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Ian Clarke of Freenet Intereview

Posted by Hemos on Thu Aug 10, 2000 04:29 PM
from the peer-to-peer-review? dept.
The Internet
abe1x writes "Ian Clarke of Freenet is interviewed at Feed by Christopher Locke of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Pretty interesting, can't wait for Freenet to actually function smoothly on a large scale."
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Ian Clarke of Freenet Intereview 50 Comments More /

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  • Have you registered the trademark in Ireland or at the EU trademark office? If not, I suspect you are SOL.

  • Freenet rocks.

    I wish someone would write a client that speaks both Freenet [sourceforge.net] and Mojo Nation [sourceforge.net] protocols...

    There should be "bridge nodes" that speak at least two protocols and that link the various distributed networks together.

  • but the people who are all fussing about how Freenet has competition for it's 'market' space are missing something entirely... It [afn.org] has [bfree.on.ca] competition [tfn.net] for [leon.fl.us] its [ohiou.edu] very [cleveland-freenet.org] choice [cam.net.uk] of [dgrc.crc.ca] name [scfn.net].

    And I hate to point this part out, too, but not only are we not nearly as controversial; we got there first. I'm pretty certain there's actually even a trademark on the name.

    [ looks ]

    Yep [uspto.gov]. 1986.

    And for the anal-retentives in the audience, yeah, I think a court would accept a dilution argument, given the close association of the problem spaces.

    Cheers,
    -- jra
    -----

  • Of course I have a choice about whether to install a freenet node. Thats not the question. The question is: Freenet, and other technologies, if used widely, have consequences even for those who do not use it, in that, for instance, copyright will become untenable. Is it therefore OK that those who introduce such things do so unhindered by social constraints ?

    Spouting naive egoism doesn't answer every (or possibly any) question. People don't live in hermetically sealed boxes, and therefore don't always get a choice when the "rules" start changing.
  • The problem with deleting via a key is that it's vulnerable to attack from a single source. Deleting old data is a distributed action and thus not vulnerable to an attack from a single source.

  • If Freenet is completely anonymous, then there won't be any real way to block spammers, is there?

    I suppose it could be made pseudonymous, like slashdot. If you want the +2 bonus you need to establish a reputation.

    Pseudonymous communication is possible in an otherwise anonymous network through digital signatures. For example, if all slashdot posts were Anonymous Coward, someone could come along and create a client-side thing to automatically GPG sign posts and verify GPG signatures, hilighting posts from known-good GPG keys.

    This sort of thing has been discussed on the cypherpunks sewer^H^H^H^H^Hmailing list for years.

  • What are you talking about? It runs fine on Windows 98!
  • Freenet appears to be quite a bold project. However it already faces competition from the most common distributed file sharing services:
    Napster
    Gnutella
    I think the major difference is in the organisation of information. Napster & Gnutella have a precise approach in that you are looking for something specific, whereas with Freenet you can browse by generic categories. Napster has some element of organisation where you can browse by genre then pick and choose a user to see what they have, but it's imprecise. A user in a Techno room could have Nirvana tracks, and it escapes the categorisation, however, if you search for Nirvana, you will find it easily.
    Now imagine if you were to think of a band you used to like, musically similar to Foo Fighters. You could browse Freenet looking in Media/Music/Alternative/Rock then finding a few songs by Nirvana and realizing that was the band you were looking for.
    OK, perhaps that isn't the best analogy to draw, but I think with Freenet you will be able to find a lot of information on a general category, as opposed to finding a specific piece of information.
  • This has always happened -- a group makes an advance in technology that offers them a chance to escape some of the restrictions that everyone has been tolerating, and decide they'll go for it. ...If you can climb to the new rung that's just been built on the ol' ladder, I would suggest you do so; those who don't are likely to get stepped on.

    So, Jimmy hacks a nanobot that turns everything into the world into chocolate cake. Jimmy likes chocolate cake!

    Jimmy's gonna let it go, too, because he says that "anyone who hasn't climbed up onto the new rung that's just been built on the ol' ladder" and built an anti-chocolate cake nanobot deserves to get "stepped on".

    Whee! Now the Mona Lisa, The Hoover Dam, and your house have all been turned into chocolate cake!

    This can't be what you want.

    The Bill Joy Point is that we have to stop thinking about technology as simply a liberating mechanism, and start reckoning with the unprecidented menace to freedom the New Technology offers. Freenet isn't even one of the New Technologies. But I think it's a premonition of them, and a good chance for us to ask ourselves the hard questions. What if there was a Jimmy with a chocolate cake nanobot? What should we be doing now to limit the kind of control of damage any one person can have through technology?

    This is the biggest hack out there, and it's one all true geeks should be interested in.

  • I'm not sure you really can, in a totally anonymous system you must allow everything or nothing because you can't filter it reliably.

    -- iCEBaLM
  • But you don't know who voted, this is a completely anonymous system, thats the point.

