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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

#221

Post by ArneBab »

cookiengineer wrote: post #208
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…

This is pretty much the identical argument of 4chan alt-right movements, where the value of free speech is primed so high that they do not think about collateral damage. There's a reason books and movies have an age restriction. The reason is that kids are not able to understand the consequences. It's easy, as an adult, to rationalize that they see it eventually. But if you had a welcome screen with some gore porn on…

In Freenet, content that does not get accessed disappears. To access content, you must first learn that it exists. You must see it.

And Freenet has a method for communities to express that people (actually pseudonyms) who disrupt the system should not be seen.

It is a decentralized blocking system where the choice of moderator is on the individual. It easily runs circles around current clearnet moderation systems, because it had to cope with actual pseudonymity from the start, and it was created to address an actual need to stop disruption without centralization.

If you don’t like gore porn, you ask the other pseudonym not to post it. And if he/she/it continues, you record blocking, and those who trust your judgement will no longer see that pseudonym. That’s how in Freenet you decide what content to see. And it works: Within Freenet we had quite a few constructive discussions between political groups that would normally be at their throats.

So Freenet itself acts like an abstracted ISP that only provides access while the moderation system does the value-call and moderation — also fully decentralized, but as separated from the core system as a hacker news moderator or web-hoster is from the internet service provider.

And if I say „the Freenet moderation system runs circles around clearnet moderation“, I mean it: The fediverse people are now experimenting with implementing the Freenet moderation system for Mastodon and others: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scalable-moderation-us...

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

#222

Post by ArneBab »

midev wrote: post #214
lolthishuman wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it’s because the education system has failed at critical thinking.

> Maybe it’s because the education system has failed at critical thinking Sure, education can improve things. But this is a problem even worse outside the United States, so it's hard to blame it on a single education system.

It’s not just the education system. It’s our structures of information that are based on engagement (to drive ad-revenue) instead of value to the reader.

And this is something Freenet actually solves to some degree. Because it had to. This is why in Freenet we know the Zen of Tolerance: https://www.draketo.de/politik/random-babcom#the-zen-of-tole...

- You are entitled to voice your opinion.

- You are not entitled to force it upon everyone.

- You are not entitled to force it upon a subgroup repeatedly.

- You are also not entitled to hurl hate towards participants, since that would disrupt communication.

- If you cannot stay respectful and friendly after being asked to, I will unsee you and advise others to do the same with a clear and brief explanation, so they can take an informed decision.

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

#223

Post by ArneBab »

kafkaIncarnate wrote: post #181
azalemeth wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Tai…

"It's incredibly slow" — I’m seeing Freenet stream video nowadays. Not HD video, but video.

Latency is typically high, but the browsing experience is pretty good.

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

#224

Post by hamstergene »

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.

There is a feature in English to call the same thing different words depending on one's moral judgement towards them. Shooting a person dead is a "kill" if a homeowner has defended himself from a burglar, but a "murder" if the burglar has fired first. My language for comparison only uses a single word, regardless of circumstances.

That's where the paradox has to be coming from. When they say "end censorship" they mean "prevent filtering that we don't want to happen" (like whistleblowing). But at the same time they absolutely totally want NOT to prevent filtering they want to happen (like drugs, child porn, terrorism, etc). It's only censorship if they don't want it, if they want it that's not censorship that's a different word.

It's like saying it's a candy if it's intended to be eaten, but a toy if it's intended to be had, and then expecting to eat the candy and have the toy.

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

#225

Post by ArneBab »

azalemeth wrote: post #13
fsflover wrote: post #2

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

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. --…

To find CSAM on Freenet nowadays you have to go out of your way to search for it. All the default index pages (entry points) filter out content that is illegal by itself (as CSAM is), and if you talk about that in FMS or Sone you’ll quickly find your pseudonym blocked by most accounts.

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

#226

Post by ArneBab »

hkt wrote: post #31
ogurechny wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freenet implements low latency queue and allows for near-realtime communication over distributed storage. Specifically, “IRC over Freenet” WAS made long time ago. You get modem-like delays and bandwidth, but is this a problem? Trying to use it when someone is actively searching for you is a different story, because there's a balance between sending data and being detectable.

TIL, my mistake. Thank you!

Not wanting to attack here, just wanting to add more info:

IRC over Freenet is actually in use today: It is called FLIP and has 1 minute round trip times. Which is shorter than what people typically notice (except if they actively measure it), because most take longer to type their answers than FLIP needs to deliver it.

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

#227

Post by ArneBab »

Flocular wrote: post #79

Still haven solved the CSAM problem, so the public servers are off limits. The private infrastructure solution always looked interesting to me, but I'm missing any actual application ideas for that?

Do you know FreeChat? That’s a messenger for android over Freenet (currently in pre-beta but working) which uses Freenet to provide privacy on the level needed for medical data: https://github.com/DennisRein/free-chat-2

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

#228

Post by ArneBab »

Santosh83 wrote: post #218
cgtzczykldpq wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Freenet for 12 years and have not run into CSAM involuntarily, and of course also not voluntarily! So I don't know how you get the impression that "public servers are off limits"? It is possible that CSAM exists in certain forums on Freenet which might indicate the specific goal of sharing CSAM by their name. But if it were to be posted into non-CSAM forums then the community's web of trust would flag…

> But if it were to be posted into non-CSAM forums then the community's web of trust would flag it as spam and thus make it disappear. So you're unlikely to just run into CSAM involuntarily. But how can a censorship-resistant network make certain content disappear? Isn't that impossible by design on Freenet, except by the slow, unreliable process of all nodes purging the data?

It works because every user can choose their own moderators: You choose on your own whom to trust to filter out the disruptive stuff.

And it’s optimized so you have much less work for that than on the clearnet. On Freenet Spam- and Disruption-prevention actually scales better than spamming.

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

#229

Post by ArneBab »

djcapelis wrote: post #205
cgtzczykldpq wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah there are no official flatpaks or docker images so you were using 3rd-party software and this is not Freenet's fault :) Perhaps you can update your topmost post to mention that? The official installers are here: https://freenetproject.org/pages/download.html Thanks for clarifying though!

Offering only a Java installer, of all things from the increasingly distant past, wholly divorced from any semblance on how most anyone wants to install or use software these days, is 100% a choice the freenet project made and entirely that project’s fault. This type of uncaring about the user experience nonsense is exactly the type of issue that the person you’re replying to is sharing about their experience.

Do you want to help fix the debian installer? Freenet has been providing a Gentoo package for years. Other distributions need more work. If you have the skills, then please help updating the debian package! https://github.com/freenet/debian

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

#230

Post by ArneBab »

belorn wrote: post #50
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…

Freenet as a censorship resistant tool had potential a long time ago, through in my view the failure points had more to do with the design and the positioning in the censorship resistant tool chain than with the unsolved problems. A shared "data store" that shuffles its pieces around was a good idea in theory, but torrents without any privacy did a better job of being a shared data store. Copyright enforcement has be…

Nowadays you can actually see privacy-dependant services test Freenet. To quote research from Bern university who do health data exchange research: “This broker is based on the peer-to-peer network Freenet. This network has been defined to be censorship resistant and to protect the privacy of persons sharing data. This covers the needs for protection expected from a secure data broker.” https://www.igi-global.com/chapter/using-freenet-as-a-broker...
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