16 ms·

Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System (2000) [pdf]

152 points by rayvy 8y ago

brian_herman__ 8y ago
My brother worked on freenet it was cool until tor came up and supplanted it
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  No, not tor. I guess ipfs would be somewhat similar today, but it has its own problems and I don't see it succeeding either.
  - Jhsto 8y ago
    Care to elaborate problems of IPFS? I just recently set up a node (which I run while I heat my apartment with GPU mining) and am wondering if there's some other project I should give my spare cycles to.
    - pdimitar 8y ago
      Well, for one thing, they don't care about anonymity at all. And already implemented a mechanism to blacklist content hashes on the demand of law-enforcement agencies. Both these things essentially defeat the purpose of many enthusiasts who would use it -- and its only function remains that of a volunteer-driven p2p network for making sure certain data doesn't die. And that's it, nothing else. Even that is somewhat ruined by paid pinning services. For many IPFS is enough for what it does. But in a world where WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden are facts of life, it falls vastly behind on what's needed out there.
    - brokenmachine 8y ago
      I'm not an expert on IPFS, but the things I personally don't like about it is the lack of anonymity (although I think it is possible to run it over Tor), and also it seems to only be useful as a store of static files. I don't think it's possible to do a dynamic site, eg something that needs to read from/modify a database, using IPFS. Not sure what project is better however. Dat looks pretty cool but also doesn't have anonymity.
- shittyadmin 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    > 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 8y ago
      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
  - rayvy 8y ago
    IPFS is indeed more similar. Tor is more of a compliment to a DFS such as Freenet (though Tor can very much works as a DFS itself)
cabalamat 8y ago
Does anyone still use Freenet? What happened with it?
- mirimir 8y ago
  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@sUm3oJISSEU4pl2Is9qa1eRoCLyz6r2LPkEqlXc3~oc,yBEbf-IJrcB8Pe~gAd53DEEHgbugUkFSHtzzLqnYlbs,AQACAAE/random_babcom/379/#Changesinstatsfrombandwidthchanges https://d6.gnutella2.info/freenet/USK@sUm3oJISSEU4pl2Is9qa1e... Generated August 25, 2017. https://www.asksteved.com/stats/ https://www.asksteved.com/stats/
simcop2387 8y ago
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.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  I had a similar experience with various other peer-to-peer networks: I2P (except the I2P torrent scene is pretty good), Zeronet, GNUnet. Tor stands out as the only one to have caught on.
- notacoward 8y ago
  Similar impressions here. Freenet was an impressive vehicle for exploring some very important topics and ideas. Unfortunately, besides the problems you mention, the community around it was ... unpleasant. On a good day they could seem a bit overzealous. On a bad day they were downright crazy, and they were always hostile to any advice or criticism from others even in their own field. For example, Freenet isn't a permanent data store. It's more like a cache; if something isn't requested long enough it just ages out. That's actually fine considering the goals of the system, but any time anyone mentioned it Ian and others would go a bit ballistic. Not sad that Freenet and its promoters have faded into obscurity.
  - renegadus 8y ago
    > That's actually fine considering the goals of the system, but any time anyone mentioned it Ian and others would go a bit ballistic. The system did not and could not store information permanently, if it did it would fill up, which is a non-starter when it depends on people volunteering their hard disk space. I don't know about going ballistic, but since this issue is addressed directly in their papers (section 3.4 of the linked paper) I can see us getting irritated by people re-asking questions that have already been answered.
Nerada 8y ago
>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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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_law_enforcements_freenet_attack_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Freenet/comments/66f0n3/missouri_la... 1) http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1873/IWPE17_paper_12.pdf http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1873/IWPE17_paper_12.pdf
cantthinkofone 8y ago
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.
- polarized 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McIntyre_v._Ohio_Elections_Commission#The_importance_of_anonymous_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McIntyre_v._Ohio_Elections_Com...
- lazyjones 8y ago
  > It makes me wonder about use cases for tools like freenet, tor, etc. Considering the content accessible through such services, their best use by far is as honeypots to catch dangerous criminals.
- ArneBab 8y ago
  You might be interested in the method Freenet uses to avoid disruption of communication: https://www.draketo.de/english/freenet/friendly-communication-with-anonymity https://www.draketo.de/english/freenet/friendly-communicatio... " 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."
OpenBSD-empire 8y ago
Freenet is great, but it has one problem: no inter-node onion routing. Otherwise it's the perfect warez platform and beats out BitTorrent IMO!
ngcc_hk 8y ago
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.

