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Freenet Project Taking Donations
Posted by
Hemos
on Sat Mar 17, 2001 08:01 PM
from the supporting-a-good-cause dept.
from the supporting-a-good-cause dept.
We've had word from a number of readers that the Freenet Project has setup an area to accept donations. These folks are doing wonderful work - using a GPL project, non-profit, dedicated to a decentralized free speech network. I highly recommend donating.
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Freenet Project Taking Submissions
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Re:I'll save my money for something that isn't fut (Score:3)
I'd suggest a reading of the docs on the site to understand what sort of information is available on a node, and how it gets there.
Very easy to donate (Score:4)
Stuart Eichert
Funny Story... (Score:3)
I'm graduating from college this May, and I recently received a copy of my credit report, to make sure I'd be ok for a mortgage. I've used one credit card since freshman year, but my entire wardrobe is made up of t-shirts from pretend-applications. I opened my report, and it had me listed as having FOUR other cards that I didn't know about. It also had 9 names for me, and 7 addresses. It was a MESS.
Took me about 3 days to sort out...it was really annoying
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3)
A strange thing happened to free speech a few decades ago. The majority of people took free speech for granted, and a small minority tried to take advantage of that. Then some college kids said enough is enough, and tried to fix things. But being college kids, their brains were the consistancy of tapioca. They meant well but they screwed up big time...
You see, they had this very strange notion that free speech needed an official place to be excercised. So they designated official "free speech areas". If you wanted to protest the war in Vietnam, you went to a designated free speech area and said your piece. Apparently they didn't believe that free speech was allowed on the street corners. The result of that movement is today's political correctness, and the heart of political correctness is UC Berkeley, home of the free speech movement.
Freenet is going down that same path. They're designating an official place to practice free speech. Apparently, they to do not understand that free speech on the internet is for everyone everywhere. If free speech is ever fully taken away from us, it will be in part the fault of freenet and their unfree notion that freedom needs to be corraled inside a fence instead of being excercised anywhere and everywhere.
For the clicking-challenged (Score:4)
"Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds."
I didn't know what it was, so I looked it up. I'm also gonna be donating.
Hmmm... (Score:3)
Paypal membership: free
Donation to Freenet: $20
Never having to answer the question "Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?": Priceless.
[I know, it's been done, but I couldn't resist :-) ]
Misdirection? (Score:3)
Oppressor #1 [Pointy haired boss amongst the oppressors]: Look! We've finally found those dastardly pirate lovers home base. Let's strike a blow against child pornographers, music pirates, and vicious terrorists everywhere! Fire the missiles!
Oppressor #2 [a uniformed flunky, who presses the button labeled 'Attack Lawyer']: Missiles away, sir. Tracking... tracking... direct hit sir, they're sucking their funding dry. Operation complete sir.
Oppressor #1: Heh. That'll show them.
Oppressor #1 [yells]: All your donations are belong to us!
Oppressor #1 [to #2]: Let's go tell the secret masters at RIAA about our victory. [They leave.]
[Meanwhile, our heros are snickering up their sleeves while they paint a big sign labelled 'Freenet Pyrate and Pedophile HQ' in big red letters on the side of Oppressor #1's house...]
The Future of Freenet (Score:4)
One of the most-repeated things here is that, as Freenet is decentralized, it's impregnable. Now, it's true that because of the decentralization, there'll always be a few people running nodes. But I don't think that the assumption that individuals running nodes will never be gone after is true in this case.
With something like Napster, there was never a question of going after all -- or even some -- users. Millions of people were using it, and the only group who would really WANT to prosecute people, the RIAA, couldn't risk the loss popularity. But Freenet's a different story. Here's what I see happening.
In the public mind, one of the most reprehensible forms of "information" possible is kiddie porn, so I'll use that as an example.
Someone -- police? concerned citizen? -- intentionally downloads a picture of, say, a terrified eight-year-old with bleeding cuts all over her body being violently raped. They get the IP of the node that sent it to them and sue the ISP and, in turn, whoever was running the node.
There is a court case. The prosecution argues, straightforwardly, that both possession and distribution of such material are crimes. The defense argues that, as the operator of the node wasn't aware of what his computer was storing or distributing, he/she couldn't be held responsible. Now, I'm no lawyer, but this seems to me to be an update of the old grade-school trick of closing your eyes, swinging your fists toward someone, and saying I'm just exercising my right to swing my arms, and if you happen to be in the way it's your fault. In other words, though the owner may not have known exactly what their node was distributing, they did know that it was likely that they would be distributing illegal content, and they installed Freenet anyway.
Running Freenet, then, would very likely be illegal. And unlike in cases like Napster, there would be a large army of publically-supported people interested in finding and going after Freenet users. Why? Remember what we're talking about here -- beaten, raped eight-year-olds. Does anyone believe that a majority of any large country would be in favour of distributing pictures of beaten, raped eight-year-olds? So popularity ceases to be an issue. And once a significant percentage of Freenet users have been prosecuted, many remaining users would no doubt be afraid to run it, leaving only a few true believers and residents of small/developing countries.
I may not be a prophet, but if a system as destructive to accepted notions of what's decent and where freedom and anarchy separate ever becomes popular, there's gonna be trouble. And plenty of it.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3)
And because of things like freenet, there are people in countries outside the US who don't have the benefit of the First Amendment, who now have a tool in their fight to say what they need to say. These people need a tool like freenet simply because the other options are totally inadequate in promoting the freedoms that they should have.
Remember, Freenet's goal isn't to limit the freedoms of other protocols, but to provide a safe haven on the internet for people who need it. Just because there is free speech on freenet does not mean that there can't be free speech on the web. Mutual exclusivism isn't a rule of the game.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
What Income? (Score:3)
We just had a discussion on kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org] about how unlike Larry Augustin (VA Linux CEO) and the other suits at VA Linux, ESR and CmdrTaco didn't sell VA Linux stock when they had the chance. With VA Linux currently trading at around $3 [yahoo.com] there isn't much money to be made from the stock especially after taxes.
I'll tell you what Freenet needs to do... (Score:4)
While this will be repugnant to many in power, if Freenet avoids being labelled "Napster II" by the mass media, the RIAA might not come down on it like a total ton of bricks. Or at least they might not throw enough money at it to buy any amount of judges and congresspersons. I'm not saying Freenet should lick the RIAA's boots, but it should definitely NOT come across with the "fuck you" attitude Napster had.
But if Freenet IS seen as the "new Napster", and if 15 million 14 year olds hop onto it so they can download Dr. Dre, you can be sure that no judge or congressperson will be capable of seeing a difference between the two, especially with the RIAA lobbyists battering down their doors. Freenet, instead of going massively public, should go *mildly* public and try to avoid being seen as the new mp3 swap system. Let Gnutella take that rap.
I'm as much against the RIAA as anyone here, but the more I learn about Freenet, the more I think it would be a tragedy to make this mistake and see Freenet ruined. This has real potential, and I'd hate to see it end prematurely because of the sympathy for the RIAA that arrogant Napsterites stirred in the government.
Not a flamebait, but what I really think. Try responding rather than moderating, huh?
-Kasreyn