Ian Clarke on Peer-to-Peer 135
Simone of O'Reilly writes "On Freenet, the more popular information gets, the more copies it
generates--and the easier it is to find and download. That's just one
significant feature of this promising peer-to-peer network. Freenet
inventor Ian Clarke may not be talking about his new company, Uprizer,
but he has a lot to say about how decentralized architectures can fix
what ails the Internet. Here's the interview." We've heard from Clarke before, but this is an interesting piece.
In Reply to: Freenet won't replace the web. (Score:1)
Freenet does support frequently updated content: see here [sourceforge.net] for instructions on web pages on freenet. The solution used is arguable better than the current one, in that older websites/old version of websites are not lost.
What Ian DOES get (I think...) (Score:1)
Whatever happens, local storage is always going to be cheaper than bandwidth, so caching is good.
I'm a bit freaked out, actually. About three years ago, I came up with a similar design called 'Osmo'. (Unfortunately, I wasn't really in the position to do anything about it) In that interview, Ian used almost identical arguments and examples.
The thing is, Freenet will build the virtual infrastructure. The next step is to remodel content. By building state machines coded in, say, Java (or any other mobile language), you can model a dynamic resource as a set of transforms from raw data (either from a fixed source, such as a corporate database, or from distributed files) to displayed content.
These state machines can be transmitted the same way static data currently is. By making the propagation decision based on weighing up the amount of data lost by transmitting the state machine versus the amount of data saved by using the transform (through the removal of undisplayed data), you can balance the system across a number of machines from source to destination.
This also gives the benefit of allowing two-way interactive stream-based content -- something the page-based web cannot handle.
Now, the next step is metadata: one thing Freenet currently doesn't handle too well. By propagating metadata, the entire Freenet network would act as a single, distributed directory... a worldwide decentralised Yahoo! with a lot of redundancy.
Once that's done, logging/usage data needs to be tackled. This can be done by packaging the information stream and reverse-propagating it: almost like magnetic data that slowly works its way back home. This can be done with a high importance but a low urgency.
So, we've got Popularity, Size, Location/Distance-From-Home (little use in keeping a copy of something when the canonical source is only one hop away), Importance, Urgency, Cost, Benefit and Local resources.
Convert all of those to fractions between zero and one. Multiply them together. You get an 'X' factor. If that 'X' factor is in the top, say 10% of items you currently store, try to propagate it. If it's in the bottom 10%, ditch it.
When requesting an object from another node, make sure the other node tells you if it knows anywhere else you could've got it from within that node's immediate vicinity. Cross-reference these. Work out what nodes are near and have the information you want the most, and reconfigure your peering list. Hey presto: a dynamic, self-repairing, self-optimising network.
Put it all together and you get the replacement for the world-wide-web.
Persuade Microsoft to write 'Word 2010' using the mobile state machine architecture, and you have truly distributed applications.. if they increase the resource requirements in 'Word 2011', don't bother running around all 60000 PCs in your organisation with a screwdriver and a buttload of DIMMs.... just pop them all in a big application server on your network, and make sure you overspec all new PCs.. then, the equation will rebalance in favour of leaving parts of the application on other machines, like your colleague's while they're on a business trip.
So, now we've not only got a new world-wide-web, we've got a true '.Net' strategy. Chew on that one, Microsoft.
Okay, I've rambled there, but since it looks like Ian Clarke's being a bit tight-lipped about his ultimate goal, there's one scenario which might work.
Re:More of a superior Usenet than a superior WWW (Score:2)
Re:This presumes peer capability remains available (Score:1)
If we take the definition of "server" to be any system for the transmission of data to someone requesting it i.e. a "client" then when a webserver looks at your cookie that it planted there you are being a server and the webserver is the cleint in the transaction, so if they put a "no servers" clause in the AUP I suggest you mail them about this, it might send their lawyers into an infinately recursive loop.
Re:How does it guarentee a copy exists? (Score:3)
Re:Big loser in P2P: mail (Score:1)
Re:What Ian doesn't get (Score:2)
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Who is responsible (Score:1)
Freenet is a censorproof peer to peer network. (Score:1)
That's all.
It doesn't cause unpopular things to disappear.
Re:FBI probably can. (Score:1)
I'm not a guru on Freenet but the FBI can track data as it moves between any two IP addresses. It doesn't matter if the data file is encrypted, it can be tracked unless every machine-to-machine exchange is uniquely ambiguated.
End-to-end encryption is implemented. All significant (>32KB) data is inserted under its SHA hash. Forgery is impossible. Pointers to data may be inserted encrypted and signed with the publisher's public key.
