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Freenet, Broken Down By Content 87

Posted by timothy from the that's-me-with-the-darts dept.
cardhore links to this O'Reilly piece about Freenet, detailing what's actually on the anonymous data cloud these days. It reads, in part, "But if we were to indulge ourselves and construct a demographic of the average Freenet user from Freenet content, he'd be a crypto-anarchist Perl hacker with a taste for the classics of literature, political screeds, 1980s pop music, Adobe software, and lots of porn." I wonder what will be there (or in equivalently untraceable data pools) in five years.
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Freenet, Broken Down By Content

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  • So, what exactly thinks that your proof of concept won't illuminate the fact that anyone can make such a trap, for any content, not just underage porn (which, according to the media, and maybe yourself (". . . it will become the focus of the network"), apparently constitutes the bulk of the Internet)?

    Don't you think the FBI/FSB/RIAA/MPAA/SS/GRU/ATF/Islamic Jihad/GCHQ will be doing exactly the same thing? Setting up "munged" Freenet servers and watching who connects, then breaking down their doors? First, stuff we can get the public behind easily (underage porn), then drug information, then abortion information, then "the wrong" politics--I think we both know the slippery slope here.

    If it's not sufficiently anonymous that what you want to do is impossible, there's really no point in Freenet--this no better, network-wise, than Napster or Gnutella if any one server with contraband content can identify clients trying to get its content.

    If I'm wrong, feel free to enlighten me, please.

    (Also, if you're basing the information on your "wall of shame" on incriminating filenames, I imagine you might find that people who deal in this stuff probably don't use names that shout out "I'm kiddie porn!!!" any more than people storing warez and mp3s on free web space name them as such. The other problem is that what you're doing would be considered entrapment in court (NAL), so you might be responsbile for letting one of these scum go free some day.)

  • can you honestly expect someone working for a newspaper to tell you the truth or at least have sme measure of objectivity? it's the journalist's job to make generalizations into a good story, or at least one that makes someone say, "O gracious, George, look at those immoral / violent / repulsive / shameful (etc) people!"

    Don't get me wrong, i have the highest respect for journalists, when the refrain from writing.

  • aww, everything is flamebait nowadays. you say hello to someone and they think its a bleeding insult.
  • "he'd be a crypto-anarchist Perl hacker with a taste for the classics of literature, political screeds, 1980s pop music, Adobe software, and lots of porn"

    What else is there!?

    disc-chord
  • This is the most absurd abuse of liberty I've ever heard of. Let me repeat to you what you have just stated:

    "I will promote the downfall of peoples that distribute information that I find offensive, without reguard for their own personal liberties or any concern for how my actions will infringe on the corner stone of a FREENET community."

    Think about the consequences of your actions before you promote your own agenda. I am not in favor of illegal pornography, but I am not inclined to infringe on the sanctity of a FREENET to enforce my own ideaology on others. I wish some of you idealists would learn something about social-interaction in a global space before you start "righteous" crusades.

    The really amazing bit here is that you acknowledge that your target is those that would distribute pornography that is illegal in the US, which means you must be aware that there are more relaxed standards in other parts of the globe. So where do you feel your place is, when you seek to enforce US policy on a global community? (or did they start limiting FreeNet to US shores while I wasn't looking?) It is the notion of US policy being enforced in a global community that inspired the gnutella's, and the napsters and FreeNet, so that information may be exchanged without the threat of "the evil empire"... now only some information may be exchanged by your policy Tuxedo Mask?

    disc-chord

  • I disagree as to the inadequacy of the sampling size. I have no knowledge of how many items actually are on Freenet. However, the margin of error on 1070 items of a population of n > 1070 to infinity is not so high as to make the stats worthless. You can make an argument against accuracy no matter what the size of the data set since the basis is probability, but 1070 in a data set is fairly trustworthy, though not overly so.

    I think the real concerns regarding the sample here are methods and the possible subjectivity of a single data analyzer. For example, a particular search pattern could yield content of a certain type more regularly than others; what is porn to one person might be art to another.

  • It probably just uses MD5 or something.
  • The thing that I don't like about porn is that I feel like I'm being lied to -- that I'm subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) being educated in falseness about what relationships between men and women are supposed to be.

