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Freenet Releases 0.7.0rc2

Posted by kdawson on Fri Apr 25, 2008 10:16 AM
from the information-wants-to-be dept.
Software Technology
evanbd writes "The Freenet Project has announced Freenet 0.7.0rc2. From the announcement: 'Freenet is a global peer-to-peer network designed to allow users to publish and consume information without fear of censorship. Freenet 0.7 is a ground-up rewrite of Freenet. The key user-facing feature in Freenet 0.7 is the ability to operate Freenet in a "darknet" mode, where your Freenet node will only talk to other Freenet users that you trust. This makes it much more difficult for an adversary to discover that you are using Freenet, let alone what you are doing with it. 0.7 also includes significant improvements to both security and performance.' Of course, for those of us who don't know anyone else running Freenet, or simply prefer it, there's also a non-darknet mode available."
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Submission: Freenet releases 0.7.0rc2 by evanbd (210358)
[+] Your Rights Online: After 3 Years, Freenet 0.7 Released 365 comments
evanbd writes "After over 3 years of work, the Freenet Project has announced the release of Freenet 0.7. 'Freenet is software designed to allow the free exchange of information over the Internet without fear of censorship, or reprisal. To achieve this Freenet makes it very difficult for adversaries to reveal the identity, either of the person publishing, or downloading content' ... 'The journey towards Freenet 0.7 began in 2005 with the realization that some of Freenet's most vulnerable users needed to hide the fact that they were using Freenet, not just what they were doing with it. The result of this realization was a ground-up redesign and rewrite of Freenet, adding a "darknet" capability, allowing users to limit who their Freenet software would communicate with to trusted friends.'"
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  • Yeah, but the question burning on everyone's minds is: is it stillas slow as pouring molasses outside in January in Michigan's Upper Peninsula?

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'll have you know our molasses-pouring operations have gotten much more efficient in recent years, you insensitive clod!

      (which, ironically, may be the figurative answer to your question)
    • In a word: yes. I suspect this is as much to do with the lack of peers as anything in the program itself. I think that if enough of us are using it, it will be much better as more peers are added.

      I like the concept of this because it is about information being free; free of inspection by those who would search your home or ask for travel papers, and do so without legal authority or permission. Perhaps it might be thought of as Freedomnet. Sharing pics with the family, or organizing a group, say like anonymo
      • Remember, Freenet's really not that different from Bittorrent. How useful is Bittorrent when there's two peers serving some years-old file?

    • start your downloads.

      New Freenet? "Here come the pedophiles!"

      New online chat system? "Here come the pedophiles!"

      New photo sharing site? "Here come the pedophiles!"

      Exactly how many damn pedophiles live in the hellhole where you reside? Has it ever occurred to you to try, you know, moving to someplace with a better normal:kiddielover ratio?

      I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.

      I can tell.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Give him a break, hes probably Britain. The country's filled with illegal immigrant terrorist paedophiles living in council houses. That's why we need more cameras. Pervasive surveillance is the answer to all of society's woes!

      • Re:terrorists and kiddy fiddlers ... (Score:4, Funny)

        by Goaway (82658) on Friday April 25 2008, @11:59AM (#23199614) Homepage

        Has it ever occurred to you to try, you know, moving to someplace with a better normal:kiddielover ratio?
        Someplace less like Freenet, in other words?

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by evanbd (210358)

          Has it ever occurred to you to try, you know, moving to someplace with a better normal:kiddielover ratio?

          Someplace less like Freenet, in other words?

          There's plenty of abhorrent material on any P2P network. In my experience, Freenet is not particularly different, for better or for worse.

          What Freenet does have more than its fair share of are conspiracy theorists and related weirdos. But I count that as neither surprising nor particularly problematic.

            • The point with Freenet, though, is that you may be responsible for hosting / serving abhorrent material and you'd never know.

              Umm, so? I hate child porn as much as the next person, but the same is true for so many other activities. I used to work for an ISP, and I'm 99.999% sure that at least one user downloaded at least one naked kid picture during that time. I'm not going to lose sleep over it, though - I was neither the uploader nor downloader.

                • You are just as guilty as the uploader, the downloader, the photographer and the abuser.

                  Grow up. Are the people at Nokia responsible because the 9/11 hijackers used their phones? Or AT&T because some phone calls went over their network? What about Microsoft, because some of them likely used Windows.

                  The legal construct of "common carrier" applies only to telcos as far as I know, but the concept is pretty well ubiquitous in real life and for good reason. If you buy gasoline, then you're financing oppression of Saudi women and non-Muslims. See how quickly everyone can be shown to sup

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Just Some Guy (3352)

          Every six months or so I re-install Freenet to see if the performance has gotten any better. Every time, I look at each of the pre-configured index pages to see what people are posting these days. Not once - never - have I seen childporn in any of those indexes.

