Why Freenet is Complicated (or not) 153
JohnBE writes "'This article is primarily a friendly rebuttal to Steven Hazel's CodeCon 2002 talk entitled "libfreenet: a case study in horrors incomprehensible to the mind of man, and other secure protocol design mistakes". Hazel presents the Freenet protocol as an overly complicated, self designed crypto layer. In fact, though somewhat complicated, literally every step in the protocol was carefully thought out to resist certain attacks and to increase certain properties desirable for Freenet operators and the network as a whole.' Interesting in light of Peek-a-booty, this article covers many of the issues involved with creating a anonymous P2P system."
A little honesty is refreshing sometimes (Score:3, Interesting)
Some perceived minor irritations may arise due to the implementation of Freenet in Java. Java is not like C, so some porting issues are bound to arise. Porting is hard sometimes.
Re:A little honesty is refreshing sometimes (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft's argument for a long time was that Java's security model was overly complicated. ASP, by contrast, had a simplified security model. Either an ASP executes scripts locally, or it doesn't. Thus ASP does have a simple security model.
Now... which security model will be suitable for your projects? Which security model is potentially better for the client browsers?
I am extremely familiar with freenet and I can tell you that the current security model is very *robust* yet I feel that it is very streamlined. By contrast, napster's security model was simple. So Mr. MP3 Pirate, which security model would you prefer? Do you want to continue to enjoy music or would you rather get nasty letters from the MPAA/RIAA and get your cablemodem shut off.
Re:A little honesty is refreshing sometimes (Score:2)
I am at Rsa2002, Microsoft just presented a security model that is much richer than than Java's.
Basically they combine the fine grained permissions model of VMS (also seen in Java) with a policy engine layer similar to that of Matt Blaze's Policymaker (not surprising given the people involved).
The problem with the java model is that it is too complex for people to use. It increases the permissions complexity without providing user interface sophistication to match.
PS: contrary to the FUD spread by Gosling the other week it is clear that the security model was built into the design of .NET and was not an afterthought.
wish they would have written it in C (Score:2)
Either way, I am just thankfull that they did it. Freenet has huge implications in terms of saving redundant use of bandwidth, and has huge benefits in terms of protecting peoples freedoms in the face of copyright freaks who would turn the world into a police state rather than give up their precious government monopoly on copying that they lobied to extend 100 years longer than it ever should have been, and then shoved the DMCA down our throats, and then wonder why people have had it with copyrights.
Oh the joys of cross-posting (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why Freenet is complicated (Score:1)
Yeah, crypto is easy. Knowing what a "CHK" is without looking it up is easy. Figuring out how to stop Man-in-the-middle attacks is easy. Solving the initial node announcment problem is easy. It's just that gosh darn Java that is getting in the way.
Incedently, there are many people working on a GCJ-compiled Freenet, which would allow you to run a Java node as a native program. Why don't you go help them out instead of whining on Slashdot?
Re:Why Freenet is complicated (Score:1)
- Benad
Re:Why Freenet is complicated (Score:1)
Re:Why Freenet is complicated (Score:1)
Re:Java sucks and I'll prove it. (Score:2)
Most times its not the language that's the problem, its the environment, either os bugs, or some other software incompatibility.
Java seems to be fast enought for realtime mission critial apps, so stop the fud.
-
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. - Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
Re:Java sucks and I'll prove it. (Score:1)
Re:Java sucks and I'll prove it. (Score:4, Interesting)
Java is slower than C, yet less powerful than C++.
Yeah, that's a testable statement. Most of java's use is network-bound programming, where pure speed isn't an issue, but it's excellent networking library is a benefit. No one is coding an OS in java.Add to this the fact that java 1.4 is on part (except for GUIs) with C++, and you have no speed issue.
Java is portible but so is C#, C, C++.
Java is binary portable which is a huge advantage. I can take compiled code from one architecture, and run it on another. Do that in C or C++. Hell, you can't even run a complete C# program in solaris now, so much for the common run time.
Java currently doesnt seem to be a match for C#
Is that why C# is an almost exact syntatic copy of java? Is that why the architectures and security models are almost the same? Which language has more users now? Which actually has deployed code running in production?
Java is ok, but i have yet to see a successful project written in java.
Have you heard of Tomcat? That's a moderately successful java project. Also, many real businesses use java on the web layers. I guess those don't count as 'successful projects', but they should count for something. The fact that there are relatively few java projects has more to do with the open source community being stand-offish regarding java, and not with language faults.Just posted on slashdot a couple of weeks ago: Root Node Live, which is a java project (brought to you by konspire) helps people trade jam-band music.
