Freenet 0.5.2 Released 711
FurbyXL writes "With the RIAA roaring to grab peer-to-peer users by their IP addresses, Freenet - fully anonymized production and consumption of content - is gaining renewed attention. Articles in New Scientist, ZDNet UK, Wired and CNET (and here) set a somewhat typical context for Freenets major release 0.52. Significant performance improvements through NIO-based messaging, probabilistic caching etc. should provide increased rest to Chinese dissidents, but may finally wake-up the RIAA's Matt Oppenheim..." The announcement on the Freenet home page lists several improvements found in the new version: "a new NIO technology that brings improved performance using less CPU and system resources," "Individual nodes are now more efficient," "the speed and routing of the entire network have significantly improved," probabilistic caching, user interface improvements, and more.
Yay! Piracy here I come (Score:5, Funny)
Questions About Freenet (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Questions About Freenet (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Just an idea.. (Score:5, Insightful)
What about this idea to increase the deniability: Imagine a trojan
that installs Freenet on the infected machine and makes it part of
the network, then erases all traces of itself. This trojan could be
put up on a web site, with a notification to the usual anti-virus
companies.
Later, when someone gets under legal pressure for running a Freenet
node, he could claim that he didn't install it. He didn't know he
was running that "Freenet thing". Most probably it was installed by
a Trojan, and in fact there is one known to do just this (reference
to anti-virus company press release).
That would be even more plausible deniability, wouldn't it?
Marc
Re:Questions About Freenet (Score:3, Insightful)
pretty hypocritical, isn't it? i want free speech about issues i dont mind, but not for stuff i find offensive
if you would limit free speech, it wouldn't be very free, would it?
Re:Questions About Freenet (Score:4, Interesting)
But the whole point is that the information is encrypted, so neither you, nor the "predator" would know that the images were stored on your computer. You might as well say "wouldn't it be ironic if a drunk driver someday used a car I sold to a used car dealer years ago to run my children down?"
Re:Questions About Freenet (Score:5, Insightful)
No matter what you do, you are supporting them, so kiddie porn is really a side issue.
The key issue is what can you do to safeguard your children's future? Freedom of speech (even if the government or corporations or popular groups in your area) is essential. Education to ensure that your kids aren't victims is another. (It's a big cruel world out there. If you shelter them too much, they *will* become victims).
And if you want a freenet-specific solution then why not use the freenet itself to define kiddie porn filters? Think outside the box. You can't search the Freenet so you have to rely on well known indexes that are floating around the freenet. Why not write a filter that automatically downloads these indexes and filters keys on you machine to ensure that you don't carry kiddie porn? Let the perps help you fight them, but don't hide your face in the sand and home that it will all go away, because it won't.
Re:Questions About Freenet (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the internet, TCP/IP, image file formats, and computers? Or even cameras and artificial light? These all help the kiddie porn distributers. I'm willing to bet you use these. I'm not sure how else your comment would have gotten here.
Just about anything you do in life, that is of any public use, could be helping out someone you don't like. If you don't want to participate in anything that could remotely benefit a kiddie porn distributer then you better lock yourself up in a room somewhere.
Re:Questions About Freenet (Score:3, Interesting)
Same problem there. Let's say a truck driver doesn't know exactly what's in all of the boxes, and can't break them all open to look. The truck driver has to take somebody else's word for it that the goods to be delivered are OK.
Most of us are not truck drivers, so I propose yet another analogy, that might be easier for everyone to relate to:
You know your t
Re:Questions About Freenet (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't get this argument. "I like the idea of freedom, but I also like the idea of controlling it." Whoa buddy. You can't CONTROL freedom, by definition. You also can't make somebody ELSE free -- freedom is a choice you make for yourself, a choice to mind your own fucking business and not expect somebody else to mind it for you. If want to be uncontrolled, you have to agree not to control anybody else, either.
My friend (who, ironically, is now in the marines) used to LOVE to tel
Re:Questions About Freenet (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, this is anarchy. No, it won't work in the real world because of what I like to call the "asshole factor." Greed stops it. But in the "computer" world, greed doesn't have to be a factor because there's no scarcity. No greed means no need to delegate your freedoms to a third party to insure "equity." No greed means no need for controls at all.
