[HN Gopher] Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-re...
___________________________________________________________________
Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant
communication
Author : brian_herman
Score : 188 points
Date : 2021-09-19 19:38 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (freenetproject.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (freenetproject.org)
| leshokunin wrote:
| I wonder if Freenet is used for anything but super illegal stuff,
| and sheer curiosity?
|
| This isn't to say privacy and escaping the bottleneck of
| traditional internet isn't compelling. But I've yet to see a use
| case for Freenet.
| [deleted]
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| You can't see any use case for a private and censorship-
| resistant publishing platform that isn't illegal? Okay,
| pretending for a moment that privacy and censorship-resistance
| aren't good ends unto themselves: Whistleblowing, publishing
| something perfectly legal but which political or corporate
| interests don't want published, and publishing or reading LGBT+
| content in a political, social, or family situation that would
| disapprove.
| tootie wrote:
| Does this actually solve those cases though? If I run one of
| these in China and talk about the Uighur genocide am I
| actually safe? Not being sassy I'm actually wondering.
| commoner wrote:
| It would definitely be safer to discuss that topic on
| Freenet than on Weibo or WeChat. China requires websites to
| be licensed,* so the typical self-hosting route isn't
| viable.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license
| user-the-name wrote:
| Yeah, but, is anybody _actually using it for that_?
|
| Or is it just used for criminality, in practice?
| ogurechny wrote:
| How would you know if someone shared data with someone else
| (using any kind of communication system, not just
| anonymous) without telling you? How would you gather
| statistics of such transfers?
|
| Some time ago, certain people used Freenet to transfer
| enormous amounts of data (for such a small network) _in the
| open_ , and most users did not notice, and it rarely got
| mentioned (if at all). So when people state they have
| estimates of network usage, I get really skeptical.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Nobody has stated they have any estimates of anything,
| but this is a really defensive response to the mere
| suggestion that it might be good to know if the network
| is used for criminality or not.
| ogurechny wrote:
| In simple terms, if someone has uploaded a picture of a
| cat to a non-public Freenet key, and someone downloaded
| it, both you and I have no way to learn about it unless
| we can spy on those users or flood the network with
| spying nodes to the point of logging each piece of data,
| and deducing that these two people exchanged something.
| Even theoretically, we can only make assumptions about
| publicly announced data (freesites and message systems),
| and then try to estimate the proportion of communication
| that happens in the dark.
|
| And people often make wrong assumptions.
| user-the-name wrote:
| So you are telling me that it is hard to find out if
| running a Freenet node will help criminals, or decent
| people.
|
| That does not really do much to convince me running it is
| a good thing, you know?
| ogurechny wrote:
| I didn't think I was convincing anyone to run anything,
| just explaining that this approach wouldn't work.
| Moreover, there's always a possibility that you, a
| "decent person" can become a "criminal" one day, and,
| counter-intuitively, that's when you want the laws to
| work and be equal for everyone, not when you're a "decent
| person".
|
| But it doesn't need to be so dramatic. Like most of the
| people on this site, you probably use more or less cheap
| broadband or mobile internet at home. The reason it's
| much cheaper than a dedicated line to your location is
| because a lot of people in your area want an internet
| connection, too (and they don't use it fully, or all at
| the same time, etc.), so there's a great deal of ISP
| infrastructure sharing. So you help your neighbor in
| having a cheap internet access, and your neighbor helps
| you.
|
| What if one of your neighbors is a maniac who streams
| killing people, or a botnet owner, or a military drone
| operator working from home, or just a domestic abuser?
| Have you asked your provider to only join the "decent
| people" network? If not, you are actively helping bad
| people right now.
| h_anna_h wrote:
| One man's criminal is another man's freedom fighter.
| Snowden is a criminal but his supporters consider him a
| decent person. I do not believe that the two are mutually
| exclusive.
|
| The whole point of projects like freenet is to let people
| communicate data between each other without censorship
| and without being identified, no matter what that data
| is. If you disagree with that principle then I believe
| that freenet is probably not for you.
|
| > That does not really do much to convince me running it
| is a good thing, you know?
|
| Make sure to block TLS connections on every network that
| you manage. You don't know what naughty things your users
| might be doing after all. You would not want to help a
| criminal, would you?
| exporectomy wrote:
| What's wrong with illegal stuff? Perhaps you mean to say stuff
| that your culture shames, abuses or ostracizes people for? In
| that case, yea, that's why somebody would want to hide their
| activity.