Re:Java sucks and I'll prove it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, rarely have I seen such a ridiculous statement. J2EE is incredibly widely used for internet businesses of all kinds. In this time of declining job options for programmers, java (well, J2EE, anyway) programmers are still somewhat in demand.
I have worked on many successful java projects. Xtra Online, Marconi Communications, and PDX, are just a few of the companies at which I have worked on successful java projects.
Business software is generally about reliability. Computers are easily fast enough to do any kind of business calculation blindingly fast in virtually any language, and Java is fairly speedy. Java has great reliability (no buffer overflows, no uninitialized pointers, no stack overflows, no doubly-deleted pointers, etc, etc).
If you think java is too slow for business applications, the game we are working on over at http://www.cosmgame.com is all in java. I get 50-100 frames per second in full screen 3d mode, all running under java. I shit you not. We will be showing it at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco March 20-23rd at Sun's booth.
Virtually no business application has anything vaguely close to the kind of performance requirements we have, and we run just fine.
See you at the GDC!
Re:Java sucks and I'll prove it. (Score:1)
1.4? Yeah. But how are you going to deploy your apps? Not everybody is running 1.4 -- can't very well expect everybody to download a 15MB installer. So you will still need to support 1.3 for at least six months to a year.
Memory use. Java eats memory for breakfast. A simple GUI app can easily take upwards of 70MB of memory. Now try to maximize the window to fullscreen. You have entered a world of PAIN. It is too slow.
Threads. You have to do frigging everything in Java with threads. It's fragile! Livelocks and deadlocks lurks after every code block.
Seriously, the Java language and the libraries are fundamentally flawed.
Re:Java sucks and I'll prove it. (Score:1)
Re:Java sucks and I'll prove it. (Score:1)
Re:Java sucks and I'll prove it. (Score:2)
Java is not VB. Older applicaions written in java have no problem running on a newer JVM. Most of the time, they are actually faster. Also unlike VB, you can continue to use nearly all of your older code in a new project. Have you even seen what Microsoft has done with VB.net? It's a new language with some passing similarity to VB.
Threads. You have to do frigging everything in Java with threads. It's fragile! Livelocks and deadlocks lurks after every code block.
Pure fud. You have either never actually used java or are actively trolling.
Re:Java sucks and I'll prove it. (Score:1)
As for threads, well, it's true. You need heaps and gobs of them. If you're a server, you'll need a separate thread for every child, because Java is rather lacking in the "sane I/O" department.
Sure, the new I/O layer in 1.4 will fix that (once they get the bugs out on all platforms) -- but then you are back to point number 1: you can't use the new I/O layer when your customers don't have/want 1.4. So it's no panacea.
Re:Java sucks and I'll prove it. (Score:2)
Why is it that when I run my freenet node, the CPU is throttled?
I'm running a P200, it's enough for Apache, X, my firewall, storing my mail, processing mailing lists, compiling programs, serving files, serving a printer, but none of that throttles the CPU.
The only reason I would have to upgrade this box is to run Freenet. This is consistent with all my experiences with Java.
You're probably right that the Freenet networking code probably isn't sucking the system dry, my guess is that it would be either the encryption, or some data shuffling going on in memory.
There must be some troubleshooting tools out there to narrow down the heaviest lines of code. But I can't speak Java.
Re:Java sucks and I'll prove it. (Score:2)
When I run my freenet node the CPU isn't even close to throttled -- indeed, freenet's more often than not just idling and using no CPU time at all. My guess would be that you're running an old, buggy version of freenet; try a current snapshot. Ya know, it's possible (pretty easy, even!) to throttle the CPU in C code, too.
In short, it's almost certainly the code itself, as opposed to the JVM, that's causing this issue. IIRC, freenet has had such issues from time to time.
Re:Java sucks and I'll prove it. (Score:1)
I could have sworn I read this verbatim before (Score:2, Redundant)
It would have been nice for the person who submitted the article to at least include the link to the article that paragraph came from...
Re:I could have sworn I read this verbatim before (Score:3, Interesting)
It was posted on infoAnarchy before it was published on kuro5hin (1:15am EST vs. 2:25am EST). It might have been posted elsewhere, or sent via email. Someone's sure going out of their way to get publicity.
The way k5 works.. (Score:2, Insightful)
This story was submitted Feb 17 <21:33 (time of comment 1)
I can't say anything of the submission process for infoAnarchy, as to whether it is readily available before it is 'posted'.
