7 ms·

This is interesting, I don't remember seeing more than trace amounts of “nazi/fascist material” there at all. Sure, someone has probably thought that the world

This is interesting, I don't remember seeing more than trace amounts of “nazi/fascist material” there at all. Sure, someone has probably thought that the world needs another copy of Mein Kampf, or has had a real important story of how Jews did 9/11, and maybe these freesites are still (partially) available after a decade or so (I am not at all bothered to check, to be honest), but general amount of such loonies has definitely been at the usual level of any decently sized internet community. As for Freenet forum systems, I can only remember a prolific Frost spammer who was either a persistent troll, or a mentally ill person, neither of which is unfamiliar to experienced internet users. It seems to me that some mental inertia has made you continue the list of “offensive content” with “nazi/fascist material, etc.” after you've mentioned “child porn”. What I don't understand is the word “exposed”. Let's take Mein Kampf, for example. I am sure have hit upon it on the internet multiple times over the years. I am sure anyone can find its text in no time, even if their native country banned it. Still it never occurred to me to start reading it. It would really be a joke, and I have nearly endless list of better things to read. I guess I was “exposed” to Mein Kampf, so what?

fwip 5y ago
I don't think "a copy of Mein Kampf" is the Nazi stuff they're talking about.
- ta988 5y ago
  No I talk about neonazi stuff. Not books that nowadays are more part of history than anything else.
kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
More like pictures of modern child abuse, child slavery (IE: ownership, sale, etc), and brutal torturous murder. Basically anything you've thought of the NSA or other intelligence agencies intercepting, it was wide out in the open there. The types of things you'd see kids telling themselves about urban legends of the "darkweb", well, it was extremely real and in the open on Freenet...
- ogurechny 5y ago
  You forgot UFO parts for sale, bulk jenkem supply in railroad tank cars, and LSD application over screen oscillation, because you certainly was on something when you've seen those urban legends of the “darkweb”. By the way, I really hate meaningless spooky terms like “dark web” and “dark net”. I can still remember the time before journalists invented them.
  - kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
    No I did not mean that. I meant what I said, not whatever you read. Which one of us is on drugs is up for debate. I do not believe the NSA is sitting around studying X-Files. They largely are analyzing and investigating large quantities of child porn and exploitation from southeast asia, rape and abuse in the middle east, cartel executions and kidnappings, war crimes and African slave trade, organ harvesting in China, among other things. Given the other responses, I wasn't the only one who was aware of the content on Freenet 20 years ago. And the quotes around "darkweb" were largely to abstract it as a concept of urban legend itself, so I guess we can agree on that.
    - ogurechny 5y ago
      Let's say someone decided to buy a child slave on a Central Slave Market on Freenet. He would have a problem with that 5 years ago. And also 10 years ago. And also 15 years ago. Why? Because there never was a Central Slave Market, and no one was selling child slaves. Perhaps my memory fails me, and you have some links to fix my error? Please share. Before you say you can't remember the specifics, let me tell you that most freesites are still available (at least the pages in their root archives), and that Frost and FMS has archives of most public discussion that happened there, so it would not be hard to check whether something like this happened or not. Anyone who took this trolling at face value should really reconsider trusting everything they read on the internet.
      - kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
        There was a messaging system before Frost. You can go look that up, I'm not doing this for you because you are calling me a troll, which is a great way to end civilized discourse and end any attempt at reasonable conversation. I never said that a central slave market was on Freenet. I don't even think the protocol would be a very effective way to do it due to how slow and unreliable the protocol is at retrieving things. What I meant was that images of this stuff were available in large galleries, and the previous messaging system before Frost would auto-find new forums for you at random. Frequently they would be large galleries of images of this stuff. So have fun with whatever you are expecting me to pull out of 20 years ago links that are like however many 40+ hex digits long. I haven't used Freenet since I saw that stuff. Not really sure why you'd think I would keep links to it or I would have a photographic memory or even would actively seek out the stuff. I'm not sitting here saying I contributed, I'm saying I would play around with Freenet, even submit some harmless static HTML pages for fun to test the protocol. After the messaging system started popping up forums that I didn't find acceptable, I deleted the client and never touched Freenet again. The burden of proof is not on me nor you. This is a conversation on the internet not a spontaneous scientific journal nor an inquisition.
adamrezich 5y ago
if people get exposed to bad ideas, they can't be trusted to use their own logic and moral faculties to determine right from wrong, which is why free speech is more than unnecessary, it's downright evil. no, instead, we need governments and corporations to regulate speech, for the good of mankind. ...or so the thinking goes
- midev 5y ago
  > they can't be trusted to use their own logic and moral faculties to determine right from wrong History has shown this to be true over and over and over. We even have evidence to this: https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels-faster-true-stories-0308 https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels-f... Fake news travels faster and convinces more people than the truth.
  - adamrezich 5y ago
    you would rather truth be determined by governments or corporations than left up to individuals to decide for themselves?
    - midev 5y ago
      > you would rather truth be determined by governments or corporations than left up to individuals to decide for themselves? Didn't say anything of the sort. And truth isn't determined by any of them. Which agin, proves the point. I had a comment with only three sentences, and you managed to misread it. I'm not for corporate or government censorship, but people that can't read comments correctly are a much bigger problem.
  - lolthishuman 5y ago
    Maybe it’s because the education system has failed at critical thinking.
    - midev 5y ago
      > Maybe it’s because the education system has failed at critical thinking Sure, education can improve things. But this is a problem even worse outside the United States, so it's hard to blame it on a single education system.
cookiengineer 5y ago
This is pretty much the identical argument of 4chan alt-right movements, where the value of free speech is primed so high that they do not think about collateral damage. There's a reason books and movies have an age restriction. The reason is that kids are not able to understand the consequences. It's easy, as an adult, to rationalize that they see it eventually. But if you had a welcome screen with some gore porn on your computer...would you a) use it in a public cafe? And b) use it in front of a kindergarden? Why not? Exactly. The same reason why communities should be able to decide why they do not want to host gore porn on their companies. Free speech works two ways. If I decide I dont like gore porn on my computer, but the peer to peer database/blockchain/whatever decides for redundancy purposes that my computer has to host it, I'm not gonna use that technology again. Users must have the decision what kind of content they want to see. Otherwise it's gonna be the same propaganda machine all over again, where content of hate and emotions will persist longer than content of rationality and logic.
- ArneBab 5y ago
  In Freenet, content that does not get accessed disappears. To access content, you must first learn that it exists. You must see it. And Freenet has a method for communities to express that people (actually pseudonyms) who disrupt the system should not be seen. It is a decentralized blocking system where the choice of moderator is on the individual. It easily runs circles around current clearnet moderation systems, because it had to cope with actual pseudonymity from the start, and it was created to address an actual need to stop disruption without centralization. If you don’t like gore porn, you ask the other pseudonym not to post it. And if he/she/it continues, you record blocking, and those who trust your judgement will no longer see that pseudonym. That’s how in Freenet you decide what content to see. And it works: Within Freenet we had quite a few constructive discussions between political groups that would normally be at their throats. So Freenet itself acts like an abstracted ISP that only provides access while the moderation system does the value-call and moderation — also fully decentralized, but as separated from the core system as a hacker news moderator or web-hoster is from the internet service provider. And if I say „the Freenet moderation system runs circles around clearnet moderation“, I mean it: The fediverse people are now experimenting with implementing the Freenet moderation system for Mastodon and others: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scalable-moderation-using-a-web-of-trust-model/2005 https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scalable-moderation-us...
sandworm101 5y ago
>> Let's take Mein Kampf, for example. Not that I want to defend that book, but it at least has some historic value. It is the sort of thing I would envision a research library keeping on a back shelf. But space lasers and pizza restaurants with dungeons, such things are beneath even Freenet.
pentae 5y ago
I mean, you can buy Mein Kampf on Amazon so it's probably not the best example