Link-by-link PKI will emerge shortly. Traffic analysis is nevertheless possible. More complex node behaviors have been proposed (transferring filler data, regular intervals for transfers, etc.) but may prove too costly for widespread deployment. An ultra-secure variant of Freenet is a plausible endeavor.
Wheelchair salesmen wield chainsaws in search of new customers.
Freenet loses information (Score:1)
This presumes peer capability remains available (Score:2)
Give it less than 5 years, and the ability to 'Peer' may well be a big-budget item, past the range of the small-timer.
Re:What Ian doesn't get (Score:2)
Yes, I am sure something like slashdot could be built within freenet - but the end user experience would be radically different. I could not respond to your response as quickly as I am today - heck, I might not even see your response. It just would not be the same.
Look at Usenet, it is distributed, and some people have attempted to build status and moderating systems into it all using smart clients (as another respondent suggested) but it still produces nothing like the experience of the real slashdot or other discusssion based web sites.
There are some services that a distributed system with the current communication limitations of the internet cannot provide.
-josh
Reinventing the wheel (Score:2)
Wow! You've just reinvented fidonet!!
on a more serious note, I really don't want to go back to something that takes that long to proliferate, if that is indeed what would be required for this to work. Slashdot's strength is in its real time and its relatively small downtime. If I have to wait days, hell, even hours to post and reply in discussions then I'll just not bother. This may sound a little bit conceited, but I believe that there is such thing as sacrificing _some_ security in favour of speed, assuming that actual gains outweigh the failings. Since Slashdot is very fast updating, and is fairly easy to make anonymous, I'll stay with it. Freenet is a good idea, but I don't know enough about its logistics to know if it even can be done on the scale that currently is used, let alone the speed...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
Nuclear War (Score:2)
On Freenet's conceptual forebears: "The intention of the original Arpanet was
Wasn't it proven that it is a myth that part of the design of the internet was to withstand a nuclear war. I remember hearing a quote that even the military isn't stupid enough to build a system that will be around even when there wouldn't be anyone left to use it.
Re:In Reply to: Freenet won't replace the web. (Score:2)
Suppose I don't care about storing versions of my web site? Suppose I change prices on my products on a daily basis and I cannot afford to have a single straggling copy of a web page with the wrong price on it? Suppose I have to absolutely positively guarantee that every portion of my web site is viewable to every user who visits?
There are just some things freenet will never do well.
That said, when is someone going to come up with some good solutions for mirroring and distributing dynamic content?
-josh
Re:What Ian doesn't get (Score:2)
But of course, that's "awfully hard" to understand and implement... especially when you're dealing with stupid, static languages... sigh
Re:Reliability of information (Score:1)
Re:Reliability of information (Score:2)
That, and you can just use public-key authentication for verification of authenticity.
Stirling, you mean the John Norman of the 90's? (Score:1)
I believe he came out of the Belgian Congo and still thinks like an Afrikaner from 1930's.
SM Stirling's Draka novels reflect his personal ideas just a little too much from what I see of his postings in Baen's Bar. http://www.baen.com/bar/Default.htm
If this works,... (Score:2)
I can imagine it now. You're using Freenet, and you see this banner ad that says, "Warning: Your freenet content may not be permanent! Click here to subscribe to our service, which guarantees to request your content 10,000 times a day." It would be a kind of popularity inflation effect. Everybody who didn't abuse the system would get their content labeled "unpopular."
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Re:Freenet loses information (Score:2)
If you want your node to store your information, you can force your node to retain that information. OTHER nodes may not store it if nobody else requests it, but that's fine -- nobody'll mirror a big web page that nobody wants to read, nor should they be forced to.
Anyhow, once enough people run nodes, information will need to be quite unpopular to be completely dropped off the network. Only marginally unpopular stuff may become rare enough to take longer to retrieve (not mirrored close to you) but that's a big difference from entirely unavailable.
Re:Version Control (Score:2)
Ahhh Free.Net! (Score:2)
Re:No hint as to how Freenet can avoid being DOS'e (Score:1)
1 - There is no way to identify who asked for the document. All you should know is which of your neighboring nodes requested it. You should have no idea if it was that node, or one 30 hops away.
2 - Please elaborate. What makes you think that could mess up the system? In what way?
To deal with your third point, which is blatantly wrong: This is not Gnutella. There is no Gnutella style search - you have essentially a URL. You request it, and it gets passed hand over hand to the correct node, NOT to every node in the net. Then, it does it's cool little data caching thing wherein it may move the data closer to you if a lot of people in that "direction" are requesting it. I don't know the internals of the URL, but I KNOW it doesn't work like craptella.
Everything I have read about this system says that it is brilliantly designed. I am waiting anxiously for it to hit prime time.
Cheers,
Jason
Re:Ian Clarke's credit card numbers (Score:1)
My point, in case you missed it the first time, was that even rabid info-anarchists like Clarke get nervous about their own information "wanting to be free".
