Surak's Journal: Filesharing and Freenet 0.52

Little techno-side bar from the usual gossip today. I promise, the gossip returns tomorrow. ;)

Given the recent way that the RIAA is going after filesharers with a vegence,
I gotta say that filesharing using Kazaa or the Gnutella network these days is just an increasingly stupid idea. There's no protection for anonymity anymore, given the fact that the courts have set the precedence that ISPs *must* disclose subscriber information for anyone caught sharing copyrighted material via P2P filesharing networks.

That being said, one can still share files and not face the wrath of RIAA, MPAA, or anyone else. Unlike other filesharing networks, Freenet really does protect anonymity from all but advanced traffic analysis or compromising of a majority of nodes. Basically, to identify you **AA would have to h4x0r the network (violating numerous laws involving breaking into secured networks), and even then it is difficult to prove that a request that came from your node wasn't just proxying someone else's request. Also, since the data is decentralized, encrypted and scattered across multiple nodes, it's still hard to tell exactly *what* data you have retrieved.

I've started to use Freenet. I haven't looked for music yet, but I can imagine that since there are no search engines at this point, finding music is difficult. That said, I have found some other content like movies and such. Downloading is slow, sometimes painfully slow even over my 2Mbps cablemodem connection. As I type this, I'm getting ~115kbps on a ~250MB download. I have, in the past, gotten as high as 1 megabit, but I suspect that I just got lucky. You often have to restart downloads because once it reaches a certain number of retries for the remaining blocks, it gives up.

I suspect that command line stuff like FUQID would make splitfile downloads somewhat less painful, and I'll be giving one of those a try as soon as I'm finished with this file. Of course, FUQID only works on Windows, so I'm going to need to find something that works on Linux. Any suggestions?

Freenet is way clunky and slow. Even as of the 0.52 upgrade. But I suspect that it would get there if people would just use it more and donate more bandwidth and drive space and if more people would run permanent (as opposed to transient) nodes. I think one day it'll get there, but as of right now, it's still not totally useable by your average user, who's gonna get frusted the first time he tries to download anything over a few meg or so.

Maybe I just need to tweak my configs somewhat, I dunno. I'll keep you guys posted as to my progress with Freenet 0.52

Erm...

[Elwood P Dowd]

Given the problems that Freenet has had in the past, I'm suspicious that the speed issues would not be solved with more resources on the network. I think it's a programmatical/protocol problem. It's going to take a long time to get better.

Another solution...

[M.C. Hampster]

Don't download copyrighted materials.

Re:Another solution...

[Surak]

Don't download copyrighted materials.

Do you really want to get me started on a whole idealogical diatribe? In the end, we will only end up agreeing to disagree, so perhaps we should just leave it at that. ;)

Re:Another solution...

[M.C. Hampster]

idealogical diatribe

You mean the one that just comes down to you wanting free music? ;-)

Face it man, if you downloading stuff illegally was about "civil disobedience" you wouldn't be looking into systems that will keep you anonymous and out of trouble. Civil disobedience is all about doing these things in public to make a point. People who perform real acts of civil disobedience do so in the hope of showing the ridiculousness inherant in a system. They usually do not personally benefit from their

how to make freenet faster

[capoccia]

this is a cut/paste from an email i sent to a friend.

>I tried that freenet, but it is very, very slow.
>Was it really slow for you? I know it says it
>gets faster the more you use it.

there are ways to make freenet faster.

one is to make yourself a permanent node. this is not permanent in the
sense that the freenet crew will come and bash your knees in if you
uninstall freenet. it allows your computer to host and share pages with
other nodes automatically. this means the content you access will probabl

Pulling My Hair Out

[MyHair]

Surak, how are you getting along with Freenet? The recent crackdowns prompted me to put up a permanent node and even publish a couple of DBR sites.

I have been messing with it for 2 weeks, but my node SUCKS! I have 5 IP's, and I can run 2 nodes; I can publish on one with htl=25 and never retrieve the data on the other. Well, I can eventually get the root DBR and sometimes even the daily SSK, but the actual data files almost never make it.

I've been reading and trying as much as I can. I didn't have this muc