    -- iCEBaLM
  • But then that leaves open the opprotunity for an organized effort to vote out legitimate content, I say don't impliment the voting system, make people work harder to kill the system, I mean, which is harder? Simply wasting little bandwidth to vote down legitimate information, or wasting a lot uploading bogus stuff? Not to mention if you allow people to vote off legitimate information then you have the possibility of no legitimate information remaining, with the organized effort to insert bogus information you still have both legitimate and bogus, so that raises the chances of finding actual legitimate info, when you know this kind of abuse will go on.

    -- iCEBaLM
  • So far I fail to see how the local, not global distinction is going to save Freenet from a tyranny of mediocrity. I think it underestimates two quantities:
    • the number of requests there will be for porn vids and Britney Spears MP3s, and the number of directions those requests originate from, especially relative to requests for other material
    • the amount of relative space required per item for porn vids and Britney Spears MP3s, vs. that for fascinating treatises on the human condition.
    As a past (and somewhat present) Usenet administrator, I've seen this effect in action before, where I've had to mark down expiry times on binaries groups again and again, and where newer caching news servers still spend nearly all of their time keeping track of binaries groups because that's where the reader demand is. Freenet will take over this task itself and automate it completely, but that will make the effect even more pronounced because just as the designer notes, it can't tell the difference. It only judges on one dimension - demand.

    The system can be tweaked, certainly - large objects can be penalised for instance - but in the end I suspect we'll find that 90% of the demand and 99.9% of the storage requirement is for recordings of Ms. Spears music and pictures of her navel. Whether this is really a failing depends on your goals going in.

    That said, the only way to find out if it works is to try it, and (as has been noted) there are other models being developed that you can inject your great novel into as well. So bring it on. :)

  • CLARKE: I think that you cannot try to prevent technological progress. What you must do is take a step back, and say, "How can we adapt to this new technology?"

    I get so sick and tired of hearing this line again and again! Let's think about it. Technology is a human-driven enterprise. All biological metaphors are just that: metaphors. Except in the case of, oh, bacterial research, new and interesting inventions do not just pop into existence. Inventors think about what exists, and make new things to improve their lives. Or at least their pocketbooks.

    We all have a responsibility to examine those inventions -- all technology, really -- to monitor its effects and decide whether it's really a Good Thing. I mean, what if (and this is hypothetical! don't flame me for this part!) freenet ended up being used for ONLY passing peoples' credit card numbers around, becoming a major tool of international fraud and nothing else ? Then yes, we'd be better off stopping it!

    The attitude that "technology can't be stopped" is just irresponsible. If you start with that attitude, you back yourself into situations where a technology gets to the point that it can't be stopped. Self-fulfilling prophecy, that's all it is.

  • I was on the mailing list and worked a little bit on Freenet early on. I didn't witness as much ego as you describe. Maybe that's happened since I left.

    I think that what the Freenet developers are trying to accomplish is considerably more difficult that what Napster and/or Gnutella have done. We're talking distributed caching, anonymous uploading, encryption of stores (at least there was talk of such). They're certainly not insoluble, but they're not trivial, either.
  • I know Gnotella has spam filters for things like FlatPlanet, but there (seems to be nothing) from stopping someone from posting a useful looking file only to really be an advertisement.

    These documents will probably be unpopular, and will be eventually dropped off Freenet. Also, with a rise in Freenet's popularity I expect to see a corresponding rise in the use of cryptography. I know I plan to GnuPG sign most documents I put onto Freenet.

  • If you set it up right, each user can choose which voters to listen to. If someone I trust has voted the file down, I won't show up on my radar. If someone I don't know has voted the file down, I might get notified but the file will still show up.

    This "Web of Trust" is common among many cryptographic solutions.

  • The real flaw of Freenet, IMHO, isn't the potential for revisionism, it's the idea that only popular information is valuable. That might make sense in a market context, but it doesn't really have any place in an intellectual context if by "intellectual" you mean to imply a search for truth instead just popularity. Moreover, it is often the most revolutionary, cutting-edge, ahead-of-their-time ideas that are the most unpopular.
    It's not the idea that has to be popular, it's the actual document. By `popular' all is meant is in-demand. If people want to read something, then it will stay on the FREENET -- whether or not its ideas are popular or not. Take, for instance, that fellow who wrote the article falsely claiming BUGTRAQ listed more bugs for GNU/Linux than Windows, and fallaciously using this mis-fact to conclude that GNU/Linux is less secure. Among the slashdot crowd, that fellow was not popular in the sense you intend, nor were his ideas. But his article was popular -- that is, it was in demand.
    At one time, the ideas of democracy and freedom of speech were extremely unpopular ideas. In some places, they still are. Freenet-like systems would not have helped the rise of democracy very much.
    That's not true at all. While the ideas may not have been popular, obviously the documents extolling those ideas must have been in demand enough to get read.
    Mind you, it's great to see that popular ideas will be more resistant to government/corporate suppression, but they already were. It is ideas held by small minorities that are the most vulnerable.
    Minority opinions will have just as much exposure, as long as people are willing to read them. A solution to what I agree is the larger problem -- not the ability to speak freely, but the ability to be heard -- is not provided by FREENET. But it's not at all prevented, either.

