Freenet 0.5.1 Released, P2P Network Stabilizing 659
mids writes "With version 0.5.1, Freenet isn't only the most secure & anonymous P2P network, but also getting pretty fast!
Reliable downloading of files as large as 700MB from Freenet at average download rates as high as 100k/sec on a broadband internet connection are sighted (which compares quite favorably to more conventional P2P applications)."
Terrorism (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Terrorism (Score:3, Interesting)
It's just one massive web of headache.
Re:Terrorism (Score:2, Funny)
Jokes that require footnotes aren't funny (1)
(1) we treat the parenthesised portion of the parent as a footnote, though technically it's an aside (2).
(2) labouring the point isn't funny either.
Re:Terrorism (Score:2)
Re:Terrorism (Score:5, Insightful)
" I don't want my node to be used to harbor kiddie porn, offensive content or terrorism. What can I do?
The true test of someone who claims to believe in Freedom of Speech is whether they tolerate speech which they disagree with, or even find disgusting. If this is not acceptable to you, you should not run a Freenet node."
From the freenet.org documentation page. I find it hard to believe that "the true test" of Freedom of Speech means tolerating child porn. You can be sure as hell that I will take their advice and not run a Freenet node.
Child Pornography (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's pretty reasonable. They take an absolute position of freedom of speech, including allowing things like libel to be placed on Freenet.
And it's technically silly to even care. The point of Freenet is that it treats all data the same, and only cares about popularity. Is chunk of data id # af325a15b7791fc13b really popular? Then regardless of the content, it's going to spread around. Freenet tries to reduce network load, and ignores artifical attempts to prevent it from doing so.
In essence, it enforces the much-talked-about common carrier status on everyone. No one knows what's passing through their computer, because it just doesn't matter. It's data, someone wants it, and caching it gets it to them more efficiently.
I find it vaguely odd that you, a network engineer, are unable to isolate the transmission of data from attempts to censor it. Do you believe that the networks you build aren't used for things that you would consider immoral?
Freenet, by virtue of some features of it and its popularity, provide some services that are unavailable elsewhere. There are few other places that you can get really truly anonymous email that you can *trust* to be anonymous.
Actually, I find Freenet a good example of the simple impracticality of attempting to censor data today, with the ease of transmission and storage available. I'll be amazed if any broad class of data can be censored.
Finally, a comment on your morality complaint. You find child pornography distasteful, and want to choose not to serve it. That's fine. However, the common condemnation of child pornography is based more upon attempts to prevent violation of a particular social code than out of interest for children's welfare (contrast this with actual sex with children, which certainly does have potentially severe negative physical effects). There are some tribes in New Zealand and Africa that do not wear clothing (well, aside from some ornamentation). If a photographer went there and took pictures (ignoring for a moment whether the tribals would have any issues with the picture-taking itself), these people wouldn't really think anything of being seen in the nude. The photographer may well have been producing material designed to "incite lust", which would make said material pornography. However, to argue that there is any form of damage being caused to the subject is ludicrous. Now, in the United States and much of the world, Victorian ethics have had an enormous impact. There's a general nudity taboo, and the concept of child pornography is generally unaccepted. However, that is very much a product of the society, an artifact of religious and social pressures, not an obviously beneficial thing.
Actually, while I'm complaining about common views of child pornography, how well do your views on it approximate the actual, legally enforced definition used in the United States? People very frequently claim that they find child pornography utterly repulsive. And yet, legally, "child pornography" includes people that most would hardly consider children. Would a nude seventeen year old be repulsive, whereas suddenly an eighteen year old not be?
I really shouldn't have to put this disclaimer here, but child pornography is so commonly disliked that it's necessary to be taken seriously. I don't find child pornography appealing, though I don't have this ridiculously overblown hatred of it and the people involved in its production that many people culture. There's also a not unreasonable chance that I'd find a nude seventeen-year-old to be attractive, so I'd enjoy some of the material that the US has made illegal.