    But then again, I'm one of those people who feels that sex only has a proper role in a monogamous committed relationship, so, you know, why beleive me?
  • For the benefit of others who haven't actually read the O'Reilly story yet, Mr. Orwant makes reference to finding "pictures of naked people playing lawn darts", hence Timothy's "that's-me-with-the-darts dept." comment.

    Why do I get the feeling swarms of people are going to be trying to find "lawn darts" on freenet now?
  • ...in which case, perhaps it's obstruction or conspiracy.
  • Wow.. you take porn pretty serious, huh? Maybe that's the problem. Porn is entertainment. It's not art. It's not meant to educate you about relationships between men and women. It's designed to arouse and stimulate your imagination.

    I can buy this in part -- you're probably right in that most people can distinguish between the fantasies portrayed in porn and real life.

    Still, it seems to me that arousing and stimulating your imagination in that way has got to color -- note I say color and not determine -- how you look at your relationships. Heck, biology and general culture are already pushing me to favor the woman who looks like Pamela Anderson over the average looking girl who I feel peaceful around, and recreational affection over conversation. Seems to me porn pushes you further that way. Not that I think anyone should plan lifelong celibacy. Just think you're more likely to make good relationship decisions w/o its influence. For some imbalanced people, it doesn't seem impossible the effects might be harsher.

    You're free to either look at porn or not. You're free to determine when and with whom you have sex. So are the rest of us. Now if we can just get the damn politicians and religious groups to understand that it's not their place to decide for us how we should live our lives, things should be just fine.

    Relax. I wasn't advocating that we send everybody with porn to jail. I'm not even advocating that we should burn all the stuff; though I'm of the opinion it might be a good thing if everybody got rid of it themselves, the implementation of trying to do it for everyone would be nightmarish and in the end futile and impossible. I agree that people have got to take responsibility for their own lives, so I state what I think some of the problems are with porn, and you still get to chose. Good system, huh?

    I think many religious leaders have a handle on that idea, too. They'd rather not see even borderline porn showing up on TV and billboards and anywhere people are likely to just trip over it ( Which is at least as valid a request as not being subject to public prayer and creationism in schools), but they also understand that the only way to really affect change in society is for individuals to chose to do so in their own life, rather than trying to solve problems by policy. Some go beyond this. It's too bad.

    I'd be curious to know, however, what you'd think of the following idea: making it illegal not to posses or produce porn, but to profit from it. Might end concerns about exploitation, and people who were into it would have to be into it for love of the hobby. :) Might drive everything underground and cause worse ills. Might have a problem defining porn. It's hard to say. I thought the idea was intruiging, though.
  • Do you really want to keep people looking over their shoulders?

    I want to stop kids from being hurt by people making child porn. I don't give a sh*t whether the consumers look over their shoulders or not. It's their own life -- as long as they aren't hurting someone else (or paying someone to hurt someone else -- same difference), I frankly don't see how I'm justified in caring about what they do.

    If you really think your actions reduce demand (and thus stop some kid from being abused) -- good for you! Otherwise, I'm not really sure I see the point.

  • Ok, since I just realized how long this thing got, I'm going to say this up front. I may come off as being rather pissed about this. That's true, but I'm not pissed at you or what you wrote, just at a lot of things surrounding this issue. Please don't take offense.

    making it illegal not to posses or produce porn, but to profit from it.

    Seems to me that there's no real evidence that porn actually causes any harm to people who look at it, even if they look at it often. As for exploitation, I don't think I understand the reasoning. People get exploited all the time in many industries. Take professional athletes for instance. They often get lured away from getting a real education by representatives of the big leagues. They play sports that are often quite physically damaging to their bodies. Some of them are paid very well, until they can't play any more. Some of them are not paid very well at all, and still suffer many of the same consequences as the well-paid players.

    Now, why is it ok for professional athletes to be exploited, but not for professional performers in the porn industry? Seems to me it's the product that many people don't like, mainly due to their religious beliefs, so they look for reasons to justify their persecution of the industry. Yet the same people ignore the exploitation in many other industries and areas of our lives.

    If someone wants to let someone take pictures of them nude, then that should be their right. What's wrong with being nude? Many people are not at all offended by nudity and consider it to be quite natural. If someone wants to let someone film them having sex, again, what's wrong with that? Even if they want to do it for a living? People are willing to pay for it. Sure, they embellish and enhance the performance, but so does hollywood with everything they do. What it all comes down to is that some people feel that nudity and sex are inherently immoral except within the limits of what their religion prescribes. Then they procede to try to stamp out anything that offends them, wherever it may occur.

