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FreeNet's Ian Clarke Answers Privacy Questions
from the who-is-that-masked-man-anyway? dept.
Who is liable?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by tcd004
You said that this: "allows information to be published and read without fear of censorship because individual documents cannot be traced to their source..."
I'm all for an open forum for free speech, but this seems almost reckless. In most venues of speech, accountability for someone's words is fundamental. The Internet has opened up the possiblity of free speech without accountability to a small degree, and look at what has happened. Do you fear any legal repercussions to your group for creating this forum based on this fact?
Ian:
Thanks for your question tcd004. The problem is that it is sometimes impossible to have free speech unless it can be delivered anonymously, since the threat of retribution can be a very effective deterrent against people stating their opinions. I would even go so far as to say that a forum which forced people to identify themselves was not permitting true free speech (This is why Slashdot allows "Anonymous Cowards" to have their say). I should further point out that there is no reason that people cannot digitally sign information they place in Freenet to indicate that they are the authors of a piece of information, but we don't force people to do that. Someone could even build up an anonymous reputation by signing all of their work with the same private key.
My personal feeling is that liable, and liable law, assumes that people will believe everything they read. This might, to an extent, be true in this time of centralized media, but my hope is that systems like Freenet (and indeed SlashDot) will encourage people to make judgments about the reliability of information themselves rather than relying on a corruptible centralized source.
Why the name FreeNet?
(Score:4, Insightful)
by K8Fan
Maybe I'm just showing my age, but to me a "FreeNet" is a local free Picospan/shell account. Maybe it's a bad idea to take the name of an existing and quite venerable free service?
Here is part of the Detroit Freenet FAQ:
* What is a Free-Net? A Free-Net is a free, public-access community computer system. Free-Nets can serve populations of any size, from large metropolitan areas to small cities and towns. They offer a wide spectrum of on-line information services to the public, including community and government databases and worldwide electronic messaging. They don't charge for their services, so everything on them is free. Free-Nets also have an interactive aspect, in that users can dialogue with information providers. While there are many Free-Nets around the world, each Free-Net is tailored to meet the needs of the local community, so no two Free-Nets are identical.
Seems like the existing Freenet is already a very good and useful thing, and it really doesn't need the confusion.
Ian:
Basically our experience is that while other systems and projects have used the term "Freenet" in the past, for the most part it had fallen out of common usage (if you don't believe me just take a look at the current contents of alt.freenet - which is primarily spam). We believe that since we are developing a "Free Network", the abbreviation of "Freenet" is too good not to use, and since it isn't really in common-usage anywhere else right now, we have resurrected it.
Poisoning the waters
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Mike Schiraldi
What protection is there against someone poisoning the system with malicious data? For example, let's say MPAASoftRIAAOL Corp. sets up a system of computers all over the place with wildly different IPs, and they feed either random or specially crafted bogus data into the system.
This is sort of analogous to renaming Barry_Manilow.mp3 to DaveMatthewsBand.mp3 and putting it on Napster. How do we prevent it? Some sort of decentralized, everyone-is-created-equal moderation system?
Ian:
You raise an interesting point, and one which has created much discussion on the mailing list since these "cancer" attacks are probably the most difficult to defend against in any system, particularly if it is decentralized like Freenet. Right now, the way Freenet works limits the damage that can be done with such a node, but in the future we plan to implement mechanisms which will make such an attack even less effective. Basically Freenet avoids becoming dependent on any particular node since requests will be spread almost equally among all Freenet nodes (by the nature of the dynamic caching and mirroring). This means that even if 0.1% of the total number of Freenet nodes are corrupted, at most about 0.1-0.4% of requests will be affected by it. Right now whenever someone requests some data in Freenet, in a sense they are voting for it, and all of the nodes which were involved in retrieving it. This is less than ideal since you don't actually know what you will get until it is too late (much like voting in the real world!). We plan to implement a mechanism to address this, where you can "undo" your vote if you aren't happy with the result, and thus Freenet gets a much more accurate idea of the quality of different types of information, and the quality of the nodes used to retrieve it. This will mean that a malicious node of the type you describe will eventually be ignored by the rest of Freenet, so hopefully the threat you describe won't be an issue when we release Freenet 1.0.