Essentially, I'd say that someone taking nude pictures of an American child is doing about the same thing as feeding beef to a Hindu child or pork to a Jewish child. They're violating social norms, and probably piss off some people, but I don't see a
Re:Child Pornography (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I'm aware, and I speak as merely a member of the human race here, and not a lawyer (are the two mutually exclusive?... I don't know) a photograph of a naked child is not "child pornography," "kiddie porn" or whatever.
If that were true, then there would be parents who've taken photographs of their children in the bath, naked on the beach or running around in the garden who were by that definition child pronographers.
H&M, an old (now defunct?) naturist magazine regularly showed pictures of persons under the age of 18 in a state of undress, and was on sale, legally, in British newsagents up and down the country, for many years.
If this was seen by the law as KP (as I believe it is sometimes quaintly known) then you can bet there would have been dawn raids on every newspaper shop in the UK. This didn't happen.
Also artists such as Balthus, would have found themselves in court, for creating works that could perhaps, at least, be called "child erotica" (there is no actual sexual activity in his paintings, but frequently "suggestive" poses, and allusions to sexuality.)
Child Pornography involves children engaging in sexual activity with other children or adults, which is then recorded. It's not just a 3 year old runing up the garden, naked as the day he was born, to his mother's camera, grinning like a maniac, on a summer's day.
Real Child pornography is not about a social norm being transgressed, although some hard-liners like the people in Kidscape, I believe, define child abuse as having sex with someone under the age of 16, here in the UK; a declaration that certain countries and cultures on the continent and elsewhere throughout the world, are populated by child abusers because of their lower ages of consent.
Of course such a position is somewhat fanatical and isn't worth much of a second thought.
Real child abuse involves events that are traumatic and have an immense impact on people's lives. It always involves the abuse of power, the taking advantage of and manipulation of someone who is less informed, and less able to understand that they are not acting in their own interests.
These people are called children.
This is why there are laws concerning the age of consent, both in sexual activity, and appearing in pornography: to protect the vulnerable.
That in The Netherlands, a 16 year old can be shown involved in a gangband with a dozen men, and the same is illegal in the US, is not the issue.
That a four year old is shown being raped in it's anus, is. I do not believe that this is a cultural issue; it is a humanitarian one.
Re:Child Pornography (Score:3, Informative)
Look,
I know this isn't central to your argument, but I feel the need to point out that you don't know what you're talking about. New Zealand is a developed, western nation with a top-20 spot on the OECD and quite clear laws regarding public nudity.
The "tribes" you refer to are known here as "iwi", and are also technologically advanced and largely western in lifestyle. The Maori (native New Zealand) people do not live in mud huts and run around in grass skirts - t
Re:Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
Quote #2:
It's hurting the children, you fool!
Honestly, your argument seems to be that it's okay to hurt people as long as you're not making money. You are saying that it's acceptable to abduct or illegally buy children, beat them, rape them, photograph/film it, and distribute it to other sick pervs as long as you're not doing it for cash.
What is this, some kind of inverted public service? Is economic damage truly the only sort of harm you recognize? That's reprehensible! Congratulations buddy, you're the first one on my Slashdot "enemies" list.
Finally. . . (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Finally. . . (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Finally. . . (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Finally. . . (Score:3, Funny)
A man walks into the shrinks office and says "Doctor, you have to help me! All I can think about all day is Tom Jones! Isn't that bizarre?!" Shrink says, "Nah, it's not unusual."
Re:Finally. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
The "RIAA sucks" kinda things don't wash here as the BBC aren't in the RIAA
However, if you can't be that legal, try your local lending library, they often have stuff like that knocking around.
I have no problem with people downloading stuff to see if they like it or whatever but from the tone of your message I'd guess you actually want to listen to the whole thing. So drink a few less beers this week, eat a couple less twinkies and go buy it......
Then bask in righteous glory
Troc
700 MB of (Score:3, Funny)
Re:700 MB of (Score:5, Funny)
And 20 GB of pr0n.
Re:700 MB of (Score:2, Funny)
The problem isn't speed. (Score:5, Insightful)
my 0.02
Re:The problem isn't speed. (Score:2)
Remember the good ole days of editting config.sys and autoexec.bat, tweaking every line to get DOOM or Wolf3d to work on your old 286, 386, or 486? We didn't care about easy interface, it was the only game in town so we did whatever it took.
