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Freenet 0.5.2 Released

Posted by timothy on Wed Jul 16, 2003 03:31 PM
from the who-are-you-again dept.
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.
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  • Yay! Piracy here I come (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:32PM (#6455789)
    Err, I mean... PRIVACY. Yes, PRIVACY here I come!
  • Questions About Freenet by ruhk (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:32PM
    • bittorrent within freenet? by gladbach (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @05:03PM
    • Re:Questions About Freenet by Anonymous Coward (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:47PM
      • Re:Questions About Freenet by vadim_t (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:09PM
      • Uh, no. Freenet wasn't designed to prevent this. Of COURSE Freenet lets you know what machines have connected to you, and what they've requested. Otherwise it couldn't send it to them -- it runs over TCP/IP, not magic! But this information -- the IP of the machine requesting an item from a datastore -- has absolutely no bearing on WHO did the intial request, or who will receive it in the end. Freenet clients make a request for a file, and the clients pass that request on as if it was there own.

        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.
        [ Parent ]
      • Re:Questions About Freenet by ReTay (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:39PM
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  • Excellent build (Score:3, Informative)

    by essdodson (466448) on Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:33PM (#6455802)
    (http://slashdot.org/)
    I've been running the 5000 series builds lately and they're considerably faster and more efficient. Hope everyone has a good experience freeneting.
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • Looking forward to trying it (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:34PM (#6455818)
    I have been using Freenet for years but except for the very most popular sites the speed and availability of the sites has made it little more than a toy. In theory, though, it is a great application.
  • Good idea, bad content (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nsideops (579890) on Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:35PM (#6455820)
    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.
    • Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RPoet (20693) on Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:42PM (#6455891)
      (http://www.haakonnilsen.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday April 06 2004, @06:59AM)
      Yes, Freenet is not for everybody. If you don't believe in total, indiscriminatory, complete freedom of speech and expression (an information anarchy, as it were), Freenet is not for you. On the other hand, if you believe there can be such a thing as "freedom of speech, but only when I agree," you probably have some thinking to do.
      [ Parent ]
      • Re:Good idea, bad content by nsideops (Score:3) Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:52PM
        • Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Interesting)

          by shatfield (199969) on Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:02PM (#6456053)
          This is the same scenario as the firing squad -- everyone knows that one gun contains a blank, but noone knows which one it is... therefore each person has a lingering hope that they were the one with the blank.

          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.
          [ Parent ]
        • Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Henry V .009 (518000) on Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:05PM (#6456077)
          (Last Journal: Wednesday September 28 2005, @12:05PM)
          Of course, and every normal person agrees with you that a perfect world shouldn't have child porn.

          But does the threat of child porn mean that you should give your government regulatory powers over speech in order to stop it? I'd think very carefully about that. Government abuse of power over speech is far more dangerous than individual abuse of free speech.

          Your line of reasoning can be logically extended. Murder is bad. Far worse than child porn. The government could theoretically end murder with current video surveillance technology. Should government have the power it needs to do that? Of course not, the abuse would be horrendous. It is one of the costs of liberty.
          [ Parent ]
          • Re:Good idea, bad content by Golias (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @06:25PM
          • Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Loki_1929 (550940) * on Wednesday July 16 2003, @06:53PM (#6457405)
            (Last Journal: Wednesday December 10 2003, @02:26AM)
            "Government abuse of power over speech is far more dangerous than individual abuse of free speech."

            Beautifully stated. What many people fail to grasp is the simple fact that liberty is hard. Your own liberty is not what makes it hard; it's the respect for the liberty of others which makes things nearly unbearable at times. In order to ensure that some poor soul has the ability to speak out against a repressive regime without being shot for it, I must in turn allow some sick bastard to get his kicks? This is difficult, but it's outright dangerous to start picking and choosing who should have which liberties.

            [ Parent ]
          • Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Interesting)

            by MourningBlade (182180) on Wednesday July 16 2003, @07:18PM (#6457586)
            (http://wasteland.go.dyndns.org/~sshields)

            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.

            "What do you see?"

            "Two people having sex. A naked woman. A threesome."

