Hacker News Reader

Comment by explorigin | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, the Freenet project scares me. I am a privacy advocate and always looking for darknet solutions.

But the problem with Freenet is the prevalence and availability of child pornography on it combined with the fact that the software can store some of this stuff on your hard-drive to maintain the network (I'm not sure if you have to visit/view the stuff first. I got too spooked when I saw it to stick around.)

I like the concept of Freenet, but it seems that the use of it could easily communicate to a jury "this guy is a pedophile" rather than "this guy believes in privacy" if you got hauled in for anything (legitimate or not).

View on HN

This is why technologies such as these need to become widespread quickly, otherwise you get tools such as these where "50 percent of their users are pedophiles" or whatever.

Even though the technology itself has no fault of its own (the technology is neutral, I'd say even more so than say guns, which are meant to kill people, one way or the other), the government/public will say it's "evil technology" helping bad guys. I mean they even try to do that with HTTPS now.

Imagine if HTTPS only came out now, and it could somehow be implemented in people's computers/browsers by individuals. Who would use it first? Probably the criminals, mostly. It would be too geeky for "regular people" to even want to do such a technical task. And they'd see no need for it. After all "who's going to read their email? Emails are private, right?"

In such a case, law enforcement could quickly ramp up lobbying in Congress to warn about the "dangers of HTTPS encryption", which is used by mostly criminals. And it would probably get banned, before anyone at Google, Microsoft or Apple even gets a chance to look at it, and before it's used as a technology for e-commerce. It would get a "bad reputation" just like torrents and other stuff, before it gets a chance to develop a good one.

This is also why I'm hoping Firefox adopts a "private mode" to replace its incognito mode, that's powered by Tor. When tens of millions of people use Tor for everyday stuff, I doubt it will be "just pedophiles" using it. Pedophiles exist whether there is technology to protect their (watching?) activities or not, and it's something they do because that's how their mind works. So I doubt we'll all turn into pedophiles once we all get Tor.

You make an excellent point. I also want to mention that while it's awful that there are victims of pedophilia, there are hundreds of thousands of times more victims of spanking, which is child abuse just the same, but not a peep about it ever do I hear.

So this pedophilia scare is blown out of proportion just so that abusive parents can think "hey at least I'm not abusing my kids". Like people say "I was spanked and turned out fine!". I'm sure between the mindset change from "f%ck anyone" to "only f%ck 18+" there were lots of people saying "I was abused when I was 14 and I turned out fine!".

In other words, forget the 10 pedophiles in your area and focus on the 90% of families in your area that treat kids worse than animals. Most families are violently abusing children (making the criminals of tomorrow) and we need to deal with this now.

It's easy to be against pedophilia but we must be against all child abuse.

It's pathetic that this is downvoted.

Child sex abuse is certainly underreported, but I would have a hard time believing that incidence is over half, whereas about half of parents spank their children. Corporal punishment is known to be counterproductive and harmful to basically the same extent child sexual abuse is known to be harmful to children. If you want to deny the hard science about the negative effects of corporal punishment, you might as well deny the hard science about the negative effects of child sexual abuse as well.

In 23 out of 50 states it's legal to spank children in schools. Cursory Google results show surveys and polls where 67% of parents approve of corporal punishment and half of parents spank their children regularly.

Calling corporal punishment abuse isn't a misstatement. It isn't hyperbole. If you think you were spanked and "turned out fine," I'm sorry, but the science says otherwise. You don't know how you would have turned out if your parents hadn't hit you, and that's the simple fact of the matter, but the science says you'd be ~10 IQ points smarter and probably a hell of a lot more adjusted.

But witch hunts are always easier and more popular than fixing systemic problems.

10 IQ points is hardly significant. Not as significant as other problems that can be cured - inoculation, diet, safe water etc. A first-world problem to be sure.

"Cursory Google results show surveys and polls where 67% of parents approve of corporal punishment and half of parents spank their children regularly."

Polls of parents as people with children, or people who have had children? Most every person I know with kids today is against such punishment. But their parents, those whose "kids" are now in their forties, have radically different views. And there are far more old people who have had kids than parents whose kids are currently under 18. Imho this issue is the quintessential generational device.