Today... if anything comes with less than 1 click install shield (on windows), I'm pretty pissed. Even Linux, if anything comes with more than a 1 rpm click, 1 red-carpet click, or what
The problem now is, it needs sites like slashdot. (Score:5, Insightful)
Freenet is finally becoming mature and stable, this is very very good news.
Now its time for people like us to go to freenet and put linux sites, slashdot type sites, and maybe some hacker/geek culture to freenet.
Freenet shouldnt be just about porn and warez because it will be very easy to outlaw it, what we need to do is fill freenet up with useful content for the masses, maybe put WikiPedia type stuff in freenet.
Its time to make some sites, specifically its time to bring back the hacker/geek culture that was lost, I'd like to see some hacker sites return, some chatrooms, etc etc
Re:The problem now is, it needs sites like slashdo (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah. Not just for warez and porn. Freenet needs mp3's!
Re:The problem isn't speed. (Score:4, Interesting)
Freenet + Gutenberg (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Freenet + Gutenberg (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Freenet + Gutenberg (Score:4, Interesting)
*Must* be able to store illegal files (Score:2)
Re:Freenet + Gutenberg (Score:5, Informative)
Freenets model is that data is transient. If some data is not used frequently, or used widely, it gets dropped eventualy. To insure avaiablilty you would need to constantly reinsert the data. Running a freenet node and inserting large quantities of data are two different things.
I run a node, because I can, and there is little effort involved in keeping it up and running. The quality of the software has improved dramaticaly. For a while it was a pain to run due to the java VMs sucking up all avaiable ram and frequent crashes. Now I check that is is running once every few days or so.
If more people start to setup nodes, and the software is idiot proof, this thing could take off.
And the software is idiot proof? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Freenet + Gutenberg (Score:2)
Is this needed? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Is this needed? (Score:2)
Re:Is this needed? (Score:4, Insightful)
More flamebait...
Why do we need software to teach our children?
Wouldn't teaching them in person be better, or are we all too busy?
Re:Is this needed? (Score:2)
ACKs, and things are tricky though.
Re:Is this needed? (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides, if I wrote crypto education software for children, the Chinese would just say "screw CPUs, in 10 years we can have a beowurf cruster of crypto cracking kids". They draft 2 million 5-year olds and in 10 years they have more crypto theorems than they know what to do with. Falungong and the democracy movement can't keep any communications secret and the world is a worse place.
You know what? By your logic, everyone in the world should drop what they're doing and go work on a cure for cancer. Let's see. I've got some Windex. I'll start out testing Windex on oncomice! No? What's wrong? I'm an MIT student and most people think I'm pretty smart, but very few people want me doing cancer/ebola/HIV/SARS research.
What about those guys that keep writing yet another Sawfish theme? Do you think they should be helping Apache run faster instead? I don't think so. They have graphics talent and enjoy the work. To get them to work where they have little talent or interest would make crappy sftware and sad programmers. I say even if not one person uses their next Sawfish theme, they've still made the world a better place by making themselves happy with honest endevours.
What's the life expectancy of Freenet? (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems to me that a secure, distributed, encrypted P2P system could be used by (insert dramatic music) terrorists!
Joke all you want (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Joke all you want (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Joke all you want (Score:2)
So now you will just be shot for using freenet.
Re:Joke all you want (Score:3, Insightful)
That's funny. So why can't China or Your-favorite-regime simply block/ban downloading freenet itself? It could also simply block the appropriate ports. Or track who is using the thing in-country and assume they are guilty of something and just take em down.
Though freenet COULD be a boon as you say in THEORY, in fact it is a particular boon to child pornographers and pedophiles but you have to break a few eggs eh? What's a few dozen/hundred/thousand child molesters when you could have a hundred or so p
because people can compile the source code. (Score:2)
You cant really block it, anyone with a java compiler can compile the code.
Look I'n not even caring about China, I care about USA, what about our freedom of speech? who gives a fuck about China, This protects our freedom of speech just as much.