            "Jane, I think you've got a fixation on sex."

            "What? Doc, you're the one showing me all these dirty pictures!"

            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

            [ Parent ]
          • Re:Good idea, bad content by xdroop (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @07:55PM
          • End murder? by jeti (Score:2) Thursday July 17 2003, @12:47AM
          • Re:Good idea, bad content by mrex (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @09:56PM
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        • Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Lemmy Caution (8378) on Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:10PM (#6456133)
          (http://localhost/)
          The question is this: if you can technologically censor some speech, you are technologically capable of censoring any speech. If you can find a way to determine what's on your hard drive, you can be held accountable for it - and freenet's entire raison d'etre as a failsafe protection for free speech is destroyed.

          In other words, one of the costs of ensuring free speech on FreeNet for Chinese dissidents is that it also gives a channel for child pornography and snuff films.

          Also, there's a big gray zone when it comes to child pornography. The production of child pornography is clearly the exploitation of children. However, is documentation of a criminal act also criminal? Are all depictions of the sexual acts of or with children criminal? Should books like "Lolita," or dramas like "Romeo and Juliet," which describe relationships and sexuality with or between minors, be rightlly censored? Most of our ancestors before the 18th century or so were bearing children by the age 15 - do we want to treat their journals and love letters as kiddie porn? (I do believe there's a line between pornography and literary portrayal, but that line can at some places become blurry, and Nabokov is one of those places.)

          Also, "kiddie porn" has extended to include pictures of kids taking a bath that were deemed just a little too sensual by some photo clerk, who brought them to a judge and got an indictment. Guess what: pictures of one's wife or husband as a minor can be treated as child pornography! There's a level of hysteria on the topic which has clouded the subject, and the desire to protect children from sex has become, in itself, a source for real censorship. And one that I'm sure the PRC would happily take advantage of while pursuing dissidents.
          [ Parent ]
        • Re:Good idea, bad content by lysium (Score:3) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:51PM
          • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
        • Re:Good idea, bad content by arodland (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @07:15PM
        • It is, however by HanzoSan (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @10:20PM
        • Re:Good idea, bad content by togofspookware (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @06:15PM
        • 2 replies beneath your current threshold.
      • Re:Good idea, bad content by guacamolefoo (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:56PM
      • Re:Good idea, bad content by Anonymous Coward (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:01PM
        • Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Insightful)

          by oxygene2k2 (615758) on Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:04PM (#6456070)
          freenet is a routing network..

          should ISPs be allowed (or forced) to filter out content they're unhappy with on their routers and not pass it on because a request was made?

          first you (not you directly, but several people here) blame china because they exercise that control, then you blame freenet because it takes away that control.
          [ Parent ]
      • Free speech isn't the issue... by sczimme (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:02PM
      • There is a difference by commodoresloat (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:05PM
        • Re:There is a difference (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Lemmy Caution (8378) on Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:16PM (#6456195)
          (http://localhost/)
          What if I want to refuse to store criticisms of the People's Republic of China on my hard drive? Or criticisms of G.W. Bush or Bill Clinton? If I find a mechanism of discerning the content on my system and becoming selective about it, then so can the people who wish to squelch the speech to begin with.

          Truly free, truly anonymous speech, if speech is understood as any text or image or sound that can possibly be stored or transmitted, whether it is secrets vital to national security, pornography, slander, libel, copyright violations, or my recipe for waffles, does really demand, in this case, that someone risk hosting materials they might find detestable.

