound like something written by the same author in the same message?
Thank you! (Score:5, Insightful)
When I first heard of FreeNet, I thought, "I live in America, what would I need of this?" No, this isn't a troll. I was happy and complacent and slightly distrustful of the Big Bad Brother. Now the purpose of a network like FreeNet has become quite clear, as I'm neither happy nor complacent and I'm more distrustful of Big Brother with each passing day, as he takes further swipes at the freedoms my Constitution tells me I'm supposed to have.
Thanks, FreeNet, for standing up. More importantly, thanks for the foresight. Imagine if they'd waited until it was really necessary.
Re:Thank you! (Score:5, Insightful)
Article I, Section 8. Powers of Congress
The Congress shall have the power ...
[paragraph 8] To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
Re:Thank you! (Score:4, Insightful)
to authors and inventors
In other words: NOT to the people who make mony off of the authors and inventors.
Re:Thank you! (Score:5, Insightful)
How ironic that you mention the Constitution, when Freenet's de facto purpose is to subvert the following:
I might almost agree with you, had Congress not already subverted it by turning copyright from a limited monopoly into an effectively unending one. So now it becomes a question of "which subversion of the Copyright Clause is better?" My vote goes to Freenet & P2P.
Michael
Can someone educate me? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:Can someone educate me? (Score:5, Informative)
As I understand it, it is none of those things... but it can facilitate those things. What it is is kind of a different paradigm for the internet. At the moment with the internet I type in an address and I get data from the person who has registered that address - if he has the bandwidth. I know who is sending the info and who posted it. And if that person has spare bandwidth or is being
If I'm wrong anywhere please correct. Or if I'm right but kind of shaky please reassure me. Hope this helps
Re:Can someone educate me? (Score:4, Insightful)
The one thing that always makes me wonder with Freenet is the potential liability for hosting 'questionable' content. If for instance, my node is used for storing some part of some kiddy pr0n and the authorities decide for whatever reason to inspect my PCs, how am I to prove that I didn't source the file myself. In fact, by hosting a node, it could be argued that I am soliciting for files of that nature.
Whilst the files are presumably encrypted in transit and on disk, its still an illegal file stored on my system.
Makes you think anyway....
Re:Can someone educate me? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Can someone educate me? (Score:5, Informative)
If for instance, my node is used for storing some part of some kiddy pr0n and the authorities decide for whatever reason to inspect my PCs, how am I to prove that I didn't source the file myself.
Your question should be modded up. It's one of the most important ones.
The idea behind Freenet's anonymity is plausible deniability. But before I can go into what that means, I need to describe how Freenet works in a little more detail.
There are two different types of Freenet nodes: permanent and transient. If you run a permanent node, it means that you're a full participant in the Freenet network. Your node acts as storage and as a router for requests and inserts. Data moves through Freenet in the form of keys, which are basically the same as files (or in some cases, segments of files) but with cryptic names. Your node caches all the keys that it sees (with least recently used keys being deleted when the node's data store is full, with "full" being defined by the amount of space you choose to let it consume).
Let's say Alice inserts two files into Freenet: the text of Mein Kampf and a picture of Adolf Hitler. She does this using her Freenet node, specifying a hops to live value on the insert. This HTL value is usually around 10 to 15, and is the number of other Freenet nodes that must be talked to. Each node that processes Alice's request decreases the HTL and passes it on to another node. When the last node to get the request sees that HTL is 1, and it still hasn't found Alice's file (because she's the first person to insert it), it returns Data Not Found to the previous node, which passes it to the previous node, etc., all the way back to Alice.
Alice's node gets the "failure" message back, and then sends actual copies of the data files back down the chain. Thus, the files are inserted into Freenet.
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. So if someone were to sniff the traffic coming from Alice's machine and decrypt it and discover that her machine was inserting Mein Kampf, then she could claim that she had no knowledge of it; that her machine was simply routing an insert by someone else.
The same goes for requests. Suppose Bob stumbles upon a key which claims to be an ISO image of Windows 2000 Professional and requests a copy of it. His node generates a request with a certain HTL (generally 15 or more for requests), and it's passed along to other nodes until one of them either finds the key, or runs out of hops. The final result (either an error condition or the key he requested) is sent back to Bob's node.