The disposable credit card numbers do not "effectively" solve the problem. You still have a permanent account number that, if made public, can allow someone to have a field day with your money.
You really think all information "wants to be free"? Fine. Gimme all your passwords. While you're at, it give me whatever information is necessary to drain your bank account.
Re:Information wants to be hypertext (Score:1)
Other, "sensitive" lists of links could be published via freenet periodically in someone's own key subspace and with a predictable date-based format.
WWW Problems (Score:1)
Not if you try to use any of the big search engines! You'll find links to porno javascript popup windows from hell instead!
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
The problem with Freenet... (Score:4)
The great thing about the Internet now is that I, as an individual, can publish pretty much anything. I can write music and put it out, I can write fiction and put it out where people can come by and access it. Until the early 90s this was just not possible. If my stuff is not enormously popular - so what - people who enjoy that kind of thing can still get it. I can publish to my heart's content and the few hundred readers can read it. Similarly, I can go and get obscure stuff myself - something that wasn't possible before the internet showed up in its current form due to publishing barriers.
But Freenet will just drop this stuff because it's not popular - and this seems like a retrograde step to me. It re-erects those old barriers to publishing that the Internet is destroying - and eventually, Freenet just holds what the Sheeple want. We end up with a network that's no better than TV or the print press - containing only what's popular. We end up with masses of Britney Spears or Blink 182, but you can't find something like the Bottom Feeders or Bradley N. Litwin.
So to summarize: Automatic for the Sheeple.
Re:Freenet loses information (Score:1)
Re:Obligatory plugs (Score:1)
Re:Nuclear War (Score:1)
Re:Ian Clarke's credit card numbers (Score:2)
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Moderators: This is overrated (Score:2)
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Moderators: This is overrated... (Score:2)
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Mojonation and Freenet have different goals (Score:2)
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This has nothing to do with the value (Score:1)
Today was just a day fading into another-Counting Crows
Re:Ian Clarke's credit card numbers (Score:1)
Re:What Ian doesn't get (Score:1)
Not a Problem. (Score:1)
Re:Ian Clarke's credit card numbers (Score:1)
Sure thing. Just give me your real name, address, time you will be doing the transaction, time and place the police can pick you up, and the accounts you've placed your ill gotten gains. This information will also want to be free.
Re:In Reply to: Freenet won't replace the web. (Score:1)
Ian Clarke's credit card numbers (Score:3)
Note: For those of you too lazy to read the whole thing, the part I am talking about is on the second page [time.com] of the aforementioned article.
Re:Ahhh Free.Net! (Score:1)
What happened to FSP similarly?
Phil
scalability (Score:2)
Lets agree to disagree on this point :) (Score:2)
Peer to Peer is not just about file sharing, it's about colaboration and communication at a higher level. For the ISP's to stifle it will be about as dificult as taxing email, simply put it ain't gonna happen.
Bandwidth is just getting faster, the p2p technology is getting more more fancy. To block any kind of 'incomming call' from any source on the internet to dsl/broadband customers is basically television.
I can understand your fear, but rest assured.. your prophesy of a non-contributing internet nation is not reality.
This was not meant to be a flame. Cheers
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Different problems, perhaps (Score:1)
In short, I don't think Freenet's distributed distribution system (for lack of a better term) and the ftp/web's centralized distribution system need be exclusive - there's room enough for both. And we need something to ease the problem of getting popular data (like the latest Linux kernel, or a new distribution, or whatever) distributed.
Re:Clarifications from a Freenet developer (Score:1)
Re:Mojonation and Freenet have different goals (Score:2)
an arbitrage service for mojo, allowing you to convert between dollars
and mojo. Anyone else can set up a rival arbitrage service. You
don't ever need to interact with the bank, even to set up a server.
There is no central server either: anyone can run any service, and
evryone has to do *something* to obtain mojo. The fundamental
difference between MojoNation and Freenet is the different ways they
seek to tackle the free rider problem. I think MojoNation does it in
a way that better ensures longevity of unpopular data.
I suggest you check the FAQ to avoid spreading myths.
Re:Mojonation and Freenet have different goals (Score:2)
content of my other post, though. Especially I think the point about
longevity is important: if I want to keep some large and
boring-but-important historical archives around, I don't need to win a
beauty contest with MojoNation, and so I think it is better for this
kind of application. Freenet deals with some free speech issues, but
it doesn't deal with them all.
Re:Mojonation and Freenet have different goals (Score:1)
Ian: actually I think we are on the same side. We intend for Mojo Nation to provide people with free speech, and we intend for Mojo Nation to be globally scalable, just as you intend for Mojo Nation.