Its debateable but sharing music, porn, or warez is a form of speech because you are sharing 1s and 0s.
Its debateable or questionable censored speech but its speech, talking about DCESS or whatever, and releasing exploits to the masses is speech, but you go to jai
Re:because people can compile the source code. (Score:4, Interesting)
It has NEVER EVER been the case, nor the INTENDED case with the US Constitution and Bill of Rights that ALL speech be protected. Freedom of Speech comes from the start with restrictions. It has never been, nor ever will, nor ever should be OK to yell "Fire" in a crowded movie house, etc. Child porn is NOT protected speech nor should it EVER be, under no banner about Rights is it legitimate. Advocating murder is not protected speech, inciting riots with "speech" is also not protected (nor has it ever been).
Me thinks what you want is anarchy, which cannot work and doesn't work. It is a state that people as a whole will not tolerate for long. Free speech is great until you get into black areas (advocating murder, inciting riots/violence, inducing panic vis a vis "Fire!" in a movie theater, etc). Then it is rightly punishable and not protected in any way, shape, or form. Never has been, never will be.
Re:because people can compile the source code. (Score:5, Insightful)
Strong encryption: people were able to be arrested as terrorists for publishing encryption algorithms or moving through customs with one printed on their t-shirts. Fucking terrorists - how dare they comprehend mathmatics!
Apple computers - weapons because their CPUs are too fast.
CSS - don't put that on your site or even link to a site with it on - those seven lines of Perl come direct from Satan
Adobe e-books - don't even think about talking to your neighboor about how weak the encryption is because you are in serious danger of revealing the algorithm to him without even thinking about it. Prison for you - you evil terrorist!
Reverse Engineering - DMCA says you can't talk about it, can't do it, can't even buy the results of it. Certainly don't try and do anything to that Playstation you *bought* because it's not your machine. Prison for you.
Slander - don't even think of calling the US president a stupid rascist monkey faced war mongering butcher or you might be getting a visit from lawyers or the FBI.
You had freedom over there once, and even still have a reasonable amount compared to some countries, but watch out, it's all moving away from the common man and into the hands of your government and big business. Be vigilant - your freedom is disappearing a thread at a time.
Re:Yelling fire can cause people to get hurt (Score:3, Insightful)
You, sir, are a sick fuck. You said "No one gets hurt when you share child porn" ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS? What about the child? Have you considered that? So, because no-one 'bought' the child-porn, no money is lost, so noone is harmed? I call BULLSHIT. Oh, its just a picture you say? What about the childs emotions - or what about more graphic child porn? That child is scarred FOREVER, but no harm done, as no money was made?
You need to get your head checked. I sincerely hope you are
Re:Joke all you want (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually what about people in our country? (Score:2)
Its not about porn or music, I want to see hacker sites return. Remember all the hacking sites which people tried to ban, I want to see them come back, I want to see culture return to the internet besides corperate culture.
We need to take advantage of freenet to make lots and lots of websites, we have unlimited storage space, if it becomes fast enough speed wont be a problem, we can put chatrooms in freenet too, this can really work.
We just need to make sites, and not just porn and warez sites, but all k
Oh no, Outlaw the gun! (Score:4, Insightful)
The gun can be used for bad things too, whats your point? The internet is here, deal with it.
As long as we build alot of useful good sites into freenet, freenet will do fine, when we let the warez and mp3 guys make all the popular sites freenet might be attacked.
So what you have to do is build sites which people want to see besides mp3, porn and warez.
Slashdotted, heh. (Score:5, Funny)
Speed/Content/Searchable (Score:4, Interesting)
1)Speed: If you have a gazillion files but it take 4 hours to get an mp3, no one will use it.
2)Content: I can go to kazaa and find music, software, video's, pictures, basically, everything. If a user has to use 3 different P2P engines to get what they want, it wont last.
3)Searchable: If it's a pain to find the files you are looking for then you wont use it, and so fewer files will be available, and more people will end up dropping it due to content.
Speeds seem to be terrible on all of the services I've used. Kazaa (Kazaalite) has the ability to download from multiple users, making up for that a little bit. I'm curious what speeds freenet can pull down from individual users. I've been thinking that those terrible speeds might just be from restrictive caps that ISP's might be placing on the P2P popular ports.