fwip 5y ago

I don't think "a copy of Mein Kampf" is the Nazi stuff they're talking about.

ta988 5y ago
No I talk about neonazi stuff. Not books that nowadays are more part of history than anything else.

kafkaIncarnate 5y ago

More like pictures of modern child abuse, child slavery (IE: ownership, sale, etc), and brutal torturous murder. Basically anything you've thought of the NSA or other intelligence agencies intercepting, it was wide out in the open there. The types of things you'd see kids telling themselves about urban legends of the "darkweb", well, it was extremely real and in the open on Freenet...

ogurechny 5y ago
You forgot UFO parts for sale, bulk jenkem supply in railroad tank cars, and LSD application over screen oscillation, because you certainly was on something when you've seen those urban legends of the “darkweb”. By the way, I really hate meaningless spooky terms like “dark web” and “dark net”. I can still remember the time before journalists invented them.
- kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
  No I did not mean that. I meant what I said, not whatever you read. Which one of us is on drugs is up for debate. I do not believe the NSA is sitting around studying X-Files. They largely are analyzing and investigating large quantities of child porn and exploitation from southeast asia, rape and abuse in the middle east, cartel executions and kidnappings, war crimes and African slave trade, organ harvesting in China, among other things. Given the other responses, I wasn't the only one who was aware of the content on Freenet 20 years ago. And the quotes around "darkweb" were largely to abstract it as a concept of urban legend itself, so I guess we can agree on that.
  - ogurechny 5y ago
    Let's say someone decided to buy a child slave on a Central Slave Market on Freenet. He would have a problem with that 5 years ago. And also 10 years ago. And also 15 years ago. Why? Because there never was a Central Slave Market, and no one was selling child slaves. Perhaps my memory fails me, and you have some links to fix my error? Please share. Before you say you can't remember the specifics, let me tell you that most freesites are still available (at least the pages in their root archives), and that Frost and FMS has archives of most public discussion that happened there, so it would not be hard to check whether something like this happened or not. Anyone who took this trolling at face value should really reconsider trusting everything they read on the internet.
    - kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
      There was a messaging system before Frost. You can go look that up, I'm not doing this for you because you are calling me a troll, which is a great way to end civilized discourse and end any attempt at reasonable conversation. I never said that a central slave market was on Freenet. I don't even think the protocol would be a very effective way to do it due to how slow and unreliable the protocol is at retrieving things. What I meant was that images of this stuff were available in large galleries, and the previous messaging system before Frost would auto-find new forums for you at random. Frequently they would be large galleries of images of this stuff. So have fun with whatever you are expecting me to pull out of 20 years ago links that are like however many 40+ hex digits long. I haven't used Freenet since I saw that stuff. Not really sure why you'd think I would keep links to it or I would have a photographic memory or even would actively seek out the stuff. I'm not sitting here saying I contributed, I'm saying I would play around with Freenet, even submit some harmless static HTML pages for fun to test the protocol. After the messaging system started popping up forums that I didn't find acceptable, I deleted the client and never touched Freenet again. The burden of proof is not on me nor you. This is a conversation on the internet not a spontaneous scientific journal nor an inquisition.