But Bob could claim that he wasn't the person who originally requested that key -- he could say that his node was simply routing someone else's request, and he had no knowledge of it.
The same thing goes for files inside the local node's data store. Just because your node is storing a copy of a nude photo of Ronald Reagan doesn't necessarily mean that you either inserted or requested that file. Your node might simply have acted as a router for someone else's activity, and cached a copy of the key.
Now, all of this protection goes straight out the window if you run a transient node. Transient nodes don't ever act as routers for other nodes -- they're pure leeches. Anything on a transient node is there because you, the node operator, requested or inserted it there. You have no plausible deniability any more.
This explanation is a bit vague, and for that I apologize. The actual routing algorithms and encryption ciphers are a bit beyond my understanding at this time. If you have more detailed questions about how Freenet works, please check the Freenet mailing lists.
Re:Can someone educate me? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Donation's Page?? (Score:5, Funny)
Paypal (Score:1, Funny)
Usability Engineering ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Usability Engineering ... (Score:4, Funny)
hope you don't run Linux then
Now that many people have FreeNet... (Score:5, Informative)
Really. There is nothing more annoying than broken links on Freenet which takes ages to resolve.
wrong (Score:5, Informative)
On remembrance day... (Score:2, Funny)
On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, let's take this time to remember our veteran programs, without whom we wouldn't have freedom of software. Don your antiquated RAM chips on your lapel and be proud to be a programmer.
A few tips for those trying to get this up (Score:5, Informative)
A quick description (Score:5, Informative)
FreeNet is essentially the bulletproof P2P data exchange. It's practically impossible to destroy, or track down people who are on it. It is NOT designed for swapping MP3s or porn for those who have got the wrong idea, it's purpose is (as the name implies) to guarantee freedom of speech by allowing totally anonymous yet scalable publishing.
Scalable? Yes, one of the more interesting aspects of Freenet is it's intelligent caching and retrieval system. This isn't Gnutella, when you request a file it traverses the nodes being cached at each level. Therefore, the more a file is requested, the more distributed it becomes and the easier it becomes to get to - the opposite of the web.
FreeNet takes the form of a web for new users, you can "surf" the FreeWeb, and there was at one point a google-style search engine for it, I have no idea if that's the case. Some of the problems I remember were that it was often hard or impossible to reach certain pages as they hadn't propagated enough to be found before the timeouts were hit, and even then the timeouts were pretty high (like 2 minutes). On the more popular sites the owners would have to manually request it from different parts of the FreeNet in order to make it accessible.
Another problem was that because nothing can ever be deleted from the FreeNet once published, it was hard to do news/blog style sites: at the time they used JavaScript date based redirects, I think that shows how long ago I used it. Suffice to say that I'll be trying this release with interest.
Re:A quick description (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, I cannot see how anonymous posting would be useful for porn or MP3's.
Re:A quick description (Score:4, Informative)
The algorithm removes the least recently used file in the datastore when the store fills up, and has a bias towards larger files.
If you insert content that is popular and gets requested though, it's not possible to delete it even if you (the author) wants to
uncontrollable network? (Score:3, Interesting)
6. Isn't censorship sometimes necessary?
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!
Re:uncontrollable network? (Score:5, Insightful)
Information (knowledge) itself isn't good or bad. It's just that: human knowledge. It's entirely upon human being what he does with the knowledge. Man should be held accountable for his deeds not for what he knows.
I know how to make explosives and yet I don't make them. Almost every high school student knows how to make nuke and (surprise, surprise) almost nobody is trying to make one. Just because I possess the information (in your case the source code) it doesn't mean I'm criminal. Nobody has the right to tell me what I'm allowed to know. And that's exactly what Big Brother is trying to do - prevent people from having the information he doesn't want them to know, and to criminalize people who possess such kind of information. Freenet is designed to fight this information slavery.
