Hacker News Reader

More like pictures of modern child abuse, child slavery (IE: ownership, sale, etc), and brutal torturous murder.

Basically anything you've thought of the NSA or other intelligence agencies intercepting, it was wide out in the open there. The types of things you'd see kids telling themselves about urban legends of the "darkweb", well, it was extremely real and in the open on Freenet...

You forgot UFO parts for sale, bulk jenkem supply in railroad tank cars, and LSD application over screen oscillation, because you certainly was on something when you've seen those urban legends of the “darkweb”.

By the way, I really hate meaningless spooky terms like “dark web” and “dark net”. I can still remember the time before journalists invented them.

No I did not mean that. I meant what I said, not whatever you read. Which one of us is on drugs is up for debate. I do not believe the NSA is sitting around studying X-Files. They largely are analyzing and investigating large quantities of child porn and exploitation from southeast asia, rape and abuse in the middle east, cartel executions and kidnappings, war crimes and African slave trade, organ harvesting in China, among other things.

Given the other responses, I wasn't the only one who was aware of the content on Freenet 20 years ago.

And the quotes around "darkweb" were largely to abstract it as a concept of urban legend itself, so I guess we can agree on that.

Let's say someone decided to buy a child slave on a Central Slave Market on Freenet. He would have a problem with that 5 years ago. And also 10 years ago. And also 15 years ago. Why? Because there never was a Central Slave Market, and no one was selling child slaves.

Perhaps my memory fails me, and you have some links to fix my error? Please share. Before you say you can't remember the specifics, let me tell you that most freesites are still available (at least the pages in their root archives), and that Frost and FMS has archives of most public discussion that happened there, so it would not be hard to check whether something like this happened or not.

Anyone who took this trolling at face value should really reconsider trusting everything they read on the internet.

There was a messaging system before Frost. You can go look that up, I'm not doing this for you because you are calling me a troll, which is a great way to end civilized discourse and end any attempt at reasonable conversation.

I never said that a central slave market was on Freenet. I don't even think the protocol would be a very effective way to do it due to how slow and unreliable the protocol is at retrieving things. What I meant was that images of this stuff were available in large galleries, and the previous messaging system before Frost would auto-find new forums for you at random. Frequently they would be large galleries of images of this stuff.

So have fun with whatever you are expecting me to pull out of 20 years ago links that are like however many 40+ hex digits long. I haven't used Freenet since I saw that stuff. Not really sure why you'd think I would keep links to it or I would have a photographic memory or even would actively seek out the stuff.

I'm not sitting here saying I contributed, I'm saying I would play around with Freenet, even submit some harmless static HTML pages for fun to test the protocol. After the messaging system started popping up forums that I didn't find acceptable, I deleted the client and never touched Freenet again.

The burden of proof is not on me nor you. This is a conversation on the internet not a spontaneous scientific journal nor an inquisition.

You might want to check again. If you use the indexes, the current forum systems (FMS) or the social network (Sone), you are very unlikely to find any of that stuff without actively going searching for it.

The days where many people posted stuff just for the thrill of being able to post something illegal and disgusting are long gone — partly because the communication structures in Freenet evolved, so such stuff will quickly make you invisible to most people (since most people subscribe to moderation that hides that).

The problem is that in early 2000s you could find child porn, gore and the rest of “NSFW” stuff on the Web. It is also not wrong to assume that almost nothing you (or anyone) saw on Freenet had originated on Freenet (which also was a fresh tiny project without significant bandwidth or storage capacity back in the days). So, using your own logic, you had to disconnect from the Internet, and never touch it again. But you did not do that. It seems to me that you chose to shoot the messenger here, and remain in sweet ignorance provided by armies of third world grunts scrubbing “normal” services clean from all the unpleasant interactions.

Also, if we talk literally 20 years ago, Freenet was at infancy, still used arbitrary human-readable content keys that were supposed to be shared externally —

https://web.archive.org/web/20000817234626/http://unicast.or...

— and web pages were only a proposed option (with Javascript!):

https://web.archive.org/web/20010405191438/http://freenetpro...

You are probably thinking of more mature days of Freenet version 0.5, which, in its turn, was a network independent from Freenet version 0.7 (2008—present). I've seen 0.5 when it still ran in parallel, and can't remember the content being way too different in general. Still no child slaves for sale.

Wait what? The NSA is sure as hell not interested in third world suffering. I'm pretty sure they're far interested & occupied with breaking crypto, hacking China/Russia, getting into Iranian/DPRK nuclear centrifuges than in child slavery, which is a shame, but that is how it is. It's an American agency serving the interests of the American govt, not necessarily victims elsewhere.

