Freenet is well designed and well maintained, but it is a solution looking for a problem. We dont yet life in the police state where everyone's political opinions need to be hidden in dark networks. At the moment, freenet has a bad reputation for hosting very illegal content. That 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. Imho, running freenet is like commuting to work on a sportbike. It is perfectly legal (i used to do it) but dont be suprised if the cops pay closer attention to you. Except those "random" license checks by the roadside arent nearly as embarrassing as them inspecting your computers.
> We dont yet life in the police state where everyone's political opinions need to be hidden in dark networks.
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].
That is what Tor is for. If all you need is protection from authorities, Tor is enough. Freenet is content-focused, designed so that not even the original uploader can ever remove popular content. Tor protects people and speech from the police. Freenet protects files from everybody.
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).
Plenty of pertinent information exists as documents, like lists of abortion providers or how/where to get hormone replacement therapy, etc. Freenet can be used for such content and would save a person from having related search queries and sites in their normal web history/traffic that can later be used against them.
Well.. Tor can create trouble for you as well, or at least it did for me. I used to sometimes go through Tor to visit competitors' websites when I used my work computer, just because I didn't want to leave a trail of my company's domain in the competitor's logs. That was quite innocent I thought. Then my sysadmin informed me that the national security monitor (or whatever it was called), which my company was connected to, got an alarm on that. Turns out they had a trigger on Tor connections because they considered it as something used for malicious purposes. It's even triggered if a passive Tor application is running on a mobile device connected to the wifi guest network, b/c it may sometimes probe a node even if not in use. So, uninstall it is. If it's that easy to monitor that someone is using Tor I don't see how it can actually be used by anyone anywhere, where it matters (for something more important than what I used it for).
Yes Tor usage by default is trivial to detect because the list of Tor nodes your client connects to is public. The EFF has a nice interactive graphic that shows what different actors see if you use Tor [0] You can make that harder to detect by using a bridge. https://bridges.torproject.org/
That’s why we need to make it the default that people use Tor whenever they search for anything connected to health or politics — topics that others might want to discriminate against you on.
Women looking for abortions in the US just learned the hard way why this is an essential practice.
Yes. Various countries, including the US, mandate isps install equipment for easy wire tapping. Google "CALEA". There is a whole consultant industry supporting compliance with such laws.
Came here to post about this seconds after you did.
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.
Exit nodes would let them decrypt plaintext network traffic coming out of the exit node, but if they controlled some of the entrance and relay nodes, too, the chances of being able to deanonymize traffic increases.
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.
I said illegal and meant exactly that. Morality and societal norms are debates for twitter and facebook. Tor/freenet/i2p are at another level of seriousness. Freenet has a rep for child abuse imagery.
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.
These days you have to go actively searching to find such on Freenet. And as journalists proved multiple times¹, if you do go searching, you’ll find a lot more of it in the clearnet via forums accessible with Tor than in Freenet.
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.
>"We dont yet life in the police state where everyone's political opinions need to be hidden in dark networks"
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.
> 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 don't live in a police state. My Russian friends definitely do. You can easily get a large fine (on the order of 2 average monthly salaries), or 5-10 years in prison for stating your political opinion on the internet. There are many countries like that and I am not at all surprised that the top comment does not even acknowledge their existence.
Just having a Freenet connection does not get a warrant — though there are researchers who use some fishy statistics which may be reason not to run a very fast node in the US (because running a fast node provably causes false positives in their statistics).
I think you might underestimate how easy it is to get a search warrant, paticularly in the US. This isnt the standard for arrest, let alone conviction. A cop saying "the machine regularly connected to a suspect network" is more than enough for many judges/magistrates... most of which dont know an IP from an IPA.
> We dont yet life in the police state where everyone's political opinions need to be hidden in dark networks.
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.
We’d rather have it and not need it at the moment, versus needing it at the moment and not having it. In other words, persistent development at this early stage is about being proactive.
That’s where we don’t want to end up, because they actually have on-device spying on mobile devices via the IME (which the Freenet First Start wizard warns about to avoid giving a false sense of security).
Something like the planned ChatControl,¹ but through a non-trustworthy third party most people have installed for convenience.
Any source for that made up number? "The black book of communism"? The one book who listed fascists killed by communists as "victims of communism"? That book lists people killed in wars started by the USA as victims of communism, for gods sake!
That book has been laughed out of the room of serious conversation for being basically capitalist propaganda and complete bullshit.
Stalin and Mao had nothing in common with communism they just called it "communism" (or more precise Stalinism/Maoism...the difference here is really important), please read Marx.
BTW: I don't say it's a perfect system but worth a look, and maybe one could mix both systems together.
When all practical realizations of a political ideology end up as being oppressive one party states, perhaps there's something wrong with the ideology.
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.
Stalin and Mao were communists and they handsomely defended communism and transformed their respective countries into global powers. You have bought into capitalist demonization of Stalin and Mao. Stalin in particular was responsible for the enormous growth of the USSR and for providing high standars of living to all citizens in the Soviet Union like they never experienced before. They both also had to defend themselves against imperialist aggresion while trying to support global communist struggle.
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.
Its amazing how propaganda can shape human perception. Stalin literally oversaw transforming the Soviet Union from agrarian society to world superpower, yet it is "unbelievable". This is what capitalist propaganda does to your brain, you literally believe lies are true, and actual reality is false. The USSR was not an industrialized, first world nation, no, it was a cartoon nightmare. I pity you. Your brain is completely consumed by propaganda. Wish you the best in freeing yourself from propaganda.
Those are buzzwords the capitalist world uses. Of course a primary agrarian society can have famines. It's not a surprise that an agrarian, semi-feudal society such as the USSR when the bolsheviks took power could suffer such a disaster. What they never tell you is that:
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.
> fabrication, made up from folk tales, oral testimonies without proof and just made up bullshit
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.
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.
You've never experienced communism. So stop talking out your ass.
I'd take it over this abomination that we have now any time.
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"
Hmmm, not if they have reached age of consent which vary greatly between countries and possibly states and only if they perform said act. One kid/teenager could identify itself as hetero/bi/homo/whateversexual for example without having had sexual intercourses.
Also I haven't seen parents being jailed in the countries I have lived in because their teenager were having sex regardless of the age of consent (excluding cases where said parents were actually involved in the act).