That 67% will drop as the old people die off along with their antiquated notions of violence upon children.

Do you know anyone who votes republican and goes to church every Sunday? Because that's a plurality and sometimes majority of the United States and I'd bet they're substantially different than the people you know.

Correlation is not causation.

We don't know for certain whether the kids who are not beaten are smarter because they were raised in a violence-free environment, or whether they are smarter because their parents are smart enough to resolve their problems without resorting to violence.

So I would not say that refraining from hitting your kids will make them 10 IQ points smarter than they otherwise would have been if you had beaten them. But the fact that you are even considering it at all probably means you are already smarter than most other parents.

That's a bit scary, when you think about it. Spending even a single moment thinking about how you could be a better parent already makes you a better parent than some parents. And that is the reason why child abuse is a problem.

That leads into a philosophical question. How willing would you be to allow a possible pedophile to stop parents from hitting their kids? How willing are you to possibly lend a pedophile encrypted space on your hard drive to maybe stop a government from performing suspicionless dragnet surveillance on hundreds of millions of innocent people?

What if that surveillance included inspecting all the sexting messages that teenagers send to each other over Snapchat? How badly does the government have to act before we finally decide to rank Pedobear lower than Big Brother on our enemies lists?

This shouldn't be down voted. It's a good point even though it's a tangent. There is abundant evidence that physical abuse is as harmful as sexual abuse.

Why is it okay to hit your child, but you go to jail for hitting an adult?

HTTPS most useful to criminals? Maybe .... but I'm not sure how. HTTPS clients are still connecting to a box whose ownership can normally be traced. If someone presents evidence of badness being hosted there, it's not so hard to prove who is behind it.

WRT Tor, the issue that gets the project the bad press is hidden services, not anonymous browsing in general. Tor's regular / most popular mode of use mixes your traffic in with a lot of abuse which gets exit nodes blocked, but it doesn't seem to be in the same league of controversy as hidden services are. So Firefox doing Tor in incognito windows wouldn't help much (I think they looked at it already, actually).

The "illegal bits" thing always seems to come up whenever anyone mentions Freenet. Has anyone ever actually got in trouble for possession of encrypted illegal stuff on their disk that they don't have the key for? It sounds like a legal case where lots of things could go wrong.

Do you want to be the first guy to find out?

Chilling effects

It is a chilling effect, if they've intimidated you into not wanting to find out. Down vote all you want, doesn't change it.

When it comes to child pornography, even the mere accusation makes you automatically guilty in the eyes of the public which can destroy your professional and personal life.

So, what happens if your IP address somehow become associated with trafficking child pornography? You run the risk of getting raided by a decidedly non-technical police force, having every electronic device you own confiscated for an indeterminate amount of time and being charged with a felony by a non-technical district attorney's office.

Even in the case where they eventually realize you didn't have anything to do with it and drop the charges your life has been turned upside down in the process. In the worst case, a district attorney could choose to try and take the case to trial regardless and then your fate is in the hands of a non-technical jury.

I just can't personally accept a risk like that in order to contribute hard drive space and computing power to a darknet project like freenet.

If you are hysteric about things like these then just don't use your own IP. Supposedly it's not difficult to buy a VPS with bitcoin. And really, pumping money into such businesses is a greater contribution to enduring internet anonymity than running Freenet.

What happens when random ppl are accused of having child pornography? I'd be Salem all over again, all it takes is one watery tart to convince an entire society that they need to stone the ppl she doesn't like to death.

Simply because it's a witch hunt is the problem, not the hunt it's self but the ppl who are to afraid to be called pedophiles to stand up against the hunt.

It's not find and good to sit there and watch someone being persecuted unjustly, you've got to keep in mind that it could just as easily happen to you.

I like the "this is normal, everybody does it" defense. If everyone were to run Freenet and store child pornography on their computer, then the which hunt ends at that. I've not seen the new MLK movie, but something along those lines where ppl are willing to die so that others may run Freenet without issue.

One should not fear the life of a Marter, one should fear living in a world where there are not any. -- Michael Mestnik.

Well, that's certainly part of the issue.

