First impressions of the Freenet network | Hacker News Reader

First impressions of the Freenet network

cheapskatesguide.org

47 pointsdavesailer25 comments

The inactivity is due to index creators having stopped updating one year ago, so what you saw were old blogs — while missing the new one from the last year.

There’s a new index that should be part of the default entry pages in the next release: USK@5ijbfKSJ4kPZTRDzq363CHteEUiSZjrO-E36vbHvnIU,ZEZqPXeuYiyokY2r0wkhJr5cy7KBH9omkuWDqSC6PLs,AQACAAE/clean-spider/37/

I wish that next release were already released, but the changes in Java 16 and 17 have thrown rocks into the path of getting Freenet 1493 released. Spending the weekends fighting with a Windows VM to get a tray app working you’ll never run yourself is pretty annoying … but necessary to make this easy for regular users.

Networks that use my disk to store other people's encrypted blobs (by default) make me uneasy. Services like IPFS where you essentially need to opt in to hosting other folks' content feels better.

Being blind to what you're hosting is required if you want to be part of a network that values "freedom of information". Partly to avoid the nodes self-censoring and partly as a form of plausible deniability.

Freedom of information doesn't imply that you must host content for others, even if there's no way to know what it is. I don't want to host content that I might not otherwise agree to host, therefore I don't care to use such services. "Self censorship" implies that it's right and correct to host anything and everything for everyone no matter what, and I reject that premise: I only want to curate what I redistribute into the world.

Well, you can certainly seed only torrents that you think are valuable and are willing to take the risk for. What happens to the content you are not willing to take the personal risk for? That's the utility of networks that value freedom of information, which achieve it by hiding what you share, even from you.

Edit: ...and importantly, from whoever can seize your computer.

> What happens to the content you are not willing to take the personal risk for?

let someone else host it if they think it's valuable

otherwise we are dooming the network to host everything forever

This is the technical challenge that a network like Freenet attempts to address.

Then you might consider I2P network instead, which provides strong anonymity without storing data blobs on your computer, https://geti2p.net.

How is I2P different from Tor? It doesn't have exit nodes and thus people can't watch you from those?

Is it still susceptible to tracking if many nodes are compromised?

I2P is a self-contained thing - once you are on I2P you can reach others who are also on I2P.

Some I2P users run an outproxy, if you use an outproxy for anonymized Internet access, the outproxy has access to your web traffic just like a Tor exit node does.

Tor will change circuits and your exit node periodically, if you use an I2P outproxy you'll have that outproxy's IP until you stop using it.

Also I2P (at least last I checked it out a few years ago) has a built-in torrent -over-I2P client.

Thank you, I've known of I2P for years but never used it. It's somehow remained constantly there but less popular than e.g. Tor.

It does have exit nodes, but they are not the point of I2P. In my view, the main advantage is the possibility of peer-to-peer connections like torrents.

> Is it still susceptible to tracking if many nodes are compromised?

Yes, but AFAIK it's generally harder. See also: https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/tor.

Oh thanks! I missed that page.

Check out Yggdrasil too.

https://yggdrasil-network.github.io

Some more overlay networks:

Pinecone: https://matrix.org/blog/2021/05/06/introducing-the-pinecone-...

Katzenpost: https://katzenpost.mixnetworks.org/

Nym Mixnet: https://nymtech.net/docs/stable/overview/nym-other-systems/

If they're encrypted blobs, then from your point of view it's just random bits being stored right?

But they're not random bits. I don't want to host content from random third parties even if I don't know what it is. Especially if I don't know what it is.

I wouldn't set up an open FTP server for folks to host random encrypted blobs. Why would I do it for a P2P network?

But from law enforcement perspective you may be distributing encrypted bits of CSAM to people that have a private key for it.

From my perspective it could be videos of a government committing war crimes, 4chan archives, Twilight fanfic or system logfiles.

> ...we strongly suggest that you install Freenet inside an encrypted drive using, for example, Truecrypt.

A word of warning: Truecrypt has been unmaintained for years; I'm not a security expert and can't suggest an alternative.

Veracrypt is a maintained foss alternative based on truecrypt. It is the best I know about. https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html

I don’t understand why the installer was corrupted.

This just works for me:

wget 'https://github.com/freenet/fred/releases/download/build01492...' -O new_installer_offline.jar; java -jar new_installer_offline.jar;

That was the same conclusion I came to when I tried it. Freenet works, but it's slow and there's barely anything there. Unfortunately, a big draw to use a network is how many users it already has.

I was very optimistic about Freenet when I first heard about it, but that was over 20 years ago. I'm less optimistic now. If it was going to take off, it would have by now. It only works when a lot of people use it, and they aren't - it seems like an uncensorable internet is not a priority for even a significant minority of users.

Download 1492? Broken on one link and ok for another? I would recheck the checksum of both files and compare it against checksums listed on the download web page, if any.

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