The only reason Mojo Nation was launched as a separate project is because the founders believed that an anarchic system could never scale without integrated microcurrency to solve the Tragedy of the Commons.
I would rather discuss how Freenet and Mojo Nation can cooperate than how they can compete, at this stage. We are both open source projects with the same goals, and the whole point is to share information between peers, so it seems natural to link the two networks together.
If you'd like to talk, e-mail me at "zooko@mad-scientist.com".
Regards,
Zooko
Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow
Re:Mojonation and Freenet have different goals (Score:1)
Duh -- obviously I meant to say "just as you intend for Freenet". Sorry!
Zooko
Popularity is local? (Score:1)
In particular this 'local not global' doesn't address the issue of supporters of an idea scattered all about.
I can imagine ideas and files dissipating prior to attaining critical local mass, although its supporters may attempt to contact one another and set up such a node where their ideas would be popular. So the idea of popularity being local has merit, but its attainment is not automatic - that is to say a desirable equilibrium might not be reached except by considerable effort. It's not an 'invisible hand' kind of equilibrium.
There may indeed be enough demand for a file, but maybe it will disappear before the demand coalesces
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Interesting... (Score:1)
The web is becoming much more of a cached entity, such that the "1000 people in UK causing a page to cross the Atlantic 1000 times" scenario is becoming less true, especially for the Yahoo!s, CNNs, etc. Given that this is the way the web is going, besides adding encryption and anonymity how is FreeNet really different than a heirarchy of web caches?
Isn't replication of data the reason that we were supposed to have URNs (Universal Resource Names) in addition to URLs? My understanding was that a URN would address data in a location-independent way, and would resolve into a valid URL which the browser would use to retrieve the data. It seems to me that URNs were skipped because they posed a difficult problem and now we're paying the price for taking the easy path in the early days.
One of the great things about the advent of mosaic was that it placed a unified interface in front of what were, up until that time, separate services (gopher, nntp, http, and to some extent telnet). Why is it that we haven't seen more growth in the protocol (e.g. "http://") area of URLs so that newer technologies can leverage the public's acceptance of the browser interface? It seems to me that this spawning of applications will lead us back to the confusion of having to use specific applications to use specific services. In other words I'd like to see freenet://... (or gnutella, napster, etc.) URLs (er, URNs) in mozilla someday, if not the commercial browsers. Is there any chance of that happening?
Anyway - I hope these comments aren't complete drivel.
Spamming Freenet (Score:2)
With Freenet, it isn't a problem because you are then saying that all the nodes have a specified piece of information, and it is all done on your dime anyway, so who is hurting? All that really happens is if I decide to access that data as well along the line, the likelyhood of finding a node with the data is going to be pretty high. Indeed, in such a scheme it still wouldn't be a problem even to the people running Freenet, because you've just added 10,000 nodes to Freenet and at least some of the server space will still be available on those nodes to store stuff that belongs to other Freenet users. It would be a win-win situation.
As far as making a bot to keep requesting a piece of information, all that it would affect is your local node, so it would at least allow others to grab it off of your node if it somehow became a piece of "popular" data. That sounds like a very good piece of software you should write... so please submit it!
Re:Ian Clarke's credit card numbers (Score:2)
I disagree with Clarke's position against all ownership of information, but that doesn't make him "rabid." The guy is an idealist who's done something about his ideals (unlike Shawn "Bertelsmann" Fanning).
get nervous about their own information "wanting to be free".
Traditional anarchists aren't against all social organization, and they certainly don't envision a situation where roving bands of skinheads come to your home and walk off with the furniture. Anarchism involves replacing legal protection of property with a system of voluntary social cooperation. I don't know if Clarke would object to "info-anarchist" or not, but advocating an end to ownership of information is not the same as saying that there can be no privacy. It just means that you protect your privacy by other means besides intellectual property laws.
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Taking the Free out of Freenet? (Score:4)
According to the K5 article, Stirling advocated the implementation of laws requiring that ID-tags be affixed to data transversing the Freenet.
"I propose a law requiring a transparent tag showing origin and history on any file on any server, and that the file be immediately accessible on request. The authorities should develop and send out a "sniffer" intelligent agent program to detect files not meeting these criteria. Immediately shut down any server/node that doesn't reply properly. With really... severe... penalties for anyone owning hardware harboring pirate files. Sufficient to make them take elaborate precautions not to do so."
Furthermore,
Stirling claims that he talked to the FBI, who told him that they have the ability to penetrate Freenet's anonymity. I suspect that either they were (a) blowing happy smoke Stirling's way, or (b) they were thinking of Carnivore catching the evil copyright violator's insertion at the ISP, before it actually enters the Freenet.