But even if Freenet users were immune from prosecution for what's in the data store on their hard drives, does that make the possibility of aiding the distribution of child pornography any less repugnant? What about other material that goes far beyond simply being offensive?

Every ISP is also aiding this distribution. Does that make running an ISP a repugnant activity? I don't think so.

It would not bother me at all. The stuff in the Freenet distributed store is all hard encrypted in a way I have no access to. I literally believe that the content ceases to exist while it is encrypted. To think any other way would allow me to believe that the file was also haunted by evil spirits and the like. As I am a rationalist I would prefer to avoid that sort of thought.

That doesn't make any sense at all. The fact that you can't access it doesn't mean you're not aiding in the distribution of it. If someone puts a ham sandwich in a locked box to which you do not have the key, and you bring the box to someone else who has the key, does that mean you didn't deliver the ham sandwich? I'm not saying I agree with the parent comment, but your reasoning is bizarre.

There are no physical objects involved here. It is entirely data. The only thing that can possibly happen is that you could gain knowledge of the data.

Someone could claim that there was some child porn embedded in the centre of a mountain but it would be just a claim. There would fundamentally be no way to prove that it was any particular thing unless someone admits to putting it there.

The people that invented the cryptography very much intended to create this philosophical situation. We can't pretend otherwise without breaking the cryptography.

That's really not the point. Whether or not you know what you are doing, you are the mechanism by which child porn is distributed. From a Bayesian perspective, you can just decide how "at fault" you are. If you're in a firing squad of 10 people and 1 guy has blanks, there's a 90% chance you're firing real bullets at the guy in front of you, even though you may have no real way of knowing whether you're actually firing blanks or bullets.

Either way, there's the objective fact of what you are doing (which is independent of your knowledge of the fact) and the degree of your complicity in the action. The parent is saying that they are uncomfortable with knowing that there is an x% chance they are aiding in the distribution of child pornography. There's an argument to be made that providing infrastructure is very different from active engagement, but it's bizarre to pretend that because you can't objectively know what each packet contains that you are therefore absolved of all knowledge of the situation.

No. You are not distributing the ham sandwich. You are distributing a locked box. You would only be aiding in the distribution of a ham sandwich if you had some reasonable suspicion the box contained a ham sandwich.

In the western legal canons, mens rea / intent either conditional or unconditional must be present for a criminal act.

I would not say I dedicate storage to freenet knowing that some of the content on my property is child porn in order for free speech to flourish. That could be construed as conditional intent.

I would say I dedicate storage to freenet in order to (insert reason here). I have no idea what is being stored in the box nor could I know.

From the Freenet FAQ[1]:

The true test of someone who claims to believe in Freedom of Speech is whether they tolerate speech which they disagree with, or even find disgusting.

If we are in favor of truly anonymous and free communication, we must not try to censor the content at all. The question is whether we really do support freedom of speech. In many (all?) European countries for example, freedom of speech is restricted. The freedom stops where it does harm to other people. It is a difficult problem to judge on a case by case basis when the freedom to communicate is more important than the feelings of other people.

[1] https://freenetproject.org/faq.html#offensive

Aren't operators of Tor relays also "aiding distribution" by that standard?

They may not be storing anything (yet [1]), but they're still passing along unknown traffic.

In fact they're even LESS aware of what their relays are being used for than a Freenet node operator, who can, if they choose to, both discover some of what is in their data store, and purge specific data from it given a known key (though it would be an endless battle and perhaps expose them to even more legal risk).

[1] It's not hard to imagine a future Tor version implementing a successor to hidden services that involves caching or securely storing data in some manner that completely prevents the relay operator from knowing what is there.

I've never personally tried Freenet, and there's a reason for that. Everyone I've spoken with who has has told me that it's basically a kidporn network -- absolutely riddled with the stuff. If you dedicate storage to Freenet chances are more than half of the data you store will be child pornography. No thanks.

It's a problem you run into with any darknet, but Freenet seems to have it a lot worse than Tor .onions. I have trawled around onionland a few times and saw only a few links that seemed like they might point in that direction, and didn't follow them. Most of Tor seemed pretty free of the stuff, and most of the directories seemed to have a policy against it.