Re:Speed (Score:2)
I really liked AudioGalaxy. I ran the client on my headless Linux box (file server), but used the web site on my Windows box, or whatever machine I wanted to. They were all behind the same NAT, so the outs
How does this compare to Edonkey/Emule? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is freenet better than edonkey?
Re:How does this compare to Edonkey/Emule? (Score:2, Insightful)
Our freedom of speech is limited in USA (Score:3, Interesting)
Try posting the source code to microsoft windows on the regular internet, see what happens. Hell just post an exploit for Microsoft windows and see what happens.
News? our news is limited, we cant talk about certain questionable subjects without being labaled communist, socialist, liberal, or something, you cant talk about hacking anymore, when I was growing up on the net, I remember hacker sites were everywhere, we had chatrooms and everything, a whole culture, and now its gone.
Re:How does this compare to Edonkey/Emule? (Score:5, Insightful)
Freenet is different.
For content to be available on freenet someone must upload it to the network. The advantage is that once something is on the network nobody can delete it and it don't matter if the original owner is online or not, but "publisher have to make an effort if they want content to be available. Freenet is not really like other P2P filesharing, it's more like a distributed anonymous storage.
Re:How does this compare to Edonkey/Emule? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope your kidding. Central control killed napster. There was only one switch that needed to be turned off, and the RIAA went after that one switch. With Freenet storage is totaly distributed, there is not one place that you can turn the switch off. And that is the point. No one organization can control it.
Mirror (Score:5, Informative)
Freenet (Score:2, Interesting)
I have left it running for weeks and never notice the hits on it from other users. As for downloading files, it is very efficient as long as you have a large upstream. Remember that you are sending data out while downloading because the overhead with communications is very high.
Page insertions are the biggest problems now. Frost has taken care of this problem, but it is still slow to get anything on the networ
The problem is... (Score:4, Interesting)
The bandwagon rolls on though. The only way to stop P2P IMO is go after the ISP's. I'm no sysadmin, but I'm sure it would be possible for block certain ports, report heavy downloaders etc. At the moment nobody dare do this for fear of a mass exodus of customers, but if the law made sure that all of these ISP's had to comply, I'm sure they alone would be able to stop the spread. How feasible is it for the ISP's to put barriers in place?
Re:The problem is... (Score:2)
Re:The problem is... (Score:5, Informative)
Plus, it's not a sharing model, it's a publish model. You have to upload files to the network, a process that used to be a total PITA anyway, if you wanted it to propogate enough to be useful.
So FreeNet isn't useful for pirates. Which is cool. What it is useful for is things like load balancing - if you've ever been slashdotted, or ever found it hard to pay the bandwidth bills, freenet offers a way out. They were even playing with streaming radio over it a while ago, though I think really IPv6 multicast is a better solution there.
So freenet is about freedom of speech, load balancing, cool P2P experiments, lots of things - but not MP3 swapping.
Not yet anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
Freenet search engines do exist, Freenet is like the early world wide web and it might someday replace the world wide web, if our gov censors the web to death.
Re:Not yet anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The problem is... (Score:2, Insightful)
The way that I see it, ISP's are heading the way of cable companies. In the future you will have one state covered by, say, AOL and a local teleco ISP; another state covered by MSN and a local teleco.
Once matters reach that point, it will be fairly trivial for them to block whatever ports are being used by freenet, etc (or maybe block all ports but port 80), and users who don't like it are SOL.
Re:The problem is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Does this mean that if I am downloading the latest distro release from (distro) that I get screwed because I was downloading a whole lot of "stuff" and thus must be "pirating"?
Heavy downloading cannot be the switch that cuts off a user or set of users. Also, what if you are in on a collaborative project of some kind? Into multimedia development? You could end up with lots of back-and-forth file swapping.
Any flag setoff for cutting off a user at the ISP had better be pretty robust so that it doesn't nail innocent net users (who are using the net for its INTENDED PURPOSE afterall). How do you do that? Ban mp3 downloads/transfers? What if they are MY mp3s? Or MY videos? Maybe I'm an amateur film maker or in a garage band.
