4 ms·

> 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 an

by 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.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      > 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. This would be an immediate DoS/censorship mechanism. Trolls would create a bunch of nodes and then have them all opt out of something they want to DoS so it falls out of the network. > 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. This is already how some of these systems work. The data distributed on the network is encrypted and to download it you get an identifier (e.g. a content hash) to locate it with along with the decryption key. The decryption key is only a few bytes and it can be included in the equivalent of a hyperlink. Without it anyone hosting the data can't read it. Mega does something similar to this by putting the decryption key in the URL fragment so it isn't sent to the server but then client-side javascript has the key to decrypt the content with. This has poor security properties in their specific implementation because the server could be serving malicious javascript to extract the key, but new custom protocols don't have to allow that. Moreover, it might be worth something in terms of keeping attackers or insiders from snooping on their customers' data because someone with access to stored content might not necessarily have access to inject malicious scripts into client pages. > You could add append style annotations so lies and misinformation at least has the opportunity of being challenged This operates at a different layer, e.g. you could have a browser that does this and people could use it if they want to without building it into HTTP. > 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. Then you would need someone to maintain all the lists even though it would be an exercise in futility rather than resulting in effective censorship of the material, since it would only cause it to be hosted in some other jurisdiction which every client could still transparently access as if nothing happened. The problem here is that you either have an effective censorship apparatus or you don't. As soon as you have one, Saudi Arabia wants to enforce its blasphemy laws and China doesn't want anyone talking about Tank Man, which means you don't actually want one. Building half of one is just assisting the villains who want to build the whole thing. > 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. Prosecutors generally know the difference between "this is a crime ring" and "this is a Tor exit node". However, some of them are schmucks. The only real way to fix this is to make sure laws and courts don't allow them to ruin innocent lives, because the details of the technology aren't going to matter when someone who shouldn't be in a position of power has a vendetta that goes unchecked.
- nine_k 2y ago
  Having bought a used computer, phone, etc, always do a factory reset, or something even stronger. Never trust the contents to be safe.
- ElFitz 2y ago
  I may have been unclear. I meant that my first instinct when you mentioned libel and slander was that neither are worth risking compromising, even slightly, the privacy and censorship resilience these tools offer. But your comment also reminded me of what I had encountered on Freenet. And I wasn’t so sure anymore.
  - kristopolous 2y ago
    Sure but there's harmful slander that can ruin people's lives and cause real harm. For instance, manifestos by hate crime mass murderers are littered with conspiracy theories and wild lies. It's faster, quicker, more scalable and less effort for propagandists to lie than for researchers to carefully document and disseminate good faith efforts at reality. It's also easier to understand manufactured bullshit than messy complex reality. It's the fundamental problem. Reality will not sort itself out because fakery is faster and can be made more compelling, so it spreads quicker and is, unfortunately, more believable by more people. I know fixing it is hand waving a magic wand but that doesn't make the current state any more acceptable
    - ArneBab 2y ago
      That’s why moderation must scale better than lies. In the original Freenet (now Hyphanet) it does, because when several people you communicate with block something, it disappears for you, too. When that was added (years ago, because having no centralized power means it was needed much earlier), communication got much more friendly in a pretty short amount of time. You can create a new ID to see it anyway — or explicitly make a spammer visible — but there’s usually no need, because you’ll actually not want to see stuff your friends identified as lies. And you can see who blocks what, so if you should doubt your friends (i.e. because something you like disappeared), you can stop their blocking from affecting you.
- k8svet 2y ago
  Nothing about the described scenario is remotely unique to Freenet. By a long shot.
kragen 2y ago
what did you see this reads like a creepypasta from 'secure contain protect'
- ElFitz 2y ago
  No creepypasta here. Just a barebones html page full of photographs of children being abused. I didn’t think it necessary to spell it out loud, but apparently it was.
  - kragen 2y ago
    what's a lot worse than pictures of children being abused is children actually being abused, for example right now in gaza a photo of this child being abused was published in the new york times https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc and that photo is generally credited with significantly shortening the war that caused that abuse many serial killers and other abusers have been caught, convicted, and sentenced because the recordings they made of their misdeeds were preserved and that is the general pattern. censorship of evidence of abuse perpetuates the abuse and protects the abusers more than the victims see, it's much easier to have a rational discussion when you spell out your position instead of relying on winks and nudges
    - k8svet 2y ago
      Uhhh. Look I think this is sort of an intractable problem. Technology is advancing. Humans are terrible. No technical or political solution is going to stop atrocities. That's of course not to say we shouldn't try to educate, prevent, serve justice, etc. But... Are you implying that random people being unwittingly exposed to CSAM is somehow going to cause a reduction in production of CSAM? Because good lord, I'm not sure I can understand that train of thought.
      - kragen 2y ago
        hopefully the explanation in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40712506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40712506 is helpful to you

