Freenet

Intro

When you enter the freenet Web of Trust, you first need to get some trust from people by solving captchas. And even when people trust you somehow, you have no way to prove your identity in an automatic way, so you can’t create identities which freenet can label as trusted without manual intervention from your side.

Proposal

To change this, we can use the Web of Trust used in GnuPG to infer trust relationships between freenet WoT IDs.

Practically that means:

• Write a message: “I am the WoT ID USK@” (replace with the

An answer to a reddit-comment by tedemang to the article 1540 Anonymous vs. TrapWire: "We must, at all costs, shut this system down and render it useless".

this just happened to me in the #freenet IRC channel at freenode.net (somewhat edited):

• toad_¹: what can freenet do well already? [18:38]

• sharing and retrieving files asynchronously, freemail, IRC², publishing sites without need of a central server, sharing code repositories [18:39]

The probes project is a google summer of code project of Steve Dougherty intended to optimize the network structure of freenet. Here I will give the background of his project very briefly:

The Small World Structure

Install and setup infocalypse on GNU/Linux:

setup_infocalypse_on_linux.sh

Just download and run¹ it via

wget http://draketo.de/files/setup_infocalypse_on_linux.sh_1_0.txt
bash setup_infocalypse*

This script needs a running freenet node to work!

In-Freenet-link: CHK@RZjy7Whe3vT3aEdox3pEG4fRbmRGsyuybPPhdvr7MoQ,g8YZO1~FAJM5suS7Uch06ugblVPE4YJd1rl15DxAwkY,AAMC--8/setup_infocalypse_on_linux.sh

In this text I want to explore the behaviour of the degrading yet redundant anonymous file storage in Freenet. It only applies to files which were not subsequently retrieved.

Every time you retrieve a file, it gets healed which effectively resets its timer as far as these calculations here are concerned. Due to this, popular files can and do live for years in freenet.

Often you want to exchange some content only with people who know a given password and make it accessible to everyone in your little group but invisible to the outside world.

Until yesterday I thought that problem slightly complex, because everyone in your group needs a given encryption program, and you need a way to share the file without exposing the fact that you are sharing it.

Then I learned two handy facts about Freenet:

• <ArneBab> evanbd: If I insert a tiny file without telling anyone the key, can they get the content in some way?

“Some years ago, I had a look at freenet and wasn't really convinced, now I'm back - a lot has changed, it grew bigger and insanely fast (in freenet terms), like it a lot, maybe this time I'll keep it. Especially regarding B.S. like SOPA, PIPA and other internet-crippling movements, freenet seems like a good idea after all!”
— sparky in Sone

So, if you know freenet and it did not work out for you in the past, it might be time to give it another try: freenetproject.org

As the i2p people say, anynomity is no boolean. Freenet allows you to take it a good deal further than i2p or tor, though. If you do it right.

• Worst case: If all of Apple would want to find you, because you declared that you would post the videos of the new iDing - and already sent them your videos as teaser before starting to upload them from an Apple computer (and that just after they lost their beloved dictator), you might be in problems if you use Opennet. You are about as safe as with tor or i2p.

• Best case: If a local politician would want to find you, after you uploaded proof that he takes bribes, and you compressed these files along with some garbage data and used Freenet in Darknet-mode with connections only to friends who would rather die than let someone take over their computer, there’s no way in hell, you’d get found due to freenet (the file data could betray you, or they could find you by other means, but Freenet won’t be your weak spot).

As I pledged¹, I just donated to freenet 50€ of the money I got back because I cannot go to FilkCONtinental. Thanks go to Nemesis, a proud member of the “FiB: Filkers in Black” who will take my place at the Freusburg and fill these old walls with songs of stars and dreams - and happy laughter.

It’s a hard battle against censorship, and as I now had some money at hand, I decided to do my part (freenetproject.org/donate.html).