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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

#351

Post by paulsutter »

pnathan wrote: post #262

I've run Freenet twice in the last twenty years. Maybe 2006, 2012? Each time CSAM was surprisingly visible. Maybe these days it's kicked off to a corner but back then it was pretty much a click away. I'm going to have to say if that's the basic motivation for censorship resistant communication in the USA, I am disappointed and sad. Wonder if it's actually useful in places where you actually have censorship, or if it'…

Decentralized platforms need signed messages, signed upvotes / downvotes, and an open ranking algorithm otherwise they can never be an alternative to centralized systems like Twitter

Censorship shouldnt be the central focus. The real hope is that from 1000 ranking algorithms, we can find one that isn't a divisiveness amplifier

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

#352

Post by jmnicolas »

pnathan wrote: post #262

I've run Freenet twice in the last twenty years. Maybe 2006, 2012? Each time CSAM was surprisingly visible. Maybe these days it's kicked off to a corner but back then it was pretty much a click away. I'm going to have to say if that's the basic motivation for censorship resistant communication in the USA, I am disappointed and sad. Wonder if it's actually useful in places where you actually have censorship, or if it'…

> Wonder if it's actually useful in places where you actually have censorship

It's not like we're immune to this in the west, didn't you see the censorship on all the social media recently?

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

#353

Post by ogurechny »

noxer wrote: post #335
ogurechny wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram has been succumbing to the pressure left and right for years now, from US and EU to Iran and Russia. Don't worry, it will always manage and find the compromise between its PR bullshit and corporate and state level requirements. I can't even imagine how many secret services monitor what's going on right on Telegram servers.

hurr durr [insert basic telegram hate here] hurr durr

I don't hate it, I've said it was a hoax since the first presentation (which was… drum roll… about rolling their own crypto — soon found to be accidentally or intentionally broken). You had to be mad to believe that literal Russian Zuckerberg, who had been known for behind-the-scenes compliance while keeping the facade of uncompromising struggle for freedom, was caring about you and your privacy.

I doubt that anyone can have any trust in “secure” and “private” communication service that got banned in Iran only to be unbanned 3 days later. They were not so soft on other big names they banned. The outcome? Telegram is the most popular messaging app in Iran, and no one is searching for anything better. Perfect place to oversee the public.

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

#354

Post by CRConrad »

noxer wrote: post #342
CRConrad wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in the EU you dont have the 1st amendment, you dont have the right to free speech. Most EU countries have some rather close analogue of the US First Amendment in their law or constitution. Sure, pretty much all of them have various exceptions, so there's no absolute free speech -- but then the US has such exceptions too, and thus also lacks absolute free speech. On the whole, IMO your comment is much more wrong tha…

Name a single place and the law that is remotely comparable to the 1st amendment. It doesn't exist. There are some analogue yes but they all have exceptions like the one mentioned above where arbitrary the holocaust is excluded or certain other topic are excluded. Or the free speech only applies if your speech is considered satire or has some arctic value. etc. etc. >but then the US has such exceptions too, and thus…

Seems I don't need to contradict you:

> No, it does not the fist amendment is very clear and short enough to not have any loopholes in there.

> ...

> Similarly if you order a person to kill someone and do so with your voice trough the act of speaking, you are committing a crime.

You've already done it for me.

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

#355

Post by CRConrad »

user-the-name wrote: post #331
h_anna_h wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to be so hostile and toxic. I only mentioned it because this is an actual argument against TLS that I have seen being used in the past, even by popular sites such as pornhub for example (before being forced to enable TLS due to google downranking non-https sites). I also mentioned it because one of the points of TLS is to hide what kind of content is being accessed, so just like freenet you will not know whet…

You are saying THAT is the "hostile and toxic" response that is not in good faith, but you are fine with "Make sure to block TLS connections on every network that you manage. You don't know what naughty things your users might be doing after all. You would not want to help a criminal, would you?"

Not only "fine with"; they wrote it.

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

#356

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

tetrisgm wrote: post #153
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't see any use case for a private and censorship-resistant publishing platform that isn't illegal? Okay, pretending for a moment that privacy and censorship-resistance aren't good ends unto themselves: Whistleblowing, publishing something perfectly legal but which political or corporate interests don't want published, and publishing or reading LGBT+ content in a political, social, or family situation that woul…

I didn’t say I can’t see a use case, did I? I asked if people use it for that. You simply never hear from people praising Freenet as a tool for censorship resistance. Nowhere near the same awareness as TOR or even Secure Scuttlebutt.