Bandwidth and Piracy
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Valdrax
In your own FAQ, you pretty much sidestep the entire issue that FreeNet would become a humongous "warez" distribution system by saying that it's merely a more efficient means of doing what others have been doing before. Ignoring the seeming subtle endorsement of piracy through the system, I'll raise an important question for adminstrators of FreeNet nodes.
In your FAQ, you say that it is very hard for FreeNet node admins to know what is on their site. With the inevitable proliferation of "warez" on the site, how will the system avoid getting bogged down with hundreds of illegal copies of popular pieces of software?
For example, when Diablo 2 finally comes out in the stores, what would prevent servers from being overloaded with:
/software/games/Diablo2.iso
/software/games/RPGs/Diablo2.iso
/software/games/rpg/Diablo2.iso
/warez/l337gam3z/Diablo2.iso
/fr33gam3z/war3z/rpg/diabloII.crack.iso
/mywarez/ObfuscatedDistributionKey/Diablo2.image
...etc.?
You could literally have hundreds of 650 Mb images of games floating around jamming up everyone's nodes. With the lack of searchability, no one would know what keys hook into what files. Without this knowledge, warez people might keep uploading copies to different keys, thus flooding the system. In essence, does not the lack of protection against piracy and the seemingly intentional goal of keeping admins from controlling their system threaten to bring down the entire network under the burden of warez and junk?
Ian:
The simple answer is that copyright is economic censorship (ie. restricting the free distribution of information for economic reasons), and thus Freenet will make it difficult or impossible to enforce copyright. As for whether Freenet will be "overloaded" with Warez junk, well current methods of distributing Warez work fine already, but as for Freenet - the system will contain whatever information people request. If people request Warez, then there will be Warez on Freenet, if they request pornography, then there will be pornography on Freenet, and if they request political documents then there will be political documents on Freenet. Freenet makes no distinction, and if it did it could not claim to permit true freedom of information. If you want to know more about why we just might be able to live without copyright take a look at our philosophy page.
Regarding your comment about large files clogging up Freenet, right now, inserting a huge file into Freenet probably won't work, since a node won't store a file which exceeds its disk-cache limit. We also plan to make large files need to justify themselves in-terms of the number of hits they receive, so that they don't displace loads of smaller files.
Why such bad press, what is being done to fix it?
(Score:5,
Insightful)
by griffjon
It's pretty scary when Wired slams you with the headline, "Alternative Net Protects Pirates", which contained in the story gems such as:
"Eric Scheirer, a music technology researcher at MIT's Media Lab, said Freenet is an interesting experiment, but said it would likely be used only by a small community of pirates and "privacy nuts."
And, failing Monday's piece in the Nando Times , that's actually been the best article so far. The New Scientist is running "out of control: The Internet is about to get even harder to police" in their current issue, and ABCNews.com did a one-paragraph style summary of this article, with the lead of "An Internet system designed to guarantee anonymous free speech on the Web could be used by child pornographers and terrorists, according to New Scientist magazine," which then proceeds to all but call you and the other programmers pedophiles in a grammatical burp.
My question is, if this is to be successful (which I for one am all in favor of, I'm in close contact with Brandon and Steven, two of the FreeNet programmers, and am very much in support of the existence of this), FreeNet can't come off as a tool for criminals and miscreants, lest you attract more attention than you'd like from the Fed-types. Now, you may say that because it's open-source and already available, etc., that the Feds can't put it down, but if it is branded as an evil tool for child pornographers (like it is currently), it will never gain the popularity and user-base needed to make it sufficiently robust against machine removals.
To get something called a tool for privacy nuts by Wired is pretty bad--and the rest of the press has been worse; is there any plan to get this project out of the gutter?
