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

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

#61

Post by mirimir »

cypher_ wrote: post #58
mirimir wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Do everything via Tor, using Whonix to avoid leaks. Hit Tor through nested VPN chains. Buy some Bitcoin, and then mix two or three times. Use a different Whonix instance for each mixing step, and a different mixing service. Then lease your VPS. And if it really matters, you can daisy chain VPS via Tor .onion SSH.[0] 0) https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/onion-ssh-hosts-for-logi...

> Buy some Bitcoin, and then mix two or three times. Simply exchange them to Monero. If you want, mix them, but only a single pass is needed. A mixer is a trusted 3rd-party, which introduces serious counterparty risk, and vulnerable to multiple forms to input-output correlation attacks, in the worst case, provides no security. If you are paranoid, create multiple Monero wallets, and send the funds back and forth, eac…

Thanks. Gotta start using Monero, I guess. It's still no where near as widely accepted as Bitcoin. But you can just convert, as the final step.

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

#62

Post by renegadus »

notacoward wrote: post #59
pdimitar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think you should have long ago learned the lesson that if you don't have a FAQ page somewhere with huge titles and colorful answers, people will never read a paper. Hell, most people don't read FAQs either.

Despite the fact that it was mentioned in the paper, developers continued to deny that it was a serious problem or claim that it had been solved since. Periodic re-insertion and date-based redirects were both touted as answers. As for "can't" that's not accurate. You can certainly prevent old data from being pushed out, by returning an error on insertion of new data if there's no free space. That's how many other sto…

Filesystems don't rely on space voluntarily donated by others, and that's the critical difference here.

Freenet is designed for sharing information, not archiving it. You can't have both.

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

#63

Post by ArneBab »

zrm wrote: post #38
nyolfen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches.”

The solution to that may be to separate the hosting from the discovery. If the hosting is anonymous and censorship-resistant then you'll get every type of content, but for anybody to use it they would first have to find it. Then you have a slew of independent discoverability portals. Some are created for child pornography, so the FBI hacks into them and then uses them to arrest everybody there. Others are created to…

This is what Freenet already provides with three different messaging systems and anonymously run indexes.

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

#64

Post by ArneBab »

notacoward wrote: post #60
6nf wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

‘Information wants to be free’

Interestingly, many of that principle's strongest proponents are selective in its application. While they're adamant that information in the sense of content should be free, they're equally adamant that information in the sense of identity should be strictly limited and controlled by its owners. Unfortunately, as soon as you remove identity you also remove accountability, and while there are edge cases (e.g. politica…

Pseudonymity is what you get when you allow people to tightly control their own information. This is what Freenet uses: You have a private key to which you can upload and which you can use as pseudonym in messaging systems.

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

#65

Post by ArneBab »

notacoward wrote: post #6
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.

Similar impressions here. Freenet was an impressive vehicle for exploring some very important topics and ideas. Unfortunately, besides the problems you mention, the community around it was ... unpleasant. On a good day they could seem a bit overzealous. On a bad day they were downright crazy, and they were always hostile to any advice or criticism from others even in their own field. For example, Freenet isn't a perm…

"it’s like a cache" is what we’ve been saying as the default description for years. When did you last interact with the freenet community?

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

#66

Post by ArneBab »

bitwize wrote: post #39
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.

And this is why censorship is the future of the internet. If you run an online service and don't censor, you become a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Exhibit A: USENET. Exhibit B: Freenet.

When did you last look at Freenet? When did you last check the moderated discussion boards? (FMS)

There’s a lot of original non-scum user content on Freenet nowadays.

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

#67

Post by ArneBab »

mirimir wrote: post #36
Nerada wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to assume Ontario is using the same method that the Missouri police are using above. Here's a response from Freenet outlining an 83% false-positive rate. https://freenetproject.org/police-departments-tracking-effor...

Yes, that's the Freenet Project response that I was thinking of. Thanks for citing it. But the problem now is that there's technical backup for both sides. So defense counsel will likely need a credentialed expert to submit a report, be deposed, and testify. Although I haven't followed any of these cases, I'm guessing that many defendants have accepted plea bargains. Because battles of experts can get expensive fast.…

There is one. If you’ve been falsely accused and you need one, contact press@freenetproject.org

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

#68

Post by ArneBab »

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…

You might be interested in the method Freenet uses to avoid disruption of communication: https://www.draketo.de/english/freenet/friendly-communicatio...

" In the past decade there hasn’t been a year without a politician calling for real names on the internet. Some even want to force people to use real photos as profile pictures. All in the name of stopping online hate, though enforcing real names has long been shown to actually make the problem worse.

This article presents another solution, one that has actually proven that it keeps communication friendly, even in the most anonymous environment of the fully decentralized Freenet project.

And that solution does works without enabling censorship."

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

#69

Post by zrm »

ArneBab wrote: post #63
zrm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to that may be to separate the hosting from the discovery. If the hosting is anonymous and censorship-resistant then you'll get every type of content, but for anybody to use it they would first have to find it. Then you have a slew of independent discoverability portals. Some are created for child pornography, so the FBI hacks into them and then uses them to arrest everybody there. Others are created to…

This is what Freenet already provides with three different messaging systems and anonymously run indexes.

Are you aware of any YouTube-equivalent? Something that allows you to search user-generated/submitted content and content feeds and has a builtin player to display them.

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

#70

Post by notacoward »

renegadus wrote: post #62
notacoward wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite the fact that it was mentioned in the paper, developers continued to deny that it was a serious problem or claim that it had been solved since. Periodic re-insertion and date-based redirects were both touted as answers. As for "can't" that's not accurate. You can certainly prevent old data from being pushed out, by returning an error on insertion of new data if there's no free space. That's how many other sto…

Filesystems don't rely on space voluntarily donated by others, and that's the critical difference here. Freenet is designed for sharing information, not archiving it. You can't have both.

Other systems have also relied on space voluntarily donated by others, and still made the choice to behave as storage systems instead of messaging systems with some history. Or caches that just happen to turn over slowly because the system's too slow and unusable to create cache pressure. If Freenet ever had really taken off, you would have had to deal with these issues. Sharing information doesn't work when the information falls out before the recipient can get it.
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