P2P cannot be killed without gutting one of the primary reasons for the internet's very existence. It was NOT designed just to distribute commercial products properly paid for. That is a tack-on that came well AFTER file sharing/data sharing.
Re:The problem is... (Score:2, Interesting)
This of course does not address
Here it is (Score:3, Informative)
Orange
Perfect timing. (Score:5, Interesting)
Class, can anyone think of why this might be helpful RIGHT NOW?
Also, check out Freeweb [freeweb.org]. Easy Freenet Web publishing. Servereless. Beautiful. Windoze-only, but nice for daily news sites. Used to run one back in Freenet 0.3.9.
Re:Perfect timing. (Score:2)
Java (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Java (Score:3, Insightful)
[freenet@freenet freenet]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
...
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 5 model : 4
model name : Pentium MMX
stepping : 4
cpu MHz : 200.456
This is an old system that I had lying around doing nothing. All I contribute is the power to run it and a little BW. The lack of power of the processor self throttles the ba
Re:Java (Score:2)
Forward Error Correction (Score:3, Interesting)
The most up to date version of the Java FEC library can be found here [onionnetworks.com].
Child Porn (Score:2, Interesting)
But freenet is not alone. I know that there is some child porn on KaZaA. Heh, don't you love porn that will not allow previews(.avi files), you have to wait until the entire file is downloaded, that turn out to be child porn. Quick view and then delete is their fate.
Re:Child Porn (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone stuck a bunch of kiddie porn on the site, and the short story is he's serving 5 years in military prison, and the fact that he had no idea that it was there didn't make a difference.
The same thing would happen to you if you let some friend store a bunch of his boxes in your garage, and they were full of child porn.
Now, since freenet distributes all of the "published" stuff across everyone elses machines basically, are you criminially responsible if someones kiddie porn is partially stored on your hard drive?
The answer is probably yes, though IANAL.
How can individual users claim that they have no responsiblity for what's being served by their machines?
Why bother to look? (Score:5, Insightful)
Theres always going to be child porn on freenet, at least the people arent profiting from it, you cant stop child porn being shared the only thing you can do is remove incentive to make the porn.
Porn thats on freenet is porn thats not sold, which means the porn industry loses money and has less incentive to make it.
I dont see how freenet is doing any harm, child porn was on the web making pedophiles and molestors millions of dollars, and now its on kazaa and freenet, they wont make a dime.
By removing it from freenet and kazaa what you are doing is saving the child porn industry, this allows more kids to get hurt and abused for profit.
Unlike other people, I tried this.... (Score:5, Informative)
What it is about is the ability to store anything, particularly items that may give the holder problems, like the film of a cop selling drugs to kids.
It isn't eDonkey, it isnt Kazzaa. With both of these systems you know what you are sharing, with Freenet you don't. With traditional P2P, MPAA can go round logging who is sharing LOTR and send them DMCA cease and desist notices. If you are living in Farkistan, you can publish your videos of police executions without fear that the police can track you down. Once you have loaded a file on the net with freenet, you don't know where it is, and neither does anyone else until they are given a hash key.
You just have some file storage assigned to the network which is browsable by a hash key through your local web browser. Freenet appears as localhost:8888 to your browser so you can access with a locked-down Mozilla or even IE (less wise because of the holes). People can know that you are running Freenet, but that is all (assuming you clear browser caches and so on).
The downside is because you can share anything anonymously, people do. However, unless someone is prepared to publish a reference to young Britney and her dog, nobody is going to find it.
The curious thing is that if you have a fairly static IP and are contributing space to the net, you have no idea what is stored on your machine. It could be human rights info, it could be copyright material, it could be very illegal pornography. You just don't know.
Also it seems to take a long time to get into the network. It is painfully slow to start and until it starts caching information locally, a letter may be faster.
Re:Unlike other people, I tried this.... (Score:3, Insightful)
And regardless of if you know or not, you're still responsible, legally and/or criminally.