Ian:
Well, we actually have had more good press than you suggest, the recent Wall Street Journal article was very positive, as was an early Brave GNU World article (see our publicity page for links). As for the bad press, well I think whenever you do something really new you are always going to encounter resistance. I think most of these journalists were trying to stir up some controversy, which is what journalists do. Interestingly many of these journalists have explained that they are often given a brief by their editors before they have even spoken to me on what tone the article will have. You rapidly develop a thick skin when you are involved in this kind of project, although for the most part I have been reasonably happy with the press coverage we have received.
Re: Why such bad press, what is being done to
fix it
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Eric_Scheirer
"Eric Scheirer, a music technology researcher at MIT's Media Lab, said Freenet is an interesting experiment, but said it would likely be used only by a small community of pirates and 'privacy nuts.'"
I stand by my quote in that article, although naturally it's a little short on context. Let me make clear that I am in favor of privacy, security, and anonymity when appropriate, and I despise the current attempts to make the WWW more corporate-controlled via both code and law. I don't think there's anything wrong with Freenet, I just don't think it will ever take off in the mainstream.
The fact is that most of the things that most people like to use the WWW for--such as e-commerce and Slashdot--cannot be built on Freenet, since it has no cookies and no memory. Given this, I can't see anything happening with Freenet except that it becomes a huge storehouse for illegal porn, pirated MP3s and 3l33t w8r3z.
It's a shame, because the potential political benefits that it raises, by allowing dissident speech in repressive countries, is great.
I guess my question for the Freenet developers would be: I am not a pirate, a privacy nut, a political dissident, or someone trying to spread illegal trade secrets. What does Freenet offer me? And are these benefits broad enough to a broad enough segment of the world population to create the momentum needed for Freenet to work sociologically as well as technically?
-- Eric Scheirer
MIT Media Laboratory
Ian:
Brandon (one of the other core Freenet developers) did e-mail you twice to answer the comments you made in Wired, he still awaits your response on the matter. Ok, what does Freenet offer someone who doesn't care about anonymity? One point that many people miss is that it is actually a very efficient way to distribute information due to its dynamic caching and dynamic mirroring. Freenet will move information to where it is in-demand, and will duplicate popular information automatically so that you should never encounter "The SlashDot Effect" with Freenet. In other words, your ability to publish information is no longer limited to the Bandwidth you can pay for. Because of this it should actually be a better way to distribute information than, say, the WWW or Usenet, even ignoring the fact that the information can't be censored. TheCarp mentions this below.
Wireless Freenet
(Score:4,
Interesting)
by john187
I think Freenet would dovetail nicely with wireless network technology. I system of Freenet servers 1-2 km apart could blanket metropolitan areas and eliminate dependency on ISP's for network service.
What are your thoughts on this? Are any hardware people interested in looking at this problem? Building some prototypes?
Ian:
I agree completely, we have actually kept the protocol packet-based for just this sort of reason. I think Freenet would be perfect for a distribute decentralized radio network, and it would be a very exciting project.
Reversed priorities?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by
mattr
If files live longer the more they are thrashed, will this not just breed thrasher bots and crowd out data from clients with less connectivity? How about a voting system for one or more directories which does not add files easily but they are there for good. If it is that good a resource it deserves a champion to protect it.
Also, I take it you are comfortable with already having divulged the identities of the entire first wave of sysadmins of FreeNet nodes? Seems like your most vulnerable time is now.
I've long considered the value of a peer to peer system for countries underdeveloped in the areas of infrastructure and rights. Unfortunately it seems that social engineering is steadily on the side of repression. Wouldn't the best way to get FreeNet into such environments be to make it a source of economic strength? In other words, your growth metric might look much better if you include authorship, copyright, and microcashpayment management. I can't see the Declaration of Independence sticking in the current system for long.. but it is in both a good library and a good bookstore.
Basically you have built a distribution system which in its optimal configuration has no delivery time since you already have the commodity on your hard drive... make it work for business as well and it may reduce prices and take on a life of its own.
Ian:
Well there is certainly more than one question here!
Firstly, the issue of "thrashing" or flooding Freenet is covered in the FAQ - I refer you to section 4.2. To summarize, the dynamic caching mechanism makes it very difficult to artificially make data more popular (since Freenet will just cache it on a node right beside you, and all of your requests will be soaked up by it).