Re:uncontrollable network? (Score:5, Insightful)
This observation is inevitable. Let's do some basic business logic:
- [Assume] Businesses need recurring revenue (i.e. you can only burn VC $ for so long)
- [Assume] As long as your hardware doesn't crap out, software lifetime is infinite
- [Assume] You have a finite customer base
- [Assume] If you keep improving your software, eventually it will do everything your customers want
- [Therefore] You can only sell so many copies of software to your customers before they don't need you any more
- [Therefore] Software as a product is only good for a limited amount of money, and that isn't recurring
- [Conclusion] Software as a product is not a viable business model in the long-run
Microsoft is having this problem right now with their operating systems. See, Windows 95 is good enough for most people. It runs AOL/MSN, Word, Outlook Express, Solitaire, and their printer. What more do they need? The MS solution has been to release a new OS every 2 years and hype the hell out of it, as well as purposely not provide patches for their older versions to support newer hardware, thus forcing software upgrades when old boxes die (since the older hardware isn't sold any more). The problem is, people are catching on, and new OS sales are fewer and fewer these days. The same could probably be said for purchases of Office. Who needs more Excel or Powerpoint templates? Anyone?The product business is fine if the product has a finite lifetime. Take housing, for instance. People will always need to repair and build houses, because they weather. Software doesn't, which means the only money to be made long-term on software is in support. The same argument applies to patents and other 'intellectual property'. Dolby has the right idea: come up with an idea, and license it until the end of time.
Companies that sell a product that doesn't break have already signed up for their death blow. Distributing the software online only speeds it up.
DMCA RIAA Bush... (Score:3, Insightful)
IMHO there are three optional futures:
* It is deemed illegal and shut down.
* It is stopped by Palladium and shut down.
* All developers and users are sued and it is shut down.
I still wounder why everything good has to go.
Paypal . (Score:4, Insightful)
Why I don't use it (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why I don't use it (Score:5, Informative)
It is. The store is cryptographically opaque; you don't know what you're hosting. Whether it's possible to identify whether a particular item is in the store when you know its key, I'm not sure.
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.
It's necessary for a distributed-storage system where the injection point needs to be distanced from the storage points. Data flows to where it's being requested, so you could keep an item in your own store by requesting it automatically every so often. It won't go anywhere else, but it will stay in the keyspace should it ever be requested later on. You could do much the same thing to prolong the longevity of someone else's data that you valued -- but again, it would tend to live only on your own node if no other nodes were requesting it.
no legitimate use (Score:3, Insightful)
Consider for just a minute that given a situation in which one individual distributes material to which another individual or group objects, most of the time there's a good reason for the objection. Maybe the material being distributed is copyrighted (like movies or music), maybe it's dangerous (like blueprints to a nuclear reactor), maybe it's offensive (like child pornography). Most of the time when the distribution of material is opposed, there's a good-- or at least understandable-- reason for it.
Now, it's possible to imagine a scenario in which it might be justifiable, or even imperative, to distribute certain pieces of information. "Soylent Green is people" is a silly example, but a more realistic one might be distributing news of the outside world to a society whose media is heavily controlled. But in that sort of scenario, is the Internet really going to be a useful communication pathway? Assuming the people who need the media have access to the Internet at all, what are the chances that they're going to have unrestricted access to the network of Freenet servers? If you think about it, I think you'll agree that it sounds pretty unlikely.
What I'm saying is this: it sounds to me like there's no realistic, nontrivial, legitimate use for this software. The idea sounds cool on the surface, but I have some serious doubts about its practicality.
Re:no legitimate use (Score:5, Insightful)
The first which comes to mind is whistle blowing.
OTOH, I think the most likely impact on freedom of speech is
On the whole, I think in resonably open societies, suc a the US and Uk still are, the only sane option is `publish and be damned'. That way they at least have to be somewhat public in acting against you. If you hide, they can attack you in hiding, perhaps by attacking everyone who looks a little like you.
Re:no legitimate use (Score:5, Informative)
On the contrary, FreeNet is used by a lot of Chinese people as it's a good way of distributing information without being traced. Right now freedom of speech may not be a problem for us, but we're lucky.
Re:no legitimate use (Score:5, Insightful)
For which reason, tools like Freenet are banned in China and a number of other nations.