    A good example of this is a church near where I live. They are lobbying the city to close down a nearby "gentleman's club" because they feel it is too close to their church. They've show this place on the news several times. It's hardly offensive in appearance. It looks just like any other nightclub from the outside. There's no lewd language or pictures to be seen. Nothing to offend anyone. But since they know that there are topless dancers inside, they are offended. Since they are offended, they feel they have the right to force the owners of the club out of business.

    Perhaps it is this sort of action that colors my views on these issues. Because I see many of the people who are against nudity and pornography as being intolerant bullies that try to force everyone to conform to their own views of how people should act. It disgusts me and I do what I can to support those people who are willing to stand up to the bullies, even when they are doing it mainly to defend their ability to make a profit. I don't think there is anything wrong with profiting from porn, as long as it's done within the constraints of the laws that protect employees in other industries.

  • Sorry for taking so long, I was banned from posting for a few days.

    I doubt that you really have a consistent position here... probably due to a misguided notion of privacy. For moral questions, privacy should be defined morally, not legally.

    To give an example:
    If I videotape people changing their clothes, and no one but myself knows of the existence of these tapes... i.e., I don't ask for permission, and I don't distribute them, then according to your position, this is hurting no one, and no one should care about what I'm doing.

    But my own feeling is that this is a clear invasion of privacy, and I should do what I can to discourage it. Granted, it may not directly hurt the people videotaped, but it at least hurts the videotaper.

    Which is not to say that eliminates the videotaper's right to privacy, so this is something which should not be pursued by the investigative arm of the government.
    [Abusive situations or selling of material is of course different, and should be actively investigated.]
    But I see nothing wrong with my trying to help people develop their sense of conscience... it's nothing I can force, and I don't claim my view of morality is absolutely correct. I feel justified in doing this for the same reasons that I feel it would be wrong for me to encourage people to beat up homeless people. (I know, that's a stretch, but I can't think of a better example at the moment.)

    Of course, this is mostly a contorted excuse to troll, but I don't think trolling is always such a terrible thing.
  • The first example you give is a bit off the mark, mostly as my definition of harm isn't what you think it is. You yourself define this as 'invasion of privacy'. Who is this an offense against? Certainly not the person operating the camera. The first example you give does indeed harm the videotapee, inasmuch as any violation of rights constitutes harm. Thus, I agree that videotaping someone in a situation in which they have a reasonable expectation of privacy is wrong, but I take this position without considering any potential harm to the videotaper.

    More importantly, though, is what exactly a `sense of conscience' entails. I don't see how making people look over their shoulders (making them afraid of consequences) translates into making them more moral people -- more scared people, maybe. But scaring people into doing The Right Thing (through hellfire-and-brimstone or any other means) isn't necessarily right itself; much better (though harder) is to teach them to do The Right Thing because it's right.

    There are other reasons the position you take could be considered objectionable as well. To address your actions in the context of your second example: what you're doing is closer to claiming that there are video cameras installed all over public property, so any attacks on homeless people will be on tape. It's done for a good reason, certainly; I absolutely respect that. However, it also has the effect of making people less comfortable in a public space (dunno 'bout you, but I don't like being watched -- even when I'm doing nothing wrong). Is giving everyone a false belief that they're being monitored in the interest in changing the behaviour of a relatively small group (who may or may not be affectd) really worthwhile? I don't think so. (Of course, if you're in London, you may have a somewhat different view of this).

    And as a final parting shot, frankly, I don't care what someone else does as long as it only harms themselves (for a definition of harm which includes any infringement on another's rights). I don't see why it should be anyone's business if some 3rd party decides to do harm to themselves, as long as the aforementioned 3rd party was capable of considering the consequences of their actions (ie. if my friend is drunk and wants to play russion roulette, I have a moral obligation to stop him; if he's sober, I'll still try to stop him -- he is my friend -- but I'm no longer in the wrong if I don't and he kills himself, as he made a conscious decision to pursue a course of action which he knew could have that result). Any other course of action denies men (meant in the generic sense, of course) the right to take any action they wish which does not infringe upon the rights of another -- something I really do consider a basic right.

