Freenet build 1495: new user experience and performance
freenetproject.org
freenetproject.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ
The interview -- like most of my interviews -- goes into depth about the entire space, and also touches on Locutus, his new project.
PS: I like to interview people on topics related to what we build at Qbix and Intercoin.
Freedom of Speech and Capitalism (with Noam Chomsky) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv5mI6ClPGc
Identity and Civic Engagement (with David Boulet) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRzVj2W9WGM
Free Cities (Patri Friedman, grandson of Milton Friedman) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lgil1M9tAXU
Community Economics (Thomas Greco) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXTn52kL0Yo
Crypto and Securities Laws (Sara Hanks) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocrqgkJn4m0
Therefore the overarching design goal of freenet is to make censorship as hard as technically possible. That’s the reason for - providing anonymity (else you could be threatened with repercussions - as seen in the case of the wikileaks informer from the army in the USA), - building it as free software network (else you could just shut down the central website, as people tried with wikileaks), - providing safe pseudonyms and caching of the content on all participating nodes (else people could censor by spamming or overloading nodes), - including good moderation tools (otherwise people could censor by just "flooding the zone with shit"), and even - the darknet mode and enhancements in usability (else freenet could be stopped by just prosecuting everyone who uses it, or it would reach too few people to be able to counter censorship in the clearnet).
One core difference between MaidSAFE is that Freenet provides communication. Content in Freenet stays accessible while people access it, without tracking accesses: When you upload something, you can imagine that a clock starts ticking. After a while (depending on file size) the content is no longer accessible. But if someone accesses it, their node "heals" that content, which resets that clock.
Also Freenet enables people to connect purely to their friends, so there’s no central point of failure or detection.
I once did a comparison to other projects for a funding proposal (that did not succeed, though) which should still give you an idea about the difference between Freenet and other systems: http://www.draketo.de/proj/freenet-funding/#sec-9
In case anyone doesn't believe me, here's the Freenet thesis which actually mentions both Gnutella and Napster in references. Hard to claim precedence when that's the case.
That paper isn't the original Freenet paper, it came later. This is the original: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Distributed-Decentra...
Including decentralized download via HTTP using just three added headers and Tiger Tree Hash Exchange: https://rfc-gnutella.sourceforge.net/src/Partial_File_Sharin...
Scalability was limited to global search in around 5 million nodes (with the network spanning 40 million people at its peak), though, due to restrictions in the number of TCP connections Windows (private edition) supported.
But when I've used it the experience was absolutely dreadful. It's difficult to find anything, and there's a lot of emphasis on trusted peers, but I don't know anyone who has even heard of this, and it's unclear how you'd find nodes to trust. Also it's horribly slow and the proxy server eats a ton of resources.
I think it's a beautiful concept with massive potential, but I'm extremely skeptical it will ever find widespread use
For some more details, see https://freenetproject.org/the-discredited-levine-2017-appro... and the links therein.
(Lol, got over v underestimate mixed up.)
The next statement below totally contradict the first one above.
>"hat rep is so bad that if authorities ever look into your internet traffic, freenet connections are more than enough to get warrants that will rip your life apart."
If mere internet traffic will "rip your life apart" - that is a police state in my book.
Exactly. Anyone who thinks the US is not a police state has not been paying close enough attention, because the standard for getting a warrant is much lower than this. Moreover, cops will exaggerate the circumstances to get questionable warrants, and being served will absolutely ruin your day if not your life.
You may not, but many of us actually do. Naturally not every political opinion, and it depends on how you express it, but still.
> At the moment, freenet has a bad reputation for hosting very illegal content.
Why is that a bad reputation? Isn't that part of the point? ... Perhaps you mean unsavory, or immoral, or socially detrimental.
> but dont be suprised if the cops pay closer attention to you
Now that is a significant point in its disfavor, yes.
And for the highest security in Freenet (the friend-to-friend mode), you need to have friends whom you trust not to go to lengths to spy on you — friends would be able to run statistical attacks if you transmit large amounts of known content. And such trusted friends are what people who want to access child abuse content do not have.