| einpoklum wrote:
| If nothing else, many people use it for personal, interpersonal
| and group communications about perfectly mundane issues,
| uninteresting to governments, on principle.
|
| (... for some definition of "many".)
| romesmoke wrote:
| I tried hosting my blog on IPFS recently, ended up paying ~80
| euros for my crypto illiteracy, still no decentralized blog. Yet
| censorship-resistance is something I want to have around my
| online home. So Freenet looks interesting. Could a Freenet-hosted
| page be accessible from a simple Web browser running on a machine
| with merely an Internet connection? If not, implementing such a
| thing sounds like a thing.
| EGreg wrote:
| Yes!!
|
| Finally. And the next generation of freenet is maidsafe.
|
| Many people on HN are unaware of most of these things. Tor still
| has sites hosted on a server. Dat and IPFS still have IP
| addresses of swarm peers. Freenet and SAFE network don't.
| alanweber22 wrote:
| In what ways does maidsafe improve upon freenet?
| EGreg wrote:
| Far far more advanced -- it splits data into chunks, encrypts
| it end to end, uses a Kademlia DHT which removes the IP
| addresses after the first hop so no one can find all the
| nodes, has consensus about the files and their evolution, and
| uses later cryptographic primitives like BLS keys etc. etc.
|
| https://safenetforum.org/t/maidsafe-vs-freenet-i2p-ipfs/9409
| cgtzczykldpq wrote:
| Freenet is _not_ affiliated with Maidsafe.
| EGreg wrote:
| That's correct!
| p4bl0 wrote:
| I see a lot of people here comparing Freenet with I2P and I know
| that these are historically tied together but I would say that it
| would make a lot more sense to compare Freenet with IPFS, as both
| are content network, while I2P is more like Tor than Freenet, an
| overlay transport network.
|
| I don't know how Freenet works well so I'm not sure how it
| differs from IPFS, I would really like to see some kind of
| comparison table on how they do things.
| Cilvic wrote:
| I read the basic difference to be anonymity of the user. Which
| freenet protects by design but has therefore spam and DoS to
| deal with. Whereas IPFS doesn't have those problems, but also
| no privacy.
| Yuioup wrote:
| I stay away from it because chunks of the data is hosted on your
| local machine, and it could potentially contain very unsavory
| data. Sure it's encrypted but try to explain that to your local
| law enforcement.
| fsflover wrote:
| > Sure it's encrypted but try to explain that to your local law
| enforcement.
|
| But how will they read it if even you can't?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| They might've purchased a decryption key from some dark
| corner of the internet and after failing to trace the money
| to the bad-guy they're now hoping to track him down by IP
| address. Probably it would surface in court that you're not
| the bad guy they're after, but who knows what kind of bad
| things they'll do to you in the meantime.
| not_m_anissimov wrote:
| They know what they're looking for. If they know the file
| locators they can find any matching chunks and decrypt them.
| It gets worse, if someone connects to you and requests a file
| from you, good chance your node will cache the chunks in that
| file. Freenet is a probable-cause paradise.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Some HN users are stuck in an interesting privacy paradox. Most
| of the time when a company or government tries to undermine
| privacy or encryption they jump at the throat and point out the
| need for both.
|
| However, it seems when we actually accomplish those goals and
| create systems that are truly anonymous, private and/or encrypted
| they basically say it's only for criminals and child abuse.
| ma2rten wrote:
| Are you sure those are the same people?
| lottin wrote:
| This is a good point. Censorship-resistance sounds good in
| theory, but when you actually think about it there is certain
| stuff that everybody would agree needs to be censored.
| h_anna_h wrote:
| A lot of people? Sure.
|
| Everybody? Not really, some people are really vocal about how
| "data wants to be free".
| wongarsu wrote:
| If everyone agrees that it needs to be censored, then who is
| posting it?
| nullc wrote:
| One problem is that the privacy invading and censorous systems
| work 99% of the time ... sucking away most of the market, which
| is boring usage, and leave the alternatives concentrated in
| "other stuff", much of which is undesirable.
| kragen wrote:
| Can you point out which HN users are doing both of these? Maybe
| they're Russian trolls.