> I didn’t say I can’t see a use case, did I?

Although I think I'm following what you meant now, it's very easy to read

> But I’ve yet to see a use case for Freenet.

exactly like that; I didn't realize that you were asking for documented real world instances.

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

#357

Post by test542 »

CRConrad wrote: post #271
test542 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is printing anything.

Yeah, because you're perfectly willing to accept that your "free speech!" can't compel someone else to operate their printing press for you... But a server on the Internet is such a totally different thing, for sure! IOW: This ancient figure of speech is used precisely to show that the issue is exactly the same old one that has been thoroughly hashed out for centuries.

Would you like to try that again?

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

#358

Post by ogurechny »

kafkaIncarnate wrote: post #210
ogurechny wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say someone decided to buy a child slave on a Central Slave Market on Freenet. He would have a problem with that 5 years ago. And also 10 years ago. And also 15 years ago. Why? Because there never was a Central Slave Market, and no one was selling child slaves. Perhaps my memory fails me, and you have some links to fix my error? Please share. Before you say you can't remember the specifics, let me tell you that…

There was a messaging system before Frost. You can go look that up, I'm not doing this for you because you are calling me a troll, which is a great way to end civilized discourse and end any attempt at reasonable conversation. I never said that a central slave market was on Freenet. I don't even think the protocol would be a very effective way to do it due to how slow and unreliable the protocol is at retrieving thin…

The problem is that in early 2000s you could find child porn, gore and the rest of “NSFW” stuff on the Web. It is also not wrong to assume that almost nothing you (or anyone) saw on Freenet had originated on Freenet (which also was a fresh tiny project without significant bandwidth or storage capacity back in the days). So, using your own logic, you had to disconnect from the Internet, and never touch it again. But you did not do that. It seems to me that you chose to shoot the messenger here, and remain in sweet ignorance provided by armies of third world grunts scrubbing “normal” services clean from all the unpleasant interactions.

Also, if we talk literally 20 years ago, Freenet was at infancy, still used arbitrary human-readable content keys that were supposed to be shared externally —

https://web.archive.org/web/20000817234626/http://unicast.or...

— and web pages were only a proposed option (with Javascript!):

https://web.archive.org/web/20010405191438/http://freenetpro...

You are probably thinking of more mature days of Freenet version 0.5, which, in its turn, was a network independent from Freenet version 0.7 (2008—present). I've seen 0.5 when it still ran in parallel, and can't remember the content being way too different in general. Still no child slaves for sale.

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

#359

Post by ArneBab »

nverno wrote: post #244
midev wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Everything is repeated throughout history, but more often than not consensus must tend towards the truth, otherwise human knowledge wouldnt have advanced so far. If the information is of real value (eg. farming techniques, technology, weapons) people are quite discerning. On the other hand, if it's essentially gossip, like twitter, the truth isn't particularly important but shock value is- it's more about social stan…

There were also times in history when technology and knowledge got lost in religious zealotry. Some of it we are only now trying to recover. We don’t know how much is still missing.

If information is of real value — like vaccines — … do you see where I’m going?

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

#360

Post by ogurechny »

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…

> There's a reason books and movies have an age restriction.

Yes, it is called hypocrisy. Do you think there exist a kid who stopped at age restriction dialog?

Ratings have always been either a publicity stunt, a way to benefit from grab of authority on them, or a pretext for censorship. Most well known example is MPAA, which basically allowed studios to make the same kind of movies while jumping through hoops to tell people they were “approved”. Later, it was shortened to “This label means the kids won't see it, so it's okay, don't worry”. Another example: until very recently, there was no age restriction on books in Russia, and no one cared at all. Then the government decided to promote itself as a defender of “traditional values”, and age ratings were promptly introduced, just to make any non-encyclopedic discussion of homosexuality fall under 18+. Does it stop people from accessing information? Not really, and it doesn't matter, because ratings are not for kids, they are for grown ups who feel good from looking at “protective measures”. And so, some teenagers are doing drugs while their parents are happy because they bought family access control software to shield their children from the information about drugs and other nasty stuff.

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