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Comment by ogurechny | Hacker News Reader

…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 too much power to dedicated observers to be safe in current political climate (which has been known for 15 years, yada yada).

Still, no one has made anything more advanced and educational. Which is quite sad, as these are still the ideas on anonymous communication from the '90s and early 2000s. A whole generation has probably gone down the drain, and did not do any work.

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> uneducated public doesn't understand they need real anonymous systems

I really don't like this wording. How are you so sure that they NEED real anonymous systems? I understand the value of privacy, but I don't think I get to dictate what other people NEED.

Some time ago, some people believed they needed a glass of wine, a ten course meal, and a charming beauty to whom to read poems, and that those backwards peasants in the fields could understand none of these needs, and only needed to get whipped regularly, just in case.

So I'm all for dictating that everyone need everything.

Can't just pin the blame on this on the public. These tools have a horrible UX problem. I tried to connect to freenet last year and I literally couldn't work it out. The GUI didn't make much sense, I couldn't work out where I was meant to go to browse content. I think I found it but nothing would load. Apparently I was meant to configure proxy settings in my browser??

I then went to the IRC, reddit and wiki and ether got nothing back or nothing useful. Eventually gave up.

Vs something like IPFS where you just run the software and localhost becomes your portal to the network and you can even access files as a basic file path via the FUSE mount.

Edit: Clarifying that I was using an unofficial build for freenet which may have made it harder.

> I tried to connect to freenet last year and I literally couldn't work it out.

Sorry but that must have been a bug or misconfiguration on your machine:

It should connect to the network by default without any tinkering.

Perhaps you didn't pay close attention to the first-time wizard and told it to only connect to manually chosen peers instead of connecting to random strangers? If you then don't add peers manually you won't have any connections.

> The GUI didn't make much sense, I couldn't work out where I was meant to go to browse content.

The default feature is browsing HTML content just like on the regular web.

By default it ships some bookmarks to "index" sites, i.e. sites which list links to plenty of other sites.

Those bookmarks should be right at the main page of the UI at http://127.0.0.1:8888

I was using some unofficial packages since installing java on my system is difficult so I used the first flatpak and the first docker image I found on google and neither of them shipped an included browser and it seemed like the way was to make firefox work with it but I could not work that out.

It's been too long for me to remember the exact details but if I couldn't work out how to make it run as a long time linux and p2p user, I can't see how the average user could.

Yeah there are no official flatpaks or docker images so you were using 3rd-party software and this is not Freenet's fault :)

Perhaps you can update your topmost post to mention that?

The official installers are here: https://freenetproject.org/pages/download.html

Thanks for clarifying though!

Offering only a Java installer, of all things from the increasingly distant past, wholly divorced from any semblance on how most anyone wants to install or use software these days, is 100% a choice the freenet project made and entirely that project’s fault.

This type of uncaring about the user experience nonsense is exactly the type of issue that the person you’re replying to is sharing about their experience.

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.

Freenet development is NOT dead! :)

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.

How would you comment on the design of zeronet ?

why do you care what a vendor of child pornography thinks of other designs

Any tech can be abused, but the tech itself is generic for both good and bad usage.

> Luckily, Freenet did that right (even though it was the first anti-censorship + privacy network!)

This isn't even close to true.

There are many networks that predate you, provide real anonymity, and still remove the child pornography that would otherwise taint them and their maintainers.

You just play games with the definition of censorship.

When people tell you "you shouldn't be the vendor of the sexual abuse of children," you try to turn it into a censorship issue. Like people somehow have the right to publish this.

Except they don't, and you've become so addicted to a decade of hiding behind that shield that you don't realize what a villain it has actually turned you into.

The reason the other networks exist is that people actually to want privacy, but they won't shame themselves by swimming in your child pornography filled pool.

Stop telling us the way to fix your network is to participate, and water the numbers down.

Fix your miserable problem.

If you had read what the poster said you’d know that they are fixing the problem. And already did a lot to fix it.

Freenet as a censorship resistant tool had potential a long time ago, through in my view the failure points had more to do with the design and the positioning in the censorship resistant tool chain than with the unsolved problems. A shared "data store" that shuffles its pieces around was a good idea in theory, but torrents without any privacy did a better job of being a shared data store. Copyright enforcement has been too slow and ineffective to push people into using Freenet.

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.

Nowadays you can actually see privacy-dependant services test Freenet. To quote research from Bern university who do health data exchange research: “This broker is based on the peer-to-peer network Freenet. This network has been defined to be censorship resistant and to protect the privacy of persons sharing data. This covers the needs for protection expected from a secure data broker.” https://www.igi-global.com/chapter/using-freenet-as-a-broker...

I agree, and it's frankly hard to believe that our governments didn't have some hand in shaping that future. The further you follow the cryptography and anonymity paper trail, the more often you run into intelligence agencies. In some ways, it wouldn't surprise me if our current "big tech" paradigm is being relentlessly funded and propped-up by the United States in some way or another. As more and more users get herded into silos like TikTok and Facebook, the stage is being set for international-scale data warfare.

No need to speculate, we know that governments had a direct role in this thanks to the Snowden revelations.

Governments have structured financial markets heavily to favor large publicly traded corporations through allowing them access to massive amounts of borderline free credit.

The goal is growth and consolidation. They want every major industry to be completely dominated by a small handful of big players. This makes it much easier to regulate and implement policy.

It would be impossible for them to have nearly the same amount of control over a economy if the economy was dominated by hundreds or thousands of small and medium players. By having 3 or 4 major public corporations they are much more easier to manipulate and keep tabs on. They can 'invite them to the table' to advise and help draft policy and regulations that are mutually beneficial. Also it makes it much easier to convince the public that such regulation is done for the public's benefit.

This model of American State Corporatism was developed in the late 19th, early 20th century and has since been exported across the world.

It is a pattern that is repeated over and over again. Whether it's automobile manufacturing, steel manufacturing, railway transportation, television broadcasting, ISPs, or Social Media.. once the government set it's sites on regulating it you will see markets devolve into 3-5 major corporate players that pretty much control everybody else. All of this heavily encouraged through regulation of capital markets and central banking systems.

The classic pre-internet example is the development of AT&T monopoly. FCC used it's ability to regulate peering agreements to heavily favor the markets towards re-establishing the AT&T monopoly. A monopoly that they essentially lost when the early Bell patents ran out.

They were then able to use that monopoly, through regulatory forces, to gain control over the communication infrastructure during the cold war, which was a national security priority. That is how we ended up with things like Room 641A. (which was in 2003-later era, but is something they did through out the entire cold war)

History repeated itself with the Prism revelations.

The release this year adds streaming video on demand over Freenet and fixes the pitch black attack.

And confidential Friend-to-Friend Chat over Freenet as Android App.

Last year saw Freenet ported to Android.

There are a lot of changes still in the pipeline to be released this year.

Loopix - https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.00536 Nym (Loopix but using blockchain for users to pay nodes) - https://nymtech.net/nym-whitepaper.pdf

https://nymtech.net/

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