    That said, I think the primary effect of FREENET, if it is successful, will not be the ability of minority ideas to evade censorship, but the de facto eradication of copyrights on digital media. (And that fact makes its success all that less probable, of course.)

  • Couldn't any motivated user could poll the FreeNet and build his/her own archive?

    Deja News would seem to be a useful analogy: USENET stuff hangs around for a while and then expires, but nothing stops motivated users, like Deja News, from archiving for later use.

    Whoever does the archiving becomes vulnerable to physical/legal attact, but that is the nature of any physical archive
  • It is true, dropping unpopular information is a problem if the definition of popularity comes from outside sources. Here's an excerpt of a paper I have written on this problem:

    1) Announcements

    In order to search for something, people have to know it. Right now, FreeNet only allows you to request a key you know, but even if you could search all FreeNet nodes, this would not help much.

    Because of this, FreeNet can only _extend_ other media, and not at all replace them. Because there are no broadcasts, and no standards of quality. (Don't be angered by this part of the sentence -- having standards of quality does not mean that you censor stuff, but it means that you make it possible to filter it on an individual basis.)

    Let's take a simple analogy: A baby that is born into this world sees and learns from various sources. It is constantly bombarded with information ("broadcasts"). Only on the basis of the outside information it receives, it can actually formulate and eventually ask questions about the world it lives in ("search/request").

    But let's stretch this analogy a bit. Imagine the baby grows up to a kid and he does not have a TV, he does not have many friends, he does not have high level education. The kid does however have Internet access, but it is only limited to FreeNet (once the final version of FreeNet has been released, the complete World Wide Web, Usenet, IRC etc. have been abandoned because they suck in comparison).

    Now what questions is the kid supposed to ask? What is he supposed to look for? How should he find out?

    Of course, the real life situation is much different. There are still TV & Co. and people will use FreeNet to find stuff they have heard about somewhere else. This is the Napster situation: They claim to promote new artists, but how should anyone find out about new artists if all that Napster allows is file searches (and chat)?

    As we know, the other places where people get their information on "what to search" are mostly non-anonymous, often highly centralized and can be censored easily. Imagine there are top secret documents that show the cooperation between the N*S*A and Micro$oft, and someone has managed to get a hold of them. Now he puts them on FreeNet, names the key /secret/nsams.txt and waits for people to leech them.

    But why should anyone search for them in the first place?

    Our current key servers are in fact a way of announcing new information put on FreeNet, but of course they are no real solution---for reasons everyone knows.

    So I think it is quite irrefutably true that we need a system of announcing new keys, and it must be a distributed and an anonymous one. Only if this is the case, FreeNet can indeed replace most common Internet applications.

    2) Ratings

    Before we talk about the technical realization of announcements, let us not forget another important issue. Let us assume the claimed relationship between No Such Agency and Redmond/WA is a fraud made up to denounce the great applications Uncle Steve & Uncle Bill produce. As true Microslaves, we want to let the world know. According to what I call "old thinking", we do this: We create a new announcement called "NEWS: Microsoft story a hoax! --- read here" and broadcast it.

    Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is like the people on Gnutella who used the search monitor that displays incoming results to chat. This is like the virus warnings on Usenet that are automatically sent out by bots browsing the groups. It works, but it's not elegant. It's a workaround.

    I like Slashdot. [Slashdot explanation omitted] Basically, Slashdot has found a solution to a common problem, and that's one of the reasons for their huge success. When I see a story that interests me and I have little time, I set my threshold to "4 or 5" and browse. And I often find true gems in there without much searching. Sometimes good laughs, too.

    But of course Slashdot suffers from the same problems all websites have, it's censorable. Just recently Microsoft has demanded that Slashdot should censor (delete) comments of some visitors who talked about and linked to the Microsoft Kerberos specifications. Slashdot hasn't given in, but under certain circumstances, they have to, and they will. On the other hand, the Kerberos specifications have shown up on FreeNet just the same day. (The only reason I know this is because of the keyservers, which are, of course, censorable as well.)

    The rating problem is absolutely essential for the future of information exchange on the net. This sentence is so important that I repeat it here: The rating problem is absolutely essential for the future of information exchange on the net. But it is not necessary in the "old world", and as most people apply "old thinking" to the "new world", they often forget the importance of ratings.

    In the example above (not Kerberos, the Microsoft story) the "new thinking" solution would be to attach rating entries to the announcement. User 1 could say: "Score -1: Fraud", user 2 could say: "Score 0: Redundant", user 3 could say: "Score 2: Funny".

    Furthermore, one or more ratings could be attached to each rating, and to the rating of the rating.

    Of course, that alone doesn't do the trick. What if a religious zealot posts some crazy text on the coming apocalypse, and many religious zealots agree with him and rate it up, just by means of their large numbers (or even generate multiple ratings per user)? We need to be able to filter the ratings.

