
Freemail - luu
https://freenetproject.org/freemail.html
======
explorigin
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).

~~~
upofadown
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.

~~~
MrZongle2
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_?

~~~
upofadown
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.

~~~
x1798DE
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.

~~~
upofadown
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.

~~~
x1798DE
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.

------
acebarry
A similar project is I2PBote[1]. It uses a similar DHT method for mail, but
over I2P[2]. As with Freemail, this is inside of the Bote network only.

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/](http://i2pbote.i2p.us/)

[2]: [https://geti2p.net/](https://geti2p.net/)

------
TheSeekerFN
Responding broadly to other comments here...

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
Cached version:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:150k8Y...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:150k8YQn1tsJ:https://freenetproject.org/freemail.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=pr)

------
hackuser
Can you send/receive email from non-Freenet Internet addresses, while
maintaining anonymity? That would be a killer feature.

~~~
zidel
Freemail only works inside Freenet, so to do that someone would have to run a
bridge for you much like Tor needs people willing to run exit nodes.

------
galapago
Is there any similar approach for Tor?

