
Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System (2000) [pdf] - rayvy
http://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/clarke00freenet.pdf
======
simcop2387
I've always loved the ideals and design of Freenet for what it does, but the
main issues I always ran into when I'd check it out were that discoverability
was horrible and then once you did manage to dig into things and find content
it was usually stuff I wouldn't want to find to begin with. That's left a lot
of bad impressions on people I think, and caused it to have a reputation for
only illegal things on it.

~~~
JoshTriplett
That's rather inherent: if you create a network whose primary feature is
anonymity and lack of rules, your early adopters will be everyone barred by
the rules of other services, which means you become a cesspool.

Tor did a good job with marketing and optics early on, to make its _intended_
use cases highly visible.

~~~
FooHentai
VOAT turning into a cesspool of everything that was being banned from Reddit
is another example of that, too.

~~~
nyolfen
“The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to
found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen,
your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled
civil libertarians and seven zillion witches.”

~~~
zrm
The solution to that may be to separate the hosting from the discovery.

If the hosting is anonymous and censorship-resistant then you'll get every
type of content, but for anybody to use it they would first have to find it.

Then you have a slew of independent discoverability portals. Some are created
for child pornography, so the FBI hacks into them and then uses them to arrest
everybody there. Others are created to replace Tumblr and YouTube and refuse
to link to child pornography, so child pornographers have no reason to go
there and the people disgusted by child pornography can safely use them.

But setting up a discoverability portal is a lot less expensive than setting
up a hosting service (because a link uses much less bandwidth than high
quality video), so there should be more competition, and in particular it
should still be difficult to censor anything that has more than a modest
amount of popular support.

~~~
ArneBab
This is what Freenet already provides with three different messaging systems
and anonymously run indexes.

~~~
zrm
Are you aware of any YouTube-equivalent? Something that allows you to search
user-generated/submitted content and content feeds and has a builtin player to
display them.

~~~
ArneBab
I am aware that we are just one release away from serving video in a video-
tag. That’s not as convenient as youtube (because it takes time to load), but
much closer than before.

For convenience, we need m3u lists of video-chunks and a simple player
shipped, since browsers cannot play m3u out of the box.

------
ngcc_hk
When I was young I thinkn internet is freedom. These day it is more of a
control device by the state.

In the older days, you can hide from the state. These day you can’t. Your day
to day activities are recorded.

China is just one example. And they are not the only one.

------
Nerada
>A recent court case in the Peel Region of Ontario, Canada R. v. Owen, 2017
ONCJ 729 (CanLII), illustrated that Law Enforcement do in fact have a
presence, after Peel Regional Police, located who had been downloading illegal
material on the Freenet network.

I haven't looked into the architecture of Freenet, but would someone be able
to give a quick rundown of how this is possible? I was always surprised there
weren't more well established, long-form, human rights blogs on Freenet but
maybe there are security concerns I'm not aware of.

~~~
mirimir
Investigators run modified Freenet nodes that serve illegal content. They log
connections with peers, and track chunks of illegal files, based on hashes. So
if your node peers with one or more of their nodes, they can see if it
requests any of those illegal chunks. If it does, you are "downloading illegal
material".

Freenet is a pure P2P system. Your peers know your IP address, and vice versa.
So your only defense is that your node was just relaying those illegal chunks
to some other node. But that requires expert testimony, and a jury that's
capable of understanding that expert testimony.

~~~
rayvy
I enjoyed this nugget of info. But a few questions (if you can answer them)

> They log connections with peers Of course (I'm assuming via just IPs)

> and track chunks of illegal files meaning what exactly? How could they track
> a 5KB chunk being sharded across say 10 different nodes? (further, flexible
> nets like freenet adjust the location of data over time based on the use of
> said data)

> they can see if it requests any of those illegal chunks My understanding is
> that yea you can see who's talking to who (via IPs), but I guess traffic
> analysis is the way to see the chunks (i.e., Peer A sent Peer B 100 bytes at
> 5:65 PM PST)? Even then, the payloads are encrypted, so I'm not seeing how
> you could infer that the content is "illegal"

Again. I enjoyed that little nugget of insight you shared. Hoping you can
share more :)

~~~
mirimir
Missouri Law Enforcement's Freenet Attack Now Public Record[0]

Levine et al. (2017) Statistical Detection of Downloaders in Freenet.[1]

0)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Freenet/comments/66f0n3/missouri_la...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Freenet/comments/66f0n3/missouri_law_enforcements_freenet_attack_now/)

1) [http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1873/IWPE17_paper_12.pdf](http://ceur-
ws.org/Vol-1873/IWPE17_paper_12.pdf)

~~~
Nerada
I'm going to assume Ontario is using the same method that the Missouri police
are using above. Here's a response from Freenet outlining an 83% false-
positive rate.

[https://freenetproject.org/police-departments-tracking-
effor...](https://freenetproject.org/police-departments-tracking-efforts-
based-on-false-statistics.html)

~~~
mirimir
Yes, that's the Freenet Project response that I was thinking of. Thanks for
citing it.