Freenet is an attempt at structured anarchy with the belief that only complete freedom can protect every freedom. There's no need for tension between conflicting freedoms because there's no conflict. Conflict is external to the system -- it's out here, in the world of pundits and attorneys. In there, it's just zeroes and ones.
Re:Freenet Blocker - is it possible? (Score:3, Insightful)
But you should know that the reason it was worthless is that keys in freenet are so easy to create that the second one got blocked, and published to a block list, you could resubmit the same file with a new key. Which would also have a different file size and CRC.
So, no way to identify offensive files until they download and decrypt. So, no useful m
Re:RIAA and 30 years of permission to copy (Score:3, Insightful)
Legislation is against human nature. If we weren't all naturally inclined to steal candy bars, shoplifting wouldn't be illegal. The RIAA is trying to tell the world that what you are doing is just as wrong, morally speaking, and as long as the people signing the papyrus and reading the verdicts believe what the RIAA is telling them, it's going to be illegal.
You know, a lot of murd
Excellent build (Score:3, Informative)
Looking forward to trying it (Score:5, Informative)
Good idea, bad content (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact that someone may have produced kiddie porn and shoved it onto Freenet does not mean that it is sitting on your machine. Since the content on your machine is encrypted, you'll never know for sure anyways.
The problem is not with the storage mechanism, it is with the sick person creating the content. That's where the problem lies, not in the bits and bytes on your hard drive.
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Insightful)
And to the poster who is concerned--> I don't agree with the K.K.K either, but I do realize that they should be allowed to speak their stance. And the fact that you & I support our local/state/ government when they grant permits for these types of gatherings, doesn't mean we're promoting the K.K.K.
I would say the same thing about Kiddie Porn. Supporting FreeNet is about so much more than possibly supporting (a very very small fraction of) the Kiddie Porn out there.
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:3, Insightful)
That statement is entirely true. HOWEVER, I doubt any court in the United States would see it that way and you could end up spending a whole lot time next to some hardened killer who "just wants to cuddle".
I'm not sure that sort of indignity is worth some wierdo's free speech rights.
And yes, I am aware that people in China die because of government repression. But it is entirely within the power of the Chinese
The firing squad (Score:3, Insightful)
Not exactly. The blanks prevent anyone else (such as the deceased's buddies) from knowing who fired the fatal shot. The soldier firing the blank knows it; blanks mostly just make noise, firing a lead slug at high velocity makes the gun kick back against your shoulder with unmistakable force.
The ana
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:3, Interesting)
God knows what goes on there. In fact, I do find out what goes on there when the police get involved. But it's not like I woke up one day and said I wanted to start a business that helps husbands cheat on their wives, and dealers sell their drugs.
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, it's funny. I'm a bit fuzzy on the dates, but child pornography was only made illegal in the US about 40-or-so years ago.
Of course, you have to separate pornography into two categories: 1) a media work showing an explictly sexual act (masturbation, penetrative sex, oral sex, etc) 2) a media work of a prurient nature that does not explicitly show "sex."
The former was illegal (minor consent laws and all that), but the latter was kinda legal.
When I say "kinda" I'm not being wishy-washy, it's that we're coming up against anachronism: according to experts on this sort of thing[1] attitudes of the "man on the street" have shifted drastically concerning photographs/drawings of young children. What would be considered "cute" and "childlike" back in the 1950's would be considered "grotesque" and "unsuitable for public consumption" now. Most of this can be linked to the witchhunts regarding child pornography.
Even more amusing, since the enactment of child pornography laws the average age of actors involved in sex scenes and -- and this is very odd -- in just plain romantic kisses in movies has gone way down. Way, way down.
I think it was Ebert (or was it Stephen King? King wrote about this a bit as well) who commented that youngsters used to go to the movies to see oldsters in a sex scene. Now it's reversed.
Salon commented[2] that the rabid and far-reaching bans on child "pornography"[3] has caused us all to think like pedophiles. Reminds me of the joke about the sexaholic who goes into the psychiatrist, who gives him a rorschach test.
Ah well.
