Sorry I’m not tech savvy! How is this different from Tor?
Freenet build 1495: new user experience and performance
11–20 of 112 posts
Re: Freenet build 1495: new user experience and performance
#12Sorry I’m not tech savvy! How is this different from Tor?
Freenet is slightly older and doesn’t route internet traffic, just distributed static sites.
Re: Freenet build 1495: new user experience and performance
#13Freenet is well designed and well maintained, but it is a solution looking for a problem. We dont yet life in the police state where everyone's political opinions need to be hidden in dark networks. At the moment, freenet has a bad reputation for hosting very illegal content. That rep is so bad that if authorities ever look into your internet traffic, freenet connections are more than enough to get warrants that will…
> We dont yet life in the police state where everyone's political opinions need to be hidden in dark networks. You may not, but many of us actually do. Naturally not every political opinion, and it depends on how you express it, but still. > At the moment, freenet has a bad reputation for hosting very illegal content. Why is that a bad reputation? Isn't that part of the point? ... Perhaps you mean unsavory, or immora…
Freenet is known for child abuse content, a topic so sensitive and disturbing people don’t want to even refer to it directly.
Re: Freenet build 1495: new user experience and performance
#14Last year, I interviewed Ian Clarke, who started arguably the first decentralized file sharing system: freenet! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ The interview -- like most of my interviews -- goes into depth about the entire space, and also touches on Locutus, his new project. PS: I like to interview people on topics related to what we build at Qbix and Intercoin. Freedom of Speech and Capitalism (with Noa…
Having been in that space at the time, I think this point is not arguable at all. Freenet was not the first decentralized file sharing system. Freenet might have been the subject of a PhD thesis in 1999, but by the time it became even slightly usable Napster and Gnutella already had substantial user bases. (Similar to Ceph BTW which had a long gap between being a PhD thesis and being an actual usable distributed filesystem, during which time others had existed in the wild for some time.) The "arguable" part is whether you could include eDonkey, GNUnet, and others in that list. What is true AFAIK is that Freenet was the first such system with things like censorship resistance as a primary design goal (though the MojoNation folks might even disagree with that) and a non-trivial user base.
In case anyone doesn't believe me, here's the Freenet thesis which actually mentions both Gnutella and Napster in references. Hard to claim precedence when that's the case.
Re: Freenet build 1495: new user experience and performance
#15Sorry I’m not tech savvy! How is this different from Tor?
In basic terms, Tor is used to browse the Internet, while Freenet is used to browse Freenet. You can browse the Internet without Tor, but you cannot browse Freenet without Freenet.
Re: Freenet build 1495: new user experience and performance
#16Sorry I’m not tech savvy! How is this different from Tor?
Tor gives you an anonymous connection to some server. Stuff that’s not linked to is still available to the server admin.
Freenet provides an anonymous, encrypted, and distributed cache that does not rely on the security of any one server. Stuff that’s not linked to could just as well not exist, because no one can access it.
Re: Freenet build 1495: new user experience and performance
#17Freenet is well designed and well maintained, but it is a solution looking for a problem. We dont yet life in the police state where everyone's political opinions need to be hidden in dark networks. At the moment, freenet has a bad reputation for hosting very illegal content. That rep is so bad that if authorities ever look into your internet traffic, freenet connections are more than enough to get warrants that will…
> We dont yet life in the police state where everyone's political opinions need to be hidden in dark networks. You may not, but many of us actually do. Naturally not every political opinion, and it depends on how you express it, but still. > At the moment, freenet has a bad reputation for hosting very illegal content. Why is that a bad reputation? Isn't that part of the point? ... Perhaps you mean unsavory, or immora…
I said illegal and meant exactly that. Morality and societal norms are debates for twitter and facebook. Tor/freenet/i2p are at another level of seriousness. Freenet has a rep for child abuse imagery.
Re: Freenet build 1495: new user experience and performance
#18These are some of the most underrated devs on the internet.
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Re: Freenet build 1495: new user experience and performance
#19Sorry I’m not tech savvy! How is this different from Tor?
Like Tor, Freenet attempts to provide anonymity by obscuring the ultimate origin of any given request
Unlike Tor, Freenet can't be directly used like a VPN.
Unlike Tor, Freenet nodes don't route to specific origin servers, but also provide storage to the network. Data is "inserted" to announce its presence, and then cached along the path of any requests. This is supposed to both provide robust access to popular data and provide plausible deniability against any given node operator being responsible for the data (the extent to which it succeeds at either aim in practice is a subject of quite some discussion).
Re: Freenet build 1495: new user experience and performance
#20Freenet is well designed and well maintained, but it is a solution looking for a problem. We dont yet life in the police state where everyone's political opinions need to be hidden in dark networks. At the moment, freenet has a bad reputation for hosting very illegal content. That rep is so bad that if authorities ever look into your internet traffic, freenet connections are more than enough to get warrants that will…
> We dont yet life in the police state where everyone's political opinions need to be hidden in dark networks.
Millions of people are in places where acknowledging that they want abortions[1] or miscarried[2] can pique the state's interest, along with people who are trans[3] or have trans kids[4].
We have police using web searches to prosecute women for abortion[1], we have states compiling lists of transgender individuals[3] and we have parents being investigated by the state because their kids were open about being trans[4].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/03/abortio...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/12/14/texas-trans...
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/23/texas-tra...