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Comment by kafkaIncarnate | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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.

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.

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).

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