So my point is that it's tough to say what's child porn and what's not, with the fact that we've gotten hypersensitive about it recently. I don't really feel like having the morality police check out all of my mom's photo albums to see if they're kosher. Especially morality police from the MPC[4]. Though being a smart son who knows the power of embarassment blackmail from mothers, I have removed all of my naked baby pictures. Now if only I could get the picture of me hugging then penguin at Sea World when I was 12....
And to spare myself accusations: no. I'm not "into" kids. To be honest, only recently has my age group become somewhat appealing to me at all: I've always been after older women, which is a real drag as women are used to young guys being...well, young guys.
So, just something to think about.
[1] I'm thinking of the historians interviewed in Salon concerning the somewhat-recent Paul Ruebens case. Interesting article.
[2] Again, the Paul Ruebens case.
[3] bare-butt baby picture arrests, anyone? Traditional Brazilian breast feeding family photos getting your kids under the care of CPS, like just happened in Dallas about a year ago?
[4] Most Persnickity Country
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:3, Insightful)
BUT.....Should we be pretending that they are sexless until older? NO! We are creating our own demons here.....
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Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:3, Interesting)
And if you believe in "Freedom of speech, but with responsibility" then Freenet and its users are a tricky problem worth thinking about. Freenet is about more than just freedom of speech, it's an attempt to get freedom from accountability. Those two things are not quite the same.
IMHO, Freenet users are going to run into this problem: if you can't pass the buc
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:There is a difference (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Free speech isn't the issue... (Score:3, Insightful)
Or what about beds? I can have sex with minors in my bed. Make beds illegal!
You're right - it's not about free speech, but it *is* about balance. Balancing the good with the evil.
If you can find a way to design Freenet so that kiddie porn is difficult or impossible to upload without altering the system so much as to make it useless for everybody, then go ahead.
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:2)
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good idea, bad content (Score:5, Interesting)
Suppose someone takes a KP image and XORs it with online copies of the U.S. Constitution, an image of Julie Andrews, and a PDF file of U.S. census data. They then take the result and put it up on the net, labeled as "white noise". Then they delete the original KP image. Where is the kiddie porn now? It can be reconstructed by XORing all the remaining files together, but none of those files by itself is kiddie porn. Is the kiddie porn really in the instructions on how to assemble the files to recreate the original KP image? Or does the KP image not exist until someone actually XORs the files and recreates it?
As soon as you censor one thing ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oppenheim still won't get it. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Oppenheim still won't get it. (Score:3, Funny)
RIAA (Score:2, Interesting)
Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Question (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Question (Score:2, Informative)
If you're wearing a tinfoil hat, find a friend on freenet (via iip [invisiblenet.net] or some other mechanism) and download from them. (not to mention the absurdity of suing someone for just *using* freenet... that'd get tossed even in a patriot act america)
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
The people who use it are still liable, of course.
I have no idea how this is going to turn out. Freenet sounds like a great idea, but it's so obviously useful for such horrible uses, and there are other tools that handle most of the useful uses... I don't see it surviving legally (I mean that it'll be outlawed anywhere it'll be useful).
-Billy
It will probably survive by analogy (Score:5, Funny)
In the same category we already have guns, knifes, airplanes, TNT, email, television, cars. I think Freenet has a good chance.
Re:Question (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Question (Score:4, Insightful)
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
If only I had anything to publish...
-Billy
Re:Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Freenet may very well serve as the ultimate litmus test of America's continuing commitment to the tenets of freedom and liberty on which its founding was based. You simply cannot have a truly free society unless you allow a
Re:Question (Score:4, Interesting)
You know, freenet isn't just a file sharing network. First and foremost it's a medium which guarantees your anonymity, which makes it great for organizing a political movement in an oppressive regime and other things. But it's equally "useful" for doing things coveretly which most of us are disgusted by.
And child pornography is well beyond horrible, don't you think?
Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Question (Score:3, Interesting)
The idea is, that it should (and is) be forbidden to speak against the principles of free speech and democracy, because they are the very ground you base your speech on. So if you praise hitler's dictatorship here, you will be punished for working against democracy.