          Otherwise, it's like saying "I support your right to live, but I'm not going to pull you out of the water while you're drowning." At best, the "support" is just so many words - it's really support for "nice" speech.
          [ Parent ]
      • Re:Good idea, bad content by guacamolefoo (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:09PM
      • Re:Good idea, bad content by MrWa (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:21PM
      • Re:Good idea, bad content by Cadillac STS (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:25PM
      • Re:Good idea, bad content by Telastyn (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:34PM
      • Re:Good idea, bad content by Shewmaker (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:43PM
      • Re:Good idea, bad content by pigscanfly.ca (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:51PM
      • Censor air to stop KP !!! by Anonymous Coward (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:51PM
      • Re:Good idea, bad content by Sloppy (Score:3) Wednesday July 16 2003, @05:10PM
      • Re:Good idea, bad content by steve_stern (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @05:24PM
      • Re:Good idea, bad content by jazman_777 (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @05:27PM
      • Re:Good idea, bad content by alienw (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @05:53PM
      • Re:Good idea, bad content by Eminor (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @06:27PM
      • Re:Good idea, bad content by DancingSword (Score:2) Thursday July 17 2003, @07:09AM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:Good idea, bad content by KillerHamster (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:47PM
      • Re:Good idea, bad content by GooberToo (Score:3) Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:53PM
      • Re:Good idea, bad content by paganizer (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:47PM
      • Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Interesting)

        by kylemonger (686302) on Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:58PM (#6456572)
        The issue is complicated. Suppose someone takes a kiddie porn image, chops it into several thousand rectangular bitmaps and scatters them across thousands of computers on the Internet. Which computer can be said to contain kiddie porn?

        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?
        [ Parent ]
        • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
      • Re:Good idea, bad content by jazman_777 (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @05:39PM
    • As soon as you censor one thing ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jstockdale (258118) on Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:00PM (#6456027)
      (Last Journal: Saturday December 27 2003, @01:15AM)
      Remember that as soon as you censor one thing, you must censor everything. If the system has the ability to say restirct kiddie porn then it must have the ability to arbitrairly restrict anything, therefore undermining the system in its entirety. Also, remember that freenet functions to keep alive items that are most frequently accessed, so if the world were free of perverts we wouldn't have the problem in the first place ;)
      [ Parent ]
    • Freenet vs. WWW by mblase (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:19PM
    • Re:Good idea, bad content by Threni (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:31PM
    • Re:Good idea, bad content by blibbleblobble (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:57PM
    • Re:Good idea, bad content by Dynedain (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @05:34PM
    • Re:Good idea, bad content by Qzukk (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @07:00PM
    • Hate groups, Terrorists, Bomb Making Kits by HanzoSan (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @10:00PM
    • Re:Good idea, bad content by Rainer (Score:1) Thursday July 17 2003, @02:05AM
    • Think about TCPA! by file-exists-p (Score:1) Thursday July 17 2003, @05:26AM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • why can't freenet be more like bit-torrent by aztechClanIII (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:35PM
  • The man used a furniture analogy to try to prove his point that copyright infringment is piracy. He discounted Freenet because it was too clunky. If the man were any more dense he'd require life support.
  • RIAA by Anonymous Coward (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:36PM
  • Guess I won't worry until the BSA kicks in my door by DeDmeTe (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:37PM
  • Question (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Acidic_Diarrhea (641390) on Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:37PM (#6455848)
    (http://www.microsoft.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday April 26 2005, @10:17AM)
    Okay, so let's say Freenet works perfectly and you can't trace anyone by IP address. But someone from the RIAA uses it to download a copyrighted song, wouldn't they then be able to sue all users of Freenet as accessories to the crime? (Assuming each node handles traffic from transactions it may or may not be involved in - that's the way I remember it working.) And then get a court order for Freenet to give up IP addresses of users who have downloaded the client?
    • Re:Question by hawkbug (Score:3) Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:41PM
      • Re:Question by Anonymous Coward (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:57PM
        • Re:Question by garcia (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:06PM
      • Re:Question by Mysticalfruit (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:01PM
    • Re:Question by Anonymous Coward (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:47PM
    • Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)

      by William Tanksley (1752) on Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:48PM (#6455945)
      Not according to current legal theory. If you provide a service (in this case, hosting encrypted fragments of files) but you have no control or even visibility of how that service is used, you're not liable for the details of how it's used.