by ElFitz 2y ago

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.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > 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. This would be an immediate DoS/censorship mechanism. Trolls would create a bunch of nodes and then have them all opt out of something they want to DoS so it falls out of the network. > 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. This is already how some of these systems work. The data distributed on the network is encrypted and to download it you get an identifier (e.g. a content hash) to locate it with along with the decryption key. The decryption key is only a few bytes and it can be included in the equivalent of a hyperlink. Without it anyone hosting the data can't read it. Mega does something similar to this by putting the decryption key in the URL fragment so it isn't sent to the server but then client-side javascript has the key to decrypt the content with. This has poor security properties in their specific implementation because the server could be serving malicious javascript to extract the key, but new custom protocols don't have to allow that. Moreover, it might be worth something in terms of keeping attackers or insiders from snooping on their customers' data because someone with access to stored content might not necessarily have access to inject malicious scripts into client pages. > You could add append style annotations so lies and misinformation at least has the opportunity of being challenged This operates at a different layer, e.g. you could have a browser that does this and people could use it if they want to without building it into HTTP. > 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. Then you would need someone to maintain all the lists even though it would be an exercise in futility rather than resulting in effective censorship of the material, since it would only cause it to be hosted in some other jurisdiction which every client could still transparently access as if nothing happened. The problem here is that you either have an effective censorship apparatus or you don't. As soon as you have one, Saudi Arabia wants to enforce its blasphemy laws and China doesn't want anyone talking about Tank Man, which means you don't actually want one. Building half of one is just assisting the villains who want to build the whole thing. > 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. Prosecutors generally know the difference between "this is a crime ring" and "this is a Tor exit node". However, some of them are schmucks. The only real way to fix this is to make sure laws and courts don't allow them to ruin innocent lives, because the details of the technology aren't going to matter when someone who shouldn't be in a position of power has a vendetta that goes unchecked.
nine_k 2y ago
Having bought a used computer, phone, etc, always do a factory reset, or something even stronger. Never trust the contents to be safe.
ElFitz 2y ago
I may have been unclear. I meant that my first instinct when you mentioned libel and slander was that neither are worth risking compromising, even slightly, the privacy and censorship resilience these tools offer. But your comment also reminded me of what I had encountered on Freenet. And I wasn’t so sure anymore.
- kristopolous 2y ago
  Sure but there's harmful slander that can ruin people's lives and cause real harm. For instance, manifestos by hate crime mass murderers are littered with conspiracy theories and wild lies. It's faster, quicker, more scalable and less effort for propagandists to lie than for researchers to carefully document and disseminate good faith efforts at reality. It's also easier to understand manufactured bullshit than messy complex reality. It's the fundamental problem. Reality will not sort itself out because fakery is faster and can be made more compelling, so it spreads quicker and is, unfortunately, more believable by more people. I know fixing it is hand waving a magic wand but that doesn't make the current state any more acceptable
  - ArneBab 2y ago
    That’s why moderation must scale better than lies. In the original Freenet (now Hyphanet) it does, because when several people you communicate with block something, it disappears for you, too. When that was added (years ago, because having no centralized power means it was needed much earlier), communication got much more friendly in a pretty short amount of time. You can create a new ID to see it anyway — or explicitly make a spammer visible — but there’s usually no need, because you’ll actually not want to see stuff your friends identified as lies. And you can see who blocks what, so if you should doubt your friends (i.e. because something you like disappeared), you can stop their blocking from affecting you.
k8svet 2y ago
Nothing about the described scenario is remotely unique to Freenet. By a long shot.

kragen 2y ago

what did you see this reads like a creepypasta from 'secure contain protect'

ElFitz 2y ago
No creepypasta here. Just a barebones html page full of photographs of children being abused. I didn’t think it necessary to spell it out loud, but apparently it was.
- kragen 2y ago
  what's a lot worse than pictures of children being abused is children actually being abused, for example right now in gaza a photo of this child being abused was published in the new york times https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc and that photo is generally credited with significantly shortening the war that caused that abuse many serial killers and other abusers have been caught, convicted, and sentenced because the recordings they made of their misdeeds were preserved and that is the general pattern. censorship of evidence of abuse perpetuates the abuse and protects the abusers more than the victims see, it's much easier to have a rational discussion when you spell out your position instead of relying on winks and nudges
  - k8svet 2y ago
    Uhhh. Look I think this is sort of an intractable problem. Technology is advancing. Humans are terrible. No technical or political solution is going to stop atrocities. That's of course not to say we shouldn't try to educate, prevent, serve justice, etc. But... Are you implying that random people being unwittingly exposed to CSAM is somehow going to cause a reduction in production of CSAM? Because good lord, I'm not sure I can understand that train of thought.
    - kragen 2y ago
      hopefully the explanation in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40712506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40712506 is helpful to you