152 points by rayvy 8y ago

brian_herman__ 8y ago

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

zzzcpan 8y ago
No, not tor. I guess ipfs would be somewhat similar today, but it has its own problems and I don't see it succeeding either.
- Jhsto 8y ago
  Care to elaborate problems of IPFS? I just recently set up a node (which I run while I heat my apartment with GPU mining) and am wondering if there's some other project I should give my spare cycles to.
  - pdimitar 8y ago
    Well, for one thing, they don't care about anonymity at all. And already implemented a mechanism to blacklist content hashes on the demand of law-enforcement agencies. Both these things essentially defeat the purpose of many enthusiasts who would use it -- and its only function remains that of a volunteer-driven p2p network for making sure certain data doesn't die. And that's it, nothing else. Even that is somewhat ruined by paid pinning services. For many IPFS is enough for what it does. But in a world where WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden are facts of life, it falls vastly behind on what's needed out there.
  - brokenmachine 8y ago
    I'm not an expert on IPFS, but the things I personally don't like about it is the lack of anonymity (although I think it is possible to run it over Tor), and also it seems to only be useful as a store of static files. I don't think it's possible to do a dynamic site, eg something that needs to read from/modify a database, using IPFS. Not sure what project is better however. Dat looks pretty cool but also doesn't have anonymity.
shittyadmin 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > 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 8y ago
    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
- rayvy 8y ago
  IPFS is indeed more similar. Tor is more of a compliment to a DFS such as Freenet (though Tor can very much works as a DFS itself)

cabalamat 8y ago

Does anyone still use Freenet? What happened with it?

mirimir 8y ago
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@sUm3oJISSEU4pl2Is9qa1eRoCLyz6r2LPkEqlXc3~oc,yBEbf-IJrcB8Pe~gAd53DEEHgbugUkFSHtzzLqnYlbs,AQACAAE/random_babcom/379/#Changesinstatsfrombandwidthchanges https://d6.gnutella2.info/freenet/USK@sUm3oJISSEU4pl2Is9qa1e... Generated August 25, 2017. https://www.asksteved.com/stats/ https://www.asksteved.com/stats/

simcop2387 8y ago

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.

nerdponx 8y ago
I had a similar experience with various other peer-to-peer networks: I2P (except the I2P torrent scene is pretty good), Zeronet, GNUnet. Tor stands out as the only one to have caught on.
notacoward 8y ago
Similar impressions here. Freenet was an impressive vehicle for exploring some very important topics and ideas. Unfortunately, besides the problems you mention, the community around it was ... unpleasant. On a good day they could seem a bit overzealous. On a bad day they were downright crazy, and they were always hostile to any advice or criticism from others even in their own field. For example, Freenet isn't a permanent data store. It's more like a cache; if something isn't requested long enough it just ages out. That's actually fine considering the goals of the system, but any time anyone mentioned it Ian and others would go a bit ballistic. Not sad that Freenet and its promoters have faded into obscurity.
- renegadus 8y ago
  > That's actually fine considering the goals of the system, but any time anyone mentioned it Ian and others would go a bit ballistic. The system did not and could not store information permanently, if it did it would fill up, which is a non-starter when it depends on people volunteering their hard disk space. I don't know about going ballistic, but since this issue is addressed directly in their papers (section 3.4 of the linked paper) I can see us getting irritated by people re-asking questions that have already been answered.

Nerada 8y ago

>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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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_law_enforcements_freenet_attack_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Freenet/comments/66f0n3/missouri_la... 1) http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1873/IWPE17_paper_12.pdf http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1873/IWPE17_paper_12.pdf

cantthinkofone 8y ago

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.

polarized 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McIntyre_v._Ohio_Elections_Commission#The_importance_of_anonymous_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McIntyre_v._Ohio_Elections_Com...
lazyjones 8y ago
> It makes me wonder about use cases for tools like freenet, tor, etc. Considering the content accessible through such services, their best use by far is as honeypots to catch dangerous criminals.
ArneBab 8y ago
You might be interested in the method Freenet uses to avoid disruption of communication: https://www.draketo.de/english/freenet/friendly-communication-with-anonymity https://www.draketo.de/english/freenet/friendly-communicatio... " 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."

OpenBSD-empire 8y ago

Freenet is great, but it has one problem: no inter-node onion routing. Otherwise it's the perfect warez platform and beats out BitTorrent IMO!

ngcc_hk 8y ago

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.