I think it works well here and I also think it's not hurting freedom of speech t
Re:Question (Score:3, Informative)
Considering the fact that you can't narrow down what any single node has or has not done to aid in the download, you would pret
guns dont kill people ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, let me have my new anonymous data transfer protocol already!!!
Re:guns dont kill people ... (Score:5, Interesting)
As an earlier poster pointed out, the problem with this is that a user's home computer could be providing kiddie porn. It's one thing to steal songs and software, but it's another thing to host pictures of some 7 year old getting raped. I don't want to even have the possibility of that happening, so I think I'll stick with another distributed client.
Legally, would host computers be analogous to the phone company -- a common carrier? If you use a telephone to plot to kill the president, the feds don't bust the phone company as part of the conspiracy. Just like they don't bust AOL for providing chat rooms for 35 year olds to pick up 12 year old English girls. Are people hosting files or parts of files like the phone company in the eyes of the law?
Re:guns dont kill people ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps the biggest freedom of Freenet is the freedom not to use it.
Re:guns dont kill people ... (Score:3, Funny)
NIO - the buggiest api ever. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm one of the main developers for freenet (see zab_ on the opn irc logs the cvs logs)
When 60% of the code (measured in locs) is workarounds for jvm bugs, you know you have problems.
If the sun QA dept. had pulled their act together, this release would have happend at least a month ago.
zab
Re:NIO - the buggiest api ever. (Score:2)
Re:NIO - the buggiest api ever. (Score:4, Insightful)
i'm just a developer who's run into these kinds of things too, and java left a damn sour taste in my mouth.
it's portable ansi C for me.
Re:NIO - the buggiest api ever. (Score:3, Insightful)
Take a look at methods such as getChannel() [sun.com] on stream implementation classes such as FileInputStream.
Now recall that channels are part of NIO and did not exist prior to 1.4. A reasonable deduction is that the implementation of IO has changed to use NIO.
Though reasonable, I cannot claim to have made it since it appears in the book "JDK
Searching on freenet? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem I see here, is that there are no easy ways to search for content, except for out-of-band stuff like the web or e-mail, which mostly defeats the entire concept.
What Freenet needs in order to be a viable platform for not only publishing content anonymously, but also for finding it, is a search mechanism built into freenet. Before that happens, there is no way that it will become any popular with the file sharing masses -- it's just too find to hard something to download.
Re:Searching on freenet? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Searching on freenet? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Searching on freenet? (Score:5, Interesting)
In freenet, you are ALWAYS searching. You're searching for a KEY, that LOOKS like a URL but doesn't have any information about where it's stored, that translates to a piece of data. When you make a request, you tell your fellow clients what you're looking for, and they either return it, or keep looking for you.
The problem with "keyword" searching over freenet is that somebody, somewhere has to index everything -- make a list of keywords, associate them by "URL," etc. On the internet, the indexing is performed by spiders that work for massive database engines. On Freenet, there's not really any way to perform indexing without exposing the data inside keys being passed back and forth.
To get around this, applications have been written to publish indexes of the data to common KEYs (like "INDEX07162003"), so you can download them and maintain a search engine on your own PC. One such application is Frost. They work pretty damned well.
In the early days of freenet, OFF freenet spiders created search engines, but these are by nature not anonymous -- and they were kind of crap. There was also some experimentation with english language keys -- eg, KSK@GPL.txt -- but the problem was that people were uploading FALSE data on top of what was supposed to be there. So most freenet content is now published using a private/public key system, so only change requests from the initial producer are honored.
The result is this system which works in the exact opposite way of the regular internet. On the regular internet, the client can only handle static content, so manipulation is handled by the server. On Freenet, the content on the server is static, so manipulation is handled by the client. You don't get the full understanding of how strange this is until you've used some of the funkee freenet messaging systems.
Lack of Content (Score:4, Informative)
Excuse me? Lack of index? (Score:4, Informative)
Why would you want an index outside of freenet anyway? Holding such a thing on a regular web server means your access can be tracked and logged, which defeats the purpose!
There's plenty to look at in Freenet. I'd bet a significant sum that you haven't tried it recently.
New upgrades work well (Score:5, Interesting)
No longer is my CPU at 100% all the time - before when I got put in seednodes I was flatlined, even with the thing niced to -18. Now it's not even noticable.