    We need nicknames.

    Don't scream. We really need them. They are truly anonymous. Without them, we're lost in the information jungle. But with them, we choose our guides, everyone by himself, and stick to them. We filter the announcements by the opinions of the people who mostly share our own opinion. Filtering doesn't necessarily mean hiding, it can also mean (like with killfiles) marking an announcement read, etc.

    The option must be given for both announcements and ratings, but it should only be mandatory for ratings. I have thought about giving the option of posting announcements completely without any UID, but that creates a LOT of problems. It's possible, however, to replace the nick with a random number/letter combination if this is desired by the user. (Reason: You may accidentally give away your nick name and thus reveal the identity behind all of your files, although not legally.)

    Once we have announcements with optional nicknames, and ratings with mandatory nicknames, all in a nested structure if desired, we can do all sorts of filtering of incoming broadcasts. We can

    • display only announcements from a list of known nicks
    • display only announcements that have ratings attached to them (these might trickle in later)
    • display only announcements with positive ratings from a certain author
    • display only announcements that have an overall positive score etc.
    • display all parentless children (ratings to which we don't have any parent announcements)

    [discussion of possible implementation omitted]

    5) Random thoughts

    Should FreeNet indeed allow users to express their opinion uncensored and share all kinds of information freely, and, at the same time, read and enjoy interesting information from other people without having to resort to other media to find out what IS interesting, it is a new evolutionary step in the history of mankind.

    This is no exaggeration. There are good books on how the masses can be controlled and influenced using corporate mass media, and AOL & M$ would surely like the Internet to work the same way. They would just love to track every move you make and to supply you with totally "customized" "information" (i.e. commercials, PR). They will kindly ask you for your feedback after every story they send you, and collect this data to improve their ability to influence YOU -- of course, all of this will be semi-automatic. [Tell you a secret: Most of this is already true to some degree anyway.]

    But with FreeNet it's totally different. There is no central authority, and people actually have to think by themselves. They have to build their own taste, and train their ability to express their thoughts. They have to make rational choices. Good ideas may have a chance to spread naturally. And there are no limits whatsoever to what you may think and express.

    I don't call it a revolution, because if all goes well, no blood will be spilt. But it is a new evolutionary step, from all the different mass media we had in the past to something new, something exciting, no longer "mass media" but rather "human media".

    Now let's be a bit crazy and think what would be possible if such a system existed. We could extend it to make anonymous, quick and easy micro- and macropayments possible! I have absolutely no clue how this could -- legally and technically -- work, because we somehow need to get the real money into the system. OTOH, we might create our own anonymous currency and try to convince others to accept it. Yeah, I know it's crazy. But I warned you.

    When this would be the case, all kinds of information exchange could be done on FreeNet. Two kinds of payment would be possible: One, the initial release of information after a certain amount has been paid in advance by many users, two, the voluntary payment for information already received.

    And I am absolutely sure that in the next decades, ever larger parts of our economy will be entirely based on information exchange. I don't want to speculate about nanotechnology or other future tech. here, but it is clear that increasing automatization changes our focus. We need to create viable concepts of making money from information without restraining its distribution. So how do we open the door to the new economy of ideas?

    FreeNet is the key. Let's forge it.

    (Note that I didn't know about MojoNation when I wrote this, which also sounds very interesting, and does want to implement a rating system.)

    --

  • Freenet is actually much more efficient than the Web in the way it distributes information. With the Web, if a hundred people in Europe request the same document in America, that will travel under the Atlantic a hundred times. With Freenet it will only travel under once or twice. And then a copy will be stored locally in Europe, where it can be distributed to the other ninety-nine or ninety-eight people requesting it.

    this would solve the slashdot effect for content access overload, because it could be cached all over.. So slightly offtopic, Has SlashDot ever considered caching, or mirroring sites they point to? At least the first page, until freenet takes over?

  • You don't have to store infinite information at any time -- you start with a finite amount, add finite amounts, and keep doing so until the human race no longer needs the system. There's no way to get an "infinite" value from finite inputs -- that's a basic mathematical truism.

    Assuming you meant dealing with a very large supply of information, there are any number of possible solutions. However, I think that most people aren't going to be willing to give up any more than a tiny fraction of their hard drive and communications in exchange for a guarantee of their rights. Most likely, you'll see a lot of folks giving Freenet a few hundred megs and using it primarily to find MP3's and porn which they'll then move to more permanent, local storage.

    The more "dangerous" or "subversive" content that finds its way out there will only stick around so long as its subject matter is popular. While this could be an interesting phenomenon to watch in and of itself, (like publishing a monthly count of the number of times various 'keyowrds' appear in a Freenet search each month) the end effect will still be far from perfect.

    I'm not saying that Freenet won't serve a valuable purpose until a better solution comes along. I just want to debunk the statements that I keep seeing that it will be a perfect and complete means of protecting the right to free expression.