I personally wouldnt touch freenet with a 10 foot pole because of this. How would you like to have your home raided at 3 AM because NAMBLA is now
Re:Unlike other people, I tried this.... (Score:3, Interesting)
If that is true, explain why every owner and operator of every ISP and phone company in the civilized world isn't already in jail? Their computers undeniably carry child porn on their usenet servers.
Re:Unlike other people, I tried this.... (Score:5, Informative)
Bzzzt, wrong answer.
Files are transmitted node-to-node in reverse of the search path. Everything you get comes from the upstream node you asked for it from, not directly from the hosting system.
Now, if you compromised 99.9999% of the nodes on the network, you could be *somewhat* certain that if your childporn request was answered by an IP you hadn't compromised, that it *might* be on that server. (In which case you compromise it and search again). If it came from one of your own servers, check its connection logs to see where it got its answer from, and repeat.
I'm still waiting for the day when people use banning software that might be used to commit a crime as a precedent to start banning guns. I can't believe the NRA is so short-sighted that it can't see this day approaching.
Re:Unlike other people, I tried this.... (Score:4, Funny)
Uh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Uh... (Score:2, Interesting)
Or else the only people "hiding" their speech on it will be pedophiles and Ku Klux Klan members.
I dont want a single electron in my PC devoted to storing or serving data for either of those groups.
I wont be part of any 'network' that doesnt let me control what data is being stored and served from my machines, not just because I could be held liable, but because I find the stuff morally repu
Free speech for everyone or no one. (Score:4, Insightful)
Choose. If you want to censor the KKK you dont support free speech.
I cant stand the KKK, and I cant stand kiddie porn, but they do have the right to talk about hate and kiddie porn.
As long as this never turns into action, its just a bunch of 1s and 0s, speech.
too risky for me (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:too risky for me (Score:2, Insightful)
IANAL, but a good lawyer could probably successfully argue you have no way of knowing what's being stored on your computer as it is part of an anonymous network. It would be like a bank being
Re:too risky for me (Score:4, Informative)
good lawyer could probably successfully argue you have no way of knowing what's being stored on your computer as it is part of an anonymous network.
Actually, you can be held liable for it regardless of whether you "know" it is there or not. For instance, if you are driving a car, and your passenger puts their crack cocaine under the seat, you can be held liable for it even if you had no idea since you are in control of the car. Ignorance is not an excuse to allowing others to use your property to commit a crime.
It would be like a bank being held liable for criminals stashing money from the drug trade in it.
This is precisely why there are long and complex laws pertaining to money laundering. All financial institutions are required to implement strong procedural safeguards to prevent abuse. Failure to do so can result in prosecution of the bank for culpability in the depositor's crime. Another area this is becoming "hot" is in the market for expensive consumer and industrial goods. The latest scheme used by narcotics traffikers is to take their drug money in South America, and use it to purchase expensive goods (like appliences) from compaines like GE. GE recently sponsored a DOJ initiative to combat this, and many of the computer manufacturers (like Dell) were included. The anonymous nature of web commerce makes this method possible.
In short, you are lible for what's on your computer, so make sure you know what people are sticking in there!
Re:too risky for me (Score:5, Informative)
Not true. For any particular freenet request you cannot be sure if the node contacting you is requesting the file, or is just passing along a request from a previous node.
The reverse is also true. For any particular file you're requesting, you can't tell if the file you're getting is from the node you're contacting or if it's passing on your request to another node.
It's a double blind. You MAY be getting the files from that node, then again by the very nature of freenet, and the large amount of information in it it is extremely unlikely that the information you recieved was actually on the node you requested it from.
Further, if the goverment finds something unsavory, and manages to somehow prove (don't ask me how) it was on your computer the caching nature of Freenet allows you to say "There's a damn good chance that file wasn't on my computer until the government requested it". At that point you have the dual defenses of reasonable doubt and entrapment.
From the Freenet Announce mailing list today (Score:5, Informative)
From: Ian Clarke
Hi All,
As most of you are probably aware, Matthew Toseland has been working
full-time on the Freenet project for the past few months, and the
benefits to the project have been dramatic. From the slaying of the
crippling "datastore bug", to more recent work, Matthew's contribution
has been invaluable. Just compare today's Freenet 0.5.1 release with
the last 0.4 release to get a feel for how much difference he has made.