Bandwidth usage also seems to be more steady, rather than spiking every now and again it holds steady at one number. (~85-90% of allocation.)
Responsiveness has increased slightly - it's about what you would expect from a 56k modem connection.
Run one in the background for a few days - you won't notice it, really. The more people running these things the better, even if they have no use for the system yet and throttle it right back. (10/5 on DSL adds less than 1ms to my ping on ut2k3.)
Bandwidth usage... (Score:3, Interesting)
The biggest factor that keeps me from using Freenet comes from the bandwidth requirement. I have a nice fat cablemodem connection, on a non-saturated segment, so I get GREAT rates, both up- and down-stream.
However, I officially have a 2GB/month cap (fortunately my ISP has yet to enforce it, since I use 5-6GB in a typical month). As slow as it sounds, 10Kbps, continuously used, would effectively consume slightly over my monthly cap. That strikes me as a
Re:Bandwidth usage... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:New upgrades work well (Score:3, Interesting)
I've mirrored some normal web content to Freenet . This freesite (only available if running Freenet) [127.0.0.1] is a mirror of http://www.operatingthetan.com [operatingthetan.com], my normal website on Keith Henson v. Scientology [xenu.net].
My major gripe with Freenet to this date is while it is marketed toward "weblike" applications, it often loses content more than a click or so in (note the front page of my freesite there works almost perfectly but if you click in the performance is significantly degraded).
I think its killer app might ultimate
Did anyone else notice how many cookies RIAA sends (Score:5, Interesting)
Weak analogies (Score:4, Funny)
I'll tell you what. If I'm robbing a bank and someone tries to pull of my mask they're getting shot.
Truth be known his comment gives us all a nice hint on how to further anonymize ourselves. What happens when the guard pulls off the mask and you have panty hose pulled over your head? Clean ones...He still can't indentify you...plus if you shoot him he can never tell anyone.
So today's lesson is if the guard/RIAA tries to pull back the mask/masque to make you identifiable then you must shoot to kill and leave no witness behind.
Thank you for playing
The Arms Race Begins (Score:4, Insightful)
The sooner they discover they are fighting a losing battle and just accept it and look for a better marketing scheme, the better.
Mark my words: (Score:2, Informative)
Its simply not efficient. I want to download music, new releases, and movies -- I don't need encryption. I don't need to store unknown files in an encrypted cache. I don't need the rediculously slow speed Freenet offers.
Enter China. They have TriangleBoy. An array of proxies available not behind the Great Firewall. Chinese dissidents can use these anonymous proxies to do publish and consume information. Freenet only inhibits this. Freenet's lack of performance is a
Re:Mark my words: (Score:4, Funny)
Please don't say that. The "BSD is Dying" Trolls are looking to expand their operations.
pfft.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Summary of my experience: I found it nearly impossible to use and it was giving me massive Gopher flashbacks.
IP GO BYE BYE (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure none of you would have a problem with that, because you're not all about double standards, right?
You can't misuse the GPL with it (Score:3, Insightful)
So what else would you do? Modify it? Okay fine, modify it. Then what? How am I going to know that this file even exists to download?
Ultimately something like Freenet doesn't really do anything to GPL software bec
Support Chinese dissidents (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, while freenet might be somewhat secure and private, it would be pretty clear by monitoring a link to an ISP that you were using Freenet. If the Chinese government were to do this they could easily identify and round up the Freenet dissidents. What can we do to help protect freedom behind the bamboo curtain? You can do your part by making sure that Freenet is also used for downloading music! Everyone knows the Chinese like to download and pirate copyrighted material. The Chinese gub'mint will not give it a second look as long as they believe it's being used for piracy and not for dissident speech. We can all do our part for freedom by making sure that Freenet becomes a popular tool for file sharing.
How do you spell "clueless"? (Score:5, Insightful)
From the C|Net interview:
Fine, let's take the corporate aspect out of it & pay only the artists' share for compact discs. That would be somewhere on the order of 30 or 40 cents per disc, if that much (if the artist has a good contract). OK. Throw in $2 for the media & production. CDs start selling for $3 (like vinyl in the early '70s) & P2P would be irrelevant.
