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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

#181

Post by kafkaIncarnate »

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 requires your hard drive to allocate ~2GB of raw space of encrypted unknown data that basically makes your machine a "node" in the network. Whatever is in that cache you will never be able to know, as it's encrypted in a way that querying is based on encrypted hops and an associated TTL like feature.

It's incredibly slow (think Tor over Tor over Tor), and needs to be run for 1-2 weeks to even work mildly. Tails would not be an ideal choice, a dedicated space is necessary.

There's no real reason to use Tor to connect to Freenet anyway, as it's encrypted in a way that the network traffic cannot be known nor even the content on your machine by yourself unless you know the private key which serves as a link to the content you are trying to locate, and it eventually will sync up those keys with your local storage. You don't even know the public key of the content that is stored in this local cache.

If you've seen Silicon Valley, this is the idea that likely founded "the Platform" concept, but they add a bit of magic and speed to the concept for the show. When your content is published, it's published "everywhere and nowhere". If you publish something, then destroy your node, that content will stay in many nodes and still be accessible. This information gets kept or cleared out based on how often it is being queried.

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

#182

Post by brokenmachine »

MrStonedOne wrote: post #4

Freenet generally has peers act as file stores. This presents some concerns people would have, but also presents an interesting question: With the existence of crypto that requires large disk spaces to mine coins, could you abuse freenet for this goal?

I'd say no because freenet storage depends on popularity of the files.

If nobody is interested to download your files, which they wouldn't be because they are undecryptable blobs, then very soon you will be the only one storing those files, and you have gained nothing from making them available on freenet, but you have wasted your own bandwidth by uploading them.

Also it would be horribly slow as far as storage goes compared to a hard drive.

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

#183

Post by Infernal »

snvzz wrote: post #174
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They might own the legendary key that turns your seemingly random data into very illegal data. plot twist: It's an one-time pad to xor your data against. (and of course, they wouldn't generate it from XORing your data against illegal data...)

Well this is a terrifying idea. Is this a hypothetical or do we know of an instance where such a “key” was invented?

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

#184

Post by midev »

adamrezich wrote: post #179
ogurechny wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting, I don't remember seeing more than trace amounts of “nazi/fascist material” there at all. Sure, someone has probably thought that the world needs another copy of Mein Kampf, or has had a real important story of how Jews did 9/11, and maybe these freesites are still (partially) available after a decade or so (I am not at all bothered to check, to be honest), but general amount of such loonies has d…

if people get exposed to bad ideas, they can't be trusted to use their own logic and moral faculties to determine right from wrong, which is why free speech is more than unnecessary, it's downright evil. no, instead, we need governments and corporations to regulate speech, for the good of mankind. ...or so the thinking goes

> they can't be trusted to use their own logic and moral faculties to determine right from wrong

History has shown this to be true over and over and over. We even have evidence to this: https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels-f...

Fake news travels faster and convinces more people than the truth.

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

#185

Post by hda2 »

Infernal wrote: post #183
snvzz wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might own the legendary key that turns your seemingly random data into very illegal data. plot twist: It's an one-time pad to xor your data against. (and of course, they wouldn't generate it from XORing your data against illegal data...)

Well this is a terrifying idea. Is this a hypothetical or do we know of an instance where such a “key” was invented?

In around 1900 i think.

It's simple for anyone to create an xor "key" for anything.

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

#186

Post by gameswithgo »

ta988 wrote: post #102
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.

I am glad it evolved a bit, it used to host a lot of child porn, nazi/fascist material etc And clearly you would be exposed to it through messages or not well annotated index.

it still does, op is disingenuous or naive

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

#187

Post by edgyquant »

dejw wrote: post #6
fsflover wrote: post #2

How is it better than I2P: https://geti2p.net ? Upd: found this: https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/freenet .

how is it different to Tor project?

Tors not really “P2P” right? It bounces you around between 7 nodes so you don’t even know the peer you’re connecting to

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

#188

Post by edgyquant »

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.

Like most things in the world there needs to be a middle ground/balance between allowing the government and corps to invade your privacy and allowing individuals to share child porn/etc with one another. I do not believe it is either or.

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

#189

Post by ogurechny »

genewitch wrote: post #177
ogurechny wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the network seemed to be mainly used by pedophiles It is not clear how that statement can emerge from the mere observations above it. Are you telling the full story?

About a quarter of all the comments above yours, other threads, etc, mention the same thing, this smells like astroturfing, but it is unclear by who. You can send illegal stuff by post, FedEx, BitTorrent, pgp encryption, etc. Who cares?

No, I've meant exactly what I've meant. There is an experience of seeing some links, and there's a conclusion that the network is mainly used by pedophiles. Even if all the data was 100% child porn (which is technically impossible, but whatever), I still can't see how the former transforms into the latter.

Or maybe it was just parroting the “common knowledge”. Another kind of common knowledge is that law enforcement from multiple countries has been arresting people for about ten years now because Freenet is far from perfect pedophile heaven. I guess there is common knowledge one prefers to use, and the common knowledge one prefers to overlook.

To put it bluntly, there is a lot of thought put into Freenet, and a lot of work, and a lot of discussions of how things should work, and a lot of uncommon practical solutions invented for truly serverless communication, and some general ideas why it is needed at all. When a casual idler shows interest in none of these, but hurries to find child porn, and with deep satisfaction proclaims “Eww, the whole place is dirty!”, it is OK to point out that there is zero understanding in that.

Because default index sites have always been filtered — and I can vouch for that, — to see something outrageous one had to actively look for something outrageous. Keep it in mind when reading all those comments.

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

#190

Post by aaa_____ »

Infernal wrote: post #183
snvzz wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might own the legendary key that turns your seemingly random data into very illegal data. plot twist: It's an one-time pad to xor your data against. (and of course, they wouldn't generate it from XORing your data against illegal data...)

Well this is a terrifying idea. Is this a hypothetical or do we know of an instance where such a “key” was invented?

Most cop-tech is just plausible-deniability for jury who are not tech-aware. Dogs, polygraphs, informational pre-crime tools.
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