    Btw, in the future should you want to inform me that you've responded to an old post, just use email; the address I post is real. (If you /did/ mail me and got no response, my bad -- the company VPN has been down for several days [grumble... incompetant sysadmins...], so I've been unable to retrieve my mail).
  • Hmm.. ok, I see. Yeah, you've pretty much convinced me I was wrong. Encouraging paranoia is pretty much the same as lying, even without trying to consider the other effects of manipulation (inna final analysis, etc etc)

    My basic moral outlook is that as people mature they develop a sense of reason and conscience, and the moral question is ultimately a matter of being true to your own conscience. So in my opinion, law exists to keep people free, and should be separate from morality. Thus laws against murder, slavery etc. are good laws. A law against drinking alcohol, while it might improve people's lives, since it tries to usurp the individual's free will unnecessarily. Not an original idea, I know.

    Ok, so far so good. But these are all very grand principles and are not always useful in specific situations. Which is just as well, otherwise what's the point in a conscience, eh?

    I guess what I want (sometimes) to do is to encourage people to develop their consciences. But I guess the only way to do that is to try to actually interact with people on a personal basis, serve as a good example, and maybe teach them to think. This is very frustrating since there is no immediate gratification. But yeah, I see now that is probably the only way to go. If I actually could make people afraid of a nonexistent punishing agency, it wouldn't be any better for them than actually making such a thing real anyway. Whew.

    Ok, thanks for the heads up, and I will now resolve to quite slashdot cold turkey.

  • Re:Misconceptions (Score:3)

    by wizard992 ( 176718 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @01:17AM (#570866)
    "I'mm getting really tired of all the people saying that Freenet (or things analogous to it) won't work because you can't trust people, and therefore you can't trust the things that people share. These people are ignoring the other major use that Freenet has (and things like Napster, Scour, and Gnutella don't), and that is extra space for YOUR stuff. If you can promote Freenet by advertising it as free extra storage, then you can build a much larger user base to then focus on the sharing aspect."

    Sure, and then we could cut out the "classics of literature, political screeds, 1980s pop music, Adobe software" part and make it just "Lots of porn"

    and mp3s...

    and warez...

    etc... IMO, advertising freenet as just another free storage service will destroy the actual project.

  • Each unique file has a unique key. In the case of say linux-2.4.0 it should be easily guessable. In the case of song-artist.mp3 i guess there will need to be a way of distinguishing different versions that make have the same name.

  • pR0n (Score:2)

    by Taurine ( 15678 )
    How amusing, the last time Freenet came up on /. I checked it out, and commented that it wasn't really promoting free speech but free pR0n, and got modded down as flamebait. Today the same comment by a different author is front-page stuff ;-)
  • "But if we were to indulge ourselves and construct a demographic of the average Freenet user from Freenet content, he'd be a crypto-anarchist Perl hacker with a taste for the classics of literature, political screeds, 1980s pop music, Adobe software, and lots of porn." I wonder what will be there (or in equivalently untraceable data pools) in five years.

    Well, I think the average user will be a crypto-anarchist Perl hacker with a taste for the classics of literature, political screeds, 1990s pop music, free software, and lots of porn. But thats just a guess.
  • You're telling me you don't have data that you only kind of want to keep around? I for one have a rather large (>4Gigs) collection of music videos that I only occaisonally watch and that is currently nearly busting my hard drive. (I have a rather small, by today's standards, hard drive. Only 6 Gigs.) I would gladly offload some or all of it onto Freenet in exchange for the low reliablility of retrieval. Of course music videos may be a bad example, because they might be popular in and of themselves, and would have a greater storage reliability than say some homework I did.
  • Actually, that wasn't my first impression, especially after skimming the description text. Although the 'dept' used may lead to some questions..

    Moz.
  • How would I know that the packages I download are official packages and not fake packages with trojans?
    That's what PGP signatures are for.

  • Re:We need everyone on freenet. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is it like napster that you type in a search word and get a huge list of hits form which you then have to manually dig out the stuff you really want to download?

    Nope, you are just supposed to guess what the filename would be. It's a real annoyance. It makes Napster seem like paradise. There are some web pages which what are supposed to list working keys for freenet, but consider yourself lucky if even 10% of those keys exist!

  • A weasel... with a joint and a porno mag.
  • this analysis doesn't take into account certain facts, such as that names do not always accurately reflect content, some listed keys were never inserted into Freenet, some listed keys have since fallen out of Freenet, and some information in Freenet is not listed.