Yes, artists deserve to be able to sell what they create. That's why the record company moguls, agents & hangers-on often make as much as or more than the artists themselves.
20 years ago, I remember the high price of CDs being explained as "recouping research & development costs." Ummm... Methinks those costs were recouped long ago. Corporate greed is what it is...
But yeah, Oppenheim, let's take the corporations out of this. Who do you think is paying RIAA in the first place? Roadies?
When the guy equated file sharing with bank robbery, he showed that he is a nutcase.
NIO (Score:3, Informative)
These include:
There's also a transparently obvious move to appeal to the
How to make Freenet suck less: Leave it running! (Score:5, Informative)
When you start up Freenet, you give it some disk space to use as a "datastore". This starts empty, and fills itself up over time as your node participates in the network.
When you click a link in Freenet, your web browser requests the key (sort of like a url) from your local node. Assuming your node doesn't have the key, it asks another node for it, which then asks another and another until the key is located. The data is then passed back up the chain to your node, and along the way some of the intermediate nodes keep a copy.
In this manner, popular content propagates in Freenet. By leaving your node running (and making sure it's actively participating in the network, serving requests) you'll allow it to store some of the keys that make up Freenet's content. When you use your node, it's likely that some of the keys you want are already stored there.
Routing is similar. When you first install Freenet, it has knowledge of a few "seed nodes", and that's all it knows about. As your node talks to the seed nodes, they tell it about other nodes, and your routing table grows. This makes you less dependent on the seed nodes (which are probably melting today).
A new system in Freenet called "probabilistic caching" results in a certain amount of specialization, and a significant performance improvement. It's based on keys (which are cryptographic hashes of content) and node IDs (which are crypto keys). Both are fairly randomly distributed, numerically. Here's how PCaching works:
If your node ID ends in 0x3F, then when your node participates in the chain for a piece of data whose key ends in 0x3F, it's very likely to keep a copy. When your node handles other keys, it might still keep a copy but it's not as likely. Likewise when you request a key that ends in 0xD3, that request will be passed, if possible, to a node whose ID also ends in 0xD3. This is a simplified explanation and I'm not a Freenet coder, but that's how it's been explained to me.
Obviously, the larger and more up-to-date your routing table is, the more easily your node can find the pages you request. Being an active part of the network is the best way for your node to keep a healthy routing table and a relevant datastore.
Freenet is unique among p2p apps in that your user experience actually improves if you contribute more bandwidth and space. (Bandwidth is much more important than drive space. 100 nodes with datastores of 1 gig each will make a much bigger impact on the network than 1 node with a 100 gig datastore!)
Freenet is *not* risk-free. (Score:3, Interesting)
With Freenet, all I need to do is record the IP address of people who I got the data from. It doesn't matter if they were the ones who posted the key in the first place. If I can verify that you were serving my IP, you're liable for it.
Not Anonymous, Not Deniable? (Score:3, Interesting)
One highly relevant quote about anonymity:
Freenet does not offer true anonymity in the way that the Mixmaster and cypherpunk remailers do. Most of the non-trivial attacks (advanced traffic analysis, compromising any given majority of the nodes, etc.) that these were designed to counter would probably be successful in identifying someone making requests on Freenet. On Freenet, whatever you do, your identity is still revealed to the first Freenet Node you talk to, and even if you limit yourself to talk only to trusted nodes (a feature that will be implemented in the future), they will have to talk to the rest of the network at some time or another. The anonymity that Freenet offers is really just obscurity in the fact that it is hard to prove that your node wasn't proxying the request for or insert of data on behalf of somebody else (who might also just have been proxying it).
And another quote highly relevant to plausible deniability (which is effectively what Freenet relies upon to store potentially controversial content on any connected node, hopefully without exposing that node's owner to prosecution for hosting that content):
Hashing the key and encrypting the data is not meant a method to keep Freenet Node operators from being able to figure out what type of information is in their nodes if they really want to (after all, they can just find the key in the same way as someone who requests the information would) but rather to keep operators from having to know what information is in their nodes if they don't want to. This distinction is more a legal one than a technical one. It is not realistic to expect a node operator to try to continually collect and/ or guess possible keys and then check them against the information in his node (even if such an attack is viable from a security perspective), so a sane society is less likely to hold an operator liable for such information on the network.
