41–50 of 112 posts
Freenet is well designed and well maintained, but it is a solution looking for a problem. We dont yet life in the police state where everyone's political opinions need to be hidden in dark networks. At the moment, freenet has a bad reputation for hosting very illegal content. That rep is so bad that if authorities ever look into your internet traffic, freenet connections are more than enough to get warrants that will…
Last year, I interviewed Ian Clarke, who started arguably the first decentralized file sharing system: freenet! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ The interview -- like most of my interviews -- goes into depth about the entire space, and also touches on Locutus, his new project. PS: I like to interview people on topics related to what we build at Qbix and Intercoin. Freedom of Speech and Capitalism (with Noa…
Having been in that space at the time, I think this point is not arguable at all. Freenet was not the first decentralized file sharing system. Freenet might have been the subject of a PhD thesis in 1999, but by the time it became even slightly usable Napster and Gnutella already had substantial user bases. (Similar to Ceph BTW which had a long gap between being a PhD thesis and being an actual usable distributed file…
That paper isn't the original Freenet paper, it came later. This is the original: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Distributed-Decentra...
Freenet is well designed and well maintained, but it is a solution looking for a problem. We dont yet life in the police state where everyone's political opinions need to be hidden in dark networks. At the moment, freenet has a bad reputation for hosting very illegal content. That rep is so bad that if authorities ever look into your internet traffic, freenet connections are more than enough to get warrants that will…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just having a Freenet connection does not get a warrant — though there are researchers who use some fishy statistics which may be reason not to run a very fast node in the US (because running a fast node provably causes false positives in their statistics). For some more details, see https://freenetproject.org/the-discredited-levine-2017-appro... and the links therein.
I think you might underestimate how easy it is to get a search warrant, paticularly in the US. This isnt the standard for arrest, let alone conviction. A cop saying "the machine regularly connected to a suspect network" is more than enough for many judges/magistrates... most of which dont know an IP from an IPA. (Lol, got over v underestimate mixed up.)
Freenet is well designed and well maintained, but it is a solution looking for a problem. We dont yet life in the police state where everyone's political opinions need to be hidden in dark networks. At the moment, freenet has a bad reputation for hosting very illegal content. That rep is so bad that if authorities ever look into your internet traffic, freenet connections are more than enough to get warrants that will…
> We dont yet life in the police state where everyone's political opinions need to be hidden in dark networks. Millions of people are in places where acknowledging that they want abortions[1] or miscarried[2] can pique the state's interest, along with people who are trans[3] or have trans kids[4]. We have police using web searches to prosecute women for abortion[1], we have states compiling lists of transgender indiv…
Freenet is well designed and well maintained, but it is a solution looking for a problem. We dont yet life in the police state where everyone's political opinions need to be hidden in dark networks. At the moment, freenet has a bad reputation for hosting very illegal content. That rep is so bad that if authorities ever look into your internet traffic, freenet connections are more than enough to get warrants that will…
Ever heard of China?
Something like the planned ChatControl,¹ but through a non-trustworthy third party most people have installed for convenience.
Nothing can fully protect against that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having been in that space at the time, I think this point is not arguable at all. Freenet was not the first decentralized file sharing system. Freenet might have been the subject of a PhD thesis in 1999, but by the time it became even slightly usable Napster and Gnutella already had substantial user bases. (Similar to Ceph BTW which had a long gap between being a PhD thesis and being an actual usable distributed file…
Napster wasn't decentralized, it relied on a centralized index which is why it was shut down. Gnutella relied on a broadcast search which didn't scale. Freenet's use of small world routing to be both decentralized and scalable was unique, as was it's use of cryptographic contracts (signed subspace keys). That paper isn't the original Freenet paper, it came later. This is the original: https://www.semanticscholar.org/…
Including decentralized download via HTTP using just three added headers and Tiger Tree Hash Exchange: https://rfc-gnutella.sourceforge.net/src/Partial_File_Sharin...
Scalability was limited to global search in around 5 million nodes (with the network spanning 40 million people at its peak), though, due to restrictions in the number of TCP connections Windows (private edition) supported.
These are some of the most underrated devs on the internet.
Definitely. Ian Clarke's Freenet has been around since March 2000 which is when I discovered Linux and Perl. The only thing I don't understand is why it was written in Java instead of C/C++. Napster was also built with Java, however, so even slow as Java was back then it was still fast enough for building file-sharing networks.
But I think it crippled adoption, it required far too much RAM for the computers of the time.
While Freenet is a technically well-designed and maintained network, it has a reputation for hosting illegal content and being associated with warrants that can cause significant disruptions in users' lives. Using Freenet may attract more attention from authorities and may not be necessary at the present time, as the current political climate does not necessitate the use of such networks to hide political opinions.