There does exist a tricky bit of how to deliver such technologies to the people in need of them; possession of crypto is still a crime in much of the world, much less crypto intended to do that which oppressive regimes cannot allow.
Re:no legitimate use (Score:4, Insightful)
How about women in the middle east being able to safely find information about women's rights in other countries, and possibly even using such a network as medium for creating political change in their own countries?
How about cuban, south african, (name your favorite country here) being able to safely speak out against atrocities performed by their own governments or provide proof of such acts without fear of retaliation?
How about americans being able to express their disagreement with current "anti-terrorist" laws or actions of the Bush administration without fear of ending up on some FBI list as a potential terrorist or disadent?
Freenet makes loads of enemies. (Score:3, Insightful)
Paypal?! (Score:2, Insightful)
US Free Speech? (Score:3, Insightful)
in some European countries propagating information deemed to be racist is illegal.
I often hear how US citicens have a constitutional right of free speech. This i not so.
On the contrary the legal system in the US poses a number of restrictions on free speech. This includes libel, porn, patent and copyright laws. These laws all in some ways limit your right of free speech. So don't tell me that the US has free speech - because you don't.
Besides I personally think it makes sense for racist propaganda to be illegal. Look at it as a sort of class action libel case. Also rasism is one of the key points governed by the UN Human Rights declaration.
How? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How? (Score:4, Informative)
Whats new in 0.5
Far too many improvements have occured between the 0.3 series and the newly stable 0.5 release. A few highlights are in order, though:
* Security
o Strong public-key cryptography used for inter-node communication which prevents man-in-the-middle attacks.
o Node announcement protocol which eliminates the need for any central directory.
o File-sizes enforced to a power-of-two to prevent traffic analysis.
* Publishing
o Support for splitfiles and redundant encoding (improves reachability of large files)
o Enhanced Freenet Client Protocol (FCP) for application developers.
* Usability
o FProxy (The Freenet Gateway) beautified and improved
o Node Status information readily available
* Resource Utilization
o Improvements made in performance, memory usage, and threading.
* Tool Support
o Many third party tools ready for website authoring, bulletin-board style discussions, and some near completion like Internet Streaming Radio, and more.
And perhaps most importantly, It Just Works!
quotation (Score:3, Insightful)
"'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?'"
"Daddy, where were you when they took pictures of me playing naked on the beach when I was five, and when they posted me to the pedophilia board."
The concept of free speech/press is not so simple.
Re:quotation (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, censorship increasingly is becoming easy (with Palladium, etc.). As information transfer gets increasingly automated (ie happens via the internet) then censorship becomes automated, too.
We get forced to a hard choice: either censorship, or freedom. Freedom means not being able to censor the stuff we don't like (racism, paedophilia, etc). We have to look to other ways to fight these
If you believe in freedom of speech, then your're defending that right for your enemies, too. Free speech means spending some of the rest of my life countering the arguments of holocaust deniers,etc.
But I'd rather do that than live without whistleblowers, in a world where employers, politicians, etc can use technologies like palladium to convince us all is right in the world, and stop us from hearing about, and _fixing_ the cruelties that exist. I don't believe for a second that most CEO's, etc. out there, given the tech. to prevent bad news of toxic waste , pollution, etc. problems in their factories killing people, would actually fix these problems if they could guarantee their workers could never tell anyone.
Our daily quality of life is guaranteed by freedom of speech. Its not just for wierdo politicos.
the Dark Side (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not worried about nazi propaganda, I think is a good thing that the normal citizen have access to this information in order to study it. But pedophilia images and personal information can also be published through this channel with no ways to remove it. My only hope in this case is that these crimes can be pursued by police through other normal ways.
On the other hand, the fact is that the more popular information is better found, and the marginal info is hard to obtain.
Moreover, the control of the net is in the hands of users. If this technology became a widely used criminal tool, people would decide to turn off their servers and the proyect would die. The purpose of the FreeNet will be decided by the majority.
Freedom to only do Right Is Not Freedom! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Wrong" as defined by whom?