Re:I could have sworn I read this verbatim before (Score:2)
Scott should really be ashamed, imagine wanting people to see your rebuttal to public criticism of your work!
No kidding. (Score:3)
Re:No kidding. (Score:1)
Re:I could have sworn I read this verbatim before (Score:2)
Yeah, well, looking at the dates on both the k5 [kuro5hin.org] and infoanarchy [infoanarchy.org] articles, and considering how the
You'll also note that the
See the double quote followed by the single quote? Looks like the submitter was quoting the article. The relevant single quote ends here:
at which point the "this article", hyperlinked to the infoanarchy piece, is supplied. Which looks an awful lot like attribution to me.
Re:I could have sworn I read this verbatim before (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I could have sworn I read this verbatim before (Score:2, Informative)
Until... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Until... (Score:1)
Re:Until... (Score:1, Informative)
I gave it a spin a while back (a week ago), and even pulling down the pages from the proxy home page (which are presumably quite popular, ie the site of good and site of evil, etc) took a good few minutes. I gave the thing a couple of hours to get some connections established, and, well, no improvement. My machine certainly had no lack of cpu power, or diskspace, or bandwidth. Pathetic.
Speaking of disk space, I initially allocated 10gb to my node, and boy, is that a mistake! I now know why the default is 100kb! Because it takes roughly half hour to initialize the storage for 1gb I ended up giving it. Hey, no one said Java was an IO champ...
An Overview of Freenet (Score:5, Informative)
Re:At least quote who you stole it off (Score:1)
Re:Freenet is not perfect! (Score:1)
Re:Freenet is not perfect! (Score:3, Interesting)
I really beleive that good documentation coupled with good code is the reason that some projects prosper and others fail. Maybe they have the balance right, the system is ludicrously easy for Windows users now. [freenetproject.org] On the plus side:
They have a Wiki system on their homepage which allows you to add to the documentation easily (had this been available 6 months ago I would have)
The code is nearing a stable level (Datastore bug gone)
Usefull non-Pr0n applications are been developed such as Frost [sf.net].
Re:Freenet is not perfect! (Score:2)
Just to insert my $0.02 on this statement. While I think that Freenet is spiffy, and the work is great, judging programmers skill by what they produce is not always the best method. Please note I am not talking about the Freenet developers here.
I strongly believe in the million monkeys principle. I have seen code that was written by a team of people that expanded over 150K lines to do some amazing things. But the code was shit. You could tell the programmers did not have a grasp on not only how to write what they wrote, but even on common agreed-upon design and implementation principles.
The result: a rewrite bringing it to 57K lines and utilizing a tremendously lesser amount of memory.
The code when we got it was really phenominal. It did a lot, but had a lot of problems under the hood.
Judge a persons ability by the quality of code, not the features they produce.
How ABSURD!! (Score:1)
How absurd. Programming is about solving a problem (especially by definition of a "program"). How one gets there is his or her own journey.
I have seen code that was written by a team of people that expanded over 150K lines to do some amazing things. But the code was shit. You could tell the programmers did not have a grasp on not only how to write what they wrote, but even on common agreed-upon design and implementation principles
This all sounds well and good, but the reality is that users/clients/consumers would choose a "poorly coded" (but stable) program with amazing features and GUI over a slightly faster, well-coded, and similarly priced application with NO amazing features. Why? Because consumers aren't stupid! Nobody will reward a company just because they put "USES 100KB LESS DISK SPACE THAN OUR LEADING COMPETITOR" on the box. People's $$ will just simply go further if they choose to buy the poorly coded, amazing features one. And if both versions are exactly the same (features, price, GUI, relative execution speed), then people will buy from the company that offers the best technical support, guarantee, and testimonials (and the most dollars to spend on advertising
In the real world, nobody except your company has to know how crappy your code is. If it's stable, who cares how it's written! What you get done at the end of the day is what counts. For example, I know of a very poorly-coded RPG written entirely in Visual Basic and made by a novice teen-age programmer. It was to be a free Ultima Online clone. Well, the graphics sucked, the code sucked, the networking sucked, but it was a fun game! Thousands of people have played, or at least heard of "Era Online", and hundreds of people still keep current about its progress (with the game's new developers) via message boards.
You *need* to have spaghetti code to finish large projects. Most programs do not get completed. An article on gamedev.net states that in only 1 instance of 50 does a started game is ever completed to the point of release. And that's remembering that with most games, it seems 'obvious' to most programmers how to code them. But take a network protocol of such complexity and see how only freenet authors are up to the challenge: if they've had direct competition developing such a protocol since 1999, then there are probably not many competitors still going strong.