| [deleted]
| trutannus wrote:
| There's another side here. Some don't like companies and
| governments chipping away at privacy. At the same time, they
| don't trust Shiny New Privacy Startup 2021 to not expose them
| to illegal material as a result of being overrun by bad actors.
| I would personally rather an established organization to
| respect my privacy, rather than move to a new platform that
| does not have the resources to protect me from liability.
| cgtzczykldpq wrote:
| Freenet has been in development for 21 years.
| bitwize wrote:
| The upshot of a project like Freenet is that no matter how noble
| the intentions, these days it's pretty much a CSAM distribution
| network and little else -- and if you publicly fess up to using
| it you'll be put on a list.
|
| This is why the future of the internet is censored, regulated
| platforms like FB, Twitter, and Reddit -- if you seek out
| uncensored platforms you are ipso facto up to no good because of
| the reputation of what goes on on those platforms.
| mantas wrote:
| There're plenty of locations where censorship is much broader
| topic. And, unfortunately, the list seems to be growing.
| dkdk8283 wrote:
| I think this comment is sensational but generally true. Replace
| CSAM with "right leaning" politics and you are just as fucked.
|
| I'm thinking about leaving the US and getting a EU work visa to
| avoid the shitshow. There are a lot of people who think
| censorship is good - in the name of fighting misinformation -
| and generally hold a negative opinion of opposing viewpoints.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Nevermind "CSAM" and "right leaning" politics -- I can't even
| seem to find a place that will host the anti-obesity group
| that I used to enjoy reading on reddit. (It was removed by
| Ellen Pao when they cleaned up "hate groups".)
| user-the-name wrote:
| That is because it was, in fact, a hate group, not an
| "anti-obesity" group.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Ok, I get it. You're against free speech.
|
| But the point stands--it's difficult to find a place to
| host a forum that contains legal discussions that happen
| to offend the sensibilities of the type of people who run
| tech companies.
| lancesells wrote:
| You can't find a hosting provider for an anti-obesity
| forum? I would think there are all types of servers you
| could find.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| The Dixie Chicks, the PMRC, and a host of other examples
| show this isn't a new phenomenon.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > Ok, I get it. You're against free speech.
|
| Another day, another person confusing 'free speech' with
| a private publisher not wanting to publish hate speech.
|
| You're entitled to print what you want, you're not
| entitled to force someone else to print anything.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I said was I couldn't find another place that would host
| it. I didn't say that Reddit didn't have a right to
| remove it.
| barbacoa wrote:
| >>you're not entitled to force someone else to print
| anything.
|
| Unless you're the surgeon general. Then you can force
| private companies to publish compelled speech on their
| alcohol and tobacco products.
| [deleted]
| mullingitover wrote:
| That was a very acceptable tradeoff for the makers of
| those products - I'm pretty sure they're rather print
| reasonable warnings than just have their products, which
| are indisputably health hazards, banned entirely.
| [deleted]
| user-the-name wrote:
| No, I am against hate groups. They are the absolute worst
| of humanity, they destroy people, and they destroy
| societies.
|
| Do not participate in them. Do not support them. Do
| everything you can to oppose them.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I'd bet you and I both would agree that we don't like
| people who recklessly put themselves in a situation where
| they are at extreme risk to catch or spread COVID. If we
| were to have a forum that criticized people who won't
| vaccinate, won't distance, won't wear protective masks,
| and promote unproven treatments would that be a "hate
| group?"
| mullingitover wrote:
| Obesity isn't contagious so these things aren't remotely
| comparable.
|
| It was just a hate group, stop digging man.
| stavros wrote:
| Yes. I visited /r/hermancainaward the other day becsuse I
| wanted to check it out, and I was stunned at how hateful
| the comments were against people who, sadly, had opinions
| that lead to their death.
|
| I was sad that people could be so misinformed/misled, but
| the subreddit seemed genuinely happy that these people
| died. That sounds very much like a hate group to me, and
| I'd like to see it as banned as fatpeoplehate (which has
| hate in the damn name) was.
|
| It's not about the _subject_ of the criticism, it 's how
| you go about it. These subreddit are toxic hate-pools,
| they aren't a force for good. They're reveling in the
| misfortune of others instead of trying to somehow help,
| and that's what makes them hate groups, not whether or
| not being fat or an antivaxxer is bad.
| fortran77 wrote:
| > I was stunned at how hateful the comments were against
| people who, sadly, had opinions that lead to their death.
|
| And yet Reddit management is ok with it.