          There's a simple explanation for all the people who talk about how Freenet is saturated with kiddy porn: they're either repeating a stupid meme that they know nothing about, or they've gone looking and found something. Which group are you in?

      • Has it ever occurred to you to try, you know, moving to someplace with a better normal:kiddielover ratio?
        Which planet might that be?
  • Whats the advantages of using freenet vs using bittorrent?
    If your in darknet mode isnt that the same as a private tracker?
    If your not in darknet mode arnt you just as exposed as BT?

    If you want to carry out conversations, then i suppose BT isnt a good medium, But isnt that what public/private mailing lists are for?

    Im not saying Freenet is useless just asking how it compares.

    • If your in darknet mode isnt that the same as a private tracker?
      No, because malicious individuals can still sign up for private trackers. In darknets, no one, not even the person you are downloading from, knows who you are.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mrogers (85392)

      If your in darknet mode isnt that the same as a private tracker?

      Not really - with a private tracker, the other users (including the tracker) know what you're uploading and downloading. That's not the case in Freenet. Also, any user of a private tracker can invite their friends, who can also see what you're uploading and downloading, so the network becomes less private as it grows. Freenet becomes more private as it grows, because there are more users who might have initiated any given request.

      If your not

      • Another disadvantage of Tor is that even though your traffic is encrypted, it's easy for someone monitoring your network connection [wsj.com] to tell when you're using Tor. If they can correlate the times you connect to Tor with the times a certain webmail account is active then your anonymity is broken [freehaven.net]. By running a Freenet node 24/7 you make it much harder for an eavesdropper to link your activity patterns to anonymous or pseudonymous messages, because your node is always sending and receiving encrypted packets regardless of whether you're active.

        But if you can afford the bandwidth you can run a tor node. is running a Freenet node lighter on bandwidth?

        • Good point about running your own Tor node. Tor and Freenet both have configurable bandwidth limits, but if you're on a really slow connection I guess there comes a point where you're not contributing much value to the network...
        • In my experience doing both, Tor can eat up as much as you give it - which since the default limit is something like 100 kb/s with bursts up to 1000 means you'll be donating ~200 kb/s in my experience. Freenet on the other hand has a more generous cap, but I don't think I've ever seen it upload more than 30 or 40 kb/s, even with a few gigs in my store.

    • Re:Freenet vs Bittorrent (Score:5, Informative)

      by Neil (7455) on Friday April 25 2008, @11:32AM (#23199240) Homepage

      Bittorrent doesn't allow you to publish and download anonymously. If you are seeding something (or downloading it) everyone who is allowed to connect to the tracker can find out your IP address.

      A Freenet network ideally consists of a large number of nodes connected by sparse network of encrypted links. Many of the nodes have a big chunk of cache associated with them. The files in the network live in the caches. To request a file you ask your node to find a file with a specific hash signature. It passes the request to its peers in the network, they pass it on in turn, and hopefully it eventually it reaches a cache that has the file you asked for. Bits then start trickling back through the chain of caches. The important thing is that because your local node is an active part of the network and is sending and receiving stuff all the time, nobody knows whether a particular request or response that goes through your node relates to something that you asked for, or whether it is just something that you've been asked to "pass on" by a 3rd party.

      If everything works as intended, even people who are fully connected to the network and participating shouldn't be able to identify the original publisher of a particular file, or identify who has downloaded a copy (though the fact that they've added the darknet mode suggests that that they aren't 100% confident about that!).

      http://freenetproject.org/whatis.html [freenetproject.org]

      This has obvious anti-censorship, freedom of speech, freedom to whistle-blow type applications:

      http://freenetproject.org/philosophy.html [freenetproject.org]

      It also has obvious undesirable applications (see the flood comments about child-porn and terrorism).

      The other major practical difference to Bittorrent is that Bittorrent is designed to be fast. Freenet is definitely not the quickest way to get information from A to B ...

      • With or without the darknet mode, the anonymity is good but not 100%. Especially for large files (or groups of files) there are statistical attacks (eg, if I'm getting requests for a large fraction of file, I'm probably closer to the requester). They're nontrivial to implement, but they're much harder on a darknet. Perfect anonymity is either impossible or very close, but Freenet is doing pretty well for many purposes. Stronger anonymity guarantees, and resistance to attackers with more substantial reso

      • though the fact that they've added the darknet mode suggests that that they aren't 100% confident about that!

        That is completely and utterly wrong. The darknet mode was added to prevent harvesting of nodes simply by joining the network. In 0.5 (and in 0.7 with activated opennet) you can create a list of all Freenet nodes just by waiting. Nodes that do not have opennet activated are not found by this method (unless you are directly connected to them in which case you wouldnâ(TM)t need to search for them). That is the reason for darknet.

