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

freenetproject.org

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

#121

Post by amelius »

wongarsu wrote: post #78
azalemeth wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that: -- i2p was originally a fork of freenet -- Freenet was designed and conceived as a datastore, fist and foremost, whereas i2p using 'garlic routing' was apt for any IP protocol proxied over it (a bit like tor) -- Freenet therefore is more efficient and distributing popular data -- There are some concerns about the algoirthms behind freenet's anonymity, which i2p claims [1] are troublesome. --…

> I am now largely terrified to, because of the prospect of accidentally finding CSAM, which I suspect is very high on both platforms. Chilling effects in a nutshell.

It's in Bitcoin's blockchain too:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47130268

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

#122

Post by stavros »

fortran77 wrote: post #117
stavros wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I visited /r/hermancainaward the other day becsuse I wanted to check it out, and I was stunned at how hateful the comments were against people who, sadly, had opinions that lead to their death. I was sad that people could be so misinformed/misled, but the subreddit seemed genuinely happy that these people died. That sounds very much like a hate group to me, and I'd like to see it as banned as fatpeoplehate (whic…

> I was stunned at how hateful the comments were against people who, sadly, had opinions that lead to their death. And yet Reddit management is ok with it.

For now.

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

#123

Post by robertlagrant »

user-the-name wrote: post #64
ogurechny wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Wait til you hear about the criminal justice system. Sometimes lawyers defend guilty people!

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

#124

Post by robertlagrant »

ddtaylor wrote: post #68

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.

Can you give some examples of individual HN users who've said both things?

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

#126

Post by SilverRed »

ogurechny wrote: post #15

…and its development has been exponentially decaying to zero for years. Mostly because of unsolved social problems (uneducated public doesn't understand they need real anonymous systems, and happily use corporate junk marketed as “private and secure”, while educated public dreams about making the next fart button app for the millions, and selling their data), but also because readily accessible public network gives t…

Can't just pin the blame on this on the public. These tools have a horrible UX problem. I tried to connect to freenet last year and I literally couldn't work it out. The GUI didn't make much sense, I couldn't work out where I was meant to go to browse content. I think I found it but nothing would load. Apparently I was meant to configure proxy settings in my browser??

I then went to the IRC, reddit and wiki and ether got nothing back or nothing useful. Eventually gave up.

Vs something like IPFS where you just run the software and localhost becomes your portal to the network and you can even access files as a basic file path via the FUSE mount.

Edit: Clarifying that I was using an unofficial build for freenet which may have made it harder.

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

#127

Post by cgtzczykldpq »

eptcyka wrote: post #85

Interestingly, Freenet hasn't migrated away from Freenode. Mind you, there is no affiliation between these two projects, AFAIK.

There is a merged pull request to migrate to libera.chat, it seems it just has not been deployed to the webserver yet:

https://github.com/freenet/website/pull/98

I would blindguess that this was caused by Travis CI shutting down its free service for open source, the website was deployed using Travis IIRC.

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

#128

Post by SilverRed »

grumbel wrote: post #60
Popegaf wrote: post #39

Is this comparable to IPFS running on I2P?

Freenet feels very similar to IPFS, but it differs under the hood. On Freenet the network itself is the data store, you don't host your own files, you upload them and they spread over the network. If you go offline, the files still remain on the network. On IPFS on the other side you are storing your own files and the network is just used for lookup and caching. Everything on Freenet is also encrypted, so you don't g…

What is the discard policy? If I upload 10TB of random junk, where does it go and how long will it be stored?

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

#129

Post by ddtaylor »

robertlagrant wrote: post #124
ddtaylor wrote: post #68

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.

Can you give some examples of individual HN users who've said both things?

[flagged]

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

#130

Post by cgtzczykldpq »

SilverRed wrote: post #126
ogurechny wrote: post #15

…and its development has been exponentially decaying to zero for years. Mostly because of unsolved social problems (uneducated public doesn't understand they need real anonymous systems, and happily use corporate junk marketed as “private and secure”, while educated public dreams about making the next fart button app for the millions, and selling their data), but also because readily accessible public network gives t…

Can't just pin the blame on this on the public. These tools have a horrible UX problem. I tried to connect to freenet last year and I literally couldn't work it out. The GUI didn't make much sense, I couldn't work out where I was meant to go to browse content. I think I found it but nothing would load. Apparently I was meant to configure proxy settings in my browser?? I then went to the IRC, reddit and wiki and ether…

> I tried to connect to freenet last year and I literally couldn't work it out.

Sorry but that must have been a bug or misconfiguration on your machine:

It should connect to the network by default without any tinkering.

Perhaps you didn't pay close attention to the first-time wizard and told it to only connect to manually chosen peers instead of connecting to random strangers? If you then don't add peers manually you won't have any connections.

> The GUI didn't make much sense, I couldn't work out where I was meant to go to browse content.

The default feature is browsing HTML content just like on the regular web.

By default it ships some bookmarks to "index" sites, i.e. sites which list links to plenty of other sites.

Those bookmarks should be right at the main page of the UI at http://127.0.0.1:8888

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