As for divulging the addresses of the first few people to set-up Freenet nodes (I assume you refer to our "Inform.php" mechanism) that is merely a mechanism to "boot-strap" Freenet for testing purposes. Once Freenet is up and running properly we will have no need for such a mechanism, but it is useful in the early stages (and people have the option to switch it off in the config file if they really care that much). I should make it clear that Freenet now is still at an early stage of development. The project is lucky to have some very talented and hard-working developers, particularly Brandon Wiley and Oskar Sandberg who have really helped turned this from a dream into a reality, but we still have much work to do. Data modification, Content Hashed Keys, local data encryption, the list of ideas which we want to implement before a 1.0 release is long - but this is indicative of the cutting-edge nature of the project.
In terms of making it possible to sell information using Freenet, or a Freenet-like system, I suspect that might be missing the point we are making! Never say never though...
Kiddy porn, rape movies, snuff films.
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Jinker
No matter what zealots tell you, no freedom is absolute. Your freedoms end when they infringe on the rights of others. This includes your freedom of speech.
My thoughts when I first heard about this project were extremely positive for the first five seconds or so. I was going to set up a server, and suggest all my other bandwidth-rich friends do the same. Then I thought about what would be going to and from my server.
Anonymity has its place from time to time, but usually in the cases of an abuse by a higher power against an individual. But in the general case, I feel that freedom of speech entails the responsability of accountability.
If I'm going to say that I hate Virgos, and all Virgos should be locked up and treated as the inhuman beasts that they are, I should have the conviction to do so without a pointy hood over my head.
If I'm going to be distributing porn, I should be able to do it with a clean conscience. If I wanted to post naked pictures on a Web site, I'd be in some way traceable. And if I wasn't identifiable, there at least would be a mechanism in place (an e-mail to my upstream provider) to curb my freedom of speech if I was posting vile material.
The ideal of individual freedom falls apart in the environment of actual individuals who abuse it.
I'm not saying in any way that this should be a legal matter, or that the product should be banned, just that in the case that it turns out like I expect it to (the majority of traffic for illicit files, both violating copyright and basic human decency) I will have no respect, even a measure of contempt for the people that do run the servers. THEY will be the ones I will hold accountable for the 'free speech' being exercised on the network. And if they were to be sued off the net by the RIAA, Church of Scientology and MPAA, I can't say I'll be surprised, or all that upset.
What arguments can you make FOR free, anonymous access to kiddie porn, snuff films and rape/torture erotica? Why should *I*, a server operator, nurture these sorts of activities in an ideal environment?
Ian:
You cannot have free speech without tolerating speech that you personally don't agree with. If you don't want to risk aiding the distribution of "kiddie porn" (which is *already* freely distributed on the Internet anyway), then steer clear of Freenet - it's not for you. On the other hand, if you want to help build a system which will help humanity share information, even though some of that information will be distasteful to you personally, then set up a Freenet node. See our philosophy page for more information on this.
some technical questions.
. (Score:4,
Interesting)
by Cuthalion
Once something is put on freenet it cannot be removed. What does this mean? No censorship, but also misinformation stays in the system just as long as correct information, so long as it can 'trick' people into requesting it (by seeming to be relevant, for instance). This can be exploited intentionally to censor (some things are nearly unfindable on search engines because of 'key' collisions - the band 'Reload', for instance), or unintentionally - I write something, post it, and five minutes later learn that I was mistaken. Oh well! People will just have to decide for themselves what is truth. Even if I DO post a retraction, there is no way to verify that a trusted entity (such as the original author) retracted it.
As a medium for sharing artistic works (e.g., music, essays, images) this is not as important, but to carry actual facts, (e.g., hardware specs, controvertial news items, etc.) this seems a major shortcoming. Is there any solution to this problem in place or in progress? I ask because I feel that this is not adequately discussed in the FAQ.
