Freenet Version 0.7 Release Candidate 1 Available 232
apostle5406 writes to mention that the "Freenet" project (a global peer-to-peer publishing network) has unveiled their first release candidate. "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."
Well, that's good... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well, that's good... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it's faster. No, it's not fast, but it is usable.
There are some browser setting changes that help a lot; Freenet includes a Firefox profile with the appropriate changes for use when browsing Freenet. It won't ever be as fast as the web, but most freesites are quite usable. Plenty of people report success downloading largish files (isos, etc).
You'll want to leave your node connected for a while; it will get faster over the first few minutes / hours it's installed, and somewhat even after that, especially as your node begins to cache popular data. As always, having a fast network connection helps a lot.
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And I did this, and it worked, somewhat. It was just staggeringly unusable, most of the time.
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solution (Score:2)
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That's an odd thing to say, considering that there are plenty of people out there using Freenet who haven't been arrested / disappeared / etc.
Perhaps you should get your tinfoil hat resized.
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What's really needed is cities/countries covered by individual Wifi devices - ie outside of the reach of ISPs. You'd probably hate the speed of that until it reached critical mass, but it would be impossible in theory to prevent the spread of any `numbers` using that system.
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First of all, most of the security bugs ARE FOUND IN THE C/C++ CODE. Java is MUCH MUCH MUCH more secure than C/C++ in practice. To remotely exploit FreeNode, you'll need quite an exotic combination of bugs in JVM _and_ in the FreeNet.
And Java works just fine on PDAs, and FreeNet doesn't use anything fancy and non-portable like cool SWING GUIs.
Bugs exist either way (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want a bug proof program, you aren't going to find that using Java or C, or C++. At least C and C++ is fast. Java is slow as hell and it's still buggy. If you like Java thats your preference, but C is my preference and you aren't such an authority where you can say one language is objectively better than another.
Are you going to say, that if GNUPG, or GNU-Net is written in C, that it's inferior to Freenet JUST because it's written in C and can fall for a buffer overflow exploit?
If you have remote exp
It's called watermarking (Score:2)
I'm not a big fan of DRM, but you could easily use an open source watermarking technology. The fact that it's already done for copyright purposes, proves it can be done for anything else if we choose.
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Exactly - and name a DRM software technology that's impossible to break. There are none - it's not possible to create a media file that will display on normal personal computers and still prevent it from being "ripped" or re-encoded in a non-DRM format.
Unless you strongly understand every aspect of a technology like DRM or watermarking, it's unwise to assume that it will magically solve a given problem, such as tracing photographs.
Re:Well, that's good... (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Freenet tries to keep downstream and upstream bandwidth equal, this means that it gets hard to tell if your node is downloading or uploading anything, which is good for anonymity, but it also means that you are limited to your upstream bandwidth, which with most DSL providers isn't all that great and often a tenth of your normal downstream bandwidth. There is basically no chance that this ever gets fixed.
2) Freenets datastore/cache is extremely slow, it doesn't really matter how often you already already visited a page, revisiting it again takes often a long long while, while it really should be instantaneous, after all the data is already on your machine. Tweaking a few settings in Firefox helps a bit, but the performance is still so bad that it is basically unusable for actual browsing, even if things are in your cache. This pretty much sucks, but luckily isn't by design and should be fixable.
3) KSK redirect downloads are slow, which in turns means that message systems like Frost, that are based on KSKs, are very easily spammed up to a level where you can't even download all the spam, i.e. it isn't just an annoyance but completly blocks both download and upload of messages. There is another messaging system in development and that KSK problem might also be fixable from what I understand.
Other then that Freenet works for most parts as expected. It won't win any speed records anytime soon, but it works for uploading and downloading even larger ones when you have the time.
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what percentage of traffic is kiddie porn? (Score:3, Interesting)
Can anyone give us numbers on the precise percentage of Freenet traffic that kiddie porn makes up?
I'm concerned about the kiddie porn problem, but why the hell would people even go through the trouble of using Freenet just to trade kiddie porn?
It's sick, but sometimes I wonder if the individuals who do upload that shit to Freenet do it precisely to get Freenet shut down.
What better way to get something shut down than to upload kiddie porn? Any serious users wont want to use it anymore and then it will ONLY
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There, fixed that for you.
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This kinda strikes me as an 'if you build it they will come' situation.
The types of sharing networks this tool provides are already useful to certain types of people.
