Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant
communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to
keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free software
for publishing and communicating on the Web without fear of
censorship.[4][5]:151 Both, Freenet and some of its associated
tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke, who defined
Freenet's goal as providing freedom of speech on the Internet
with strong anonymity protection.[6][7]
Freenet has been under continuous development since 2000.
I ran a Freenet node for quite a while. I eventually stopped for two reasons:
1.) Freenet is really astonishingly slow. Think ten kilobits per second of transfer, and tens of seconds of latency. It doesn't fit the www user interface very well at all. It would probably need to maintain a dozen copies of every file in order to attain a reasonable amount of throughput. Bittorrent has it beat cold for mildly illegal files, (copyrighted music, movies, etc) which means that Freenet's users mostly use it for very illegal files, thus:
2.) Man, it is absolutely full of child porn. If you donate 10 GiB of disk space to Freenet, then you can be sure that at least 5 GiB of that is going to be dedicated to child porn.
#2 is somewhat related to #1. It's so slow and inconvenient, the only user base are people who absolutely need the one feature it does deliver: very strong anonymity and censorship protection. Unfortunately that's to protect something gross and abusive to other human beings, not to protect legitimate free speech.
I'm very socially liberal. CP is not like drugs. It's not a victimless crime, unless you want to argue that all those 8yr olds agreed to have their pics posted and fully understand all the implications of that. Then there's the stuff that actually shows sex, nearly all of which is coerced through deception or physical coercion.
This is the problem with naive cyber-anarchism. We really do need both police and intelligence agencies because there are bad people out there who want to do very bad things. There are people who want to rob, kill, rape, con, and generally abuse other people. The problem is when governments and their agencies abuse their power and themselves engage in abusive behavior. That's a political problem, not a technical one, and has mostly political solutions.
I'm not opposed to using crypto, privacy software, etc. Privacy is also very important, as is security. To some extent these things are needed to protect you from bad actors, not just from unwarranted surveillance. They're also needed as a check and balance to limit government intrusion. It should be hard to spy on people, as this discourages overreach by increasing its cost.
All these things come down to questions of balance. How much policing do we want? The answer is "enough but not too much," but where's that line? It's a hard question. There aren't many easy answers. People who like to think in absolute black and white terms don't like that, but that's the real world.
Yep I love the idea of a decentralized, free network (mesh or otherwise) but it has to be very specialized or it gets used for CP all day long. I think the answer is way less bandwidth so it can only be used basically for text-based data - chat, scientific stuff, streams from temperature and wind gauges, etc.
I had the idea a long time ago for a decentralized network with really small object size limits and bandwidth caps. It dodges a lot of the scalability problems. The idea would be for people to use it for communication, not big file transfer. If someone wanted to send a file they could post a magnet: link or a regular http: link, etc.
Comments
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
I ran a Freenet node for quite a while. I eventually stopped for two reasons:1.) Freenet is really astonishingly slow. Think ten kilobits per second of transfer, and tens of seconds of latency. It doesn't fit the www user interface very well at all. It would probably need to maintain a dozen copies of every file in order to attain a reasonable amount of throughput. Bittorrent has it beat cold for mildly illegal files, (copyrighted music, movies, etc) which means that Freenet's users mostly use it for very illegal files, thus:
2.) Man, it is absolutely full of child porn. If you donate 10 GiB of disk space to Freenet, then you can be sure that at least 5 GiB of that is going to be dedicated to child porn.
#2 is somewhat related to #1. It's so slow and inconvenient, the only user base are people who absolutely need the one feature it does deliver: very strong anonymity and censorship protection. Unfortunately that's to protect something gross and abusive to other human beings, not to protect legitimate free speech.
I'm very socially liberal. CP is not like drugs. It's not a victimless crime, unless you want to argue that all those 8yr olds agreed to have their pics posted and fully understand all the implications of that. Then there's the stuff that actually shows sex, nearly all of which is coerced through deception or physical coercion.
This is the problem with naive cyber-anarchism. We really do need both police and intelligence agencies because there are bad people out there who want to do very bad things. There are people who want to rob, kill, rape, con, and generally abuse other people. The problem is when governments and their agencies abuse their power and themselves engage in abusive behavior. That's a political problem, not a technical one, and has mostly political solutions.
I'm not opposed to using crypto, privacy software, etc. Privacy is also very important, as is security. To some extent these things are needed to protect you from bad actors, not just from unwarranted surveillance. They're also needed as a check and balance to limit government intrusion. It should be hard to spy on people, as this discourages overreach by increasing its cost.
All these things come down to questions of balance. How much policing do we want? The answer is "enough but not too much," but where's that line? It's a hard question. There aren't many easy answers. People who like to think in absolute black and white terms don't like that, but that's the real world.
Yep I love the idea of a decentralized, free network (mesh or otherwise) but it has to be very specialized or it gets used for CP all day long. I think the answer is way less bandwidth so it can only be used basically for text-based data - chat, scientific stuff, streams from temperature and wind gauges, etc.
I had the idea a long time ago for a decentralized network with really small object size limits and bandwidth caps. It dodges a lot of the scalability problems. The idea would be for people to use it for communication, not big file transfer. If someone wanted to send a file they could post a magnet: link or a regular http: link, etc.