Ian:
As I mention above we are working on improving the way that people can "vote" for the validity of information - I hope that this will address some of the concerns you raise. Having said that, you can't really drownout information on Freenet in the manner you suggest. If you have the key, you can get the data unless it has died out due to never being requested.
The whole area of choosing appropriate keys for the data you wish to insert is a huge, and ripe for further research. For some things, like MP3s, or poems, choosing an appropriate key is pretty easy ("music/mp3/artist/album/track" or "poem/poet/title" for example). It merely requires a standard way to refer to these things - and since it is in everybody's interest to use the same standard, hopefully good standards will emerge quite quickly. Other things are less easy. When people created the Internet, they probably never thought it might be used the way we are using it now - and they didn't need to. Similarly, Freenet is a platform upon which we hope others will build.
Re: Why compete?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by TheCarp
Actually....the Freenet Has a huge technical advantage over http protocols. The thing is... it's not just hard to track down who wrote it (unless they sign their name...it's only anonymous if you want it to be) and where it's stored...
It has cacheing built in. When you request something, it propagates. This means more copies exist. So if a document is REALLY popular, then no one server is bogged down with distributing it.
Imagine some really popular band that believes in mp3 distribution puts out a new mp3. Now everyone 80% of college students go to download it.
WHat happens? After the first few downloads at each college...the local university freenet server will have a copy of the mp3 and will be serving it to that university.
None of the requests for it will be going outside the local university network. Its the basic equivalent of everyone in the world being behind multiple layers of http cacheing proxy, except somewhat better (its built into the protocol)
Ian:
What can I say? Cool - you get it! Just to reiterate though, Freenet is an experiment. It is quite different from projects like Linux and Mozilla, which are essentially open source re-implementations of technology which has already been proven (and, incidentally, I am a big supporter of both of these projects). There aren't really any precedents which we could follow in designing Freenet, certainly nothing that came close to what we wanted to achieve. The difficulty with Freenet is that we can only *really* test it by encouraging people to use it on a reasonably wide scale. There is much further work to be done on Freenet, it is really only at the beginning of its testing phase right now - so please don't expect it to change the world just yet - but please do try it out!
--------------------------
You may also be interested to note that we have released Freenet 0.1beta.
All the best,
- Ian
Re:DOS attacks on Freenet (Score:3)
--
Re:Freenet sounds brilliant! (Score:3)
Cars, computers, medicine, software, music, art. I was under the impression that *people* made these things, not corporations. A corporation is only a piece of paper (a charter). Open source shows that it's more than possible to exist without huge monolithic corporations.
No money? Definitely possible, western culture seems to be the only one that can't imagine society without a centrally controlled monetary system. On the other hand, who said that corporations are synonymous with money? You can get rid of corporations and still have an economy. You could even do vice-versa if you're ambitious.
Really think about what you're saying before you say it.
Michael Chisari
mchisari@usa.net
FreeNet goes AGAINST the First Amendment (Score:3)
I completely agree. The most popular data is not necessarily the only important data. The First Amendment is all about the rights of the minority, and deleting little-used data is violating the spirit of free speech. I think that is an important issue.
Re:Freenet sounds brilliant! (Score:3)
Just like they were waiting for pencils, paper, cars, etc. Freenet is a tool and if people always focused on the horrible things a tool could be used for, we'de have a lot less tools, no?
Bad Mojo
Re:I just don't see it... (Score:3)
Is the world crying out for a way to anonymously share information via the internet? YES! Many just don't know it. Far too many people won't feel their rights have been violated until it's far too late.
Copyright violations? Breaking copyright is still illegal. If your business is using illicit software, it's STILL illegal. If you are in posession of banned material, it's STILL illegal. Leave that up to the community. FreeNET is simply a medium that is free of censorship as of NOW.
Re:DOS attacks on Freenet (Score:3)
No, no. Not random. I am talking active hostile information warfare. The point of Freenet is to publish information that makes certain people, corporations and government very, very unhappy. Put 2 and 2 together yourself.
