Comment by cgtzczykldpq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cgtzczykldpq | Hacker News Reader

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I've been using Freenet for 12 years and have not run into CSAM involuntarily, and of course also not voluntarily!

So I don't know how you get the impression that "public servers are off limits"?

It is possible that CSAM exists in certain forums on Freenet which might indicate the specific goal of sharing CSAM by their name.

But if it were to be posted into non-CSAM forums then the community's web of trust would flag it as spam and thus make it disappear. So you're unlikely to just run into CSAM involuntarily.

Also, IMHO saying "public / private servers" in the context of Freenet is wrong because Freenet is not organized into "servers". Basically the whole of Freenet is connected into one big public network.

And it addresses files, not machines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28588336

"Private" happens in terms of a file being "private" if you don't share the link to it with anyone.

(A separate Freenet network which is fully private would be possible if every participant configures his instance to not connect to the outside. But one participant disobeying that and it is not private anymore, so it's unlikely that such networks exist.)

I downloaded Freenet during the post-Snowden privacy craze since the concept of a decentralized anonymous network interested me. Here’s my experience circa ~2014:

1. Installed Freenet

2. Clicked on the site directory from the Freenet home page to see what sites are out there

3. Saw links to child pornography sites on the site directory

4. Uninstalled Freenet

I hope this has been addressed, it’s sickening how the network seemed to be mainly used by pedophiles.

How do you expect it to be addressed? By its very nature, a decentralized anonymous content network like this is highly resistant to all forms of censorship. This includes CSAM removal. It's like crypto - it's either strong or it isn't, you can't have strong crypto with backdoors for when "somebody must do something".

So the issue was that the default bookmarks contained a site directory - "index" in Freenet terminology - which was not properly filtered by its author.

IIRC Freenet's current policy is to only add indexes to the default bookmarks if their authors do label them as filtered.

Perhaps this was a slip-up of whoever the anonymous maintainer of the index was.

It is also possible that in the past the bookmarks contained both the filtered version of an index as well as another one of the same index which was explicitly labeled as unfiltered with a big warning. Then the users could decide on their own if they want filtered content or unfiltered content for the sake of avoiding censorship.

In any case: The default bookmarks are here, you can check the git history yourself:

https://github.com/freenet/fred/blob/master/src/freenet/clie...

> the network seemed to be mainly used by pedophiles

It is not clear how that statement can emerge from the mere observations above it. Are you telling the full story?

About a quarter of all the comments above yours, other threads, etc, mention the same thing, this smells like astroturfing, but it is unclear by who.

You can send illegal stuff by post, FedEx, BitTorrent, pgp encryption, etc. Who cares?

No, I've meant exactly what I've meant. There is an experience of seeing some links, and there's a conclusion that the network is mainly used by pedophiles. Even if all the data was 100% child porn (which is technically impossible, but whatever), I still can't see how the former transforms into the latter.

Or maybe it was just parroting the “common knowledge”. Another kind of common knowledge is that law enforcement from multiple countries has been arresting people for about ten years now because Freenet is far from perfect pedophile heaven. I guess there is common knowledge one prefers to use, and the common knowledge one prefers to overlook.

To put it bluntly, there is a lot of thought put into Freenet, and a lot of work, and a lot of discussions of how things should work, and a lot of uncommon practical solutions invented for truly serverless communication, and some general ideas why it is needed at all. When a casual idler shows interest in none of these, but hurries to find child porn, and with deep satisfaction proclaims “Eww, the whole place is dirty!”, it is OK to point out that there is zero understanding in that.

Because default index sites have always been filtered — and I can vouch for that, — to see something outrageous one had to actively look for something outrageous. Keep it in mind when reading all those comments.

Sorry this is nonsense, seeing something outrageous within seconds of getting on freenet was also my experience about 15 years ago, and I certainly didn’t go looking for it.

Things may have improved on the common indexes since then, I’ve not been back to check, but you seek to whitewash and diminish the problem which is not great either.

I'm not whitewashing, I'm trying to make people reflect on their reasoning.

What exactly is the problem? That child exploitation exists, or that you are reminded that it exists (and prefer not to be reminded)? It doesn't stop from you not using Freenet, and it doesn't stop from everyone not using Freenet (for anything). If you believe that it's only good for child porn, it's your opinion; others might think differently.

For some reason, people find a simple idea that you need to tolerate people you don't approve of because other people also tolerate you hard to get. Freenet is basically a technical implementation of Voltaire's quote — and any real censorship-resistant network will be same.

> I'm not whitewashing

Of course you are, you're outright denying people's reported experiences - "to see something outrageous one had to actively look for something outrageous."

As for the rest, I'm not making any particular claims here, just pointing out that yours seem to be driven by agenda more than reality.

The original claims that freenet is mostly used for CSAM might not be supportable either (in fact they may never be supportable, given the nature of freenet and how it works), but you go too far the other way.

Ya this whole thread is weird. Either 1) peoples opinions about the net have changed drastically in a very short amount of time 2) this thread is an anomaly 3) This thread is being turfed

All of these make me uneasy

People's opinions about the net may well be changing, and things like logging on to the hot freedom-preserving tool to be presented in short order with child sexual abuse may be part of that.

Other things that have changed my opinions about the nature of speech on the internet are what's happening with american politics, anti-vaccination conspiracies and a bunch of other instances in which our wonderful tools of mass communication cause negative outcomes, either through directed propaganda or through simply connecting hoards of morons together.

Tech utopianism seems to be waning.

I had the very same experience. It made me realise I couldn’t run a node in good faith because I did not want my computer distributing such stuff or aiding people that want to do that.

It’s a shame but it’s a pattern - if you make untraceable communication platforms, people will use them for that.

> But if it were to be posted into non-CSAM forums then the community's web of trust would flag it as spam and thus make it disappear. So you're unlikely to just run into CSAM involuntarily.

But how can a censorship-resistant network make certain content disappear? Isn't that impossible by design on Freenet, except by the slow, unreliable process of all nodes purging the data?

It works because every user can choose their own moderators: You choose on your own whom to trust to filter out the disruptive stuff.

And it’s optimized so you have much less work for that than on the clearnet. On Freenet Spam- and Disruption-prevention actually scales better than spamming.

Ah I see. So the content will still be there as long as people store/access it, but you can filter it out by subscribing to filter-lists? Got it, thanks.

Can you also filter out certain content (by means of hashes I suppose) that you don't want to personally host (not even as partial chunks) but allow everything else?

Yes to the first.

To the second no: In Freenet 0.5 there was a plugin for that, but for 0.7 this has not been written yet.

You can write that, but you cannot check what exactly it would block. Whom do you trust to censor you? The devs cannot make that judgement. And who will control the censors? You would need a list of all chunks to block (by their routing key).

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