41–50 of 443 posts
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?
…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…
The upshot of a project like Freenet is that no matter how noble the intentions, these days it's pretty much a CSAM distribution network and little else -- and if you publicly fess up to using it you'll be put on a list. This is why the future of the internet is censored, regulated platforms like FB, Twitter, and Reddit -- if you seek out uncensored platforms you are ipso facto up to no good because of the reputation…
I think this comment is sensational but generally true. Replace CSAM with “right leaning” politics and you are just as fucked. I’m thinking about leaving the US and getting a EU work visa to avoid the shitshow. There are a lot of people who think censorship is good - in the name of fighting misinformation - and generally hold a negative opinion of opposing viewpoints.
I wonder if Freenet is used for anything but super illegal stuff, and sheer curiosity? This isn’t to say privacy and escaping the bottleneck of traditional internet isn’t compelling. But I’ve yet to see a use case for Freenet.
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…
Or is it just used for criminality, in practice?
…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…
I have been contributing for ~ 12 years and now have acquired long-term funding (independent of Freenet's own funding!) to continue my contributions in a more intense fashion.
The core network which serves static HTML sites + audio/video is stable and usable. It has a bunch of reliable long-term contributors working on it.
Hence development on my personal side is focused on polishing existing dynamic applications which are built on top of Freenet, and implementing some new ones.
Basic implementations of notably forums, social networking, blogging and mail exist already, the goal is to make them easy to use (integrate them into the main UI instead of being standalone), add much more features, improve performance and security.
Here's a list of these and dozens of other apps built on Freenet: https://github.com/freenet/wiki/wiki/Projects
Developing dynamic stuff is taking so long because it is a complex endeavor:
On the regular Internet, censorship happens by "look up who owns the IP, go to their address, remove the computer."
Since this is not possible on Freenet as everyone is anonymous, censorship will happen by denial of service: For example forum systems would be spammed to death to get rid of unwanted content.
Thus the architecture of censorship-resistant systems has to be reinvented from scratch, you can't just take a regular forum system and stick Freenet on top of it.
It has to be decentralized to be resistant against DoS - there must not be Tor-alike central servers ("hidden sites" / .onion sites). Instead messages are stored across the whole network and replicated automatically if they are downloaded more often and thus need more bandwidth (the added redundance also makes them more censorship-resistant).
And spam filtering need to be a first-class application, I have worked for years only on that.
So the different architecture is the primary pitfall which many projects which decided "Freenet is too old, we're gonna build this from scratch with nice Javascript etc." fell into IMHO: First it's "we'll develop a regular app, we can bolt Tor onto it later", then they realize that the threat-model is so different that this is just not possible and the projects never become anonymous/censorship-resistant.
So privacy needs to be built in from the start.
Luckily, Freenet did that right (even though it was the first anti-censorship + privacy network!), and I don't mind that it's taking decades to develop because of the extended threat model:
That's still better than being one of wheel-reinventing post-Freenet projects which then abandon the privacy idea in the end anyway, or postpone it forever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this comment is sensational but generally true. Replace CSAM with “right leaning” politics and you are just as fucked. I’m thinking about leaving the US and getting a EU work visa to avoid the shitshow. There are a lot of people who think censorship is good - in the name of fighting misinformation - and generally hold a negative opinion of opposing viewpoints.
Nevermind "CSAM" and "right leaning" politics -- I can't even seem to find a place that will host the anti-obesity group that I used to enjoy reading on reddit. (It was removed by Ellen Pao when they cleaned up "hate groups".)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you talking about?
There is no near-absolute right to free speech in the EU. Countless people have been successfilly prosecuted for what would be covered under the 1st amendment in the EU.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nevermind "CSAM" and "right leaning" politics -- I can't even seem to find a place that will host the anti-obesity group that I used to enjoy reading on reddit. (It was removed by Ellen Pao when they cleaned up "hate groups".)
That is because it was, in fact, a hate group, not an "anti-obesity" group.
But the point stands--it's difficult to find a place to host a forum that contains legal discussions that happen to offend the sensibilities of the type of people who run tech companies.
…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…
Tor won over most of the anti-censorship users of Freenet by adding hidden services. The model of servers and clients seemed to be easier to model around than a shared data store, for reason that might have to do with how websites on internet has moved on from the 90's and early 2000s.
I am unsure if the concept of a anonymized and censorship resistant shared data store has a place in the future. If copyright enforcement actually become effective in stopping torrenting, then maybe Freenet will see a renewal (possible as a patch to the torrent protocol). Hopefully without java.