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I remember discussions of Freenet on "news for nerds" forums in the early millennium, and it was obvious that that particular technology was doomed and would n

I remember discussions of Freenet on "news for nerds" forums in the early millennium, and it was obvious that that particular technology was doomed and would never be widely adopted. You see, people were reluctant to run a Freenet instance because that would involve hosting and passing on content from other users as well. While all Freenet content was encrypted, people were horrified by the thought that if the crypto algorithm were ever broken, they would suddenly be revealed to have been hosting child pornography on their computers (unwittingly, but still). Thus, distributed platforms today must allow people to pick and choose what content they wish to host.

anotheracct_ 6y ago
A good reminder that not everybody has reasoned opinions or should be listened to.
xtracto 6y ago
It was also terribly slow.
- realusername 6y ago
  Indeed, I think it's the slowness which killed it more than anything. Also I remember it supported a very limited subset of CSS even for the time and no way to make websites dynamic since there were no JS, that for sure did not help.
AgentME 6y ago
>Thus, distributed platforms today must allow people to pick and choose what content they wish to host. IPFS works more like torrents than FreeNet. If you run an IPFS node, it only hosts content that you pinned on it yourself.
- brokenmachine 6y ago
  IPFS also has none of the anonymity. So it's a tradeoff.
mirimir 6y ago
It hasn't even been necessary to break the encryption. Police can just run Freenet nodes, which serve child porn, and then log IPs of peers that download chunks of those files. While it's true that Freenet does a good job of obscuring data routing, arguably providing plausible deniability, it's in practice nontrivial to convince juries of that.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  The question being, how that is supposed to be any different than any other service operated by anybody else? If a pedophile signs up for AT&T, is AT&T not routing their illegal data? Or Starbucks if they use the WiFi there? If they sign up for AWS or some other hosting provider, isn't the provider hosting their illegal data? The obvious solution is to make actual knowledge a prerequisite to liability. The pedophile who knows what it is goes to jail, the random person who is only providing a generic service to the public does not.
  - mirimir 6y ago
    In reality, police identify Freenet users that have "downloaded" child pornography. And then they arrest those people, impound all their gear, and file charges. So defendants now face the challenge of convincing juries that they were just relaying data to other users. And that's not trivial. Or at least, it's expensive to hire expert witnesses. So many just accept some plea bargain.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      These are the stories fearmongers tell because it happened to one or two people many years ago. The same thing has happened to hosting providers. Sometimes bad police are malicious or incompetent and screw up the lives of innocent people. But that doesn't have anything to do with Freenet, that can even happen to you driving down the street when some dirty cop needs a bust and decides to pull over a random car and plant drugs on it. The answer isn't to never do anything, it's to fix the systems that oppress innocent people for no good reason. And in the meantime you can't live your life in fear of low-probability oppression by defective authority figures.

anotheracct_ 6y ago

A good reminder that not everybody has reasoned opinions or should be listened to.

xtracto 6y ago

It was also terribly slow.

realusername 6y ago
Indeed, I think it's the slowness which killed it more than anything. Also I remember it supported a very limited subset of CSS even for the time and no way to make websites dynamic since there were no JS, that for sure did not help.

AgentME 6y ago

>Thus, distributed platforms today must allow people to pick and choose what content they wish to host. IPFS works more like torrents than FreeNet. If you run an IPFS node, it only hosts content that you pinned on it yourself.

brokenmachine 6y ago
IPFS also has none of the anonymity. So it's a tradeoff.

mirimir 6y ago

It hasn't even been necessary to break the encryption. Police can just run Freenet nodes, which serve child porn, and then log IPs of peers that download chunks of those files. While it's true that Freenet does a good job of obscuring data routing, arguably providing plausible deniability, it's in practice nontrivial to convince juries of that.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
The question being, how that is supposed to be any different than any other service operated by anybody else? If a pedophile signs up for AT&T, is AT&T not routing their illegal data? Or Starbucks if they use the WiFi there? If they sign up for AWS or some other hosting provider, isn't the provider hosting their illegal data? The obvious solution is to make actual knowledge a prerequisite to liability. The pedophile who knows what it is goes to jail, the random person who is only providing a generic service to the public does not.
- mirimir 6y ago
  In reality, police identify Freenet users that have "downloaded" child pornography. And then they arrest those people, impound all their gear, and file charges. So defendants now face the challenge of convincing juries that they were just relaying data to other users. And that's not trivial. Or at least, it's expensive to hire expert witnesses. So many just accept some plea bargain.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    These are the stories fearmongers tell because it happened to one or two people many years ago. The same thing has happened to hosting providers. Sometimes bad police are malicious or incompetent and screw up the lives of innocent people. But that doesn't have anything to do with Freenet, that can even happen to you driving down the street when some dirty cop needs a bust and decides to pull over a random car and plant drugs on it. The answer isn't to never do anything, it's to fix the systems that oppress innocent people for no good reason. And in the meantime you can't live your life in fear of low-probability oppression by defective authority figures.