And let's not forget that no program is ever perfect. Making a compiler work how you imagine it should work sometimes fails, and one ends up hacking up work-around code... which eventually end up being part of the permanent code.
Successful programmers don't write the most efficient code. Successful programmers accomplish things. There is nothing one can criticize Freenet programmers for with what they have done so far.
Re:How ABSURD!! (Score:2)
My point is - bloated, poorly coded software vs. well coded and slim software.
Same features. There is always more than one way to write something, a successful and good programmer finds the shortest path and does it well.
If you believe you *need* spaghetti code to finish, I think you're a dipshit in all honesty. Because I've finished many software projects that were well-designed and thought out. Yeah, sure there are components that were not as clean as they could be - but those are things that typically act as black boxes and can be re-written later (and typically do).
You wonder why Microsoft software sucks? Because people have the same rational as you.
Re:How ABSURD!! (Score:1)
What I think many miss is that BUGS = INSECURITY! and also MORE CODE = Exponentially MORE BUGS.
To make a more secure and less bug prone system, we need to limit the code size.
From Firewalls and Internet Security (the God book of security IMHO)
- All programs are bugy
- Large programs are even buggier than their size would indicate.
- If you do not run a program, it does not matter whether or not it is buggy.
- Exposed machines should run as few programs as possible; the ones that are run should be as small as possible.
This all applies to security, but in a more general sense, it applies to reliable code.
(I'm a lousy coder in general...) Sure, I can create cool IDEAS, and impliment them, though in a crude but working manner. But, when you want to maintain my code, it's not so pretty. Since 9/10th's of a project is maintain and extend, the real cost of my code comes after I've written it. Thus, someone that has COOL ideas paired with someone that has AWESOME coding skills is a real marriage made in heaven.
Successful coders DO write the most efficient code. Probably not the most efficient POSSIBLE, but really efficient. If you don't start there, by the time the project is extended, and maintained, you've got a massive mess. (Believe me, I know!)
The best programmers make a balance between perfect technical code, and actually finishing a project. If you slap it all together, and "just get the project done..." the result is sucky code, and really sucky extendability and maintainability. If they work too hard on technically wonderful code, you get wonderful code, and no finished project.
The best coders I know _DO_ write elegant code - it's truely beautiful to read - but they also know that eventually, some compromises will need to be made. The actual design can't always mirror the design spec, and so they're willing to deviate. But frankly, the tendency it to "slap it together." If I were to stray to one tendancy or the other, it would be to produce more elegant code. More often than not, when it gets "slapped together" the maintainers and extenders go back and fix it right later anyhow. Why not do it right the first time!
Cheers!
Re:Freenet is not perfect! (Score:2)
Every major operating system (Solaris, Linux, Windows, BSD) has an independant implementation of TCP. None of them share significant code, each was designed with different goals. Every one of these implementations is validated against the standard, which spans multiple RFCs. The entire Internet is held from congestion collapse by cooperation amongst these implementations.
What are you talking about?
Re:Freenet is not perfect! (Score:1)
IIRC there was one guy who wrote most (all?) of the original Win95 stack, dunno if he nicked anything from BSD though.
ALERT /. EDITORS: Stolen comments (Score:2)
While the comment obviously deserves the score, I really don't think that those who posted them deserve the karma for posting other people's work unattributed. Perhaps if one of Slashdot's editors reads this, they can take appropriate action.
I agree (Score:2)
I also think if freenet were written in C, it would have far more developer support.
Documentation is lacking and that doesnt help, what also doesnt help is using java, Freenet barely works on Linux and MacOSX.
C would have been the language of choice simply because more people know C than java, porting would have been faster.
As far as the freenet project going down, someone needs to port freenet to C right now, if its ported to C people will develop for it.
While I konw C, i dont know java. Alot of people would like a freenet DLL for windows from which they could do somethinng like write a vb app front end for the freenet backend. This would make freenet more popular for windows.
I dont know, I disagree about the freenet developers not knowing how to code, they code way better than me, they dont seem to document anything, they dont have a status page, they rarely use the mailing lists and talk too much on frost, communication skills would help.
I think freenet has come far, I think with alittle more support, perhaps some kinda sponser or from donations, or if they make it easier for people to contribute code, freenet will be a success.
Right now freenet is just too underground and esoteric for normal programmers to deal with.
