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That's dangerously incorrect. Freenet provides no anonymity. What it provides is "plausible deniability". All Freenet peers know each others IP addresses. Ther

That's dangerously incorrect. Freenet provides no anonymity. What it provides is "plausible deniability". All Freenet peers know each others IP addresses. There's no onion routing. There is the option of running in "darknet" mode. That is, connecting only with known peers. Ideally, people you know and trust. But that provides no access to data from the global Freenet opennet. For that, at least one darknet peer must risk peering freely with the global opennet. Although there's no onion routing, there is a very effective method for routing data through peer networks. With that, it's arguably impossible to distinguish those who share and access data from those who merely relay it. However, the "plausible deniability" argument depends on understanding how Freenet routing works. If you want to check out Freenet, never run a node at home. Use a VPS that you lease and access only via Tor. Ideally, connect to Tor via nested VPN chains. Use cryptocurrency that's been thoroughly anonymized. And setup the Freenet WebGUI as a Tor onion service.

bawolff 6y ago
Well by that definition Tor doesn't provide anonyminity either. A common definition of anonoyminity is that given a set of users, its impossible to determine which element (person) of the set did the action (published a document) [or have a better chance of guessing than guessing at random]. I think freenet mostly provides this property (with a bunch of devil in the details)
- mirimir 6y ago
  I agree that Freenet allows publication that's both anonymous and not readily censurable. What it doesn't allow is anonymous access, except in the sense of plausible deniability that depends on highly technical arguments. Tor actually does provide anonymity through onion routing. It's not effective against global adversaries, and doesn't claim to be. But it's hard to imagine how any low-latency overlay network could resist global adversaries. Chaff, caching and mixing would help, but they aren't that practical or effective unless you accept greater latency.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    But your argument was "All Freenet peers know each others IP addresses". All the nodes in the tor network also know each other's ip addresses. (I suppose clients arent really public, especially if you are using a obfuscating bridge). I don't understand how you are distinguishing between "plausible deniability" and "anonyminity". I feel like either both freenet & tor either have these properties or they both don't, depending on what your definition of those terms are. That's not to say they have the same threat model or provide the same protections. They are very different systems that have different properties - but at a broad-brush high level they both roughly allow you to publish stuff without people being able to easily track the information back to you under various assumptions. > But it's hard to imagine how any low-latency overlay network could resist global adversaries. This is a bit of an aside, but making a scalabe low-latency anonymous network is tricky. If you drop the scalabe requirement you can use dining cryptographers.
    - mirimir 6y ago
      There's a key distinction between Tor and Freenet. With Freenet, all nodes host content, access content, and relay traffic for other nodes. But with Tor, only clients (including onion services) host and access content, and they don't relay traffic. Conversely, relays merely relay traffic, and don't host or access content. Also, only entry guards ever see the IP addresses of clients. And they only see encrypted data going to middle relays. So attacks like police have used against Freenet are impossible. Because clients never connect directly to each other. The closest analog is taking over an onion site, and then serving malware to users. But that's much harder than running nodes, serving child porn, and logging IPs. Also, given that relays retain no content, operators have so far managed to escape liability.

bawolff 6y ago

Well by that definition Tor doesn't provide anonyminity either. A common definition of anonoyminity is that given a set of users, its impossible to determine which element (person) of the set did the action (published a document) [or have a better chance of guessing than guessing at random]. I think freenet mostly provides this property (with a bunch of devil in the details)

mirimir 6y ago
I agree that Freenet allows publication that's both anonymous and not readily censurable. What it doesn't allow is anonymous access, except in the sense of plausible deniability that depends on highly technical arguments. Tor actually does provide anonymity through onion routing. It's not effective against global adversaries, and doesn't claim to be. But it's hard to imagine how any low-latency overlay network could resist global adversaries. Chaff, caching and mixing would help, but they aren't that practical or effective unless you accept greater latency.
- bawolff 6y ago
  But your argument was "All Freenet peers know each others IP addresses". All the nodes in the tor network also know each other's ip addresses. (I suppose clients arent really public, especially if you are using a obfuscating bridge). I don't understand how you are distinguishing between "plausible deniability" and "anonyminity". I feel like either both freenet & tor either have these properties or they both don't, depending on what your definition of those terms are. That's not to say they have the same threat model or provide the same protections. They are very different systems that have different properties - but at a broad-brush high level they both roughly allow you to publish stuff without people being able to easily track the information back to you under various assumptions. > But it's hard to imagine how any low-latency overlay network could resist global adversaries. This is a bit of an aside, but making a scalabe low-latency anonymous network is tricky. If you drop the scalabe requirement you can use dining cryptographers.
  - mirimir 6y ago
    There's a key distinction between Tor and Freenet. With Freenet, all nodes host content, access content, and relay traffic for other nodes. But with Tor, only clients (including onion services) host and access content, and they don't relay traffic. Conversely, relays merely relay traffic, and don't host or access content. Also, only entry guards ever see the IP addresses of clients. And they only see encrypted data going to middle relays. So attacks like police have used against Freenet are impossible. Because clients never connect directly to each other. The closest analog is taking over an onion site, and then serving malware to users. But that's much harder than running nodes, serving child porn, and logging IPs. Also, given that relays retain no content, operators have so far managed to escape liability.