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I presume you've flipped the bozo bit on me and will take my response in bad faith but I'll do so anyway. There's a difference between something that is intent

I presume you've flipped the bozo bit on me and will take my response in bad faith but I'll do so anyway. There's a difference between something that is intentionally anonymized, distributed and designed for perpetuity. These make freenet have an affordance for potential malicious use. here's some recent instances, specifically with freenet: https://news.google.com/search?q=freenet%20arrest https://news.google.com/search?q=freenet%20arrest There's no server to seize, no way to take it offline, it's there forever. Last time I tried it, there was no way for me to blacklist content I did not want to be a node for. If a policeman had seized my laptop, who knows what they could have found in the Freenet databases, I certainly had no idea. Maybe these people in prison are innocent non-technical normal computer users that just downloaded Freenet a long time ago, poked around for 20 minutes and it's been running for years without them knowing. A jury of 12 non-technical people hear "This person's computer downloaded and distributed gigabytes of child porn" from the testifying police officer, and that's all that's needed I'd suspect. You can call this the "4chan" problem. Regardless of the virtues of the people who built it, there weren't enough safeguards to prevent the bad actors from becoming the dominant users and eventually the inmates who ran the asylum. I want the principles held by Freenet to be preserved and not polluted by propagandists, fabulists, scammers, and pornographers.

ElFitz 2y ago
> There's no server to seize, no way to take it offline, it's there, encrypted, for perpetuity. I usually disagree with any argument trying to compromise on anonymity, privacy, and free speech. Fifteen years ago I was fascinated by Freenet and I2P as a teenager. A censorship-free resilient world-spanning network. One populated by actual anarchists, cypherpunks, and their manifestos, where I could perhaps learn how to make rockets from ping pong balls. Until one day I clicked on one random nondescript link too many. After the initial shock I got rid of Freenet, then and there, for good. And I2P. And I have never looked back on my brief cypherpunk phase. You just reminded me that what I saw that day is still out there, probably will be until the day Freenet dies, and nothing can be done about it. Just the thought of it makes me sick. I am aware this is anecdotal personal experience, but it’s the kind that makes it harder to remain strongly committed to absolute anonymity, censorship-resilience, and privacy, over all else.
- kristopolous 2y ago
  I am sympathetic to the cyberpunk anarchist position but how the system is currently set up, from my understanding, is some non-technical person could say, purchase a used laptop from facebook marketplace where the previous owner didn't remove Freenet and then get caught up in a child porn sting and go to prison without not only having no idea what Freenet is, but also having never engaged with, sought after, or viewed the material and merely because that program was running in the background. I'm not trying to be a scold here, I've been running Tor for 20 years, I actually care about this stuff. I just don't think people should be sent to the clinker and outcast as a child pornographer for a background process
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    This concern seems misplaced. You would have the same result with a used laptop that contained unlawful materials for any other reason. You have no control over what the previous owner put on the machine. Which is why you can have a look at 18 U.S.C. § 2252A and see a lot of instances of the word "knowingly". Now, could a malicious prosecutor convince a technically unsophisticated jury that you're guilty even though you didn't know it was there? Maybe, but that's also true in all of the other cases. It's the same thing if you're infected with some trojan and then a criminal enterprise is using your PC to distribute their unlawful materials. All it takes is for a lazy prosecutor to decide they'd rather get the notch in their belt by prosecuting a victim than have no case to trumpet because the actual perpetrators can't be identified or are in a Eurasian country that doesn't extradite. The problem here is not "Freenet exists", the problem is that there aren't enough safeguards against delinquent prosecutors. If anything the situation would be improved by making things like this more common, so that normal people use them themselves for distributing ordinary content and then realize how it works and put the blame on the actual perpetrators instead of the perpetrator's UPS driver.
    - kristopolous 2y ago
      Sure but things could be done to ameliorate the situation. This is just spitballing but you could have opt-in and opt-out lists whereby if a certain threshold opt something out then it becomes opt-out by default thereby requiring some type of agency to be exercised for more controversial material. You could also store things using some distributed encryption whereby multiple parties have to be online for the content to reassemble in the clear and only on the viewers machine. You could add append style annotations so lies and misinformation at least has the opportunity of being challenged You could have a more general region specific illegal content opt in for each node that has to be explicitly reaffirmed by the user, say every 30 days. I'm not saying ban illegal content in the same way that the existence of stabbings doesn't mean you should ban knives, just make sure innocent people don't get flagged for it.
ArneBab 2y ago
Blocking content is done on a higher level: on the level which links are shown. The default bookmarks only include links to safe content and the core communication tools (Sone, FMS) have decentralized moderation with which people sharing horrific content get blocked without creating centralized power structures. If you see something you think should not be there, you block it, and it disappears for all who trust your judgement. And yes, it took a lot of work to get to this point. The advantage here is: as soon as no one accesses that horrific content anymore, it disappears. So this moderation actually removes horrific stuff. Because the original Freenet is not actually for perpetuity: when a media file is not accessed for a month, it is gone.