    On the contrary. The third paragraph is pretty clear on the fact that the names don't neccessarily reflect the content, saying that a file called "constitution.txt" could contain ANYTHING be it an MPEG or copy of software. The author then suggests that he is indulging himself by constructing the demographics based on keyname, even though he knows it is not neccessarily accurate...

    Sounds to me like he's taken into account the probable inaccuracies and made that clear to the reader.

    Ender

  • Of course. Anyone who thinks that pornography bears any relation whatsoever to real life is stupid. I just don't connect the two. In real life, sex is not my goal.

    ------
  • Pornography and monogamous relationships are not against each other. In fact, pornography has nothing to do with real life relationships, especially monogamous ones. When you realize this, you realize that it isn't so bad, because it's just a bunch of entertaining pictures. It's only bad if you connect the images to reality.

    ------

  • Yeah, you're right. We shouldn't be wasting our time on inventing new technologies, because heck, they take *time* to implement. All of the software we will ever need has already been coded. The global network is as fast as it's going to get. We have enough privacy.

    PFFT.

  • I remember a lot of talk on this, regarding how the volume of porn on VHS was a big thing that helped that format claim shelf space from Betamax. Now? Still much porn out there, but it didn't end up becomming the only thing available... It worked out well.
  • The complaint that you're being miseducated can be (and has) be waged against every fictional piece since the beginning of time. Do you complain about Star Wars because it was created in order to give you a view of divinity that you would consider false?

    Porn is not didactic, as a general rule. It is not designed to educate. It is not designed to reflect reality. To judge it on those grounds, is absurd.
  • The Freenet designers have taken incredible steps to ensure that no Freenet communication that has been intercepted can have its start point or finish point determined. This can only be done if you know for sure that all communication going through your server originated from the server that it came from and was not passed through by that server from somewhere else. You cannot identify that by looking at the communications received or sent by your server. You would need some other way to determine this such as a packet sniffer (Carnivore) or phone tap.
  • Well, yes, except that the Adobe software and 80s pop music are subsets of "warez" and "mp3z," respectively. Nevertheless, excellent point. Making Freenet just another place to go for warez would a) take the fun out of finding warez, and more importantly b) drown out the content for which it was designed.

  • FREENETS BROKEN!!! (down by content) (Score:5)

    by Sanity ( 1431 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @11:32PM (#570884) Homepage Journal
    What an unfortunate title!

    --

  • definately porn
  • I'll tell ya what's gonna be there in five years: porn.

    Ah, porn: it's nice to find a constant these days.

    ^_^
    ---
  • Well, my "smart" side wants to side with those who chose porn as the correct answer. I'm sure the future is safe in that respect. It needs to be broken down into further subgroups, though, like: "Perl hacker with a taste for 80's cartoons, Macromedia software, and lots of hentai." Or even: "PHP hack who enjoys walks along the beach underneath the moon and surfing BUGTRAQ seeks clueless script kiddie. And lots of pr0n."

    On the other hand, nevermind....
  • What about the stolen M$ source code ?? ;)

    & Genuine Britney Spears pr0n ...
    & Bill Gatez credit card serialz ...

  • "Lots of porn" redundant (Score:3)

    by Temporal ( 96070 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @11:47PM (#570889) Journal
    I mean, who doesn't like porn?

    ------

  • on freenet (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    classics of literature, political screeds, 1980s pop music, Adobe software, and lots of porn.

    Can I enter the Matrix?

  • If my understanding of freenet is correct, as well as being anonymous it is also smart enough to choose the best source of a file if multiple copies exist. As well as allowing anonymity, it would also allow people to use things like apt-get without needing to maintain lists of ftp servers or let you download the linux kernel from your closest mirror without needing to know what that mirror is.

    But for this to work, we need to get the major FTP servers out there to start running freenet servers too.

    What will be on Freenet in 5 years? Hopefully anything you would want to download.

  • That must have freaked you out. I actually read it as "Freenet has been destroyed by the content that it carries." Of course, that's not what the article is about. I'd suggest a better title would have been "Categorizing Freenet content."

  • Read the story man!

    It's about the content being categorised not the system breaking :-)

  • I mean, ONE adverticement was enough to count for 2% of the total video content.

    Freenet is not done yet and the number of people who use it seems to be much too small to infer anything.