To some extent, I can empathize with Stirling's fears as an author -- I wouldn't necessarily want someone to reproduce my copyrighted works with impunity and scatter to texts to the winds. However, I find Stirling's "draconian" (to use his own words) reaction unsettling.
I'm wondering about the possibility of Stirling's proposed restrictions to Freenet. Are such measures feasible (legally and technologically)?
Sincerely,
Vergil
No hint as to how Freenet can avoid being DOS'ed (Score:2)
- The issue of goodwill: Freenet can be subverted. Because anyone can run a Freenet node, it would be trivial for a black-hat to claim to have any information which is to be censored, and either return something else or look to see who is submitting the requests.
- The issue of spoofing. Merely faking the metadata on documents could really mess up the system.
- The issue of request propagation. A document which is widely distributed will be returned quickly, but a document which is present in only one place potentially requires the request to visit every Freenet node. Suppose that someone generates a bunch of bogus requests for documents which do not exist? Each request goes to every Freenet node, flooding the system.
I know next to nothing about these issues, but I was still able to formulate the questions. Why don't we have answers? If Freenet is supposed to be able to function even in a very hostile environment, shouldn't it be proof or at least resistant to these attacks? And we know it will be attacked, by bored script kiddies if no one else.--
Security on P2P networks? (Score:3)
Re:In Reply to: Freenet won't replace the web. (Score:1)
Suppose that you change your prices every time a customer comes to your site. Oh wait, someone already thought of that. :)
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Ahem (Score:1)
knock, knock, crash ...
Err! Never mindRe:The problem with Freenet... (Score:2)
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Americans are bred for stupidity.
Let the market solve the cacheing problem (Score:2)
jim
Stirling? (Score:1)
ubiquitous existance of "truth machines" that
make all forms of dishonesty "impossible"? As if
politicians won't find technological means to
nullify the truth machines....while requiring
everyone else to have no protection.
Version Control (Score:1)
I am not sure that it matters for items of low value, but if a network is to be highly valuable, does it not also need to provide some level of versioning? It seems that access is part of a larger more complex problem.
As information is distributed, there is the opportunity for errors (or active manipulation) to change the meaning or value of the document.
(The book Darwin's Dangerous Game touches on some of these issues and is the seed that is fueling my comment)
Dynamic content is hard in P2P (Score:2)
The next step for these systems are to pass around the code to turn the database of objects (which P2P systems like Mojo Nation and Freenet are good at distributing) into something dynamic and structured on the local client. Imagine giving the user a chunk of the /. database for an article along with code to explain how everything should be formatted, etc. The presentation and organization is local (along with any dynamic effects) while the data is just a selection from the pool of possible objects. This would also mean that when you download the articles you can pre-load the higher ranked articles or use collaborative filters to trim out the bits you are not interested in and avoid having to download these in the first place.
Freenet has some good cacheing mechanisms in there but there is a balance which needs to be maintained between de-centralization (which provides the censorship resistant features of systems like Mojo Nation and Freenet) and dynamic information features that require a trusted codebase for execution. If Java had lived up to some of its hype perhaps we could be passing around dynamic objects that contained information and presentation all in one bundle and we would run these in our browsers without fear, but it just didn't turn out that way...
Re:What Ian doesn't get (Score:2)
While you can't do full database lookup things, you could do versioning fairly easily by adding an "update key" to stuff that could be updated. This would be the owner's public key and a string encrypted with the owner's private key. When a message with the appropriate tag comes in to the local server, it supercedes the old information. It might simply add a "superceded by" pointer to the old version; there are good reasons for keeping old versions around, not the least of which is to guard against post-facto censorship. To get an old version, you simply add the version number to your request.
As to something like Slashdot, note that it is not really "dynamic" information. It is a sequence of static submissions. Submissions could simply be Freenet messages. The only thing that is really dynamic is the moderation scores. These could either live on a normal website or go out as frequently updated messages (see above) from the main site. Should be fairly easy to do a Java applet that pulls it all together. (It'll be a while before browsers unserstand "freenet://" URLs
BTW, I'm not familiar with the exact architecture of Freenet, but I would assume that when you put a message into the system, your local system tags it as the "definitive" version. It is then outside of the LRU cache scheme. It may take a while to get it from elsewhere in the network, but it's there.
The big problem that I see with Freenet is that 95% (at least) of the data will be pr0n and warez. The pr0n and wares kiddies are collecters and love to play "minez bigger than yourz" games. If one of them has, say, 100 pirated versions of Microsoft Office, he'll happily pump them all into Freenet just for bragging rights. Other kiddies will check them out, and like as not, relabel and retransmit them.
There's no way that I can see to stop them; basically, it's a built-in denial of service attack.