  • No, my definition was indeed the same that was being used in the Freenet interview, and architectural whitepapers, and other discussion and arguments I have seen. I have just as much of a problem with destroying a document because no one has read it as I do with destroying it because people don't like it. I forsee the most "popular" works, be they controvercial novels or Top-40 singles, proliferating, at the expense of the obscure, unheard-of, and unknown gems that not enough people have stumbled across.

    Humanity is fickle and emotional, and as a group, we have very short attention spans and poor memories. The same tragedies occur time after time, and no one ever knows about it, because it's just one voice lost in the noise. Free speech won't do you a damn bit of good if no one can hear you over all the people shouting, and it will do you even less good if you only have a relatively short time to make your message heard, after which it might as well have never existed.

  • So, can you have a completely anonymous system in which there is still at least a semblence of accountability? Or, will any channel of communication which completely seperates data from the identity of its creator be overwhelmed with raw noise?
  • No one is forcing anyone else to install a Freenet node on their computer. In this case, an individual has simply shown people one possible option, and is letting them choose whether to join it or not. If Freenet never reaches critical mass, than those who run it are at risk of being branded and tracked down; if it does reach sufficient popularity to make its use safe, then "Humanity" must have spoken on the subject.

    If you don't want to accept the new "rules", then don't. If you don't ever log on to Freenet, then you've cast your vote against it. At least give others the freedom to cast their vote as they see fit.

  • You are choosing a dangerous argument here, for one simple reason: Freenet is not being designed, implemented, or supported by any corporation. It is a volunteer project, being built on the labors of those who believe in it, not those who wish to profit monetarily through it. I forgive you for sounding hyperbolic, because I, too hate the rising tide of corporatism and technolust that is eroding so much of our ability to remain truly individuals. However, I do not fear the loss of financial value of my creations nearly so much as I fear the control of those works being usurped by corporations who would profit from them. Intellectual property law, in its current incarnation, gives almost no power to the individual; anything that opposes a major corporation's interests can be demolished with lawsuits, intimidation, and FUD.

    If this old order has to be thrown into a temporary state of upheaval to return the power of free speech and choice to individuals. We cannot put the genie of technology back into the bottle, so we have to attempt to shape it in such a way as to insure the world remains as free as possible for us and our children. You, sir or madam, are a preservationist, which is noble, but unrealistic. Accept the fact that progress will continue, and start doing what you can to support its more benevolent forms.

  • The nature of physical archives has indeed meant that the owner or creator of that record becomes inherently vulnerable to persecution in any number of forms for its contents. However, what people are beginning to realize is that digital technology gives us the potential to change that irrevocably. However, Freenet, as much as it may hint at this possibility, does not make it a reality. In order to make an archive truly serve its purpose, its contents must be protected beyond the moment of their peak popularity, without sacrificing the anonymity of their holders and viewers.
  • Okay, I guess I don't make it up a rung -- the second-to-last sentence should have read: "...potential for constructive or dangerous applications..."
  • Although it's not quite as simple as that, I guess there must be hundreds of cases like this all around the world. Just because something is made into a law, doesn't mean its perfect or even fair.

    I understand that, but his answer makes it seem like he is against copyright only because people are taking offense to Freenet because it allows unauthorized copying. (Its this which has made Freenet so popular in the first place)

    Let's face it: laws are made by governments, not by the common people. Laws should be made in order to help / protect / take care of the people, but they usually are not.

    I believe in a lot of cases the government has overstepped it bounds... but you have to admit, 99.5% of laws are in place to "help / protect / take care of the people"

    Take the copyright laws, for instance. They were made in order to protect the creators of works of music, art, etc. but in reality they're used to protect the big corporations who make money out of them.

    Big Corporations who spend millions (mostly on peoples pay) shouldn't have the right to protect their creations?? Come on now....
  • And then, the RIAA/MPAA/anti-piracy-goons will be able to flood the system with anti-votes for copyrighted material.

    Surely a danger. But, as the old 60's song says, "they have the guns, but we've got the numbers ...". I think the RIAA would have its hands full fielding a large enough force to overcome the millions of people and millions of files involved. If I recall how Freenet works (anyone who wants to chime in here with better info, feel free), it boils down to a 'one-IP-one-vote' sort of system, so any attempt at an automated attack would require a Class A address segment for the RIAA to use (which I wouldn't put past them). And if they really tried this sort of attack, perhaps something like the MAPS 'blackhole list' could be used to thwart them. (Anyone else notice how this measure/countermeasure scenario starts to resemble actual warfare? Hmmm. Wonder what a surplus Nike missile sells for these days. :-)
  • One of the areas of vulnerability Freenet has (one which it shares with Gnutella) is that it's possible to post bogus stuff (like fake MP3s containing anti-piracy messages, for example) in an effort to pollute the stream, so to speak. Clarke has said that he wants to eventually implement an 'anti-vote' (my terminology - I've forgotten his term for it) so that users who discover one of these files can demote it and cause it to eventually disappear. I hope that he can get that mechanism working before Freenet gets too widely used. Otherwise, I'm afraid that an organized effort to gum it up will result in a lot of bogus files with high 'popularity', causing them to persist for quite a while.
  • I don't really see this as being such a prevalent problem with freenet, because it separates the ideas of search and storage.

