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

freenetproject.org

321–330 of 443 posts

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

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever been threatened by a right-wing extremist that they would come to your house when you answered their hatred online and pointed out the flaws in their logic? I have been. That’s why I deeply appreciate having a pseudonym that’s separated from where I live so I don’t have to fear Neonazis turning up at my doorstep or attacking my kids when I write something they do not like.

You know that you could just name yourself "John Doe" and that's it, right?

Yes. That experience made me change to that. But “John Doe” will quickly be my IP address when there’s a Nazi in police (see the reports about organized Neonazis in police and military in Germany in the past few years who also leaked police data to other Neonazis).

I can use Tor or I can use Freenet. That’s it. I use both: Tor to google simple medical questions. Freenet to discuss. Because in Freenet — different from Tor — the Forums don’t die and the prevailing forums don’t block me with neigh unsolvable CAPTCHAs.

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

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are falsely equating anonymity for privacy. The goal of anonymity is to avoid disclosure of identity but not secrecy of content. You don’t care if the entire world sees the substance of the communication. You care that they cannot detect who you are. Networks like this and Tor share your information across a large number of nodes to resist identity detection. Privacy is the opposite. You don’t care that the entir…

Freenet provides both: Secrecy of content and pseudonymity — both are required to enable confidential disclosure to a journalist on the (typically valid) assumption that the opsec of the journalist is far from perfect.

The entire goal of journalism is information disclosure, to publish a story. That is not privacy. The goal here is to not reveal the identity of a source.

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

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freenet provides both: Secrecy of content and pseudonymity — both are required to enable confidential disclosure to a journalist on the (typically valid) assumption that the opsec of the journalist is far from perfect.

The entire goal of journalism is information disclosure, to publish a story. That is not privacy. The goal here is to not reveal the identity of a source.

The goal is to publish a story. Hiding the identity of a source is a way towards that goal.

The journalist does not need privacy or confidentiality to publish. The source does. And without the source, there’s no story.

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

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's already passed, so one way or another it is a part, as it faced very little protest.

That it faced little protest is not true. It only faced little protest in the streets, because most responsible people stayed at home during the pandemic. The protest online was loud.

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

#325

Unpopular opinion - People keep on creating so many privacy focused platforms but general public doesn't seem to care. Seems like there is only like a small minority which cares about privacy.

I don;'t think it's fair to say that people don't care about privacy, they just don't care about it as much as dedicated privacy advocates do and put in effort proportionate to the priority they put on the issue.

The fact is a lot of, if not most people think people who trade in CSAM should be tracked down, terrorist and criminal communications should be monitored and don't have a problem with government agencies spying on foreigners. They don't have a problem with them spying on domestic communications too in pursuit of the aforesaid goals.

Yes a slim majority say state monitoring is too invasive, but that doesn't mean they want it to stop.

I do appreciate that the earnest libertarians behind Freenet try hard to expunge CSAM and such, but the only reason they are able to do that is because Freenet is dominated be earnest libertarians. As soon as a more representative demographic got on to it, that would go right out of the window.

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

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's talk about Germany, to give one example. In that country, the top court can outright declare political parties illegal, if it believes that they constitute a threat to the democratic order. This was used against the Nazis, of course - but also against the Communist party. So, ironically, under the current interpretation of 1A, communists have more freedom of speech and association in US than they do in Germany.

> Let's talk about Germany, to give one example. In that country, the top court can outright declare political parties illegal, if it believes that they constitute a threat to the democratic order. So what? Which country can't declare organisations illegal, if it determines them to be terrorist organisations? I'm pretty sure the USA can. So what does it matter if a terrorist organisation calls itself a "party"? (Didn…

In the US, an idea can't be a "terrorist organization". In Germany, it can be. I much prefer the US model of free speech. Free speech only for ideas that the government doesn't consider dangerous isn't free speech at all.

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

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah I see. So the content will still be there as long as people store/access it, but you can filter it out by subscribing to filter-lists? Got it, thanks. Can you also filter out certain content (by means of hashes I suppose) that you don't want to personally host (not even as partial chunks) but allow everything else?

Yes to the first.

To the second no: In Freenet 0.5 there was a plugin for that, but for 0.7 this has not been written yet.

You can write that, but you cannot check what exactly it would block. Whom do you trust to censor you? The devs cannot make that judgement. And who will control the censors? You would need a list of all chunks to block (by their routing key).

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

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

These days you just ship it in a flatpak which is easy to install on any system. Distro specific packaging is a relic these days.

A pull-request (or repo) with a flatpak recipe would be very welcome, too.

Though distro-packaging in Guix is still far superior to a flatpak, because it gives the freedom of flatpaks but integrates much better.

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

#329
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they meant a different anti-obesity forum.

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

Well, /r/fatpeoplehate was definitely a hate group. I wonder why they would go around claiming it wasn't.

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

#330
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, /r/fatpeoplehate was definitely a hate group. I wonder why they would go around claiming it wasn't.

Nobody ever thinks they are in a hate group.
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