    Also, if a similar study was made about the real net, I suspect certainly that atleast as much porn would be found.
  • Journalism at its finest when inuendos can be made based on names of files rather than the content of such files.
  • Fount it...

    It's in sourceforge [sourceforge.net].

    --ricardo

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • You last used JDK 1.0 didn't you -cp becomes -classpath in java 1.1 and above
  • Fine, so you can change your node to keep all inserted files. This still doesn't free up any hard drive space for you.
  • Someone should put the Celera Genome Sequence on Freenet.

    Ahhh, synergy.

  • Permanent files aren't possible (Score:3)

    by retep ( 108840 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @09:09AM (#570901)

    Requesting your own files doesn't work. You would have to do the requests from nodes all over the network. If you just request from one single node it will get the data, cache it then just give you the data every time. So only that one node would have a copy of your data.

    Telling your node to not delete specific files doesn't work. Just because a specific node has some data on it doesn't mean any other node can find it. Each node has a set of references that point to other nodes. If a key x is "close" to reference y then the node pointed to by reference y will be contacted. But the references don't last forever and are only renewed by someone requesting data. If no-one requests the data the references to your data will eventually decay. When that happens even if someone did want to request the data they would be able to find it.

    See this [netunify.com] page for a more indepth discussion of this.

  • First, proper servers and clients must be written. I run a freenet node (when I'm not in Windows playing cstrike) and the current server would definitely turn off any sysadmin running a major FTP server. It's written in Java, doesn't background itself and detach from the terminal, writes debug info to the console, and eats up a gigantic amount of CPU power for even a single connection (I don't know how much of that is Java's fault and how much is necessary because of the encrypion freenet uses).

    There are no really good clients either.

    Naturally, these problems will go away in time, but I think even then the big boys will not want to run freenet servers for legal reasons. Let's say you're a sysadmin for a large ISP or college and you're running a freenet node. The nature of freenet dictates that after a while, your node will have become basically a proxy cache for your freenet using clients. Now let's say some of your clients fetch a lot of kiddie porn from freenet. You have now become a distributor of child pornography. You don't know that yet. You have plausible deniability because freenet doesn't allow you to see what you're storing on your disk and pushing over your pipes on behalf of other freenet clients. But if law enforcement has decided that freenet is bad, they will have no qualms about going after your freenet server (and leaving your http and ftp proxies in peace, even though the legal situation is exactly the same there).
    --

  • Just because something is anonymous doesn't mean that you can't trust it. Freenet permits nifty things called "subspaces" which allow you to anonymously claim authorship of a number of pieces of data. If you prove to be reliable, even though people won't know your name, you can still build up a reputation that people can trust.

    --

  • actually, you can be easily traced on usenet by isp logs, your post can be removed by moderators, and your isp can choose to block certain groups, making usenet not at all like freenet.
  • Having a wealth of porn on freenet is not all that bad. If that's where people go to get their porn, then that's where they will start to go to get other stuff too. Freenet, like the internet itself could have porn eventually draw people in in bulk. Think about it, if the internet never had any porn on it, why would people who didn't care about computers, or video games have gotten on the internet at all five years ago? Think real hard and try to remember people getting the internet that you didn't expect to be the kind of people to use it. Maybe they didn't want to get sports scores or read the news after all. I'll bet it brought in more people than you might think.
  • 9.4% of the audio on Freenet is Jesus Christ Superstar.

    Umm...I'm not sure what to think.
  • A friend of mine is working on a gui client (windows and unix) and he hopes to have it working by Christmas. That should make it much more popular.
  • The whole point of Freenet is that it is impossible to determine who is accessing what information.

    --

  • If anyone needs the address for the Freenet website then here it is:

    http://freenet.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]

    Self Bias Resistor
    "If ye doubt your courage or your strength, then come ne'er further. For death awaits ye with large big pointy teeth." - John Cleese, Monty Python and the Quest For The Holy Grail

  • I've been following freenet from near the beginning. I've run a node for quite some time, hoping upon hoping that eventually there would be clients that actually do something useful. I'm currently waiting for the Tropus project to come out with some code. Last I checked, there was nothing substantial being committed. They claim to be working on a music client that will be ready before Christmas. Well, there's only 2 more weeks left before Santa has to comes down the chimney with that killer mp3 app.

