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).
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.
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.
tldr; If an anonymous system is can't protect sequences of bits you abhor, it can't protecting your sequences of bits either.
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Freenet is a solution to a problem many people refuse to believe exists, and therefore is mostly only used by people that are either at least a bit paranoid, or are actively persecuted. As long as people favor convenience over privacy, or have zero qualms about having their lives monetized by others while seeing little to no benefit from forfeiting their individuality, freenet will almost never be used for anything that is not frowned upon by the mainstream.
Yes, the first thing critics will do is point at child abuse because it's an easy straw man. But for a counter-point, check out some of the Japanese release boards on Frost or FMS. Byte for byte, there's probably more unoffensive anime raws being dumped into freenet daily than all of the CP that has ever existed on the network. The perceptive difference? There are no frequently updating freesites being created for those inserts, so you have to know where to look to find the keys.
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The idea of the Darknet was supposed to keep people from feeling icky about Freenet. You only connect directly to friends, and you're not friends with pedos, right? User base never grew large enough to allow organic growth of the network that way though. Maybe with better tools...
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The main reason people shit on Freenet while holding up Tor as some pure and noble effort is that they can buy and sell things over Tor, while Freenet has no profit incentive.
[+] [-] explorigin|11 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] higherpurpose|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] upofadown|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alex_duf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shittyanalogy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acebarry|11 years ago|reply
If the DHT doesn't suit you, I2P also runs a mail server in their network that can relay out to normal email. Ships with I2P by default.
[1]: http://i2pbote.i2p.us/
[2]: https://geti2p.net/
[+] [-] TheSeekerFN|11 years ago|reply
tldr; If an anonymous system is can't protect sequences of bits you abhor, it can't protecting your sequences of bits either.
--
Freenet is a solution to a problem many people refuse to believe exists, and therefore is mostly only used by people that are either at least a bit paranoid, or are actively persecuted. As long as people favor convenience over privacy, or have zero qualms about having their lives monetized by others while seeing little to no benefit from forfeiting their individuality, freenet will almost never be used for anything that is not frowned upon by the mainstream.
Yes, the first thing critics will do is point at child abuse because it's an easy straw man. But for a counter-point, check out some of the Japanese release boards on Frost or FMS. Byte for byte, there's probably more unoffensive anime raws being dumped into freenet daily than all of the CP that has ever existed on the network. The perceptive difference? There are no frequently updating freesites being created for those inserts, so you have to know where to look to find the keys.
--
The idea of the Darknet was supposed to keep people from feeling icky about Freenet. You only connect directly to friends, and you're not friends with pedos, right? User base never grew large enough to allow organic growth of the network that way though. Maybe with better tools...
--
The main reason people shit on Freenet while holding up Tor as some pure and noble effort is that they can buy and sell things over Tor, while Freenet has no profit incentive.
[+] [-] flexterra|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackuser|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zidel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tombone5|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] galapago|11 years ago|reply