Who said they "cared"? I said intercepted. They basically intercept everything, and specifically will capture everything they monitor of terrorists.

> In the years since 9/11, police raids of terrorist cells in the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain have yielded countless images of hard-core child pornography.

https://nypost.com/2015/02/17/why-are-jihadis-so-obsessed-wi...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nsa-porn-muslims_n_4346128

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/191554-nsa...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S2qtGisT34

I'm done with this thread. You guys are way too literal. If I cared I would find better sources, but two simple Google searches is enough for me. I have dishes to wash which is much more productive than these threads have become.

OMG! You just copy pasted from the internet that makes a link from 9/11 to CP and then you want to do the dishes? YAF!

TIL 'jenkem'.

BRRR!

edit: though bulk delivery by railroad car may be technically correct, just add some heat, or let the car stand for a while.

One does not need to imagine the 'epic whiffs' coming from that, because it happens IRL!

[0] https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/poop-train-full-of-nyc-sew...

You mean like the early 2000's 4chan random board?

Sarcasm aside, that experience sounds similar to what I've seen when trying out freenet way back.

On the other hand my I2P experience was quite pleasant (by just following the planet.i2p stream, basically an announcement site for new "registered" domains and torrents), with easy discovery of downloadable leaks, anarchist and conspiracy theorist blogs. Really felt like my 90s internet experience where I could find new and edgy content everywhere.

> way back

Maybe you should try again. It is quite a different experience nowadays (if you just use what you see and don’t go digging for stuff to get angry about — if you do the latter, you’ll also find "the internet" to be a place full of disgusting evil).

Happy to hear that new user experience is different nowadays, and also the fact that there's time and money invested into continued Freenet development (as I've seen in other comments).

Maybe I'll give it a go next time when I muck around with anonymous P2P setups and protocols, until I get frustrated with the UX/DX, as always, and give up.

That would be great — I’d love to welcome you to Freenet, where no one can watch you read!

I was on 4chan's random board in the early 2000s, and it was nothing at all like that.

The nsa intercepts everything so naturally there’s something illegal among it

>> Let's take Mein Kampf, for example.

Not that I want to defend that book, but it at least has some historic value. It is the sort of thing I would envision a research library keeping on a back shelf. But space lasers and pizza restaurants with dungeons, such things are beneath even Freenet.

This is pretty much the identical argument of 4chan alt-right movements, where the value of free speech is primed so high that they do not think about collateral damage.

There's a reason books and movies have an age restriction. The reason is that kids are not able to understand the consequences. It's easy, as an adult, to rationalize that they see it eventually.

But if you had a welcome screen with some gore porn on your computer...would you a) use it in a public cafe? And b) use it in front of a kindergarden?

Why not? Exactly. The same reason why communities should be able to decide why they do not want to host gore porn on their companies.

Free speech works two ways. If I decide I dont like gore porn on my computer, but the peer to peer database/blockchain/whatever decides for redundancy purposes that my computer has to host it, I'm not gonna use that technology again.

Users must have the decision what kind of content they want to see. Otherwise it's gonna be the same propaganda machine all over again, where content of hate and emotions will persist longer than content of rationality and logic.

In Freenet, content that does not get accessed disappears. To access content, you must first learn that it exists. You must see it.

And Freenet has a method for communities to express that people (actually pseudonyms) who disrupt the system should not be seen.

It is a decentralized blocking system where the choice of moderator is on the individual. It easily runs circles around current clearnet moderation systems, because it had to cope with actual pseudonymity from the start, and it was created to address an actual need to stop disruption without centralization.

If you don’t like gore porn, you ask the other pseudonym not to post it. And if he/she/it continues, you record blocking, and those who trust your judgement will no longer see that pseudonym. That’s how in Freenet you decide what content to see. And it works: Within Freenet we had quite a few constructive discussions between political groups that would normally be at their throats.

So Freenet itself acts like an abstracted ISP that only provides access while the moderation system does the value-call and moderation — also fully decentralized, but as separated from the core system as a hacker news moderator or web-hoster is from the internet service provider.

And if I say „the Freenet moderation system runs circles around clearnet moderation“, I mean it: The fediverse people are now experimenting with implementing the Freenet moderation system for Mastodon and others: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scalable-moderation-us...

> There's a reason books and movies have an age restriction.

Yes, it is called hypocrisy. Do you think there exist a kid who stopped at age restriction dialog?