But the problem now is that there's technical backup for both sides. So
defense counsel will likely need a credentialed expert to submit a report, be
deposed, and testify. Although I haven't followed any of these cases, I'm
guessing that many defendants have accepted plea bargains. Because battles of
experts can get expensive fast.

And then you've got the challenge of explaining this stuff to a jury. And
countering the emotional "evil child molester" rhetoric. I wonder if the
Freenet Project would provide such an expert?

~~~
ArneBab
There is one. If you’ve been falsely accused and you need one, contact
press@freenetproject.org

------
cantthinkofone
It makes me wonder about use cases for tools like freenet, tor, etc. Espionage
of some sort comes to mind and the need to deliver a message from sender to
receiver without identifying any participants . Otherwise there is some other
implicit recognition that anonymity can be productive.

Anonymity clearly changes how individuals communicate, but the research I know
of tends to focus more on how people like to behave badly and mischievously
when there is no known reputation or name associated with the consequences of
a action.

Anyone who has spent any time on the internet knows the ability to obscure
identity, however thin or unsophisticated, elicits changes in behavior. I
highly doubt the producers of these tools construct them with the goal of
inviting mayhem in mind. Regardless, the more anonymous a data transfer is,
the less social pressure there is to communicate within certain permitted
boundaries.

Outside of a authority point of view, there's also the potential for
creativity and free association related to anonymity. If one feels you won't
be judged because of saying something, you might open up.

~~~
ArneBab
You might be interested in the method Freenet uses to avoid disruption of
communication: [https://www.draketo.de/english/freenet/friendly-
communicatio...](https://www.draketo.de/english/freenet/friendly-
communication-with-anonymity)

" In the past decade there hasn’t been a year without a politician calling for
real names on the internet. Some even want to force people to use real photos
as profile pictures. All in the name of stopping online hate, though enforcing
real names has long been shown to actually make the problem worse.

This article presents another solution, one that has actually proven that it
keeps communication friendly, even in the most anonymous environment of the
fully decentralized Freenet project.

And that solution does works without enabling censorship."

------
cabalamat
Does anyone still use Freenet? What happened with it?

~~~
mirimir
You can find usage stats on Freenet. But I found a couple reports on clearnet:

Uploaded: 2018-11-28 (UTC)
[https://d6.gnutella2.info/freenet/USK@sUm3oJISSEU4pl2Is9qa1e...](https://d6.gnutella2.info/freenet/USK@sUm3oJISSEU4pl2Is9qa1eRoCLyz6r2LPkEqlXc3~oc,yBEbf-
IJrcB8Pe~gAd53DEEHgbugUkFSHtzzLqnYlbs,AQACAAE/random_babcom/379/#Changesinstatsfrombandwidthchanges)

Generated August 25, 2017.
[https://www.asksteved.com/stats/](https://www.asksteved.com/stats/)

------
brian_herman__
My brother worked on freenet it was cool until tor came up and supplanted it

~~~
shittyadmin
Freenet still does a lot of things better than Tor. For example, no server is
involved so there's nothing to attack or track down, making anonymity
guarantees seem to be much better. Yet they've still managed to pull off some
forms of interactive communications.

IPFS is closer really, but doesn't move in an anonymity friendly direction at
all.

~~~
mirimir
> For example, no server is involved so there's nothing to attack or track
> down, making anonymity guarantees seem to be much better.

Not really "no server". I mean, Freenet users collectively _are_ the servers.
As in BitTorrent, I2P and IPFS.

What Freenet does better than Tor is keep content available, even if the
provider goes away. As long as it's popular content, that is. Although Tor
.onion services are perhaps harder to find, once they're gone, they're usually
just gone. There are exceptions, of course, such as the The Hidden Wiki. But
any mirroring that happens is entirely _ad hoc_. In Freenet, it's automatic.

~~~
shittyadmin
The point is, Tor relies on establishing a connection with a server which will
provide content, Freenet simply distributes data and that data can come from
any client/server on the network, Tor's hidden services are modeled off the
traditional client server model, while Freenet operates more like a P2P
network.

That difference in model is what provides a potential anonymity benefit as
there's no longer a path to the origin of the content