¹: Example (in German): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iItLpwkQMUQ
If I connect to Freenet, will I be offered images of abused children? ... I would assume the answer is no.
Well, child abuse is one of the top excuses for governments to demand to be able to spy on everyone.
Once we've seen a complete ban on government use of violence because it sometimes kills innocent people, then talk to me about how private communications is problematic because people use it for child porn.
Millions of people are in places where acknowledging that they want abortions[1] or miscarried[2] can pique the state's interest, along with people who are trans[3] or have trans kids[4].
We have police using web searches to prosecute women for abortion[1], we have states compiling lists of transgender individuals[3] and we have parents being investigated by the state because their kids were open about being trans[4].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/03/abortio...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/12/14/texas-trans...
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/23/texas-tra...
Freenet protects communication — content in flow. Somewhat larger files that are not accessed automatically disappear from Freenet after a short while.
Tor protects your connection to another computer.
The stated usecases are excellent examples for usage of Freenet: information for transgender people or about abortions. Even accessing such information can get you in danger nowadays.
And a site accessed via Tor can more easily be compromised (to get your identity by tracking information from your OS or similar) or taken down (so the information is gone).
What is this? Are governments mandating that corporations install government monitoring modules in their networks?
Not only CALEA, but telecoms, ISPs, and other providers work hand in hand with governments who request data, whether those requests are via NSLs, warrants, subpoenas, court orders or just government employees asking nicely for the data.
Many companies, including for example Apple who is open about this, are happy to hand over private information via simple requests from law enforcement that they are not legally bound to respond to like they are with warrants or subpoenas.
I'd assume by scratching law enforcement's back, the government scratches compliant companies' backs, as well, considering the contracts they get and favorable treatment they get from regulators.
Women looking for abortions in the US just learned the hard way why this is an essential practice.
Recommended watching: The NSA surveillance doesn’t scale — Constanze Kurz at Euro Python 2014: https://archive.org/details/EuroPython_2014_kSFzmDYc
Given that Tor is a US government creation, I'd assume they'd find value in controlling as many different nodes as they can in order to deanonymize traffic. Tor only has/had value to them as a way for government agents to communicate clandestinely in other jurisdictions.
Try being a communist in America. You will get fired and your life ruined for your political opinions.
These days you get people openly saying that capitalism is evil and major politicians insisting that ubi is the only way forward.
Vietnam. Cheap life, good life, friendly people. None of this "I'll try to screw you over and steal your money, because money is all that interests me"
You have no idea.
I assure you, I have a pretty good idea.
BTW: I don't say it's a perfect system but worth a look, and maybe one could mix both systems together.
Then again, seeing the current state of "market-based" Russia, I'm giving more credence to the idea that it was not communism than ruined Russia, but vice versa. They seem to have that effect on many things.
Don't be so quick to jump into cold war propaganda against Stalin, with all his failures and shortcomings he was still an amazing leader.
You must live i a parallel world...this is unbelievable.
>he was still an amazing leader.
Now i am getting sick of you.
Holodomor never happened, and the Gulags are just western propaganda right?
a) It was the last big famine that the USSR suffered in its history (after a long history of famines), after it the union of republics experienced tremendous growth and prosperity and famines were erradicated once and for all
b) Famines such as that were common in capitalist countries, like Ireland, and in colonies of capitalist countries, such as India. There, the british killed dozens of millions of people, maybe surpassing the famines in the USSR, and it was a conscicious policy of the british (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_famine_of_1899%E2%80%93...). Yet you never hear about how England is an abhorrent country that should be shamed and erradicated from this world. They killed far more people and it was a completely conscicious decision, but THEY are the ones to judge which famines we remember and which ones we forget.
Gulags: another western buzzword. The famous book that popularized the concept in the West was the "Gulag Archipielago", which has throughly debunked as a fabrication, made up from folk tales, oral testimonies without proof and just made up bullshit. Even wikipedia admits it:
"Natalya Reshetovskaya described her husband's book as "folklore", telling a newspaper in 1974 that "the subject of 'Gulag Archipelago,' as I felt at the moment when he was writing it, is not in fact the life of the country and not even the life of the camps but the folklore of the camps."" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago)
Yes, there were gulgas, but those were centers of detention, not death camps. The average prison length was around 5 years. And yes, prisons with forced labor are horrible, but America has them and they consider themselves to be the most "democratic" country in the world, right? There isn't any aspect of the gulags that is much different from what we have today in most democratic countries, yet they are singled out as an extraordinary fact, while Guantanamo Bay is just America being democratic and promoting freedom and stuff.