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Re:Clarifications from a Freenet developer (Score:2)
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Unpopular speech and censorship (Score:2)
Another thing that worries me is that one of the characteristics of censorship is that it's mysterious: you don't know what you're missing due to censorship. This sounds a lot like what happens when your speech mysteriously disappears from Freenet, presumably due to low popularity. How do you know that it was really due to low popularity, and not to someone cracking Freenet? To me, the issue isn't really permanence, since dead tree format is the only format that's really permanenet on time scales of more than 30 years. It's the issue of not knowing how long your information is supposed to last. I'd rather know that my information will be there until I stop paying the bill to my webhost.
Finally, it seems that a lot of the agenda behind proposals like the .porn TLD is to make it
easier to recognize unpopular speech so that it can be censored. Doesn't it seem like running
a Freenet node is the ultimate red flag being waved at the censors, saying, "Secret police, here
I am"? Maybe the information is already out there and
free, but your own wetware is now in a smelly jail cell...
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get a clue (Score:2)
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Actually that's a terrible article (Score:2)
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Re:Nuclear War (Score:3)
Packet-based networks were pretty much the development of people who had seen the benefits of then-new timesharing. The ARPANet was bandwith-sharing. (there just weren't that many data lines back then, though early maps of the ARPANet will show how few links there were between IMPs) For any number of nodes n greater than 2, a minimum of n-1 lines are needed; yet there isn't the danger of having a single potential point of failure as in a star topology. (naturally, you want a hell of a lot more lines than n to guard against failure, but it took years to get to that stage)
The nuclear war thing comes from an unrelated but contemporary (late 60's) RAND paper on the subject.
Re:Obligatory plugs [Mojo Dollars] (Score:2)
You get Mojo when you actually provide service for someone else (i.e. you let someone download a block from you, accept a block from someone, return search results, or relay messages for others). Tokens are given directly to the counterparty (though they exchange them for fresh ones right away so you can't spend the Mojo behind their back).
Reasonably logical analysis. :) (Score:3)
Nope. Both of them are utter pipe dreams. The "transparent tag showing origin and history" already exists today, except it has a much shorter name and a much more spotty record. They're called "watermarks", and they're pretty much a joke. Just look at SDMI, which has had some brilliant minds tackling the watermark problem and, even after millions of dollars in research, they still haven't managed to come up with a way to stop a really determined 15-year-old.
Translated into modern idiom,
- I propose a law requiring watermarks on every file on every server, and that the files be immediately accessible on request.
Problem number one: watermarks don't work.Problem number two: if the law is going to require that every file on every server be immediately accessible on request, that's going to play hob with e-commerce. Do you really want to place that order for Naked Amazon Women In Bondage from Amazon.com, knowing that anyone can send an email to Amazon saying, "Hi! Pursuant to the new Federal laws, I want to investigate your site to make sure you're not using any of my IP. Please send me all of your customer purchase records."
The alternative to this, which Stirling probably means, is that the watermark be kept available, although the file may not necessarily be. That defeats the purpose of a good watermark; one of the principles of good watermarks is they can't be removed.
- The authorities should develop and send out a `sniffer' intelligent agent program to detect files not meeting these criteria.
Stirling, meet the First Amendment. If I don't want to include watermarks in my original works, neither you nor the government get to say whoopty-doo about it.On a technological note, I've got some experience with smart agents. At the present time, they're really not very smart. Remember that there exist such things as countermeasures; once people figure out what ruleset the expert system behind the agent is using, they'll figure out ways to avoid triggering the agent.
- Immediately shut down any server/node that doesn't reply properly
Violates due process of law. Shutting down a server does Nasty Stuff to online businesses, and would require that a court hearing be held. Remember, nobody can be deprived of life, liberty or property without the due process of law.This is the only proposal which is feasible technologically, BTW. After all, to take down a server all you need is a fire axe and strong arms.
- With really severe penalties for anyone owning hardware harboring pirate files
Violates the legal principle of mens rea, which basically means--"if you had no criminal intent, then you didn't commit a crime". If I'm an ISP and someone is running warez off their shell account, I'm not liable until I'm notified of the illegal copying and I have time to verify the allegations myself.Technologically unfeasible, too, given that many systems will be harbored in foreign countries which are not signatory to any such ludicrous treaty as Stirling is suggesting. To penalize the owners of those servers would require... well, a small Special Forces team could probably convey the US's displeasure, but that seems like overkill, doesn't it?
- Stirling claims that he talked to the FBI, who told him that they have the ability to penetrate Freenet's anonymity
Maybe true, maybe false. Sounds more like happy smoke to me. Think about this: if the FBI does have this capability, why in God's name would they tell anyone about it?Stirling needs to talk to his dealer about the purity of his rock.
