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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

#291

Post by ArneBab »

edgyquant wrote: post #188
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.

The balance has been that the cops can take you into custody when there is suspicion against you, but if you’re not suspected of a heinous crime, they are not allowed to read your diary.

In the past decade that has been shifting more and more towards “the cops can break open every device you have just in case you may someday do something illegal”.

But if they can install physical surveillance, all security is already moot. That is the balance that works.

But that is no longer enough. They want to have cheaper surveillance of everyone instead. Surveillance that is cheap enough to be used on everyone.

And they promise they will totally not abuse that. Or send your address to violent extremist groups that are pissed at you because you exposed their activities. As happened to more than one journalist in Germany who investigated Nazis.

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

#293

Post by tsimionescu »

midev wrote: post #184
adamrezich wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would take sociological studies on hot-buttos issues with many tablespoons of salt. People by and large live in a consensus reality, so obviously there are social mechanisms that ensure this. This happens even in the presence of massive propaganda systems pouring money and time into distortions of the truth - like the huge anti-environmental propaganda, or soviet propaganda that was widely known to be false even inside the soviet union.

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

#294

Post by user-the-name »

kragen wrote: post #282
user-the-name wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it was named "fatpeoplehate", which is a tiny little bit of a giveaway. Funny the original poster forgot to mention that detail, I wonder why.

Maybe they meant a different anti-obesity forum.

No other one matches the details given. Also, OP pretty much confirmed it.

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

#295

Post by ArneBab »

intricatedetail wrote: post #273

How this will be legal in the EU? E.g. incoming TERREG regulation requires website operators to have 1hr SLA for deleting harmful content and a dedicated officer to liaise with government requests.

You could also ask, how TERREG could be consistent with European values.

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

#296

Post by swebs »

Infernal wrote: post #216
hda2 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In around 1900 i think. It's simple for anyone to create an xor "key" for anything.

I phrased my comment poorly. Do we know of a case where cops or prosecutors have actually faked such a “key”? If so, it’s terrifying that you could have any encrypted data, with cops and their invented xor “keys” claiming your data is whatever they want it to be.

I don't know of any widespread consumer encryption tools that use a one time pad. For comparison, a standard RSA key is 4kb.

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

#297

Post by notanzaiiswear »

cgtzczykldpq wrote: post #171
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.

Freenet does not give you the decryption keys to the data you host, you don't know what you're hosting, hence you're not responsible for what it could be decrypted to. And even if law enforcement could successfully convince a court that you're doing something illegal by hosting data which you cannot look into: They couldn't first acquire the necessary search warrant because they couldn't prove that you are the one wh…

But if somebody downloads the data, and they can track the source to your computer, do they even have to decrypt it on your computer? (I mean does law enforcement have to decrypt it on your computer, or could they just indirectly prove you hosted the data).

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

#298

Post by h_anna_h »

kragen wrote: post #81
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 point out which HN users are doing both of these? Maybe they're Russian trolls.

We could do with less racism and cold-war-era scare.

Edit: As a revenge for pointing his racism the above user decided to act abusively and go to my history and downvote my recent posts - the only one of my 4 most recent posts that was not downvoted was this one, as people can't downvote replies to their own posts. It happened just after that poster responded, feel free to form your own opinion about it.

Apparently pointing out that associating a whole ethnicity with hacking, trolling, and shilling is racist is "vicious, hateful slander" and a lie. I guess this user is going to complain next about indian scammers, jewish bankers, and whatever other vile racist description he can think of when it is convenient.

I find it sad that a lot of posts nowadays end up attacking the person behind the post rather than just the post itself, it seems like it is becoming more and more common as time goes on (although I do recognize that this applies to my edit too rather than just the reply).

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

#299

Post by kybernetikos »

hamstergene wrote: post #224
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 mea…

> at the same time they absolutely totally want NOT to prevent filtering they want to happen

I'm sure there's a lot of this about, but the situation with freenet is more complex than that. When you run a freenet node, you are storing data on behalf of others, and you don't have access to that data so you don't know what it is.

It's one thing believing that speech should be free, but that's a different thing to believing that individuals should be forced into storing and sharing speech they disagree with.

It's that extra level of potential complicity in speech you find objectionable that makes freenet more problematic, and that makes accusations of hypocrisy a little unfair.

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

#300

Post by h_anna_h »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #105
h_anna_h wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no free speech anywhere in Europe This is a bold and unsubstantiated claim. > And there is no doubt she would be free in every state in the US. For this specific action? Sure. For other actions that are protected under the 1st amendment? Depends on whether there is a law against it and if she pissed off someone "important" or enough people. There are various such cases. edit: will respond to the replies af…

There aren't any cases I know of for anyone being jailed for expressing their beliefs. Can you name several?

Specifically for expressing beliefs? No. Only the one that I mentioned as a reply to the sibling post to yours.
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