Matthew is able to do this while the Freenet project can pay his living
expenses, which amount to only $1,125/month (this is a fraction of what
even the least expensive software developer makes in the UK). The
project has paid this from donations made via Freenet's website.
Unfortunately, at this time the project's funds are very low, and we are
approaching the time when we need to renew Matthew's contract - without
a significant amount of income over the next few days, it is unlikely
that the project will be able to do this.
It is for this reason that I am making an appeal to subscribes to our
announcements mailing list, something we have never done before, and
which will not be a regular event, I promise.
If every subscriber to this list donated just $10, we could commit to
funding Matthew for the next 8 months.
If you are able to make a contribution, you can do-so by credit card via
our donations page:
http://freenetproject.org/tiki-index.php?page=Don
We now also accept "E-Gold" for those who prefer not to use PayPal for
whatever reason.
Any contribution you can make would be greatly appreciated,
Kind regards,
Ian.
It is faster (Score:5, Funny)
There is a GNU Klone of Freenet (Score:4, Informative)
Re:There is a GNU Klone of Freenet (Score:4, Insightful)
"We support free speach." sounds a lot better than "We support free speach, except when it comes to pedophiles. Oh, and Neo-Nazis. No mp3s either, since most of those are illegally posted. Oh, and we also don't put up links to sites that think women should be allowed outside without their faces hidden because that might also offend some people in certain cultures." If you only support free speach on your own terms, you don't support free speach. Stop kidding yourself.
Winny (Score:3, Interesting)
Blocked Ports, end of 'free' speech.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Its really easy just to block its usage by isps..
IE: dont rely on it as your only outlet for speech.. use it to supplement only.
Hope they add ability to deal w firewall (Score:4, Insightful)
KIDDIE PORN KIDDIE PORN KIDDIE PORN (Score:4, Insightful)
Freenet, according to their website, works somewhat like this. I want file XYZ. I search for file XYZ. Freenet brings all 68 parts of X from node 1, 13 parts of Y from node two, the other 13 parts of Y from node three, and the rest of the file comes from node four, five, six, seven, and twelve.
The guilty party is the person that's got file XYZ. The guilty party is the person who *requested* file XYZ. You may or may not have had part of file Z, You don't know, the people up and down stream from you don't know, and the person requesting the file doesn't know.
Child Pornongraphy is reprehensable. Duh. But using it as an argument against freenet is like using the "it's for the children" to ban guns and remove them from every house that owns one.
Anonymity comes with a cost. So does freedom. The price of being able to write a letter to the editor about the 2000 election is seeing that the letter next to yours is from the Grand Wizard of the KKK. The price of seeing the Rodney King video on a cheesy fox special is the knowledge that someone, somewhere is being exploited and it's on video tape.
1984 isn't worth fearing in this society. Farenheit 451 is.
The REALLY nice thing about freenet (Score:5, Interesting)
As it is fundamentally web based, freenet represents the a system where being able to publish is not dependedent on being able to buy server space. This represents a very real democratisation of the net ($10 a month is a lot more in Asia), and the totally anonimous nature of the ntwork allows for much freer political speech.
It is also worth noting that it automatically spreads frequently requested data across the network, meaning no more slashdot effect. This also makes for a more effecient network, as data is stored near to you.
You want to support the freedom of code? Get freenet and do your bit.
Re:The REALLY nice thing about freenet (Score:2)
Re:The REALLY nice thing about freenet (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The REALLY nice thing about freenet (Score:2)
Re:[OT] Re:The REALLY nice thing about freenet (Score:5, Funny)
Ha!
Re:Anonymous ? Fast ? (Score:3, Informative)
You have to run a Freenet node for some time before the speed starts to pick up. The longer you run your node, then better it gets integrated into the network.
I've been using Freenet for a month now, and the performance has been growing steadily. Try downloading Freenet from my server [gimpster.com] to get a different set of seed-nodes than the ones distributed from SourceForge.