TANSTAAFL (Score:2)
This is not erecting new barriers to publishing, it is lowering them and letting anyone get in on the action. Nothing is for free, but if people work together we can make the cost so close to free that no one will really care. In the end, you need to have at least some cost for publication or else you are just shifting the problem from one of publishing to one of filtering out all of the crap that everyone else is publishing (which turns into its own set of messy problems.)
jim
updating is on roadmap... (Score:2)
(I believe this is in our faq.)
Freenet is a work in progress, and it isn't even half done at the moment. Ways to update data on the network have been on the table for almost half a year. It's not an easy thing to achieve, but we believe that it can be done, and I think we are 90% agreed on the method (I wrote up a detailed proposal a few months ago, which should be somewhere on the webpage). Don't hold your breaths, but I would certainly like to get started on it in the somewhat near future.
That said, there are of course things that cannot be done on Freenet the way they are done on the web. Obviously you can't allow limited lookups against a database for example, but more often than not it will be a question of thinking different (let Freenet be the database...)
/ Oskar Sandberg
Re:Lets agree to disagree on this point :) (Score:2)
Check out the new version of MN! (Score:2)
Check out the new 0.920 version, just released yesterday! A much better install, faster and a lot less buggy as well. The centralization issue is being worked on (there is a single bank, although peers use micro-credit between any two counterparties so bank failure != system failure) and we are pushing things out to the edges as quickly as we can.
Part of the advantage we think we have with a market-based structure is that it is easy for us to be flexible about control decisions and letting local choices provide emergent behavior. For now, some stuff is centralized just because it was easier for us to do it that way and move on to the important bits that needed to get coded -- we are paying the price of this and going back to replace certain centralized features with most distributed solutions, but in the end it is simple for anyone to build a better mousetrap to solve a problem within Mojo Nation and replace an existing market actor by offering the other agents a better deal. :)
jim
How does it guarentee a copy exists? (Score:3)
Re:Ahhh Free.Net! (Score:2)
...I still get my email through the local freenet (which is no longer labelled as such)...
Reliability of information (Score:2)
Anybody remembers util-linux with a backdoor on a server in Holland?
I'm not going to rely on any data from untrusted sources. :-)
I don't mean slashdot
Re:Mojonation and Freenet have different goals (Score:2)
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A good article on the state of P2P (Score:2)
l sources of both ideas and links for further reading.
Re:How does it guarentee a copy exists? (Score:3)
It doesnt!
From the Freenet FAQ [sourceforge.net]:
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More of a superior Usenet than a superior WWW (Score:3)
Don't you spend far more time on sites with some form of interactivity, or at the very least, which are updated from hour to hour?
Incidentally, I think the terminal client to terminal client approach is technologically backward. It may have some advantages in preventing censorship (though I'm willing to bet that it would be pretty easy to spoof freenet, one way or another, to lower it's signal-to-noise ratio below slashdot in flat mode, ignoring moderation scores), but it would make far more sense with a true "web" structure than with the internet which is closer in many ways to a free tree. Caching on machines that are only connected to each other through a backbone makes much less sense than caching on the backbone.
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Re:How does it guarentee a copy exists? (Score:3)
Not directly, but with storage being so cheap (as the FAQ says), and the number of freenet nodes growing, it's VERY likely that the document in question will stay available, perhaps not infinitely, but at least for a long time.
On that note, I just read the FAQ and didn't read anything about how they're dealing with duplicate informtion. Sure, reduncancy is good, but just looking at something like Napster, one could make the assumption that a LOT of 'content' on a given freenet node will be the duplicate of another piece of 'content' on the same node. Back to the napster thing: it reports almost 7 terrabytes of 'content,' but we all know that a large portion of that is a seemingly infinite number of duplicates of the same top40 song.
Maybe there's really only 2 terrabytes of unique data on Napster. It would be great if I could search for "Phish Live" and not have 90% of the results be files of the same name, bitrate, length and filesize. This seems trivial to implement.
Re:The problem with Freenet... (Score:2)
Hm, I guess I had assumed that if you continued to request something from freenet, freenet would continue to supply it. If you were the only person to request it, then presumeably it would be stored in the node closest to you.... That is, on your computer. Would this be much different from having a web page on your server that no-one else ever reads?
But then, I don't understand how freenet works. No one does at this point, I suppose, because it's not finished. In any case, saying that "unpopular" stuff will be dropped isn't quite the same as saying that only the 1000 (or whatever) most popular documents will be kept in the system. Could you explain why you believe that Freenet would drop data that's still requested, but only by a small number of people?
Currently, yes, anyone can put something on the web, but only if they're willing to pay---sure, you can get free web space if you're satisfied with poor bandwith and banner ads, but if you want to get your stuff out to more than a few people, than you need resources.