Actually, Freenet's goals go far beyond this. Freenet is a further refinement of cyberspace, another step towards the further seperation of it and the world of physical reality. The most obvious consquence is that one of the basic laws of cyberspace, "Information wants to be free", is a lot stronger on Freenet then it is on the Internet (as it is stronger on the Internet then it when information was carried in books and minds only), but it is far from the only consequence.
Pissing people off is not a goal within itself. The fact is that those people who would be pissed off by Freenet are those who do not want any Freedom in Cyberspace - and that are already threatening it on the web.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Re:I think this is kind of cool however. (Score:3)
BTWx1, It will work with Kaffe, for those of you who don't want to use proprietary software.
BTWx2, I originally wrote the perl client because the text based protocol made it very easy. Perl's thread handling would probably make writing a Node with even a chance at being cross platform very difficult.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Re:How to destroy FreeNet? (Score:3)
In the US at least, one needs a targeted search warrant - the police cannot just invade your (virtual) house and look around for anything that might be illegal. Even aquiring a search warrant for kiddy porn and then booking you for warez is not legal.
In Canada, that is not the case
Of course, the courts might decide that since the material is publicly available, this is equivalent to putting up pictures of kiddie porn on your front lawn.
Hoewver, due to the cacheing nature of the system, I can't see how you could be held liable for the contents of a filing cabinet you put on your front lawn, and then someone else starts putting illegal things into it.
In the end, I suspect that someone, somewhere will legislate against this sort of thing, but for now it will probably be legal.
Cyano
Healthy civil disobedience (Score:3)
Crime is everywhere, yet we don't have ID and papers check points on every street to stop criminal activities. But on the net there are tons of virtual id checkpoints and some people won't stand for it.
The world certainly isn't 'crying out for a means to anonymously share information,' as you put it, because they're happy with yahoo.com, shop.com, and cnn.com. There are people who have a great need and desire to exchange info anonymously, just because Joe "lowest common-denominator" Public doesn't want it doesn't make the project useless.
There are also bigger issues that this project serves, that anonminity doesn't equal criminality and illegal/legal doesn't equal wrong/right.
Re:DOS attacks on Freenet (Score:3)
I then ask you has that stopped the internet in the least?
"Freenet by definition has to accept information from untrusted sources. As the goal is anonymity, it cannot authenticate posters. Thus, at least two DOS attacks: "
Oh no not "untrusted sources". Bad not getting all that authentication.
"(1) Plain-vanilla: rapidly dump (and continue dumping) a lot of random-noise content into Freenet from multiple launch points (DDOS). Soon enough the random noise will crowd out the real information. "
Eventually that information will not exist because it will not be avaible because no one in their right mind would requst random noise.
"(2) Targeted: let's say there is a Freenet file, e.g. '/us/politics/ClintonBlowsGoats' that you want to suppress. Just make your own file with the same net and inject it into Freenet. Again, use multiple launch points and repeat injection
at will. Again, the bogus file will crowd out the "real" file very quickly. "
A read over the mailing list freenet-dev will show you that in fact these things are being addressed. If you feel the need to discuss these things with people who know sign up.
I think this is one of the first things that is being addressed.
"Note that the threat model for Freenet must assume that large corporations and governments will be trying to suppress info. It's clearly within reason for them to be able to inject false/misleading/random information into Freenet from
100s and 1000s of geographically distributed machines. "
There is no historic prcedent for information dumping and the like (I may be wrong). References?
"An accompanying problem is non-uniqueness of keys. There could be dozens of different info chunks floating around Freenet, each tagged with a '/foo/bar/qux' key. Which one you'll get depends on the node through which you access
the Freenet -- not a very desirable dependency. Try to get the same thing a day later and you may well get a different info chunk for the same key. "
The server is supposed to prevent you injecting something with the same key. It is true that you will go along a different route to request the same data but the node may actually remain the same for a while.
"To summarize, this is a key vulnerability of Freenet -- it can be saturated with bogus/misleading information quickly and easily. "
This will eventually be addressed in it's full form. What I think is that despite the possibility for random information good information will always win in the end.
You might be able to say block information from someone you suspect to be an evil source of said information. Or you could filter information from requests on your node. That is entirely possible. Eventually the data will dissapear.