  • Wow.. you take porn pretty serious, huh? Maybe that's the problem. Porn is entertainment. It's not art. It's not meant to educate you about relationships between men and women. It's designed to arouse and stimulate your imagination. You're free to either look at porn or not. You're free to determine when and with whom you have sex. So are the rest of us. Now if we can just get the damn politicians and religious groups to understand that it's not their place to decide for us how we should live our lives, things should be just fine.

  • ...unless someone else requests them. Otherwise, they just stick around on your node -- and if they aren't requested there often, they get deleted (unless, of course, you modify the code appropriately).
  • Not really. If you add 8,000 nodes with just warez and mp3s to the 200 with warez, mp3s and political screeds, you still have 200 nodes with political screeds. If some of the 8,000 people request any political screeds (or some of the 200 peoples' requests go through them), then copies get propogated out onto their nodes too.
  • FYI, there is work going on (finished?) protocol-wise to support searching. Previously, it wasn't a matter of lack of tools but lack of ability.
  • Done any statistics work? If your sample is truly random (which it isn't, in this case -- freenet doesn't have any mechanism to permit random sampling), then only a small sample is needed. The problem here isn't a lack of sample size, but rather a lack of random sampling.
  • Scare people away from accessing the stuff (you can't *really* do a Freenet Wall of Shame, as it would hit false alarms on your neighbors and miss nodes further away, but you can threaten it) and if you're sufficiently succesful, the material gets eliminated. Straight clever.

  • Misconceptions (Score:3)

    by GMontag451 ( 230904 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @12:23AM (#570917) Homepage
    I'mm getting really tired of all the people saying that Freenet (or things analogous to it) won't work because you can't trust people, and therefore you can't trust the things that people share. These people are ignoring the other major use that Freenet has (and things like Napster, Scour, and Gnutella don't), and that is extra space for YOUR stuff. If you can promote Freenet by advertising it as free extra storage, then you can build a much larger user base to then focus on the sharing aspect.
  • I found this link [oreillynet.com] at the bottom of the linked page to be rather interesting as well. It lists many other "sharing" projects, several of which I was unfamiliar.

    Would you like to pet my Penguin? The Linux Pimp [thelinuxpimp.com]

  • This is an analysis of the keys listed on key index servers, analyzed by name. The key index servers are publically accessible web sites where people can enter keys for things which they have placed in Freenet.

    Therefore, this analysis doesn't take into account certain facts, such as that names do not always accurately reflect content, some listed keys were never inserted into Freenet, some listed keys have since fallen out of Freenet, and some information in Freenet is not listed.

    This is not so much an analysis of what is on Freenet as in what people think they should tell the world is in Freenet.
  • the author is only profiling 1070 items that he found... assuming freenet isn't really *that* small (and if it *is*, then why are we bothering to talk about it?), then this sample is way too small to generate any accurate stats.

  • Nope, sorry (Score:3)

    by Galvatron ( 115029 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @04:59AM (#570921)
    Doesn't work for Freenet. Freenet storage is not permanent. Since nodes must set aside dedicated HD space for storing Freenet files, whenever there's a space crunch, the least popular files go. So, if people don't want to download your English essay, it's probably going to get removed.

    You could automate it, I guess, so that you kept requesting your files, thereby increasing their popularity. Unfortunately, I believe that if you have space for it, the file will be moved to your node if you've left room (Freenet tries to move files to the areas where they're most popular), and if there is no room, I guess you've got a little extra space, but you've probably got no bandwidth left because you're constantly requesting your own files.

  • "...he'd be a crypto-anarchist Perl hacker with a taste for the classics of literature, political screeds, 1980s pop music, Adobe software, and lots of porn."

    Hehe - one wonders what kind of animal would be appropriate for the O'Reilly treatment of FreeNet. hmm..no..beats me...
    --

  • The same way you know you can trust Debian in the first place. I mean, the entire distribution _could_ just be a trojan horse. Unless you've read and understood every single bit of the source (which I haven't) you don't know whether it's real. But it's fairly easy to make a guess.

    Besides, freenet isn't trying to replace the entire internet, is it?

  • or something.

    aside from some of the technical content, doesn't seem much here that I would be all that interested in

    most of it is available elsewhere in better quality.

    and to be honest, the bandwidth and reliability needed to make it work well is still a few years out.

  • Re:No addresses? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I mean, the entire distribution _could_ just be a trojan horse.