adamrezich 5y ago

if people get exposed to bad ideas, they can't be trusted to use their own logic and moral faculties to determine right from wrong, which is why free speech is more than unnecessary, it's downright evil. no, instead, we need governments and corporations to regulate speech, for the good of mankind. ...or so the thinking goes

midev 5y ago
> they can't be trusted to use their own logic and moral faculties to determine right from wrong History has shown this to be true over and over and over. We even have evidence to this: https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels-faster-true-stories-0308 https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels-f... Fake news travels faster and convinces more people than the truth.
- adamrezich 5y ago
  you would rather truth be determined by governments or corporations than left up to individuals to decide for themselves?
  - midev 5y ago
    > you would rather truth be determined by governments or corporations than left up to individuals to decide for themselves? Didn't say anything of the sort. And truth isn't determined by any of them. Which agin, proves the point. I had a comment with only three sentences, and you managed to misread it. I'm not for corporate or government censorship, but people that can't read comments correctly are a much bigger problem.
- lolthishuman 5y ago
  Maybe it’s because the education system has failed at critical thinking.
  - midev 5y ago
    > Maybe it’s because the education system has failed at critical thinking Sure, education can improve things. But this is a problem even worse outside the United States, so it's hard to blame it on a single education system.

cookiengineer 5y ago

This is pretty much the identical argument of 4chan alt-right movements, where the value of free speech is primed so high that they do not think about collateral damage. There's a reason books and movies have an age restriction. The reason is that kids are not able to understand the consequences. It's easy, as an adult, to rationalize that they see it eventually. But if you had a welcome screen with some gore porn on your computer...would you a) use it in a public cafe? And b) use it in front of a kindergarden? Why not? Exactly. The same reason why communities should be able to decide why they do not want to host gore porn on their companies. Free speech works two ways. If I decide I dont like gore porn on my computer, but the peer to peer database/blockchain/whatever decides for redundancy purposes that my computer has to host it, I'm not gonna use that technology again. Users must have the decision what kind of content they want to see. Otherwise it's gonna be the same propaganda machine all over again, where content of hate and emotions will persist longer than content of rationality and logic.

ArneBab 5y ago
In Freenet, content that does not get accessed disappears. To access content, you must first learn that it exists. You must see it. And Freenet has a method for communities to express that people (actually pseudonyms) who disrupt the system should not be seen. It is a decentralized blocking system where the choice of moderator is on the individual. It easily runs circles around current clearnet moderation systems, because it had to cope with actual pseudonymity from the start, and it was created to address an actual need to stop disruption without centralization. If you don’t like gore porn, you ask the other pseudonym not to post it. And if he/she/it continues, you record blocking, and those who trust your judgement will no longer see that pseudonym. That’s how in Freenet you decide what content to see. And it works: Within Freenet we had quite a few constructive discussions between political groups that would normally be at their throats. So Freenet itself acts like an abstracted ISP that only provides access while the moderation system does the value-call and moderation — also fully decentralized, but as separated from the core system as a hacker news moderator or web-hoster is from the internet service provider. And if I say „the Freenet moderation system runs circles around clearnet moderation“, I mean it: The fediverse people are now experimenting with implementing the Freenet moderation system for Mastodon and others: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scalable-moderation-using-a-web-of-trust-model/2005 https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scalable-moderation-us...

sandworm101 5y ago

>> Let's take Mein Kampf, for example. Not that I want to defend that book, but it at least has some historic value. It is the sort of thing I would envision a research library keeping on a back shelf. But space lasers and pizza restaurants with dungeons, such things are beneath even Freenet.

pentae 5y ago

I mean, you can buy Mein Kampf on Amazon so it's probably not the best example