Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication

freenetproject.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 443 posts

Re: Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication

#61

Post by ogurechny »

user-the-name wrote: post #54
ogurechny wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 est…

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.

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.

Re: Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication

#62

Post by exporectomy »

tetrisgm wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Re: Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication

#63

Post by [deleted] »

mullingitover wrote: post #58
fortran77 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication

#64

Post by user-the-name »

ogurechny wrote: post #61
user-the-name wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 (freesit…

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?

Re: Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication

#65

Post by cgtzczykldpq »

azalemeth wrote: post #32
samsquire wrote: post #18

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.

Out of curiosity, what sort of things are on freenet? Is it worth installing it in a Tails VM?

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.

Re: Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication

#66

Post by lancesells »

fortran77 wrote: post #49
user-the-name wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is because it was, in fact, a hate group, not an "anti-obesity" group.

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.

You can't find a hosting provider for an anti-obesity forum? I would think there are all types of servers you could find.

Re: Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication

#67

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

fsflover wrote: post #29
Yuioup wrote: post #9

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.

> 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?

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.

Re: Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication

#68

Post by ddtaylor »

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.

Re: Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication

#69

Post by cgtzczykldpq »

marcodiego wrote: post #56

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 int…

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.

Re: Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication

#70

Post by fortran77 »

mullingitover wrote: post #58
fortran77 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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.
Post reply on HN