Finally, you have to remember that the Soviet Union was under extreme internal and external pressure to destroy communism and bring back the burgeois class to power. There were plenty of reactionary, anti-revolutionary spies, saboteours, nazis, fascists, tzarists and so on that wanted to destroy the revolution. How do you deal with that, if you want to preserve the revolution? Yes, a lot of innocent people were unjustly condemned (again, not too different from our current system), but you have to have prisons to deal with people (a lot of them nazis) who want to destroy communism and bring back capitalist exploitation.
It just makes no sense to argue like that.
If you want to change your mind that many Gulags where death camps have a read:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1gxp6fb
>>Russia's Penal Colony in the Far East: A Translation of Vlas Doroshevich's"Sakhalin"
Doroshevich died in 1922, 7 years before Stalin took power!
Sakhalin was written 20 years before the October Revolution! What the fuck are you talking about?
You know what doesnt make any sense? To quote works of fiction written by novelists 20 years before the Russian Revolution to argue against Stalin.
This is the life expectancy in Russia since 1845: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041395/life-expectancy-...
You can see that Stalin was directly responsible for increasing life expectancy from 37 years (in 1930) to 58 (in 1955). That's 20 more years! And the communist policies almost doubled life expectancy until it started to stagnate in the 60s. Also, part Stalin, part Lenin were responsibly for erradicating illiteracy from the Soviet Union, read about the Likbez.
Those are facts, not some works of fiction written by some dude 20 years before the russian revolution.
Damn you got me.
I believe most of what we know about the alleged Holocaust was also from oral testimonies. And I don't think they were cross-examined at all in Nuremberg? Other highly suspicious sources include a young girl's diary.
You sound very biased to assume that only side did propaganda. You have an extremely provocative theory, that the alleged massacres of Katyn and Holodomor didn't happen, very interesting.
It's also quite damning that skepticism of this event has been brutally criminalized.
> Even wikipedia admits it
It's a known thing that Wikipedia (it's inner cadre of editors) has been taken over by commies. It's unreliable when it comes to anything even mildly "political", unfortunately.
That book has been laughed out of the room of serious conversation for being basically capitalist propaganda and complete bullshit.
A more detailed debunk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RIFgoVNVUQ
Something like the planned ChatControl,¹ but through a non-trustworthy third party most people have installed for convenience.
Nothing can fully protect against that.
Maybe you don't. I expect my country will turn into such a state mere days from now. A communist president will assume power next year and I have no doubt he will regulate the press and the internet to extents I didn't think possible. There's also a judiciary dictatorship installed with supreme court judges openly persecuting right wing political parties. Tools like these will be absolutely vital for anyone exercising political or intellectual freedom.
You’ll wait up to 30s¹ for a 100k html file nowadays. 1 minute for a 2 MiB website.
¹: if you have at least 10 peers. If you try to run with the lowest possible specs (5 peers), you won’t get a good experience, but with 10 peers it works pretty well (and the Japanese with their awesome connection speeds actually get 60 peers).
But I think it crippled adoption, it required far too much RAM for the computers of the time.
Freenet provides an anonymous, encrypted, and distributed cache that does not rely on the security of any one server. Stuff that’s not linked to could just as well not exist, because no one can access it.
Unlike Tor, Freenet can't be directly used like a VPN.
Unlike Tor, Freenet nodes don't route to specific origin servers, but also provide storage to the network. Data is "inserted" to announce its presence, and then cached along the path of any requests. This is supposed to both provide robust access to popular data and provide plausible deniability against any given node operator being responsible for the data (the extent to which it succeeds at either aim in practice is a subject of quite some discussion).
I had to rewind a few times. Is Clarke saying the covid "lab leak" theory was censored and turned out to be true?