| kragen wrote:
| That's interesting. Can you elaborate on what this "anti-
| obesity" forum was like? How was it different from a hate
| group?
| noxer wrote:
| Everyone moved to telegram. They host your "offensive"
| memes and chats, they dont care. Right-wing, left-wing
| whatever you can post it there.
|
| You cant call for violence or show violence, like gore
| content and terrorist videos do get removed. Everything
| else is fine (for now).
|
| Download the app from the website not form the stores to
| avoid googles censorship.
| hwers wrote:
| Not really sure leaving the US would do that much good
| (speaking as a european).
| zepto wrote:
| You do realize the EU is _further_ down the path of enabling
| censorship than the US?
| fsflover wrote:
| What are you talking about?
| sgjohnson wrote:
| There is no near-absolute right to free speech in the EU.
| Countless people have been successfilly prosecuted for
| what would be covered under the 1st amendment in the EU.
| h_anna_h wrote:
| ECHR contains the freedom of speech as a human right and
| so do most EU countries in their own constitutions.
| "Countless people have been successfully prosecuted for
| what would be covered under the 1st amendment" (and the
| ECHR) in the US too. The constitution only has value as
| long as it's enforced.
| bitwize wrote:
| If you express Nazi views in Germany, you will be
| arrested. In the USA the First Amendment has been ruled
| to apply to even the most odious kinds of speech,
| including neo-Nazis and the KKK.
|
| That said it's also true that Germany is, in practice, a
| freer country than the USA -- and a lot of that may have
| to domwith the fact that they banned Nazism and public
| expression of Nazism over 70 years ago. The concept of
| "unalienable rights" so enshrined in American political
| philosophy is a myth. COVID should have taught us that
| all freedom is contingent. A corollary of that is that in
| order for a society to be, in practice, free, individual
| rights must be balanced against public health and public
| safety. The radical American belief in inviolable
| individual rights led us down the present course of toxic
| individualism, which got us Trump and the current antivax
| movement.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| > That said it's also true that Germany is, in practice,
| a freer country than the USA [citation needed]
|
| Freer by what standard?
|
| I'm a European living in Europe, but if I could move to
| the United States, I'd do it overnight.
| bitwize wrote:
| Don't. In addition to the fact that our police are
| intrusive, our criminal legal system is optimized for
| tallying high numbers of convictions rather than justice,
| everything is dependent on your credit score, you get
| effectively no vacation and very little in the way of
| labor protection compared to back home, and you're fucked
| if you get sick or injured without adequate employer
| health care -- according to various European Hackernews
| who came here, our food is terrible.
|
| As for how Germany is freer than the USA... it
| consistently scores higher on various press freedom
| indices and on Cato's Human Freedom Index. Social
| mobility and legal protection of privacy are both higher
| in Germany.
| h_anna_h wrote:
| > which got us Trump and the current antivax movement
|
| I think that you are stretching it a bit here. Claiming
| that individualism is responsible for that seems
| unsubstantiated.
| notriddle wrote:
| It's a stretch to blame "absolute rights" for Trump's
| election. That can be placed pretty solidly on
| xenophobia.
|
| The anti-maskers? The only reason those guys think they
| have a case is exactly because they think bodily autonomy
| has no limits.
| noxer wrote:
| Makes no sense, Trump is pro vaccine and has been from
| the beginning.
| noxer wrote:
| Ursula Haverbeck is currently in a German prison at the
| age of 92 for the "crime" of verbal holocaust denial aka
| for speech.
|
| There is no free speech anywhere in Europe. And there is
| no doubt she would be free in every state in the US.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Haverbeck
| h_anna_h wrote:
| > There is no free speech anywhere in Europe
|
| This is a bold and unsubstantiated claim.
|
| > And there is no doubt she would be free in every state
| in the US.
|
| For this specific action? Sure. For other actions that
| are protected under the 1st amendment? Depends on whether
| there is a law against it and if she pissed off someone
| "important" or enough people. There are various such
| cases.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| There aren't any cases I know of for anyone being jailed
| for expressing their beliefs. Can you name several?
| noxer wrote:
| >This is a bold and unsubstantiated claim.
|
| I'm fine with that but its non the less the hard truth
| there is nothing like the 1st amendment in any other
| place.
|
| >For other actions that are protected under the 1st
| amendment? Depends....