Ratings have always been either a publicity stunt, a way to benefit from grab of authority on them, or a pretext for censorship. Most well known example is MPAA, which basically allowed studios to make the same kind of movies while jumping through hoops to tell people they were “approved”. Later, it was shortened to “This label means the kids won't see it, so it's okay, don't worry”. Another example: until very recently, there was no age restriction on books in Russia, and no one cared at all. Then the government decided to promote itself as a defender of “traditional values”, and age ratings were promptly introduced, just to make any non-encyclopedic discussion of homosexuality fall under 18+. Does it stop people from accessing information? Not really, and it doesn't matter, because ratings are not for kids, they are for grown ups who feel good from looking at “protective measures”. And so, some teenagers are doing drugs while their parents are happy because they bought family access control software to shield their children from the information about drugs and other nasty stuff.

I mean, you can buy Mein Kampf on Amazon so it's probably not the best example

if people get exposed to bad ideas, they can't be trusted to use their own logic and moral faculties to determine right from wrong, which is why free speech is more than unnecessary, it's downright evil. no, instead, we need governments and corporations to regulate speech, for the good of mankind.

...or so the thinking goes

> they can't be trusted to use their own logic and moral faculties to determine right from wrong

History has shown this to be true over and over and over. We even have evidence to this: https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels-f...

Fake news travels faster and convinces more people than the truth.

you would rather truth be determined by governments or corporations than left up to individuals to decide for themselves?

> you would rather truth be determined by governments or corporations than left up to individuals to decide for themselves?

Didn't say anything of the sort. And truth isn't determined by any of them. Which agin, proves the point. I had a comment with only three sentences, and you managed to misread it.

I'm not for corporate or government censorship, but people that can't read comments correctly are a much bigger problem.

Maybe it’s because the education system has failed at critical thinking.

> Maybe it’s because the education system has failed at critical thinking

Sure, education can improve things. But this is a problem even worse outside the United States, so it's hard to blame it on a single education system.

It’s not just the education system. It’s our structures of information that are based on engagement (to drive ad-revenue) instead of value to the reader.

And this is something Freenet actually solves to some degree. Because it had to. This is why in Freenet we know the Zen of Tolerance: https://www.draketo.de/politik/random-babcom#the-zen-of-tole...

- You are entitled to voice your opinion.

- You are not entitled to force it upon everyone.

- You are not entitled to force it upon a subgroup repeatedly.

- You are also not entitled to hurl hate towards participants, since that would disrupt communication.

- If you cannot stay respectful and friendly after being asked to, I will unsee you and advise others to do the same with a clear and brief explanation, so they can take an informed decision.

Everything is repeated throughout history, but more often than not consensus must tend towards the truth, otherwise human knowledge wouldnt have advanced so far. If the information is of real value (eg. farming techniques, technology, weapons) people are quite discerning.

On the other hand, if it's essentially gossip, like twitter, the truth isn't particularly important but shock value is- it's more about social standing/status, entertainment or whatever.

The arguments for controlling 'misinformation' are really just claims by one entity that they should be in control of the gossip.

There were also times in history when technology and knowledge got lost in religious zealotry. Some of it we are only now trying to recover. We don’t know how much is still missing.

If information is of real value — like vaccines — … do you see where I’m going?

The vast majority of Americans have multiple vaccinations. How many are required for school? Just because people are hesitant about a new vaccine for a year hardly proves a greater point- it is a long-term trend towards truth, not a straight line. Those dark times in history are notably high points in censorship as well.

I would go further. I would say that people should be allowed to make up their own mind without unjust interference (i.e. censorship (such as shadow-banning) and artificial manipulation of visibility (such as putting 'fact-checks' in prominent positions)) regardless of whether someone in a position of authority (whether elected into government, bought into the board of directors or shareholders of some company, or just has mod privileges for whatever reason) thinks it's true or not. The people decide for themselves what's true, not the powerful.

I would go even further and say that people should be able (in practical life) to choose their own moderators to filter and curate content. And know that they work for them, not for some third party.

In today's media visibility is massively skewed by the platform's interest of "engagement" — which too often means enragement. That’s how fake news spread so fast (also in ad-click-financed newspapers, by the way).

They aren’t only exploiting human psyche, but also the proprietary, centrally controlled algorithms that drive social networks and the ad-financing of newsrooms.

If you log out of Youtube and then watch a talk about Java development, and then the Youtube algorithm suggests alt-right content in the auto-play-list, then something is wrong with the algorithm.

It is ironic that platforms that send the fake news your way in the first place then put a fact check underneath.

I would take sociological studies on hot-buttos issues with many tablespoons of salt. People by and large live in a consensus reality, so obviously there are social mechanisms that ensure this. This happens even in the presence of massive propaganda systems pouring money and time into distortions of the truth - like the huge anti-environmental propaganda, or soviet propaganda that was widely known to be false even inside the soviet union.

I don't think "a copy of Mein Kampf" is the Nazi stuff they're talking about.

No I talk about neonazi stuff. Not books that nowadays are more part of history than anything else.