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Comment by azalemeth | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, what sort of things are on freenet? Is it worth installing it in a Tails VM?

Freenet requires your hard drive to allocate ~2GB of raw space of encrypted unknown data that basically makes your machine a "node" in the network. Whatever is in that cache you will never be able to know, as it's encrypted in a way that querying is based on encrypted hops and an associated TTL like feature.

It's incredibly slow (think Tor over Tor over Tor), and needs to be run for 1-2 weeks to even work mildly. Tails would not be an ideal choice, a dedicated space is necessary.

There's no real reason to use Tor to connect to Freenet anyway, as it's encrypted in a way that the network traffic cannot be known nor even the content on your machine by yourself unless you know the private key which serves as a link to the content you are trying to locate, and it eventually will sync up those keys with your local storage. You don't even know the public key of the content that is stored in this local cache.

If you've seen Silicon Valley, this is the idea that likely founded "the Platform" concept, but they add a bit of magic and speed to the concept for the show. When your content is published, it's published "everywhere and nowhere". If you publish something, then destroy your node, that content will stay in many nodes and still be accessible. This information gets kept or cleared out based on how often it is being queried.

"It's incredibly slow" — I’m seeing Freenet stream video nowadays. Not HD video, but video.

Latency is typically high, but the browsing experience is pretty good.

Freenet's default feature is HTML sites - just like the regular web but fully hosted on Freenet and only accessible through it.

The content of those sites is whatever their authors want it to be :)

Further, dynamic applications such as forums are also available. Here's a list of apps built on top of Freenet: https://github.com/freenet/wiki/wiki/Projects

Freenet needs UDP so it likely won't work on Tails as Tails tunnels everything through Tor - which does not support UDP AFAIK.

Freenet can be run through Tor using Onioncat as a virtual network. [0]

[0] https://bluishcoder.co.nz/2016/08/18/using-freenet-over-tor....

If I read this correctly it implies that Freenet's opennet does not work anymore?

So you can only connect to Freenet with this setup if you already know someone else who uses Freenet and peer with them manually ("darknet").

> The content of those sites is whatever their authors want it to be :)

A network vending child pornography should not be happy about this. This should be a terrifying warning to you.

Unfortunately you don't see it as a genuine problem, so you explain it away.

for a society to have freedom of speech there absolutely has to be a „safe“ way to host csam.

> Freenet's default feature is

bad developers that make excuses for a network that won't stop the delivery of child pornography by hiding behind false ethical arguments

What I see are mostly opinion blogs (lots of technical and political stuff), forums and some media-sites. The most recent pretty unique site I saw was a mario64 fansite.

Check with your local laws whether you expose yourself to the risk of a friendly 2am visit by the police for hosting illegal content.

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