    Freenet itself simply provides a framework to massively distribute files within a system that (theoretically) makes them fairly easy to access from anywhere and fairly difficult to delete from everywhere. The difference between it and gnutella is that a search mechanism is not central to propogating files. Files propogate simply by being sent across the peer-to-peer network. The filename, or freenet key, or whatever you want to call it is essentially just a capability [dnaco.net] for the file you want.

    Based on this structure, any number of directory services could be built on top of freenet to provide access to, and authenticate capabilities for files within the system. Freenet seems to be a reasonable model to do this, but there is no reason to necessarily tightly couple the search to it.

    Come to think about it, there could likely be many ways of searching for files on a system like freenet. There could be a peer-to-peer, gnutella-like search. Perhaps one with the ability for you to prioritize results comming from peers who you trust or have had good experience with in the past (this could get tricky with file propigation in freenet). There might also be a moderated search facility that provided capabilities that had been verified by someone already.

    The bottom line with this is that the RIAA or whoever you are afraid might get in the way of good, honest, information sharing might be able to completely bog down a system such as freenet by putting big files on it and requesting them from many disperse locations -- freenet is going to have an incredibly hard time coping with this sort of attack -- but they probably won't be able to interfere too severely with people finding what they are looking for, if it is in fact there.

    btw... I posted another note [slashdot.org] describing differences between freenet gnut and napster a while ago, but did a pretty horrible job with the formatting... there it is if you are more patient that I would likely be. :)

  • Perhaps, but the first person requesting the file has to wait while it downloads in its entirety between each successive server between them and wherever it is... this is how freenet is preserving anonymity.

    So they have issued the request for the file from the network to transfer their file across through five or ten different servers... The latency to do this, before they actually start seeing their little download progress bar move past 0% is the total number of hops times the time to download the file. So a file that takes three minutes to transfer at high speed, but is five hops away, is going to actually take 12 minutes to initiate while you wait for it to propogate to your peer and then three minutes to download. Granted, whoever asks for it next will be served very quickly.

    Except that the person who requested it in the first place got bored waiting, thought something was broken, disconnected, reconnected to completely diffetent peers, and is bogging the network down by initiating another request.

    ALSO, you can't make the geography assumption here... that a person on freenet in europe will request a file and have it more to be available to everyone in europe. The clustering is arbitrary because it is just a peer network built on IP addresses. One person requesting a file does result in propigation of that file across the net, but it does not necessarily do anything to move it closer to other people with similar interests, geography, or anything.

    but that might be an interesting way to optimize a peer network... users connect to users with similar interests. hmm.

  • Re:Competition (Score:3)

    by flink (18449) on Thursday August 10 2000, @02:18PM (#864197) Homepage
    I've been lurking on the development list since March, and I haven't noticed anything like that. The lead developers are just very adamant about preserving the integrity of the system, and they're not afraid to tell some one "no". I would rather wait a while and see something like this come out right the first time than have it get damaged by coming out ineffiecent and full of security holes.

  • Re:What the architecture tells us (Score:3)

    by robl (53384) on Thursday August 10 2000, @02:20PM (#864198)
    The freenet developers just can't decide what they want this tool to be. Is this a tool for violating copyright, or is it a tool for the real propagation of free speech?

    People have said many unpopular ideas, and written unpopular essays, that over time American citizens grew to accept. No, it didn't happen overnight, and it may have taken several decades for us to accept something as true. "Citizen Kane" was plagued with bad reviews when it first came out, and is now considered one of the best films of last century.

    I also find it interesting, that the developers believe in deleting documents that are unpopular, but won't let people who enter keys delete their own documents.

  • Re:Competition (Score:3)

    by Eloquence (144160) on Thursday August 10 2000, @02:20PM (#864199) Homepage
    First, Gnutella doesn't develop at an impressive pace at all. There are many clients, but they are all still working with the 0.4 protocol, which is completely flawed (which is why Gnutella is unusable now).

    Napster? The development they are most concerned with is of a legal nature.

    There are two serious competitors: MojoNation [mojonation.net] and Blocks [kripto.org]. And they both have to deal with the problems FreeNet deals with now.

    The problems are far less trivial you think. On the one hand, you want information to be as dislocal as possible, on the other hand, you want to "localize" (search) the information on the network. An individual host has no idea which keys it is storing (at least in theory), it doesn't know their names (only their hashes) nor does it know the actual content (which is encrypted). So you can't simply say "Server X, tell me what you're storing".

    Which is why meta-networks may be necessary, distributed search engines similar to AltaVista, but of a distributed nature. Again a new challenge, perhaps not less complex than FreeNet iself.

    So don't trivialize. The FreeNet team is working very hard (just look at their development traffic), but they can't do wonders.