Unless there are some serious reversals in governmental surveillance policies, tools like this will only become more valuable.
Re:Well, that's good... (Score:4, Informative)
The first link from the Ultimate Freenet Index (one of the larger index sites) is to images of violence in Tibet.
Is that somehow not good enough for you?
Link [127.0.0.1] (requires freenet to be installed and running.)
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How fast is it? (Score:2)
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Darknet Mode (Score:3, Funny)
Sure, that's all fine and dandy for the person who wants to conceal that he's using Freenet
The humanity!
Pedophiles (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Pedophiles (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Pedophiles (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been using freenet for a long, long, log time, since 0.3 was freshly released.
The truth is that Pedophiles do NOT use Freenet 0.7; it's insecure, and their identity would be too easily compromised.
This means it's also not smart for whistle blowers, activists, freedom fighters, or anyone else to trust it's anonymity & privacy. You seize the computer of one Darknet user, and all the members of that darknet are compromised. other insecurities abound.
A good rule of thumb; if Pedophiles can use a system with impunity, it's probably safe to talk about your boss ripping off the government.
Freenet 0.5 is still active, still has thousands (at least) of users, and is still private and anonymous; the only thing anyone can say about a user without using a keylogger is that they are, indeed, a user. and thats not necessarily easy to say with total certainty.
Freenet is either going to have Pedo's and other sick farks, or it's anonymous & private; you can't have both.
Re:Pedophiles (Score:4, Insightful)
note to self: use the frakking preview button!!
try "Freenet is either going to have Pedo's and other sick farks, or it's NOT anonymous or private; you can't have it both ways"
Well you could... (Score:2, Insightful)
To put it another way:
Before 1969 when Al Gore invented the tubular interwebs, there were no "Pedo's and other sick farks" on the Internet, and after the human race self-destructs, there won't be any either. In the meantime, it's unavoidable.
Re:Pedophiles (Score:5, Insightful)
That does not make it any less necessary for our future freedom.
Remember, privacy does the same thing: it allows people to do bad things. That doesn't mean we give up our privacy, just because people will do bad things privately.
At some point, pedophiles (and other bad actors) have to stick their heads above ground in order to satisfy their urges. That's where they should be met and stopped.
I think it's safe to say that any communication medium that is secure, private and anonymous will be accused of harboring the "bad guy du jour" whether it's terrorists, pedophiles or soon, file sharers. It doesn't matter whether this accusation is true or not, because those with power are going to make the accusations regardless. If our world is to be governed by a tiny group of rich and powerful people, preventing personal security, privacy and anonymity is a matter of survival.
That's why we have to support Freenet and other such tools. Plus, it's a great way of flushing out the tyrants: Just look at whomever is originating the claim that such a tool is full of "pedophiles, terrorists, gay priests, etc etc".
Remember, child pornography can be sent in a sealed envelope. Should we abolish the sealing of envelopes? It's been tried elsewhere. You can bet that shutting down Freenet or any other secure anonymous mode of communication will do absolutely nothing to eliminate pedophilia and other perversions from the face of the Earth.
You'd have better luck locking up all the priests (and Republicans). [note: I'm just kidding...
Google search records (Score:2)
If theres so many pedophiles on the net searching for kiddie porn, wouldn't they use Google?
I'm not saying they wont use freenet, but there are ways to catch them. Google probably has a record of their search history, and likely flags the people who have pedophile search patterns. These people should get watched.
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Re:Pedophiles (Score:5, Interesting)
The big draw of the Darknet system, to the best of my knowledge, is that it makes you less likely to be noticed in the first place, and you can sort of "pick & choose" which nodes your computer talks to.
Lets put this in a real world situation:
You are A tibetan, living in the U.S.; you have a Darknet made up of other Tibetans, some of them living in China, some in Tibet. You use Freenet 0.7 to plan protests.
If one of your darknet members gets caught by the chinese government, for whatever reason, they will take that persons computer and analyze it. assuming the person did not put the Freenet 0.7 files in a encrypted volume, they then have the IP address of each computer that persons Freenet 0.7 node talked to; since it's a Darknet, they know that those computers are probably involved with the same thing the person they caught was involved in.
In a Open Net (Freenet 0.5), no matter how they analyze the persons computer, they can't say anything about the other nodes the examined computer talked to except that they are running Freenet 0.5; they are still most likely screwed if they live in China or Tibet, but they could conceivably be a little less screwed.