The Bush family thinks it is wrong to leak information emberrassing to the family out to the press, and they punish people severely (within their power) when they do so, yet what they do is clearly constitutional.
Supporters of Clinton felt it was severely wrong to have private, political groups fund and possibly incite lawsuits by private citizens for poltical ends, but clearly that was within the bounds of the constitution.
I'm not worried about nazi propaganda, I think is a good thing that the normal citizen have access to this information in order to study it.
Ah. So are you the person who gets to tell us what is "right" and what is "wrong?"
But pedophilia images and personal information can also be published through this channel with no ways to remove it. My only hope in this case is that these crimes can be pursued by police through other normal way.
Pedophilia is an illness, and people who act on those feelings are criminals. It was never necessary, nor smart, to subvert the first amendment by making information (child pornography) illegal to possess. Illegal to sell, yes (that falls under the commerce clause), but making the possession of child pornography illegal was a serious mistake.
Why? Two reasons I can think of off hand
1) Possession doesn't imply any intent or even desire. Ever get child porno SPAM in your mailbox? How about child porno popups when surfing completely unrelated adult pornography, or perusing newsgroups some looser has spammed with their vile crap? Most people have, and have immediately become guilty under the law for possessing child pornography (it is copied to your machine's memory). Worse still, that crap is cached on people's hard drives, often without their knowledge, for extended periods of time.
2) Any photographs are by definition evidence of a crime. Instead of banning information, such evidence could be routinely siezed, to be returned to its owner only after the crime (child molestation) has been solved. That would have had the twin benefit of not eroding the 1st amendment and building a strong incentive to squeel on the seller into the entire process.
The "dark side" of freedom is a red herring. If we are free, we are free to do things others disagree with. The only limits should be when those freedoms reduce the freedoms of others (that was what the founding fathers intended, after all). IN other words, in the case of pedophelia, the crime is the molestation and harm to the child (and the selling of a regulated, in this case banned, product), not the mere possession of the photographs. However, the police can and should seize any such photographic or video evidence, and keep it on hand in a file, until the case is solved and the child raping perpetrators convicted and put in prison. Of course, such evidence couldn't be returned until said perps had exhausted all appeal opportunities
A little clear thinking would go a long way toward solving many of the 'problems' that come out of people's misuse of their liberties, without eliminating those liberties altogether. And those downsides which can't be eliminated through intelligent application of the law, within the bounds of the constitution, should be viewed as the price we are obligated to pay for liberty.
A price, by the way, which is laughably small compared to that which our forfathers paid in establishing and protecting those freedoms in times past.
Okay, hate to be the first "help me post"... (Score:3, Informative)
Has anyone had any luck getting the proxy to bind to interfaces other than loopback? The docs refer to fcp.allowedHosts, fproxy.allowedHosts, and fproxy.bindAddress. I've tried all these, and fcp.bindAddress, in all possible combinations, binding to all interfaces and allowing all hosts. And yet still "telnet 127.0.0.1 8888" works, and telnet "192.168.2.1 8888" fails.
Without this, I have to run a server on every computer on the network ;-(
FreeNet not so 'free' (Score:1)
Not free as 'leeching free'.
learning curve... (Score:1)
KSK@images/humor
I just donated 50 Euros. (Score:5, Insightful)
Some day soon something like freenet will be nessecary even in the US if you want to say something critical about bush or ashcroft without getting on some list of potential terrorists.
regards,
mrright
okay (Score:2, Funny)
What do you think it is? Beautiful artwork? Lovely poetry? pics of the goatse guy?
-Kevin
How will Freenet and GNUnet _share_ the World. . . (Score:1)
. . no pun intended . .
: P
Just wondering, because it seems inevitable to me that Freenet and GNUnet [ovmj.org] are going to be the only place left in the world where independent idea publishing can be, a short few years from now.
How will their differences in design/engineering change their 'base', or
otherly phrased, what portions of our idea-world will live freely in each 'net'?
As much as I like freenet... (Score:1)
It sure would have been nice for that gpl outfit to make certain their program would run with the current kaffe stable series, eh?