|
| To be in the right doesn't mean you win the court case
| that's true but in the EU you dont have the 1st
| amendment, you dont have the right to free speech. If the
| court system does its job correct you go to jail not when
| the system fails because of "important" people and
| corruption. You go to jail because what you said is
| actually a crime to say. Needless to say that the list of
| "crime speech" only gets longer and longer over time.
| sweetbitter wrote:
| Federated platforms are pretty good with getting rid of public
| objectionable material. I thought that ever since encryption
| became a thing, we had pretty much forfeit the possibility of
| preventing the sharing of CSAM? Hence why Facebook is where the
| overwhelming majority of CSAM is found on the internet.
| IndySun wrote:
| >Hence why Facebook is where the overwhelming majority of
| CSAM is found on the internet.
|
| It's not that. It's because fb is huge. CSAM and it's
| purveyors will determinedly find a way to share digitally,
| eventually, on every platform. Only regularly shutting
| down/restarting anew, wholesale, disrupts; that or
| censorship.
| ogurechny wrote:
| If something is not safe for child porn and terrorism, it is
| not really safe for everything else. Only as safe as someone
| lets you be. Alternatively, if something has means to censor
| "just" child porn and terrorism, they WILL be used for
| something else one day.
| Popegaf wrote:
| Is this comparable to IPFS running on I2P?
| grumbel wrote:
| Freenet feels very similar to IPFS, but it differs under the
| hood. On Freenet the network itself is the data store, you
| don't host your own files, you upload them and they spread over
| the network. If you go offline, the files still remain on the
| network. On IPFS on the other side you are storing your own
| files and the network is just used for lookup and caching.
| Everything on Freenet is also encrypted, so you don't get the
| content-addressability benefits (e.g. dedup) you get on IPFS.
| summm wrote:
| Freenet uses convergent encryption, so you do get
| deduplication.
| ogurechny wrote:
| ...and its development has been exponentially decaying to zero
| for years. Mostly because of unsolved social problems (uneducated
| public doesn't understand they need real anonymous systems, and
| happily use corporate junk marketed as "private and secure",
| while educated public dreams about making the next fart button
| app for the millions, and selling their data), but also because
| readily accessible public network gives too much power to
| dedicated observers to be safe in current political climate
| (which has been known for 15 years, yada yada).
|
| Still, no one has made anything more advanced and educational.
| Which is quite sad, as these are still the ideas on anonymous
| communication from the '90s and early 2000s. A whole generation
| has probably gone down the drain, and did not do any work.
| [deleted]
| smoldesu wrote:
| I agree, and it's frankly hard to believe that our governments
| didn't have some hand in shaping that future. The further you
| follow the cryptography and anonymity paper trail, the more
| often you run into intelligence agencies. In some ways, it
| wouldn't surprise me if our current "big tech" paradigm is
| being relentlessly funded and propped-up by the United States
| in some way or another. As more and more users get herded into
| silos like TikTok and Facebook, the stage is being set for
| international-scale data warfare.
| garmaine wrote:
| No need to speculate, we know that governments had a direct
| role in this thanks to the Snowden revelations.
| hushpuppy wrote:
| Governments have structured financial markets heavily to
| favor large publicly traded corporations through allowing
| them access to massive amounts of borderline free credit.
|
| The goal is growth and consolidation. They want every major
| industry to be completely dominated by a small handful of
| big players. This makes it much easier to regulate and
| implement policy.
|
| It would be impossible for them to have nearly the same
| amount of control over a economy if the economy was
| dominated by hundreds or thousands of small and medium
| players. By having 3 or 4 major public corporations they
| are much more easier to manipulate and keep tabs on. They
| can 'invite them to the table' to advise and help draft
| policy and regulations that are mutually beneficial. Also
| it makes it much easier to convince the public that such
| regulation is done for the public's benefit.
|
| This model of American State Corporatism was developed in
| the late 19th, early 20th century and has since been
| exported across the world.
|
| It is a pattern that is repeated over and over again.
| Whether it's automobile manufacturing, steel manufacturing,
| railway transportation, television broadcasting, ISPs, or
| Social Media.. once the government set it's sites on
| regulating it you will see markets devolve into 3-5 major
| corporate players that pretty much control everybody else.
| All of this heavily encouraged through regulation of
| capital markets and central banking systems.