There are some other security improvements in 0.7; nothing is stopping the Freenet developers from putting those improvements on the 0.5 system.
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It would also seem to be a good rule of thumb to assume that the system used by the most dangerous elements in society is the system that is going to be under systematic attack by the agencies most likely to have the resources to defeat it.
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Back at that time, there were some links to "default" pages, including some "more or less" directories (i.e. User-lists of freenet sites).
The only directory that loaded before timeout (its freenet, yeah), had 3 links to sites with descriptions that clearly showed its childporn.
I would really _love_ to think that this was just some anomaly, but the only other guy i know who tried it came to the same conclusion: Childporn, a few white pride nuts and somne lonely warez that take 50
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I'm curious...what makes 0.7 less secure and anonymous than 0.5? Can you expand on this?
Re:Pedophiles (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pedophiles (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, yes, obviously there are a number of pedophiles around there. After all, Freenet is a fairly successful anonymizing network. But thanks to this property, it can be immensely useful to other people as well. I'm not sure what can be done about that problem, if anything. Once it starts being monitored to screen the child porn, everything else will be screened too, and those doing the screening will likely only be mere humans that may choose to censor other material as well. And then everything is lost. Anonymizing properly seem to be a bit of an all or nothing deal, just like there is no such thing as a "little" freedom. Either you have it, or you don't.
I guess in the end, it is a fairly simply philosophical matter. A question on whether a person is willing to risk supporting something that's criminal in most parts of the world for other things the person believes in or not.
Re:Pedophiles (Score:4, Insightful)
I am not interested in running a freenet node because despite its potential for good the reality is that the chances that my actions will actually accomplish any good are vanishingly small while it's almost a certainty that I would be aiding the distribution of harmful material. There are other ways to support free speech without also compromising my belief in not causing harm to others.
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I am not interested in running a freenet node because despite its potential for good the reality is that the chances that my actions will actually accomplish any good are vanishingly small while it's almost a certainty that I would be aiding the distribution of harmful material.
As decent people leave, the network has a higher percentage of bad content. I'm sure people would never have used email and the WWW if 90% of first adopters had been pedophiles, but think of what the world would have missed out on in that case.
It also reminds me a lot of plummeting real estate prices in newly desegregated inner-city neighborhoods. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. "If THEY move in, it'll all go to hell! I'm getting out of here!" then they pat themselves on the back when it indeed does go to
Re:Pedophiles (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know what index pages you managed to find, but the ones that are preconfigured in Freenet (as of about 6 months ago when I last tried it) were packed with links to government criticisms and a mix of stuff from Wikileaks and Project Gutenberg. The reason you keep getting modded down is that your claim is factually incorrect based on what I've seen.
I'll take your word for it that the nastier stuff is available, even if you have to go digging for it. That doesn't mean that Freenet's not potentially very useful, in exactly the same way the Internet itself is useful even when considering the bad elements.
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I tried out freenet several years ago, and poking around in the content that existed, it was extremely heavily weighted toward child pornography.
Of course Freenet is used for child pornography too, paedophiles would be dumb if they didn't use it for their purposes. You can say whatever you want about paedophiles, I for my myself would call them perverts, disgusting people harming those who can't defend themselves, but one thing I can't say about them is that they're more stupid than other people.
The point is, that Freenet wasn't designed for those people, it was designed to enable everyone to speak up without having to fear censorship. I would e
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When a pedophile is masturbating in front of his screen, he is not raping a real child in real life.
Point taken. For some people, porn is an adequate substitute for real sex with a kid. However, for some people who would otherwise never molest a child, kiddie porn acts like a "gateway drug." The great unknown is whether on balance more or fewer kids are victimized when kiddie porn is available. Another unknown is the additional psychological harm it does to a child to know films of her are "out there" and will probably stay out there forever.
And I should add that logically, if we make pedo files very hard to get for pedophiles, a black market with high prices for those videos and a mafia ready to kidnap, rape and kill children are encouraged.
There will be some of that. There will also be a large nu
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When a pedophile is masturbating in front of his screen, he is not raping a real child in real life
The problem lies not in the pedophile masturbating in front of his screen but in the pedophile who posts the porn to freenet for the other to see. While you normally hear about the one in front of his screen being caught thats simply because they are an easier catch. It is the other one that benefits most from freenode as the penalties for the poster are far greater than the penalties for the viewer. It is unfortunate but that guy is the reason most people I know (including myself) have shut down our freen
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This is obviously cat and mouse to some extent but at least it isn't a step back from anonymity, more of a way for people to opt out of hosting stuff they don't want to.