Does anyone 'round here know of another excellent gpl p2p system that works well with Free Software?DistribNet (Score:3, Interesting)
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].
How to get it? (Score:1)
Can't run it (Score:1)
I've got a question too, why does Freenet have to use threads? I honestly don't understand why are they needed. Couldn't it just switch between connections like an IRC server? Maybe it'd be a bit smaller that way.
Advantages of freenet over the regular internet (Score:2, Interesting)
-> 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
The problem with freenet (Score:3, Insightful)
practical use anyone might want to put it to. You can agree with the
ideology all you like, but fundamentally freenet is so concerned about
providing free anonymous speech that in practice what it's going to
provide is the ability to shout in the forest where nobody hears.
I'll explain. Because they want everything to be anonymous, they
made sure content gets spread across all nodes (flooding) and can
not be (easily) traced to the given originating node. Consequently,
there's no reliable addressing mechanism. You cannot, therefore,
create content and make it available at a certain address all the
time. All you can do is create the content and watch it get mixed
with all the other content.
Survivable? Sure, if you mean by that that as long as people run
nodes they'll be sharing _something_, but if you want a particular
piece of content to remain available, the only way to ensure that
is to keep injecting it again and again and again -- like the way
spammers use email. Otherwise, it goes through each node once,
in the midst of whatever other content is being injected, and soon
is gone. That model is _anything but_ survivable in practice.
Sure, it may work now, when everyone running a freenet node is
genuinely concerned about free speech and wants the system to work,
but if it ever catches on, it will rapidly devolve into a shouting
match, where injecting your content only a few times will ensure no
one can find it in the sea of _stuff_ that gets repeatedly injected.
Freenet signs it's own death warrant (Score:3, Insightful)
As I understand it, freesites proliferate based on usage; the more people who look at something, the more widely it gets distributed.
The main "portal" freesite contain several links to kiddie porn, and thus supports the distribution of it.
I would love to run a machine or two as a freenet node, but am afraid that supporting that filth and subjecting myself to 20+ years in prision because I cannot control the cache on my computer is not acceptable.
And before you say "it anonymous, nobody can see your encrypted cache"... I call bullshit. There are plenty of bugs out there, and I'm sure that governments have found flaws in encryption algorithms that the public doesn't know about.
Re:Freenet signs it's own death warrant (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Freenet signs it's own death warrant (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think you fully understand the technology. Or maybe I don't.
I have 100 bytes on my computer [1], mixed in with 100 million others, all encrypted. It's not a picture, it might be piece of a picture, but even assuming I could decrypt the datastore and take those bytes out it's certainly not recognizable as anything. I don't have the rest of the picture and am not sure who does. I might be able to find out, but I doubt it.
That picture could potentially be child pornography. Assuming it is, am I responsible? Are the other 1000 people who have other pieces responsible? I have 100 bytes of data which I volunteered to store for someone else.
Now assume someone wants to prosecute me.
"Excuse me judge, but where's the evidence (porno)?"
[1] How many bytes is a nitpick I'm not interested in.
It's slashdotted... (Score:1)
kazaa user, please... (Score:1)
very good, but with this speed (Score:1)
BUT
mamma mia, each page takes some 5 minutes to download! that is not a viable solution!
AND this is with a direct connection to the internet backbone in the netherlands (Surfnet). so
Search engine?? (Score:1)
looks like a nice task for the google teams..
Great "pay for development" example (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this is similar in some ways to the street performer protocol.
Anyone gotten it to do anything usefull? (Score:1)
I spent another half hour installing freenet and a GUI called frost. I have done this now 4 times over the past several years. Thats 15 minutes longer than any common user would spend.
Guess what? Nothing. I have yet to get this thing to "work" for me. I know it is running, but it's not doing anything for me.
Call me at 1.0.
Zero Knowledge source used/referenced? (Score:1)
Freenet vs the GPL (Score:2)
Under the GPL, if you distribute GPL'd software you are obligated to make the source available. Whether this is good or bad is not the point here. The point is that it is a limitation, a rule, that you must follow.
But Freenet is designed to free us from such limitations and rules. It allows us to publish information without regard to any restrictions that some third party wants to impose - even restrictions imposed by the GPL.