    • Whats the advantages of using freenet vs using bittorrent?
      If your in darknet mode isnt that the same as a private tracker?
      If your not in darknet mode arnt you just as exposed as BT?

      First of all, unless you got your torrents encrypted the ISP can see everything. With torrent connections encrypted, they can still see you downloading the .torrent file. With Freenet they can't see anything of meaning in either darknet or opennet mode, though it's not like the ISPs really care because they throttle by protocol and/or traffic volume anyway. I suppose it's if you think all your traffic gets routed by AT&T to the NSA.

      A private tracker hides what you're downloading, but if the RIAA/MPAA g

  • Pedophiles! Pedophiles, pedophiles, pedophiles!! Obscenity!! Pedophiles! Terrorists!! Filth!! Pedophiles, pedophiles, pedophiles!! Terrorists! Terrorist pedophiles!! Pedophile terrorists? Pedophiles! Terrorists! Criminals!! Islamofacists!! Think of the children!!

    If You Have Nothing To Hide Then You Have Nothing To Fear.

    </newscoverage>
  • I gave RC1 a try, but then gave up when I found out that the potentially most interesting feature, the FROST message board, had several exploits in it and was being DoS'ed to oblivion and back. The FMS system is an interesting replacement, but it's still not widely used and without the ability to search for new newsgroups.
    • FMS is much more widely used these days; Toad did a (very cursory, I believe) code review and is now using it. There's a list of all newsgroups that people you know of have posted to; it's not very long, generally, so searching isn't particularly required (and is your newsreader's problem anyway).
  • My country has a problem that I perceive as a big issue: although, in theory, freedom of expression is guaranteed by law, in practice, you will get your ass seriously sued if you touch on some flaming issue (which can be anything the person on the other end of the screen thinks).

    Journalists that work for big media outlets don't have this problem so much here in Brazil because they have teams of lawyers to fight the legal battles. But any blogger can get in serious trouble. Having to sell your furniture beca

    • Re:And here's why it's doomed to failure: (Score:5, Insightful)

      by CogDissident (951207) on Friday April 25 2008, @10:42AM (#23198486)
      The TOR network http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network) [wikipedia.org] has been around forever, and doing something rather similar, without being successfully shut down.
      • In the case of TOR, my money's on the first possibility I mentioned.
      • I'd be disinclined to trust TOR on its own. I've heard speculation that the NSA is in control of enough nodes that they can identify the origin of a message.
        • Then that just means we need more people on TOR, to out-flood them. They need a "lot" of computers to determine origin locations, at least 1/2 the network to do it reliably.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by MikeBabcock (65886)
        Tor doesn't allow publishers to create content anonymously at all. It just allows you to fetch it anonymously.

        Incidentally, running a tor node at home got my IP banned from Slashdot from users spamming said geek news site via tor and my machine inadvertently being a part of it.

        Freenet allows you to create anonymous or pseudonymous identities to communicate with others or post content in such a way that others are unlikely to ever determine the source of said content. This is a very useful feature for vari

        • Tor doesn't allow publishers to create content anonymously at all.

          Yes it does. One can set up a server at an anonymous public address under a TLD (.onion) only accessible via the Tor network. The clients never see the server's real IP address. Tor Hidden Services [torproject.org].

    • I believe Tor is still around.

    • Re:And here's why it's doomed to failure: (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kjella (173770) on Friday April 25 2008, @11:46AM (#23199446) Homepage

      The government is never going to allow a method of communication it can't eavesdrop upon. Either your allegedly "secure" communication will be clandestinely monitored, or the technology itself will be outlawed, on the grounds that it enables terrorists and pedophiles to evade the law.
      Funny that, would you care to tell me where the government backdoor is in firefox, openssh, openpgp and all the millions of other secure ways to communicate? And in closed source, I doubt everyone would silently bend over to the government and every police agency around the world shut up about it, particularly not outside the US. The only new thing here is anonymity, not security...
      • What about CALEA requirements - which have already been extended to IP traffic - once it goes out into the network its fair game right - regardless of protocol?

    • The government is never going to allow a method of communication it can't eavesdrop upon.

      Welcome! Welcome to the year 2008! Park your De Lorean over there, good sir, and let me fill you in on communications technology in the 21st century.

      1024 bit asymmetric encryption is the norm in 2008. The governments of the world can't eavesdrop on Joe Average's web browser, let alone Freenet. The encryption battle was lost in 1993, and a good thing too, or internet commerce would be impossible.

      So you can put away that tin-foil hat, and relax in the knowledge that the internet has not become a panopticon,

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