|
| The classic pre-internet example is the development of AT&T
| monopoly. FCC used it's ability to regulate peering
| agreements to heavily favor the markets towards re-
| establishing the AT&T monopoly. A monopoly that they
| essentially lost when the early Bell patents ran out.
|
| They were then able to use that monopoly, through
| regulatory forces, to gain control over the communication
| infrastructure during the cold war, which was a national
| security priority. That is how we ended up with things like
| Room 641A. (which was in 2003-later era, but is something
| they did through out the entire cold war)
|
| History repeated itself with the Prism revelations.
| cgtzczykldpq wrote:
| Freenet development is _NOT_ dead! :)
|
| I have been contributing for ~ 12 years and now have acquired
| long-term funding (independent of Freenet's own funding!) to
| continue my contributions in a more intense fashion.
|
| The core network which serves static HTML sites + audio/video
| is stable and usable. It has a bunch of reliable long-term
| contributors working on it.
|
| Hence development on my personal side is focused on polishing
| existing dynamic applications which are built on top of
| Freenet, and implementing some new ones.
|
| Basic implementations of notably forums, social networking,
| blogging and mail exist already, the goal is to make them easy
| to use (integrate them into the main UI instead of being
| standalone), add much more features, improve performance and
| security.
|
| Here's a list of these and dozens of other apps built on
| Freenet: https://github.com/freenet/wiki/wiki/Projects
|
| Developing dynamic stuff is taking so long because it is a
| complex endeavor:
|
| On the regular Internet, censorship happens by "look up who
| owns the IP, go to their address, remove the computer."
|
| Since this is not possible on Freenet as everyone is anonymous,
| censorship will happen by denial of service: For example forum
| systems would be spammed to death to get rid of unwanted
| content.
|
| Thus the architecture of censorship-resistant systems has to be
| reinvented from scratch, you can't just take a regular forum
| system and stick Freenet on top of it.
|
| It has to be decentralized to be resistant against DoS - there
| must not be Tor-alike central servers ("hidden sites" / .onion
| sites). Instead messages are stored across the whole network
| and replicated automatically if they are downloaded more often
| and thus need more bandwidth (the added redundance also makes
| them more censorship-resistant).
|
| And spam filtering need to be a first-class application, I have
| worked for years only on that.
|
| So the different architecture is the primary pitfall which many
| projects which decided "Freenet is too old, we're gonna build
| this from scratch with nice Javascript etc." fell into IMHO:
| First it's "we'll develop a regular app, we can bolt Tor onto
| it later", then they realize that the threat-model is so
| different that this is just not possible and the projects never
| become anonymous/censorship-resistant.
|
| So privacy needs to be built in from the start.
|
| Luckily, Freenet did that right (even though it was the first
| anti-censorship + privacy network!), and I don't mind that it's
| taking decades to develop because of the extended threat model:
|
| That's still better than being one of wheel-reinventing post-
| Freenet projects which then abandon the privacy idea in the end
| anyway, or postpone it forever.
| sweetbitter wrote:
| Loopix - https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.00536 Nym (Loopix but using
| blockchain for users to pay nodes) - https://nymtech.net/nym-
| whitepaper.pdf
|
| https://nymtech.net/
| belorn wrote:
| Freenet as a censorship resistant tool had potential a long
| time ago, through in my view the failure points had more to do
| with the design and the positioning in the censorship resistant
| tool chain than with the unsolved problems. A shared "data
| store" that shuffles its pieces around was a good idea in
| theory, but torrents without any privacy did a better job of
| being a shared data store. Copyright enforcement has been too
| slow and ineffective to push people into using Freenet.
|
| Tor won over most of the anti-censorship users of Freenet by
| adding hidden services. The model of servers and clients seemed
| to be easier to model around than a shared data store, for
| reason that might have to do with how websites on internet has
| moved on from the 90's and early 2000s.
|
| I am unsure if the concept of a anonymized and censorship
| resistant shared data store has a place in the future. If
| copyright enforcement actually become effective in stopping
| torrenting, then maybe Freenet will see a renewal (possible as
| a patch to the torrent protocol). Hopefully without java.
| cortesoft wrote:
| > uneducated public doesn't understand they need real anonymous
| systems
|
| I really don't like this wording. How are you so sure that they
| NEED real anonymous systems? I understand the value of privacy,
| but I don't think I get to dictate what other people NEED.