    --

  • A healthy Cheer for Freenet (Score:3)

    by ackthpt (218170) on Thursday August 10 2000, @11:54AM (#864200) Homepage Journal
    I appreciated the value of unrestricted resource and information sharing about 5 years ago, when arranging a simple trade of a couple sweatshirts across international boundaries.

    Some may think nothing of this, but since I have conducted far more commerce around the world via the internet. Upon examination I, and my trading partners, are probably violating any number of trade, tarriff, informational or customs restrictions for either end of the transaction. Multiply this by a few thousand people and governments will sit up and take notice. Iran is already struggling with the internet. No doubt if a student is reading this post the government knows about it, and has evaluated this post for Evil Western Influence(TM)

    A Free internet is vital, not just for my selfish purposes, but to bring down barriers, not erect them. I'm actually pretty thrilled, in a Berlin-Wall-Coming-Down way, when I think of how easy it has been to communicate and exchange around the world.

    Worry when the only way you can communicate is through commercial enterprises (AOL, YAHOO, MSN, etc.) which may fall under goverment regulation.

    Vote [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000

  • Fast mirror (Score:3)

    by Kiro (220724) on Thursday August 10 2000, @11:49AM (#864201)
    Some fast download links if SourceForge is too slow:

    Windows client [infinit.net]
    Linux client [infinit.net]
    Source code [infinit.net]

    --
    Kiro

  • Re:What the architecture tells us (Score:4)

    by Azog (20907) on Thursday August 10 2000, @01:06PM (#864202) Homepage
    You are using a subtly different definition of "popular" than Ian Clarke is.

    Your definition of popular seems to be "stuff that people like and agree with".

    Ian Clarke's is "stuff that people download".

    Take an example: "Mein Kampf". That's an "unpopular" work, in the sense that few people agree with it. But it might be "popular" in that many people will download it.

    In fact, many of the people who download it probably disagree with it. Me, for instance. I know I disagree with Hitler's view on Jews, but I'm still interested in finding out exactly what he wrote, so I can decide why, exactly, I think he was wrong.


    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)

  • The Spectre of Ubertechnology (Score:4)

    by Dan Crash (22904) on Thursday August 10 2000, @11:59AM (#864203) Journal
    You know, I think this is a dim shadow of the point Bill Joy was making about the fundamental difference in kind between the Old Technology and the New.

    Ian Clarke, one Not Particularly Thoughtful Kid, decides copyright is bad. Or at least that he's bored. He decides to create and unleash a technology that subverts it. And it spreads. Suddenly the whole world begins to resemble what one person, or one small group of people, decided it should resemble.

    Take this analogy and apply it to nano, or genetics. This is the future. Or it could be. If so, welcome to the new fascism.

    The big challenge here is to respond to Freenet's antagonism of copyright in a way that lays the groundwork for responding to similar technological threats. To set up the mechanisms which insure democratic governance of Humanity by Humanity instead of Technology.

    Highfalutin' words, but these is highfalutin' times. I reckon.

  • Re:Competition (Score:4)

    by blanu (128654) on Thursday August 10 2000, @02:45PM (#864204)
    It's interesting that you say that. I haven't seen any new features added to Napster or Gnutella since the first Freenet release. I'm not knocking Gnutella. It's a very cool project. I just don't understand where this idea of relative advancement is coming from when there aren't any new features being added.

    I think the reason that things are progressing so slowly is because what we're doing is REALLY HARD.

    Anonymous, efficient, non-abusable searching and updating is a problem no one has solved yet. I lot of people think they have solved in, in which case I invite them to the mailing list for some good intellectual jousting.
  • This has always happened -- a group makes an advance in technology that offers them a chance to escape some of the restrictions that everyone has been tolerating, and decide they'll go for it. Spoken language, literacy, radio, the Internet -- even consciousness itself -- were all means of changing the rules for you, and quite possibly taking everyone else along for the ride. The only thing that's changed is the pace.

    So, yes, there is a great potential for constructive of dangerous applications of any significant new technology. If you can climb to the new rung that's just been built on the ol' ladder, I would suggest you do so; those who don't are likely to get stepped on.

  • Re:What the architecture tells us (Score:4)

    by scorbett (203664) on Thursday August 10 2000, @12:52PM (#864206) Homepage
    From the freenet sourceforge FAQ:

    2.5. What prevents important documents from being discarded? Freenet is not intended to be an eternal archive. Because the system is completely democratic, it does not inherently distinguish between the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights and my kindergarten drawings - documents are scored solely by requests. It is anticipated, however, that the current low cost of storage will make enough storage available to Freenet that documents will only rarely have to be discarded.

    Dropping "unpopular information" from the system is not intended to be a form of censorship, merely a way to save disk space by eliminating seldom-requested or never-requested data. As the author indicates, as disk space gets cheaper and as more freenet servers come on line, the need to drop data will diminish.