Re:I just don't see it... (Score:3)
"
I very, very, seriously doubt this in any way. The people who are doing the work are in disperate locations, and because of this access is difficult to curtail. Not to mention that even people like me are probably mirroring the data for no apparent reason. Doom censoring at all.
"Idealism can be a nice thing, but there is such a thing as focusing so strongly on a central idea that all perspective is lost. Is the world crying out for a means to anonymously share information via the internet? No, not really. "
Maybe not now but what about tomorrow? Ian Clark is quoted on http://freenet.sourceforge.net as saying that he fears that his child may ask what happened to the freedom of the press on the internet. True freedom may have already been distroyed. Freenet is trying to get it back.
I just don't see it... (Score:3)
Idealism can be a nice thing, but there is such a thing as focusing so strongly on a central idea that all perspective is lost. Is the world crying out for a means to anonymously share information via the internet? No, not really.
Re:Missing control and diversity (Score:3)
Actaly, it seems to me that pictures and vidoe would be illegal because 1) the production of them is a crime (since it must involve the illegal actions) making distributers an accessory if the crime's main point was to make them money. 2) Except in narrow cases, you need a person's permission to distribute their image. Children cannot legally give that permission, and any parent who would in the case of child pornography would also be giving permission to rape their child and lose custody pretty damn fast. Therefore, if it is real images of a real child, it is automatically illegal to distribute, unless said child has reached the age of consent and is now making money by distributing the tapes taken into evidence of his/her own rape.
Frankly, I'm not enough of a free speech fanatic to think that this means that child porn cartoons or text descriptions are beyond any control, but thats another subject.
Sick thought of the day - what if the RealDoll company started making child dolls? Is there anything wrong with that?
-Kahuna Burger
Meth Bill would let AG shut Freenet (Score:3)
The exemption, added just before the Senate closed for 1999, protects ISP and hosts, by turning them into forced agents of government censorship.
The House Judiciary is overdue on their touted hearings on this bill. I suspect its backers, including the Clinton admin, know it was in trouble, and are quitly reworking it.
Bill text:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c106:3:./
Cannabis Culture: http://cannabisculture.com/library/artlist.cgi?su
My notes http://weedstock.com/ben.htm
re: DOS attacks on Freenet (Score:3)
Sure, this works, but only to the extent that people are willing to continue doing it indefinitely. Who's going to maintain the access points to keep flooding Freenet day-in and day-out? Who's going to go to all the trouble to find all the Freenet nodes and keep dinging them with bogus requests?
Freenet needs some sort of mechanism for blocking requests from hosts (and perhaps even entire domains) that keep pulling the same keys over and over. I believe they're working on that.
(2) Targeted: let's say there is a Freenet file, e.g. '/us/politics/ClintonBlowsGoats' that you want to suppress. Just make your own file with the same net
Aren't the keys hashed from the actual data in the file? It was my understanding that keys are unique, and so simple name substitution won't be an effective attack.
The Freenet site expresses some doubts about whether it's desirable (or even technically feasible) for Freenet to be easily searchable by document title or keyword. That's just not how it works.
The keys will be distributed through non-Freenet channels, in much the same way as people distribute PGP keys now: as e-mail and news .sigs, on WWW sites, etc. No one will request the bogus "ClintonBlowsGoats" file, because they'll be looking for it based on a key passed to them by a trusted source.
Re:I think this is kind of cool however. (Score:4)
#2. Java isn't as cross platform as perl? Hmm. Could have fooled me. My java apps run on my Windoze boxes (all of them), my linux box, my sparc, my mac, and the list goes on.... And with Perl, it's NOT fully cross platform. There are exceptions for every platform.
#4. How do you figure that a java runtime takes up so much space? It doesn't.
#5. We are developing something completely new, so why should we use a 'standard' protocol? There ISN'T a standard protocol that even comes close to matching what we want to do. By your logic, HTTP should not have been developed, and they should have just used a 'standard' protocol. Same for MySQL. They should use a 'standard' protocol too.