In short, using Freenet one could take GPL software, modify it and redistribute it without making the source code available. And you could get away with it. No one would be able to track you down and make you stop. Freenet makes it easy to bypass the GPL.
Granted, it would be hard to get paid for such software. Some people claim that the real point of the GPL is just that, to prevent people from getting paid for software (not that GPL advocates would ever admit it!). But it seems inconsistent at best for software designed to provide complete freedom of speech to be released under a restrictive license.
The first thing someone should do is to make a copy of the Freenet code with all the GPL licensing terms stripped out of the source, change it to a license that has no restrictions, and publish it on Freenet. That will truly demonstrate the nature of the beast.
for what?! (Score:3, Interesting)
-- 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.
You need to leave your node on for a few hours (Score:1)
Just keep your node running (in permanent mode if you have a static IP/DNS... not transient) so that the rest of Freenet learns about it. Then you will get a far better idea of request times. As it stands now, Freenet is very very bogged down but it should adapt without people leaving.
Ban it All (Score:4, Funny)
New version 0.5.0.1 just out. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd guess there will be some much improved builds comming out within the next couple of weeks as they learn more about today's stress test.
In other news, supposedly the great firewall of China started filtering out http packets with "freenet" in them today. (Source is questionable.)
(Future) Legal Problem with Freenet (Score:2)
However I must ask: Isn't it likely that once Freenet becomes popular, a law will be passed saying:
1.) You are responsible for what you are sharing on your computer.
2.) If you join with other people to collectively share data, then each of you is responsible for ALL content shared.
Under 2.) anyone running a freenet server could be busted as long as some illegal content is found on the system.
While law 2.) does not currently exist, I doubt those in control will have trouble pushing such a law, esp. if they raise the "terrorist documents" red herring. Wouldn't law 2.), if enacted, be the end of freenet?
configuration... (Score:2)
System Config:
AthlonXP 1700+
1GB DDR
more drive space than you can shake a tree at
business cable (3.5mbps/384k)
Win2k
Freenet is configured as follows:
non-transient (duh)
10GB disk space allocated (willing to add more if needed)
announce to other nodes is on
Init Req HTL: 15
Max HTL: 50
Max connections: 40
Max Threads: 160
CPU priority: (lessthan)NORMAL (interferes with games and such is it's on normal, I suppose it's something to do with the thread scheduler, perhaps talking to the folks at distributed.net [distributed.net] might help with that.)
If anyone can help shed some light on this for me, I'd greatly appreciate it. It's entirely possible that this is all normal; it's just that being new to freenet, I don't know what "normal" is in terms of software/network behavior. From what I've seen, freenet is a more secure/private version of the pre-WWW internet. I like the concept and I'd like to help out if I can get the software nailed down.
Re:lack of choice. (Score:3, Informative)
Some people...
Re:Bandwidth Limits (Score:1)
Yes. There's six confiration file options to adjust bandwidth usage:
bandwidthLimit
averageBandwidthLimit
These two control the combined input/output bandwidth usage. bandwidthLimit is the absolute limit, and averageBandwidthLimit sets the average (duh) allowed bandwidth usage, averaged over a week.
inputBandwidthLimit
inputAverageBandwidthLimit
outputBandwidthLimit
outputAverageBandwidthLimit
These four should be self-explanatory.
So, for a 10GB monthly limit, the average bandwidth limit should be about 4438 bytes/sec.
Re:nice propaganda (Score:1)
Unlike most open-source projects, Freenet could be considered extremely controversial and once they reach the "easy-to-use worldwide-popular Windows-client" level it looks like they'll probably have a lot of explaining to do. They're just explaining it in advance.
And, as you said, they are doing a fine job on prioritizing philosophy [freenetproject.org] over technology [freenetproject.org]. You see how everyone knows the general idea/intention of it ("new paradigm", "no liability for data", "copyright issues", etc.) but nobody here can explain clearly how it actually works? :)
Re:lack of choice. (Score:1)
-- fish
Re:Slashdot takes down entire network (Score:1)
Re:They can. (Score:1)