| ogurechny wrote:
| Some time ago, some people believed they needed a glass of
| wine, a ten course meal, and a charming beauty to whom to
| read poems, and that those backwards peasants in the fields
| could understand none of these needs, and only needed to get
| whipped regularly, just in case.
|
| So I'm all for dictating that everyone need everything.
| samsquire wrote:
| You have to go out of your way to find abusive media on freenet.
| There are many top lists of freesites and they are censored of
| abusive media.
|
| I recommend FMS the freenet messaging system which uses web of
| trust successfully to moderate messages in a Usenet forum.
| ta988 wrote:
| I am glad it evolved a bit, it used to host a lot of child
| porn, nazi/fascist material etc And clearly you would be
| exposed to it through messages or not well annotated index.
| azalemeth wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what sort of things are on freenet? Is it
| worth installing it in a Tails VM?
| cgtzczykldpq wrote:
| Freenet's default feature is HTML sites - just like the
| regular web but fully hosted on Freenet and only accessible
| through it.
|
| The content of those sites is whatever their authors want it
| to be :)
|
| Further, dynamic applications such as forums are also
| available. Here's a list of apps built on top of Freenet:
| https://github.com/freenet/wiki/wiki/Projects
|
| Freenet needs UDP so it likely won't work on Tails as Tails
| tunnels everything through Tor - which does not support UDP
| AFAIK.
| Flocular wrote:
| Still haven solved the CSAM problem, so the public servers are
| off limits. The private infrastructure solution always looked
| interesting to me, but I'm missing any actual application ideas
| for that?
| cgtzczykldpq wrote:
| I've been using Freenet for 12 years and have not run into CSAM
| involuntarily, and of course also not voluntarily!
|
| So I don't know how you get the impression that "public servers
| are off limits"?
|
| It is possible that CSN exists in certain forums on Freenet
| which have the specific goal of sharing CSAM.
|
| But if it were to be posted into non-CSAM forums then the
| community would flag it as spam and thus make it disappear for
| those who don't un-flag it manually, so you're unlikely to
| involuntarily see it there.
|
| Some HTML sites might link other sites which contain CSAM, but
| the links will very likely have a name which implies what
| you're gonna see.
|
| Also, IMHO saying "public / private servers" in the context of
| Freenet is wrong because Freenet is not organized into
| "servers". Basically the whole of Freenet is connected into one
| big public network.
|
| And it addresses files, not machines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28588336
|
| "Private" happens in terms of a file being "private" if you
| don't share the link to it with anyone.
|
| (A separate Freenet network which is fully private would be
| possible if every participant configures his instance to not
| connect to the outside. But one participant disobeying that and
| it is not private anymore, so it's unlikely that such networks
| exist.)
| unixhero wrote:
| Is that still around?
| marcodiego wrote:
| I like the fact that I can expose a machine using tor. Its .onion
| address becomes something analog to a public ip address[0]. It
| even works behind a nat, so I can ssh to a machine of mine from
| anywhere in the world. The problem: the other point must support
| tor to access it.
|
| Anyone knows a way using these overlay networks, tor, i2p,
| freenet, to expose a service on a machine behind a NAT to be
| accessed through the internet without the need of clients needing
| special software?
|
| [0] https://golb.hplar.ch/2019/01/expose-server-tor.html
| cgtzczykldpq wrote:
| Freenet is _not_ a point-to-point network. I.e. you cannot
| address a specific computer on Freenet by something like an IP.
|
| (Well you can, but you shouldn't want to, will explain below.)
|
| Freenet is a datastore: It addresses content, not computers.
|
| So a Freenet address points to a file or a directory of files
| (a zip). The addresses can be versioned so files/dirs can be
| updated.
|
| A file/dir may be stored _anywhere_ in Freenet. Where it is
| stored is _not_ known - the machines which store it are
| anonymous so censorship is prevented. If many people request a
| file, it will get stored on more machines automatically.
|
| Now of course you can make a specific computer constantly
| publish new versions of a file to "send" data like on IP and
| poll for a remote file to receive data. This can emulate direct
| connections and does work.
|
| But it invalidates the whole point of Freenet:
|
| Freenet wants to be censorship-resistant, so content should not
| rely on a single computer to keep existing because that is a
| single point of failure.
| [deleted]
| fsflover wrote:
| How is it better than I2P: https://geti2p.net?
|
| Upd: found this: https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/freenet.