    No shit. But if it were, I'd know who to blame. We know exactly who works on it, the ftp servers log uploads very well, etc.

    However, my brilliant young scientist, Freenet is specifically designed to be untraceable, to destroy logs, and to generally remove any consequences from uploading anything.

    Surely you see the difference.

    You can of course download your apt modules, then make sure the official Debian boys have signed them. But this is a needlessly complex and risky way to work around the very nature of freenet.

    The internet is not anonymous. Never has been, never will be. You can be tracked online more thoroughly than you ever could before. But you generally aren't, because no one gives a shit what you do online. Freenet is a toy cooked up by paranoid freaks who have not come to realize these simple facts.

    Well, at least it keeps the kooks busy.
  • Just to give fair warning to all you you deal in illegal (US) pornography:

    I'm currently hacking together a munged Freenet server for a Freenet Wall Of Shame [zeropaid.com].

    I do not oppose Freenet. Actually, I think it may not just be useful in safeguarding our liberty -- it may even be essential.

    That is why I am trying to protect content. I am not trying to eliminate underage porn from Freenet, but if we don't do something it will become the focus of the network, and it will be shut down... not to mention all the people such as myself who are not willing to donate system resources to promote the exploitation of minors.

    If anyone else here is working on a similar project, please note it below as we may be able to collaborate.

  • It runs fine on my 486... I installed freenet and Java without going root. I was rather surprised. It was like the good old days... I think I had to specify some path before I ran it. It blew my mind that it ran at all.

    Something like:

    export PATH=$PATH:/home/user/jre1.2.2/bin/:/home/user/jre 1.2.2/lib/

    The downside was that I could finish my coffee before my 486 could deal with all that encryption code written in Java.

    I do have a K6-2, but it looks like Freenet doesn't do NAT yet, so either I figure out the ports, or I run it on my "firewall."

  • How about java -jar freenet.jar.

    Cannot say anything about the parameters, though, I don't know the freenet app. With a decent manifest file you shouldn't have to specify the application class as a user. And any config file should be in the home directory, so I don't understand why you have to specify that. Maybe a couple of ./ (like in current directory) could help. View the content of a JAR file with unzip -l freenet.jar (it's basically a ZIP file).

    And please guys, no more Java bashing. It has been said many times that JRE's have improved in terms of speed, functionality etc.
  • You can't trace people back to their REAL identities, but you can trace them back to their public keys if they choose to let you. You can request only a copy of a file signed by an individual (ie. the debian) pubkey.

    If I choose to use a particular public key for all my freenet postings, people can trust me by what I post -- which is how they trust me anyhow.
  • I call it "trolling with a conscience."

    If it keeps a few more people looking over their shoulders, I'm happy. Paranoia is no substitute for morality, but it sure is better than nothing.

    If I did want to catch freenet users I'd hand out trojans (as it were) since that would actually work. But that's clearly illegal, so I may as well leave that to The Feds. (muhahahaha...)
  • KHKs are quite obsolete now (they were the only type of key in Freenet 0.2). They have been superseded by KSKs where the key transmitted is essentially the SHA1 hash of a public key generated from a textual key, and the file is encrypted under the corresponding private key generated from that same textual key.
  • Sorry, but files on Freenet are favored not only on popularity but also on *size*. Small files are favored over large files. The main purpose of this is to keep huge unpopular files from wasting gigabytes of space on Freenet, while keeping smaller files such as textfiles and HTML files which are just as unpopular, but don't take up nearly as much space.
  • There is a specific mechanism in Freenet to handle this exact kind of problem. It is called subspaces. Subspaces give people PK encrypted (anyone who knows of a particular subspace and a file in it can access it, but only one with the proper private key can put files in a particular subspace) private namespaces. Since they're PK encrypted so that only one with the private key can add files to it, you can trust a particular subspace to be safe. It is actually *more* secure than the web - on the web you could theoretically change the packets in HTTP connections on the fly, because normal HTTP connections are not PK encrypted like subspaces are.
  • Playboy is art, but then, again, it's not porn.
  • You can see what it might be someday, but at the moment it's not very useful: the installation process is clunky, and there aren't any polished clients.

    Hm, reminds me of another open-source protocol in development...ah yes, "Jabber" I believe it was called. :) For that matter, it sounds like a good number of OSS programs/OSes, unfortunately.

    -lx

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