In any case i quit running mine for the same reason, for me its not worth it.
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On a serious note, yes it will. But the world is full of tradeoffs. Nothing is perfect. High anomnity allows the scumballs to hide just as much as the legitimite users. Althogh scumballs and legitimate users are a matter of perspective. You may share copyrighted files on there, and think the pedophile is bad for sharing kiddie porn, while he thinks the terrorist is bad for shari
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The problem I have with Freenet(and why I don't run it anymore) is that it hasn't been tested in US court yet. For those not from here, the US is currently having a "save the childrens from them evil pedos!" witch hunt that makes the red scare look tame. And while I know that Freenet encrypts the cache, I also now that someone with the unlimited funds of the FBI can throw some serious iron at cracking that crypto. Now I'll admit that I haven't studied Freenet's algorithm for encryption, so I have no idea how much iron it would take to crack it, but considering that a single thumbs.db file can net you ten years in PMITA prison, not to mention destroying any future you may have had before conviction, means that until a US court rules on whether the cache from Freenet is considered an illegal download or not I simply cannot risk my families future on it.
Agreed. The current atmosphere in the US towards anything even suspected of being child pr0n is too hysterical and kneejerk to take any risk. Happen to run across a picture of a naked child 3 years ago and immediately delete it? That could cost you five years in federal prison and a lifetime of sex-offender registration.
The penalties for child pr0n possession have become insane, and the threshold is very, very low. The definition of what constitutes child pr0n also becomes broader every year. I don
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The worst part IMHO, is the way they have pretty much left it to the discretion of the prosecutors and judges.
I agree with your post, but the reason it is left to the discretion of the prosecutors and the judges is because of current public opinion. 99% of the time any jury in the usa will convict anyone and anything the instant they hear the words "child pornography". They convict people possessing thumbs.db files, they convict people for possessing images of clothed children, and they convict underage teenagers for taking nude pictures of themselves... The media and law enforcement have hyped up child pornogr
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I suspect you were just being flippant, but in case you weren't...
A lot of people believe that the death penalty is never justified. Check out the wikipedia map [wikipedia.org]. It strikes me as odd that the US constitution doesn't prohibit state-endorsed murder. I believe that the highest legal punishment should be life imprisonment, but that's a different r
Prove this (Score:2)
If it's filled with pedophiles, show us some proof. Stop fear mongering.
People like to say the internet is filled with pedophiles too, and it's usually the people who never seriously use the internet who think this way.
The pedophiles exist EVERYWHERE, they aren't on the internet, or on Freenet, they are your neighbors, and a lot of them like to be gym teachers and priests, and other suspicious jobs. I guess lately we like to think that the internet is a haven for pedophiles, as if the pedophiles didn't exis
Re:Pedophiles (Score:4, Interesting)
However, if it really gets faster, in one year or so the useful content will override the unlawful content a hundred to one, and then maybe the medium will get some popularity at last.
Re:Pedophiles (Score:5, Interesting)
The people (DoJ especially) pushing the pedophilia boogie man already think you are a pedophile. It doesn't matter if you are or not. Download the wrong file from some random person (honey pot) on a p2p network and you are fucked. I have a buddy doing 3 months in a work furlough program to prove it. (I've known him for years, he is not into children).
On a side note, last week he was fitted with a GPS anklet. His lawyer is fighting to have it removed after the 3 months. If he loses, he gets to wear that god damned thing for 3 years of probation. Justice is hiding spoon marks under that blindfold.
Are you talking BS? (Score:2)
Tell us more about this friend of yours who has 3 years of probation for downloading a file on a P2P network.
I'm not saying it's impossible given the current laws, but I figured it was only hundreds of people who got caught up in this, and I only read about that one guy so far.
Freedom (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Freedom (Score:5, Interesting)
Also useful for Tibettan monks blogging about their current activities and trying to get the word out
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Or I don't know, you could use ssh/scp/vpn? Something fast that doesn't suck? The only extra freenet adds is that the hostiles wouldn't know which servers you were talking to I guess.
embassies and organisations can use this (Score:2)
It sounds like this is a response to the story about *embassies* that discovered they were 1-hop on freenet away from an attacker. I assume the people who actually need this level of security will find a way to set themselves up. E.g. set up enough "front" nodes that the important traffic isn't so obvious to the rest of the darknet. Individuals are in much worse shape when you consider that the connection can be seen as enough evidence by an author
The viscious circle of bootstrapping freenet (Score:4, Informative)
It's worse. There ain't no such thing as a 'darknet' to your ISP. If you are in the sort of place that needs Freenet you can be certain your ISP will report you to the government for using freenet. In the sort of places that need Freenet, possession of Freenet will get you shot. In places that having freenet won't get you shot the only people who will bother setting it up is pedophiles and others who are doing things that would get them imprisoned or shot.
