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Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps

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Re: Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps

#261

Post by sanity »

outside2344 wrote: post #238
sanity wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, we've also experimented with hosting git repos on Freenet, see: https://github.com/freenet/freenet-git

Consider in your presentations leading with this as a demo to motivate the technical infrastructure you've put in place. It is hard to grok what Contracts, etc. etc. allow you to do in the abstract so working through how it allows us to build a decentralized GitHub might be a good anchor in a tangible use case.

Appreciate the suggestion. It's often difficult to know where to start when explaining a project like this.

The freenet-git work is quite recent but we do feature River, our group chat app, fairly prominently on our installation page[1] so that people can quickly try out something useful. River is by-far the most fully developed app so far.

[1] https://freenet.org/quickstart/

Re: Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps

#262

Post by sanity »

foobarian wrote: post #110
hbarka wrote: post #33

Is this similar to how Napster worked?

I thought Gnutella was a bit more like Freenet than Napster, iirc only the bootstrap was centralized.

Gnutella was decentralized like Freenet, but it's broadcast search approach limited scalability relative to Freenet's "small-world" approach which can scale indefinitely.

Re: Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps

#263

Post by sanity »

angoragoats wrote: post #259
sanity wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently you follow him a lot more closely than I do, nonetheless I stand by my point even if I might use different words today.

I don't follow him at all, and in fact I try to stay as far away from anything involving him as possible. But your claim didn't pass the smell test, so I looked it up. You might consider doing the same before making easily-disprovable claims in the future; at least in this thread it seems to be a recurring problem for you.

Fair enough, I misremembered the timeline. My broader point was about identitarianism and ideological conformity, regardless of what terminology I used at the time.

Re: Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps

#264

Post by cess11 »

sanity wrote: post #231
cess11 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of see "focus" in the FAQ and "goals" in this thread as interchangeable. It would surprise me if this would not be a common interpretation of these texts alone among the readers here. As for the general reputation of the OG Freenet in this lineage, to the extent I'm aware, anonymity was pretty much the defining characteristic. More or less everything else in the user experience suffered to some extent compared…

If we're doing archaeology, my original 1999 paper was called "A Distributed Decentralized Information Storage and Retrieval System".

Fine. Page 6, which is Chapter 2, under the heading Aims, there is a numbered list. What is the second item in this list?

Re: Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps

#265

Post by sanity »

angoragoats wrote: post #260
sanity wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was that "wrong, harmful, or dishonest" - specifically?

It's wrong because a "woke mind virus" literally doesn't exist, and you just made up the concept, or more likely appropriated it from a Nazi-salute-slinging billionaire whose brain has turned to mush. It's dishonest because it pretends that people behaving in a way that you don't like are somehow infected by some (literal or metaphorical) contagion, when I am not aware of any evidence that this is the case. I'd be de…

It refers to Critical Social Justice ideology. There are entire books, academic papers, and debates about it from across the political spectrum.

Re: Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps

#266

Post by qwezxcrty »

sanity wrote: post #221
nextgens wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've abstained form interfering until now... but have you honestly forgotten? Please explain how "the new freenet" tackles censorship resistance. https://web.archive.org/web/20001017133926/http://freenetpro... "Freenet is a peer-to-peer network designed to allow the distribution of information over the Internet in an efficient manner, without fear of censorship." https://web.archive.org/web/20050201110519/http://free…

> Please explain how "the new freenet" tackles censorship resistance. Primarily through the same core mechanism as the original Freenet design: decentralization and relaying requests through multiple peers such that no individual peer sees the entire request path. The new design also supports pluggable anonymity systems such as mixnets and onion routing. In some respects these are stronger than Hyphanet's approach be…

First, thank you for creating this project. When I was a young high school student in China, I tried all different kind of tools to evade internet censorship, including Freenet (although admittedly with little success, there was never enough peers to connect to and/so it was too slow to download anything meaningful).

My question is whether freenet is designed to be resistant for active adversaries with deep packet inspection capability, particularly like the Chinese firewall that is also observed to do statistical timing analysis of packets? Is there any possibility to apply obfuscation to the peer to peer connection? And is there any mechanism to aide peer discovery (DHT?)

Re: Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps

#267

Post by sanity »

qwezxcrty wrote: post #266
sanity wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please explain how "the new freenet" tackles censorship resistance. Primarily through the same core mechanism as the original Freenet design: decentralization and relaying requests through multiple peers such that no individual peer sees the entire request path. The new design also supports pluggable anonymity systems such as mixnets and onion routing. In some respects these are stronger than Hyphanet's approach be…

First, thank you for creating this project. When I was a young high school student in China, I tried all different kind of tools to evade internet censorship, including Freenet (although admittedly with little success, there was never enough peers to connect to and/so it was too slow to download anything meaningful). My question is whether freenet is designed to be resistant for active adversaries with deep packet in…

> First, thank you for creating this project.

You're welcome :)

> My question is whether freenet is designed to be resistant for active adversaries with deep packet inspection capability, particularly like the Chinese firewall that is also observed to do statistical timing analysis of packets? Is there any possibility to apply obfuscation to the peer to peer connection?

Freenet's transport protocol is a custom encrypted protocol over UDP, but it is not currently designed to evade sophisticated deep packet inspection or timing analysis by state-level adversaries like the Great Firewall.

That said, the transport layer is modular, and we would absolutely accept contributions adding traffic obfuscation or pluggable transports, subject to the usual tradeoffs around latency, bandwidth overhead, and resource usage.

> And is there any mechanism to aid peer discovery (DHT?)

Freenet uses a distributed small-world routing topology for peer discovery and efficient message propagation. It isn't a conventional Kademlia-style DHT, but conceptually it serves a similar purpose.

The network is designed to self-organize into a small-world topology.[1]

[1] See the "Distance" graph at the bottom-right of the circle visualization - http://nova.locut.us:3133/

Re: Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps

#268

Post by sanity »

cess11 wrote: post #264
sanity wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're doing archaeology, my original 1999 paper was called "A Distributed Decentralized Information Storage and Retrieval System".

Fine. Page 6, which is Chapter 2, under the heading Aims, there is a numbered list. What is the second item in this list?

If you have a point to make you should make it.

Re: Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps

#269

Post by angoragoats »

sanity wrote: post #265
angoragoats wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wrong because a "woke mind virus" literally doesn't exist, and you just made up the concept, or more likely appropriated it from a Nazi-salute-slinging billionaire whose brain has turned to mush. It's dishonest because it pretends that people behaving in a way that you don't like are somehow infected by some (literal or metaphorical) contagion, when I am not aware of any evidence that this is the case. I'd be de…

It refers to Critical Social Justice ideology. There are entire books, academic papers, and debates about it from across the political spectrum.

I understand what Critical Social Justice is, and it is not in any way a virus either literally or figuratively. Perhaps I wasn't clear, but I was asking for sources establishing that such a thing as a "woke mind virus" exists. I doubt there are any serious sources which frame critical social justice as such, but once again I'd love to be proven wrong on this. I'm still waiting.

Re: Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps

#270

Post by evilos »

sanity wrote: post #136
evilos wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That phrase is on par with "chemtrails" and "vaccine truther" with its ability to vaporize one's credibility, if used unironically as OP did in those emails.

Your need to sort people based on trigger phrases says it all.

It's not the phrase that's the issue, but you knew that.
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