#6. Evil powers might just try. Yeah. They might try at that. Good luck...
DOS attacks on Freenet (Score:4)
Freenet by definition has to accept information from untrusted sources. As the goal is anonymity, it cannot authenticate posters. Thus, at least two DOS attacks:
(1) Plain-vanilla: rapidly dump (and continue dumping) a lot of random-noise content into Freenet from multiple launch points (DDOS). Soon enough the random noise will crowd out the real information.
(2) Targeted: let's say there is a Freenet file, e.g. '/us/politics/ClintonBlowsGoats' that you want to suppress. Just make your own file with the same net and inject it into Freenet. Again, use multiple launch points and repeat injection at will. Again, the bogus file will crowd out the "real" file very quickly.
Note that the threat model for Freenet must assume that large corporations and governments will be trying to suppress info. It's clearly within reason for them to be able to inject false/misleading/random information into Freenet from 100s and 1000s of geographically distributed machines.
An accompanying problem is non-uniqueness of keys. There could be dozens of different info chunks floating around Freenet, each tagged with a '/foo/bar/qux' key. Which one you'll get depends on the node through which you access the Freenet -- not a very desirable dependency. Try to get the same thing a day later and you may well get a different info chunk for the same key.
To summarize, this is a key vulnerability of Freenet -- it can be saturated with bogus/misleading information quickly and easily.
Kaa
Re:How to destroy FreeNet? (Score:4)
Re:DOS attacks on Freenet (Score:4)
Maybe none of this concerns you now, but how long until it does? How long until something you want said pisses off some corporation and your ISP kicks you out. How long until you no longer want a Web covered in corporate plastic and littegation
- a place controlled completely by the corporate interests, meant only to pump information into you without ever letting you have access to it. Things have gotten rapidly worse on the Web over the last year, and nothing seems to indicate that this has turned around.
And, if not for anything else, then a lot of (very normal) people are already trying to get around economic censorship (I'd bet even you are: have you paid your "existance of huge international recording conglomerate" fee for all your MP3s?) I'm not to happy about this being the main use of Freenet, because it is so bandwidth intensive, but the freedom of information is the freedom of information, no matter what the size is.
Freenet implements freedom. The sort of people who will fight Freenet are also the ones who are fighting freedom on the Web - where it is still possible without fighting the Web itself. If these people have the power and will to destroy all of Freenet (like you believe), then they definitely have the power and will to destroy freedom on the Web completely.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Elite Waiters? (Score:4)
No kidding, we don't those ciminals with their sommelier's spoons, white towels, and silver crumbers corrupting the Internet!
See this thread??? (Score:4)
And this thread is absolutely swamped with useless, moronic, offensive posts, drowning out all useful discussion, and wasting everybody's bandwidth.
Somehow, I get the feeling that a point is being tragically missed here.
Re:I just don't see it... (Score:5)
Its nice to live in a free country where you can so easily say such a thing isn't it? The fact is that most of the peoples of this world live under the constant threat of governments that don't allow them to speak their minds, so its kind of hard for them demand such a thing. When you have freedom, you don't spend much time asking for it do you? There is a huge number of people that not only want the ability to this, but survival demands that they have it - but without it, they can't ASK FOR IT! Wonderful problem eh?
I can't even begin to count the number of times that I've gotten e-mail from persons in Singapore, China and other places thanking me for running an anonymous remailer and making it possible for them to do something, speak freely, that would otherwise get them killed. A right that you take for granted, which is actually quite rare.
Its all fine and dandy, in a free country, to say that people do not need anonymity to speak freely. "Put your name on it!" they cry, "only criminals need anonymity!", "what are you hiding?" and so on. Ignorance is bliss I suppose. When you have freedom, its hard to understand what its like to live in a country without it.
Never forget this: Most of the world does not have the freedoms that you enjoy. Is the world crying out for a means to speak freely and without the fear of reprisals? Yes they are... just not in public.
--
Python
Freenet sounds brilliant! (Score:5)
I have to say, I am very impressed with the level of dedication to freedom that the authors of Freenet