---Bruce Fields
Clarifications from a Freenet developer (Score:4)
"Freenet is an attempt to replace the web." - This is more true than saying that Freenet is a replacement for Napster, but it's still not true. Freenet is better than the web in a couple of ways, mainly anonymity and decentralization. If you don't need these features, then by all means use the web.
"You can't create Slashdot on Freenet because Freenet doesn't have dynamic content." - Sure you can. A web forum was already created, but is currently being overhauled. We already have a web frontend and newsgroups, mail, and hyperlinked documents in Freenet. A web forum is just an HTML frontend to a newsgroup with some bells and whistles. The reason that they use dynamically generated pages is because they use RDMS backends so that the servers can handle the load. Since the load in Freenet is distributed, this isn't necessary. Sometimes you really do need dynamically generated content, but in the case of web forums it's mostly just a performance enhancement.
"Popular == worthless. Freenet will be filled with worthless stuff." - Popularity is local, not global. If you connect to your friends instead of random strangers then the local network will be filled with items of shared interest.
"The problem with Freenet is that unpopular items are dropped." - Popularity is local, not global. You want items that no one in your local network is requesting to disappear. Files go to where they are wanted and disappear from where they are not wanted.
"I can't trust the information that I get out of Freenet." - We have tamper-proof keys that rely on digital signatures and content hashes. If you are worried about authenticity, then use those.
"Freenet must track what people request because it knows what is popular. That leaves an audit trail that compromises anonymity." - Popularity is local, not global. Your node discards items that have not been requested in a while. There is no global rating or tracking of any kind.
"Freenet requires a high-speed connection" - No, but it would certainly be nice.
The link (Score:2)
The P2P Myth [cnet.com]
Re:Ahhh Free.Net! (Score:2)
Think of the net's elite as the surface, and the Joe Users as the volume. Now, as the net's volume increases, so does the surface area. It's just that the ratio is expanentially getting higher.
There are more smart users than there were 10 years ago. It's just that the number has been growing slower than the number of keyboard-monkeys.
Oooo!!!! I've got it! (Score:2)
Oh, wait... we're talkin' 'bout 'puter stuff here, aren't we? Damn... I was hoping to pollute the world's water supplies with LSD.
The colors, the colors... I can see the music!
Obligatory plugs (Score:2)
It has an ingenious solution to the freeloader problem, namely an
internal currency system, which may make the system more scaleable
than Freenet. Advogato [advogato.org] also
runs some good discussions of these issues.
I am skeptical of freenet (Score:3)
It seems to me like freenet also needs to track data to a certain extent because it caches the most popular content on other sites. That means there is an audit trail, even more than me setting up an ftp server on the different IP addresses I get with a dialup account, and just send an encrypted email to my friends to upload/download the content that is illegal from there. I would think there is less chance of me getting caught, even though I have to more actively do something considered illegal. Also, keep in mind that I realize freenet is not only going to be used for illegal stuff. But, it is the illegal (illegal is not always immoral, but often unpopular to the powers that be) content that is going to need the most protection and need to be cached the most. Stuff like deCSS mirrors are one example. We might be able to build on the peer to peer model some, but we still need there to be a strong structure based on a server passing clients to each other, or something. The only problem is that we know they won't allow this easily. Just look at napster, who does not distribute mp3's, but is getting in trouble for users doing it.
Anyone else have any better ideas?
What Ian doesn't get (Score:5)
Come on, how could a web site like slashdot possibily exist in freenet? It couldn't. It is simply too dynamic, too frequently updated, and reliant on a coherent and consistent database of comments and articles that simply cannot exist in a distributed network.
Freenet will be a boon for the archival of static and infrequently updated content and web sites, but for anything more dynamic, freenet fails to offer a solution - and as such will nicely complement, but never replace the web.
-josh
Re:What Ian doesn't get (Score:3)
- Ian Clarke
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Re:The problem with Freenet... (Score:2)
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Re:How does it guarentee a copy exists? (Score:2)
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Ian Clarke never said that (Score:2)
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Re:What Ian doesn't get (Score:2)
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Re:What Ian doesn't get (Score:2)
Actually, from what (little) I've read about Freenet, something like Slashdot would be possible - albiet in an altered form. Since its much "cheaper" for a user to upload something to Freenet than it is to create and acquire hosting for a web site, Freenet itself could be used for the kind of discussion Slashdot and Kuro5hin-like sites try to achieve. And in a much more permanent form. Instead of clicking on a reply link, you write a counter-argument or suppliment to a piece by another author and upload it. If its well-written and informative, then it will presumably be passed around by lots of people and spread through Freenet. Which would also (in theory) create interest in other pieces on the same subject....
-RickHunter