Freenet Releases 0.7.0rc2

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."

Performance

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?

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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)

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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 b

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Remember, Freenet's really not that different from Bittorrent. How useful is Bittorrent when there's two peers serving some years-old file?

terrorists and kiddy fiddlers ...

start your downloads.

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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

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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 ...

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?

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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 tha

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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

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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 in

Freenet vs Bittorrent

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 mediu

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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.

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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 c

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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?

Re:Freenet vs Bittorrent

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 ...

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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

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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, t

Expected Level of Public Discourse

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>

Have they fixed FROST?

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

Re:And here's why it's doomed to failure:

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.

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In the case of TOR, my money's on the first possibility I mentioned.

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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 inadverten

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I believe Tor is still around.

Re:And here's why it's doomed to failure:

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...