These are hard facts. Yes it would be great if a critical mass of non illegal activity could get on Freenet to provide the chaff to provide cover for the occasional whistleblower who really needs it, but getting from here to there is all but impossible. Freenet will, by design, underperform a normal straight connection so there is a strong disincentive for legit content to use it. The only possible hope is if the *IAA goons drive piracy[1] far enough underground that the file traders adopt Freenet. But I really doubt Freenet in it's current form will be able to scale anywhere near large enough to handle the warez scene, especially in the age of full HD ripping we are hurtling towards. The limited size of the local data cache and cable/DSL upload speeds just won't suffer the inefficiencies involved.
[1] Yes, 'pirated' movies are illegal just like kiddieporn but as a practical matter they differ in one vital aspect. 90+% of Internet users currently trade movies, songs, etc. and thus would likely trade them on Freenet if Bittorrent becomes too dangerous, whereas few will currently install a freenet node due to the popular perception is that having one currently is tantamount to admitting being into, or at least a willing faciliator of kiddieporn.
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How do you know that? (Score:2)
In theory, steganography would work. The main problem however is that Freenet isn't as secure as it could be.
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Trying to use Steganography to hide Freenet is like trying to hide a Steganosaurus in a mail envelope, might in theory work if the envelope is large enough, but it would be still rather obvious what is going on.
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In that case, Freenet won't really work in places like China.
They will KNOW who is using Freenet through traffic analysis, and they'll know whether or not Freenet is capable of Steganography and use Steganalysis. In theory on paper it could work, but Freenet would have to be perfectly designed, meaning it would have to be designed much better than it is designed now, and it would probably be harder to scale. It might be that something like Mute will end up being better than Freenet from a design perspective
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Freenet will, by design, underperform a normal straight connection so there is a strong disincentive for legit content to use it.
That's almost true. Your node caches all content that passes through it, even that which your neighbor nodes have requested. Once it's cached, retrieval is almost instantaneous since your browser is fetching it from your own server. Translation: peer with people who share your tastes, and let their browsing habits pre-cache the content that you might also find interesting.
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So, to bootstrap Freenet adoption, we need to invent some nice-sounding excuse for those casual pirates. Something that would sound like a "killer app" for Freenet.
- Hey, you're running Freenet, you must be a filthy pedophile!
- Calm down, I'm just using it for [safer banking / private chat / business talk / foreign news]
What would be good legitimate candidates for that list? What kind of legitimate content / communication should really enjoy the advantages of Freenet once it becomes popular?
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Exactly. Large regular encrypted traffoc between a set of 'end points' on the Internet. That will stick out like the proverbial turd in a punchbowl to anyone with a clue. Legit encrypted traffic will be intermittent to big web servers or VPN links into large corporate networks. With just a little traffic analysis the suspicious stuff will pop out easily.
Map a few dozen cable/dsl links doing bulk encrypted traffic amongst themselves an
Re:Freedom (Score:4, Interesting)
Freenet 0.7+ is not secure. they gave anonymity and privacy up when they went with the Darknet concept.
With a Darknet, if you compromise one machine, or even just do traffic monitoring, you can easily determine other members of the Darknet; anonymity is just not there.
The old system, Freenet up to 0.5 (which is still alive and well, and might even have more users than 0.7) is an OpenNet; all you can tell about a person by monitoring traffic is that they are, indeed, using Freenet. even on a seized computer, You can not really tell who the people that person talks to are; you can only tell which other freenet nodes the persons computer has talked to, and that gives no clue as to the person identity. it can, theoretically, give clues (assuming a vast network of computers is trying to track someones identity) that a node is statistically likely to be someone you are looking for. But thats it.
No one who is sticking with 0.5 has a clue why the Freenet Developers are doing this, when it's so obviously a flawed concept. Conspiracy theories abound.
Re:Freedom (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't like darknet mode, don't use it. 0.7 has both darknet and opennet available.
