Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System (2000) [pdf]

Post by 6nf » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 3:39 AM UTC

yason wrote: post #9

simcop2387 wrote: post #4

I've always loved the ideals and design of Freenet for what it does, but the main issues I always ran into when I'd check it out were that discoverability was horrible and then once you did manage to dig into things and find content it was usually stuff I wouldn't want to find to begin with. That's left a lot of bad impressions on people I think, and caused it to have a reputation for only illegal things on it.

It's no wonder really. If you build a system that allows anonymity and untraceability you will end up hosting everything that can't normally happen without anonymity and untraceability. Hackers marvel at the idea of complete anonymity and untraceability because it's technically exciting and fits so well with the hacker thinking. I mean, why should you have to reveal who you are because of mere accountability? Everyon…

Post by polarized » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 4:07 AM UTC

cantthinkofone wrote: post #42

It makes me wonder about use cases for tools like freenet, tor, etc. Espionage of some sort comes to mind and the need to deliver a message from sender to receiver without identifying any participants . Otherwise there is some other implicit recognition that anonymity can be productive. Anonymity clearly changes how individuals communicate, but the research I know of tends to focus more on how people like to behave b…

Post by shittyadmin » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 4:29 AM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #21

shittyadmin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freenet still does a lot of things better than Tor. For example, no server is involved so there's nothing to attack or track down, making anonymity guarantees seem to be much better. Yet they've still managed to pull off some forms of interactive communications. IPFS is closer really, but doesn't move in an anonymity friendly direction at all.

> For example, no server is involved so there's nothing to attack or track down, making anonymity guarantees seem to be much better. Not really "no server". I mean, Freenet users collectively are the servers. As in BitTorrent, I2P and IPFS. What Freenet does better than Tor is keep content available, even if the provider goes away. As long as it's popular content, that is. Although Tor .onion services are perhaps har…

Post by mirimir » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 5:02 AM UTC

chocolatebunny wrote: post #29

mirimir wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the public Freenet opennet contains lots of horrible content. But then, Freenet's focus has always been censorship resistance. Content gets distributed and replicated according to its popularity. It's a lot like BitTorrent, but with serious transport encryption and randomized routing. And arguably it's worked pretty well for that, given that there's been consistently lots of horrible content for 18 years. Conten…

I think there needs to be a way to have personal filters on P2P systems. I don't want censorship but I don't want to support the distribution of child pornography, not because it's illegal but because it doesn't align to my personal moral compass.

Post by brokenmachine » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 5:57 AM UTC

Jhsto wrote: post #19

zzzcpan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not tor. I guess ipfs would be somewhat similar today, but it has its own problems and I don't see it succeeding either.

Care to elaborate problems of IPFS? I just recently set up a node (which I run while I heat my apartment with GPU mining) and am wondering if there's some other project I should give my spare cycles to.