They are clearly moving in the right direction, but are they really there yet? Would it be possible, for example, for the RIAA to say, "Hey everybody, this free application will help you decrypt your Freenet node so that you can ensure you're not infringing," and then they're free to nail if you if you're "trafficking" in illegal files? Obviously there are other hurdles (such as identifying you and the content you're hosting), but I suspect the basic idea still describes a potentially unpleasant scenario.
Also, I saw a slashdot reply to another article recently (somebody help me here?) which quoted a legal decision (somehow involving Sony?) which pretty clearly stated that you're still considered guilty if the prosecution can prove that you were intentionally trying to avoid having knowledge of what you suspected was illegal activity for the sole purpose of using that as a defense later on. (At least, that's how I interpreted it... I wish I could find the citation.) Freenet seems to fall flat on it's face in this respect.
Don't get me wrong, I've been fascinated with Freenet and I think they're trying to do a Very Good Thing, but these are two points that I think are important which a lot of people overlook.
Heh, ironically, slashdot is currently showing me this quote: Be careful how you get yourself involved with persons or situations that can't bear inspection. :)
Re:Huzzah! (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is, the minute you guarantee anonymity (something which, IMHO, is required for free speech... after all, what's the point of free speech if you're afraid to exercise that right?), people will abuse it. However, if you truly believe in the right to free speech, you must be willing to take the good with the bad. Anyone who suggests anything else doesn't truly believe in free speech.
Re:Huzzah! (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right. One can use these means to acquire child pornography. My concern with Freenet is that it could be hosted on my PC...without my knowledge of consent. Right now, its this factor that keeps me from adopting Freenet. But that's just my opinion....
Re:Huzzah! (Score:3, Insightful)
It sounds like you are not ready to be free. The first step towards freedom is the release of control. As long as somebody is able to make a decision affecting somebody else's use of the medium, then it is not free. It is censorship -- and it doesn't matter how righteous you want to get about it, it's absolu
Re:Flaw in your analogy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Another example, you own a field and someone grows weed on it, does that make you liable? I double that, too...
The fact is, Freenet protects the node operator because they honestly have no idea what content is on their computer. Moreover, they aren't even likely to have the full contents of any given file... only parts of it. Therefore, I suspect there's a real defence for people running Freenet nodes.
Re:Hrm... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What concerns me about Freenet (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What concerns me about Freenet (Score:5, Insightful)
If child porn were speech, it would be just talk. As it stands, at the best it is evidence of a crime that was committed in creating it. At the worst, it is a product that required the rape of a child to create and is a tainted product.
Child Porn != Speech.
Child Porn != Expression.
Re:What concerns me about Freenet (Score:3, Insightful)
Clearly the logic you suggest isn't true, as many forms of non-verbal communication have been deemed 'speech' and are protected.
There are some (no, I am not one of them) who view adult male, child male sex as not only good, but a requirement for a healthy life. The North American Man Boy Love Association is an example of such a group. Until recently their motto was "sex before eight - or it's too late."
I personally find this sort of behavior abhorr
Re:What concerns me about Freenet (Score:3, Insightful)
Absurd (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Guess I won't worry until the BSA kicks in my d (Score:3, Interesting)
And since the BSA will never know what anyone is downloading or uploading, they really have no-one to send their stupid letters to.
Freenet, saving tr
Re:If all content could be encrypted .... (Score:5, Insightful)
Encryption everywhere without the rest of the infrastructure means that there is a better than average chance that the spam in your inbox has not been snooped in transit.
Re:Anonymity? (Score:3, Insightful)
Without certain peices of information, they would have no case.
RIAA: "Your honor, we show here that said defendant connected to this other person at noon on the 15th. We suspect that they downloaded a copyr
Re:Correct me if i'm wrong, why not FreeNet-Napste (Score:3, Informative)
look in the "tools" section of the freenet site.
Re:Dynamic IP, router... (Score:3, Informative)