    --

  • Re:Journalistic Ethics? (Score:4)

    by Vuarnet (207505) <luis_milanNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Thursday August 10 2000, @11:52AM (#864207) Homepage

    goosh.. you mean what I wrote can be used to break the law.. I didn't think of it like that.. Well, I guess that law sucks and shouldn't be a law then..
    Although it's not quite as simple as that, I guess there must be hundreds of cases like this all around the world. Just because something is made into a law, doesn't mean its perfect or even fair.

    Let's face it: laws are made by governments, not by the common people. Laws should be made in order to help / protect / take care of the people, but they usually are not.

    Take the copyright laws, for instance. They were made in order to protect the creators of works of music, art, etc. but in reality they're used to protect the big corporations who make money out of them.

    Just my 2 pesos worth...

  • Re:Competition (Score:4)

    by Tough Love (215404) on Thursday August 10 2000, @12:11PM (#864208)
    Freenet appears to be quite a bold project. However it already faces competition from the most common distributed file sharing services: Napster Gnutella

    Yes, and Freenet development proceeds at a snail's pace compared to either of the above. I know why too: some of the early developers in the project are more interested in preserving their own exalted positions in the project that in letting the design/development process move forward effectively. There is more 'blocking' going on in the project than actual code development. I don't doubt it will eventually get where it's trying to go, but the question is: how many other projects with the same goals are going to get there first? I mean, come on, it's been months, and still no way to update information? Or search it? Give me a break, those problems are not insoluable.

    Ian is pretty cool, and especially, his philosphy is right on the money. His original paper [sourceforge.net] is a mighty good read. But it takes more than philosophy to build a killer software app. Please note, this isn't a troll or a flame, it's because I actually care about the project. Get your act together guys, bury the egos, and you'll have a worldbeater.
    --

  • Freenet and Spam (Score:4)

    by 1g$man (221286) on Thursday August 10 2000, @12:11PM (#864209)
    Does Freenet have similar capabilities for spamming as Gnutella does? I know Gnotella has spam filters for things like FlatPlanet, but there (seems to be nothing) from stopping someone from posting a useful looking file only to really be an advertisement. If Freenet is completely anonymous, then there won't be any real way to block spammers, is there?

  • Re:The Spectre of Ubertechnology (Score:5)

    by Cardinal Biggles (6685) on Thursday August 10 2000, @12:18PM (#864210)

    The big challenge here is to respond to Freenet's antagonism of copyright in a way that lays the groundwork for responding to similar technological threats. To set up the mechanisms which insure democratic governance of Humanity by Humanity instead of Technology.

    If you think progress was decided in the past by democratic means instead of by the development of technology you are (at least partially) wrong.

    There was never a government body that decided to start printing books. Someone just invented the printing press.

    Funnily enough, the closest thing to a technological revolution initiated by a government is the internet. And now that it's here, we start to find, for example, that we don't need copyright anymore.

    There are some who would stop the technology because they like the way the rules used to be. Even if they are the majority, they will fail in the end. They always have.

    You can call it fascism. I respectfully disagree and call it freedom.

  • Re:What the architecture tells us (Score:5)

    by Angst Badger (8636) on Thursday August 10 2000, @12:14PM (#864211)
    Unpopular information is dropped from the system.

    The real flaw of Freenet, IMHO, isn't the potential for revisionism, it's the idea that only popular information is valuable. That might make sense in a market context, but it doesn't really have any place in an intellectual context if by "intellectual" you mean to imply a search for truth instead just popularity. Moreover, it is often the most revolutionary, cutting-edge, ahead-of-their-time ideas that are the most unpopular.

    At one time, the ideas of democracy and freedom of speech were extremely unpopular ideas. In some places, they still are. Freenet-like systems would not have helped the rise of democracy very much. Mind you, it's great to see that popular ideas will be more resistant to government/corporate suppression, but they already were. It is ideas held by small minorities that are the most vulnerable.

    --

  • Re:Journalistic Ethics? (Score:5)

    by baka_boy (171146) <lennonNO@SPAMday-reynolds.com> on Thursday August 10 2000, @01:25PM (#864212) Homepage
    "Intellectual property" is the term for a creator's rights to a valuable idea, right? Show me a single company that is capable of thought, and therefore entitled to protection of its "intellectual property", and I will show you an employee who actually did the work, and no longer has the right to use their own ideas.
  • The most significant statement in that entire article was, "Unpopular information is dropped from the system." This reflects, in my eyes, dangerous assumption about what kind of data (or free speech) is valuable, and what isn't. The stated goal of Freenet is to allow unbounded free speech, yet it doesn't allow for a record or history of what has already been said. That is where the most dangerous power of censors and opressors lies: the ability to make us forget our own history, so that we can be manipulated in the same ways time and time again.

    Think of it this way: If you were trying to build a library, would you only stock periodicals? True, they are updated regularly, and are often a dense source of current information, but they are, by design, transient. Also, assuming you have finite space in which to store them, you will have to start throwing out the ones no one has checked out when the shelves are all full. Some of the old editions might cover popular events or figures, and would therefore stay popular and in cirulation, but the obscure or unknown stories of the past issues would be wiped away without a trace.

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