      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
      [ Parent ]
      • by Pac (9516) <paulo...candido@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:02PM (#6456057)
        Freenet sounds like a great idea, but it's so obviously useful for such horrible uses

        In the same category we already have guns, knifes, airplanes, TNT, email, television, cars. I think Freenet has a good chance.
        [ Parent ]
      • Re:Question (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Zork the Almighty (599344) on Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:06PM (#6456082)
        (Last Journal: Thursday November 11 2004, @05:39AM)
        The day it's outlawed in any western country is the day i set up a dedicated node with 40gb of hd space. There was a reason that Freenet was created after all.
        [ Parent ]
        • Re:Question (Score:4, Insightful)

          by William Tanksley (1752) on Wednesday July 16 2003, @05:18PM (#6456714)
          Yes, I would do the same, but the day it's outlawed is the day it becomes possible to arrest anyone using it -- and it's easy to detect use. This is why we agitate against laws to illegalise crypto. It's hard to tell what's being encrypted; but it's easy to tell that crypto is being used.

          Yes, it's technically possible to defend against even this; but most people won't be able to, even technically competent ones.

          I guess there's a good defence: everybody think of good uses for Freenet and start using it NOW. The more there are, the harder such a law will be to pass and slip by the judges. To be really powerful such a use should REQUIRE Freenet, and I can't think of any such uses (but I trust that others will). BUT ... don't let that stop you. Use Freenet instead of Kazaa to publish your legally permissible stuff.

          If only I had anything to publish...

          -Billy
          [ Parent ]
          • Re:Question by Cyno (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @05:37PM
          • Re:Question by gilgongo (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @05:45PM
      • Re:Question by rmjiv (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @06:50PM
      • Re:Question by stwrtpj (Score:3) Wednesday July 16 2003, @10:02PM
      • Re:Question (Score:4, Interesting)

        by foolip (588195) on Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:42PM (#6456430)
        (http://foolip.org/)
        I believe he's referring to the fact that it would be quite possible to set up a kiddie porn ring of something in freenet, and it would be near impossible to get hold of the criminals.

        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?
        [ Parent ]
        • Re:Question by Cyno (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @05:40PM
        • Re:Question by jazman_777 (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @05:53PM
          • Re:Question by PyromanFO (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @06:15PM
          • Re:Question by Jeremi (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @07:31PM
            • Re:Question by jazman_777 (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @07:58PM
        • Re:Question by Qzukk (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @07:25PM
        • Re:Question by dasmegabyte (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @07:33PM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:Question by x_man (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:51PM
      • Re:Question by Zork the Almighty (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:30PM
      • Re:Question by Neon Spiral Injector (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:54PM
      • Re:Question by duffbeer703 (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @07:35PM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:Question by tuba_dude (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:56PM
    • Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Henry V .009 (518000) on Wednesday July 16 2003, @03:58PM (#6456007)
      (Last Journal: Wednesday September 28 2005, @12:05PM)
      It's worse than the RIAA. There is a large quantity of child porn on Freenet. Now, because of the way Freenet works, you have no idea what's being served from your computer at any given time -- and no way to find out since it's encrypted. So if you run Freenet on your computer, you may be hosting child porn. Can the government go after you for that? If it wants to it can. Are there good reasons to take the risk? That's up to you to decide.

      Is having truly free speech where some people inevitably abuse that speech better than having speech regulated by governments who inevitably abuse their regulatory powers themselves? Participatory democracies don't have a great track record when it comes to allowing unpopular opinions to be heard. In most of Europe today -- to pick one example -- you will serve jail time for questioning the holocaust. To pick another example, anti-hate speech statutes have been sucessfully used in Britain and Canada (and elsewhere, no doubt) to supress supporters of immigratation reform. Libel law is commonly used to supress opinions of those who don't have the money to defend themselves in court.

      Is this a power you want to trust the government with? I don't trust mine with it. That's why I run Freenet. And hopefully, Freenet -- or the idea of Freenet -- will have enough popular support to make my government wary of cracking down on it. And as long as Freenet exists, there is at least one forum for truly free speech.
      [ Parent ]
      • Re:Question by tuba_dude (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:10PM
      • Re:Question by einstein (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:10PM
      • Re:Question by Anonymous Coward (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:24PM
        • Re:Question by duffbeer703 (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @07:33PM
        • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
      • Re:Question by Anonymous Coward (Score:1) Wednesday July 16 2003, @04:50PM
        • Re:Question by Qzukk (Score:2) Wednesday July 16 2003, @07:34PM