ElFitz 2y ago

> There's no server to seize, no way to take it offline, it's there, encrypted, for perpetuity. I usually disagree with any argument trying to compromise on anonymity, privacy, and free speech. Fifteen years ago I was fascinated by Freenet and I2P as a teenager. A censorship-free resilient world-spanning network. One populated by actual anarchists, cypherpunks, and their manifestos, where I could perhaps learn how to make rockets from ping pong balls. Until one day I clicked on one random nondescript link too many. After the initial shock I got rid of Freenet, then and there, for good. And I2P. And I have never looked back on my brief cypherpunk phase. You just reminded me that what I saw that day is still out there, probably will be until the day Freenet dies, and nothing can be done about it. Just the thought of it makes me sick. I am aware this is anecdotal personal experience, but it’s the kind that makes it harder to remain strongly committed to absolute anonymity, censorship-resilience, and privacy, over all else.

kristopolous 2y ago
I am sympathetic to the cyberpunk anarchist position but how the system is currently set up, from my understanding, is some non-technical person could say, purchase a used laptop from facebook marketplace where the previous owner didn't remove Freenet and then get caught up in a child porn sting and go to prison without not only having no idea what Freenet is, but also having never engaged with, sought after, or viewed the material and merely because that program was running in the background. I'm not trying to be a scold here, I've been running Tor for 20 years, I actually care about this stuff. I just don't think people should be sent to the clinker and outcast as a child pornographer for a background process
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  This concern seems misplaced. You would have the same result with a used laptop that contained unlawful materials for any other reason. You have no control over what the previous owner put on the machine. Which is why you can have a look at 18 U.S.C. § 2252A and see a lot of instances of the word "knowingly". Now, could a malicious prosecutor convince a technically unsophisticated jury that you're guilty even though you didn't know it was there? Maybe, but that's also true in all of the other cases. It's the same thing if you're infected with some trojan and then a criminal enterprise is using your PC to distribute their unlawful materials. All it takes is for a lazy prosecutor to decide they'd rather get the notch in their belt by prosecuting a victim than have no case to trumpet because the actual perpetrators can't be identified or are in a Eurasian country that doesn't extradite. The problem here is not "Freenet exists", the problem is that there aren't enough safeguards against delinquent prosecutors. If anything the situation would be improved by making things like this more common, so that normal people use them themselves for distributing ordinary content and then realize how it works and put the blame on the actual perpetrators instead of the perpetrator's UPS driver.
  - kristopolous 2y ago
    Sure but things could be done to ameliorate the situation. This is just spitballing but you could have opt-in and opt-out lists whereby if a certain threshold opt something out then it becomes opt-out by default thereby requiring some type of agency to be exercised for more controversial material. You could also store things using some distributed encryption whereby multiple parties have to be online for the content to reassemble in the clear and only on the viewers machine. You could add append style annotations so lies and misinformation at least has the opportunity of being challenged You could have a more general region specific illegal content opt in for each node that has to be explicitly reaffirmed by the user, say every 30 days. I'm not saying ban illegal content in the same way that the existence of stabbings doesn't mean you should ban knives, just make sure innocent people don't get flagged for it.

ArneBab 2y ago

Blocking content is done on a higher level: on the level which links are shown. The default bookmarks only include links to safe content and the core communication tools (Sone, FMS) have decentralized moderation with which people sharing horrific content get blocked without creating centralized power structures. If you see something you think should not be there, you block it, and it disappears for all who trust your judgement. And yes, it took a lot of work to get to this point. The advantage here is: as soon as no one accesses that horrific content anymore, it disappears. So this moderation actually removes horrific stuff. Because the original Freenet is not actually for perpetuity: when a media file is not accessed for a month, it is gone.