| dejw wrote:
| how is it different to Tor project?
| hkt wrote:
| They are different things. I2P is a transport layer, freenet is
| a (imo weird) combination of transport layer and distributed
| storage. So, running IRC over freenet (for instance) isn't a
| thing. Personally my take is that freenet is conceptually not
| as interesting as running bittorrent over i2p, but YMMV.
| ogurechny wrote:
| Freenet implements low latency queue and allows for near-
| realtime communication over distributed storage.
| Specifically, "IRC over Freenet" WAS made long time ago. You
| get modem-like delays and bandwidth, but is this a problem?
| Trying to use it when someone is actively searching for you
| is a different story, because there's a balance between
| sending data and being detectable.
| hkt wrote:
| TIL, my mistake. Thank you!
| azalemeth wrote:
| My understanding is that:
|
| -- i2p was originally a fork of freenet
|
| -- Freenet was designed and conceived as a datastore, fist and
| foremost, whereas i2p using 'garlic routing' was apt for any IP
| protocol proxied over it (a bit like tor)
|
| -- Freenet therefore is more efficient and distributing popular
| data
|
| -- There are some concerns about the algoirthms behind
| freenet's anonymity, which i2p claims [1] are troublesome.
|
| -- Incidentally, I have heard complaints about the crypto
| behind i2p, but I am not expert in this area enough to comment.
| My understanding is that the consensus is that "tor r is
| better", but note you can e.g. run freenet over tor if desired.
|
| I played with both as a curious teenager around the time they
| were released. I am now largely terrified to, because of the
| prospect of accidentally finding CSAM, which I suspect is very
| high on both platforms.
|
| [1] https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/freenet
| not_m_anissimov wrote:
| You're not likely to find child porn on Tor anymore unless
| you go looking for it. It's there, because Tor is much bigger
| than Freenet and I2P, but it's out the way. The hidden wikis
| were all cleaned up years ago. I bet the drug marketplaces
| thought it was bad for business to be listed alongside that
| sort of thing.
|
| Freenet is the same as it ever was. I don't think you could
| play around on there and not find that stuff. Dunno what's
| going on on I2P these days.
| sanity31415 wrote:
| > Freenet is the same as it ever was. I don't think you
| could play around on there and not find that stuff. Dunno
| what's going on on I2P these days.
|
| You're very unlikely to find it unless you're looking for
| it, none of the default indexes allow it.
| wongarsu wrote:
| > I am now largely terrified to, because of the prospect of
| accidentally finding CSAM, which I suspect is very high on
| both platforms.
|
| Chilling effects in a nutshell.
| amelius wrote:
| It's in the Bitcoin blockchain too:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47130268
| mikece wrote:
| Without getting into which are better for now, are these the
| only two options for this concept right now?
| fsflover wrote:
| https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/other-networks
|
| Also, Tor hidden services are somewhat close:
| https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/tor.
| mastazi wrote:
| From the second link you posted:
|
| > The two primary differences between Tor / Onion-Routing
| and I2P are again related to differences in the threat
| model and the out-proxy design.
|
| This is the first paragraph. No further explanation is
| given about this point. The fact that it says "are again
| related..." suggests that the page used to have another
| paragraph before this one, that was later removed?
|
| I would like to read about the different threat model and
| about the out-proxy design, anyone has sources?
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| There is always Tor
| eptcyka wrote:
| Interestingly, Freenet hasn't migrated away from Freenode. Mind
| you, there is no affiliation between these two projects, AFAIK.
| kragen wrote:
| Maybe Freenet people are chatting on FMS?
| w6rpv3om wrote:
| I like to read about those projects, but only use Tor in my daily
| life.
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| Freenet generally has peers act as file stores. This presents
| some concerns people would have, but also presents an interesting
| question:
|
| With the existence of crypto that requires large disk spaces to
| mine coins, could you abuse freenet for this goal?
| root_axis wrote:
| No. The data being stored as proof of work cannot be useful,
| otherwise it's not "work".
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I've never heard about disk space as a relevant constraint on
| crypto mining. Do you mind elaborating or sharing a link or
| term I can search?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Probably https://www.chia.net/ , a crypocurrency that uses
| "Proof of Space and Time" (prove you've stored stuff on disk)
| rather than proof of work.
| drefanzor wrote:
| Chia Coin miners use hard drive space as proof of work.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-19 23:00 UTC)