There are lots of reasons why darknets are better, but if you'd rather use an opennet instead no one is stopping you. You can get to the network either way.
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Not so sure. (Score:2)
This is not to say Freenet is useless, or even that the allegations a
Dark net is a key feature? (Score:2)
Trust no one (Score:2)
how solid a foundation is that in the real world? the relationships you build in face-to-face contact are fragile enough. as a darknet expands how do you maintain confidence that it is still secure?
Web of trust (Score:2)
But if you know a person and trust them, then it makes sense. You should be able to trust your friends at least alittle bit.
/.ed (Score:2, Funny)
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Re:Don't get excited... (Score:5, Informative)
Only the primary design goal of Freenet: make the people uploading and downloading the content anonymous! If you're using bittorrent, it's easy for the Bad People (government, isp, mafiaa) to tell what you're uploading and downloading. Not so with Freenet (it probably can be done, but it would take a *lot* of effort).
It is easy to tell that someone is running Freenet (still harder than bittorrent, though -- with everything encrypted and ports randomized, it requires traffic analysis). But it's hard to tell who's downloading or uploading what.
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Don't forget your local data store is also encrypted.
Re:Don't get excited... (Score:4, Interesting)
You mean, like having packet sniffers on all major chokepoints that log which IPs are talking to which other IPs, in order to build up a suitably-large database for purposes of traffic analysis?
Freenet was an interesting political statement: Since inception, every statement about its security model has been prefaced by "in any sane/democratic/free country...", followed by a list of assumptions about the integrity of the telecommunications system. For example, when Freenet was first designed, NSA couldn't legally monitor domestic traffic, nor could it legally share what it found with the FBI, and FBI needed a warrant.
The political implications of the project were supposed to motivate people to lobby for stronger telecom privacy laws, lest we become as non-sane, non-democratic, and non-free as the countries in systems such as Freenet are illegal/hazardous to use.
That experiment has run its course: In post-9/11 America, of course, none of those assumptions about the telecom system are true. Although it's arguably lamentable that Post-9/11 America telecom policy is every bit as not-sane, not-free, and not-democratic as China, it's indisputable that the experiment has ended. The privacy wars are over; the Freenet guys lost.
If you were interested in Freenet because of its implications for free political speech, it's time to give up: for better or worse, anonymous political speech is dead. The only justification that I can see for its continued development is that it gives enough of the illusion of anonymity to be a fantastic self-selecting honeypot for sleazeballs, and as far as I'm concerned, said sleazeballs deserve what they get.
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No, traffic monitoring at the ISP level wouldn't be sufficient to de-anonymize freenet (in theory; there may be bugs etc, but that's the idea). However, that combined with a large number of nodes operated by the attacker probably would, at least if the target is running opennet or can be convinced to create a darknet connection to the attacker.
The assumptions about ISPs and telecoms required for Freenet to guarantee anonymity are far fewer than you seem to think they are. The major one is that use of en
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Yes, but why would that be a problem? The really CPU-intensive stuff is handled in native code anyway on most platforms (with Java fallbacks). I'm running it on a 1.4GHz Athlon (not exactly modern...) and it's using typically 10-20% of the CPU (though that number will rise on a faster connection).
Performance is limited by network connections, mostly. The real performance question is how quickly the developers can improve it and find and fix bugs, and if they say Java helps in that regard, then Java is
performance bound by peer resources (Score:3, Interesting)
The network should eventually level demand across nodes. If one node for some reason gets saturated, peers will eventually find data faster elsewhere, reducing its load. Lower performance machine/network nodes may end up slightly less popular and those equipped will move more traffic. Freenet has a number of ways to optim
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Which is impressive, given that Java uses garbage collection. You kind of have to work at it to leak memory in a Java program.
Why is it that everyone assumes Freenet sucks because of Java? Sure, Java isn't helping matters, but if it sped up this much, and it's still using Java, what does that tell you about how much Freenet used to suck?
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Also: It's supposedly an open standard, and should be implementable in things other than Java. However, the implementation is complex enough that I'm glad to have at least one guaranteed-portable implementation.
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If I remember, the main reason Java portability sucked was Microsoft's broken implementation. Anyone knowledgeable enough to be implementing a Freenet node should know how to install an actual Sun Java.
Certainly, I'd never want to actually write Java myself -- it's a hideously ugly language -- but as a VM, it's not bad. And I honestly don't get why the AC is deciding not to use a program because of the language it's implemented in.
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