I think this is a special case of a more general problem with libertarianism. There are in general two kinds of libertarians: those who want to maximize freedom for humanistic reasons, and those who want to maximize freedom because they want to be free to bully and exploit people without supervision or interference. Child pornographers fit into the latter, a category they share with people who want financial deregulation so they can fleece investors with pump and dump scams or KKK types who want the Federal government out of our lives so they can establish local tyrannies and oppress minorities.

There's no policy against child porn sites at the directory level or at any Tor level. There was a talk at CCC some days ago that claimed 80%+ of hidden service traffic is to child abuse sites. So I'm not sure it's so different to Freenet, actually.

Hrm. Maybe more hidden then. Honestly this doesn't bode well for darknets. The problem is that even if darknets have a legitimate reason to exist, non-creeps will avoid them if they see much of this kind of thing.

I've also heard stories of very realistic looking rape porn -- maybe a bit too realistic -- in places like this. It's gross.

> Honestly this doesn't bode well for darknets. The problem is that even if darknets have a legitimate reason to exist, non-creeps will avoid them if they see much of this kind of thing.

Non-creeps shouldn't use cash to purchase anything. People will almost always use money to purchase drugs, because it's extremely difficult to trace.

Just because people use something for something illegal, doesn't mean that it shouldn't be used at all. In fact, if more people use darknets for legitimate activities, then there is less illegal activity going on overall (looking at it percentage wise, there would still be arguably the same amount going on).

I don't like the fact that these things occur on darknets. But these places are perfect for them, and I highly doubt these darknets would be created solely for the purpose of illegal activities.

That's a bad analogy. Networks are more akin to social spheres, especially if they are "sub-networks" like Tor.

Imagine you walk into a hotel. There's a guy in the lobby with a visible gun on his hip, and he's not a cop. The elevator opens up and someone's getting a blow job from a hooker. There's a dead roach in the corner. Would you stay there? With your kids?

It's not a question of should or shouldn't. What I'm saying is that normal people will run away screaming from a network that's full of child porn. They won't use it. As a result, it loses its utility for non-creepy but legitimate uses like political expression. The swimming pool is yellowish and stinky.

That claim probably isn't correct, as there are several confounding factors in linking the number of hidden service descriptor requests to the number of individual requests for each hidden service, and in correlating those to actual usage: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/some-thoughts-hidden-servic...

> I have trawled around onionland a few times and saw only a few links that seemed like they might point in that direction, and didn't follow them.

You can use Freenet the same way. Use the indexes that exclude such content or use the uncensored index and ignore the content that has warnings.

If you use Freemail, Sone and FMS it's unlikely you'll randomly encounter CP unless you are looking for it.

I use Freenet as a decentralized twitter-like, an encrypted email and mirroring my blog. For those purposes it works fine. Having more users using the network for normal purposes would be good.

"You never know until you try."

Saying "I didn't follow a link because I was unsure of what was behind it." is the same as never having followed that link. Why bother to say "There is child port on Freenet." and then in the same breath say "I've never seen it." That's the same as keeping your stupid mouth shut, but unfortunately stupidity like yours is simply contagious.

If your statements are correct, then that would mean that Everyone You've spoken with has actually seen kidporn. Does that include your hairdresser? We don't really care about the hear say of someone who can't remember the last time he/she talked to someone about something other than Freenet.

At least tell us how many ppl you've talked to who claim to have actually seen child pornography? I sure haven't and I've seen a lot of porn, even went looking for the stuff and have only come close. There was a few times when I though "ohh, there it is", but then did some research only to discover that the model in question was in her mid 20s. Now that's not to say the content of the images was legal. My understanding is that if it looks like a kid, then it's just as illegal as the "genuine??" article. That is had drawn images of children are illegal, even though no children were harmed.

If there is kidporn on Freenet, then do the correct thing please post a takedown request.

In Germany, a retroshare user was found guilty of distributing copyrighted material when encrypted traffic went through their node.

Lots of things can go wrong in such cases, but in both directions.

I tried it as well, had the exact same reaction. And I'm a privacy advocate as well...

I'm not sure this is a legitimate concern and you're kind of just spreading FUD with posts like this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com