Re:I agree (Score:1)
C would have been the language of choice simply because more people know C than java, porting would have been faster.
Freenet did not initialy start using Java because of being cross-platform. It was used because Java is a nice language for prototyping, and because Java is very nice to use for network-centric programs.
someone needs to port freenet to C right now, if its ported to C people will develop for it.
Are you talking about the node or the clients? The clients have FCP, an easy protocol to implement, so there is no reason why you can't write your client in C. As for the node, do you really expect Freenet to throw away all the work that has been done for the last few years and start over in C? (We actualy had this debate on the Freenet development lists recently).
Further, while lack of documentation certainly doesn't help, Freenet is a inheirently complex beast that isn't for the faint of heart to attempt understanding of. Knowing a lot about crypto will give you a head start, but even so, the typical time to overcome Freenet's learning curve is about six months, if you push it. Porting the node to C isn't going to help people who are having problems getting over basic Freenet concepts, such as CHKs.
If you don't like the lack of documentation, why don't you write it yourself. The developers are quite responsive to anyone needing help with documentation.
java vs c wars. (Score:2)
There is a whiterose C++ implementation of freenet.(development is frozen there however 8) i think this is not picked up before 1.0
But above all freenet now requires:
-documentation. (no coding
-testing procedures. a test set or something like that. (you can code the tests in the language of your choice.....)
-more nodes in the network. (just download it)
-better client software. you can write a client in any language you want.
Re:I agree (Score:3, Insightful)
It's much easier to write network applications in Java than C, and cross-platform compatibility is far better. Performance is another matter, but apparently they would rather make it work first and then make it work faster, which is entirely reasonable.
While I konw C, i dont know java.
There's your problem
Re:I agree (Score:2)
Now that Apple has turned to BSD, there is Unix and Windows left for the desktop. And last time I checked, JAP [tu-dresden.de] (Java Anon Proxy) worked ok on Win98 (except that Win98 occasionally crashes ..), but had huge problems on Linux (incomplete page downloads) - which might tell something about the "portability" of Java.
Re:Freenet is not perfect! (Score:1)
> freenet code will most likely agree with me, that
> many of the freenet developers couldn't code their
> way out of a wet paper bag.
I remember looking at Scott Miller's code on Gamora and feeling like, "Wow, this is the most elegent OOP code I've seen in the wild". Most code really sucks, especially if it's written in an OOP language and gets to be more than a few thousand lines.
Very few people could make the concept work in those days when Design Patterns was still new. Scott was one of those people and it looks like he's still an active developer. So, while I agree with the other statements in your comment I must disagree with the snipe about the coders not being any good.
Re:Freenet is not perfect! (Score:1)
War was beginning (Score:1, Funny)
Kuro5hin artical as well. (Score:4, Informative)
For those of you who care, Ian Clark also commented on the story himself(1 [kuro5hin.org] 2 [kuro5hin.org] 3 [kuro5hin.org] 4 [kuro5hin.org] 5 [kuro5hin.org])
And my sanity is intact (Score:1)
By the way, Kuro5hin is Scoop based, Slashdot is Slashcode based.
Freenet is not complicated (Score:1, Redundant)
When you compare it to stuff like gnutella, mojonation and others, freenet is about average.
Freenet's not hard to write programs for at all, Freenet itself is whats complicated.
Currently I know C, VB, and I'm learning Java.
Freenet is not that complicated. Its just not documented as well as it could be.
Re:Freenet is not complicated (Score:2, Insightful)
In comparison to what? Client development? Ease-of-use? Node implementation?
Freenet is pretty easy for client development and average for ease-of-use. However, node implementation is no easy task (just ask Adam Langly).
Re:Freenet is not complicated (Score:4, Informative)
I wrote a gnutella client in one night, when gnutella first hit the net people had already figured out the protocol and we're writing clients for it within days. There are only about 5 different commands in Gnutella, i have no idea how many freenet is. But i have attempted to understand more then just a high level concept and found the details to be confusing as all hell.
anyway,
-Jon
Re:Freenet is not complicated (Score:1)
Look for the FCP documentation on the Freeenetproject.org website, it is one of the aspects that is fairly well documented (I would link to it but the site appears down).
Re:Freenet is not complicated (Score:1)
Yes, Freenet is complicated, but what you lose in simplicity you gain in security, functionality, and resilience. (When was the last time people in China got news via Gnutella...)
Re:Freenet is not complicated (Score:2)
Freenet only does this for hash query matchs, where Gnutella does it for search strings, so it might be slightly more efficiant. Freenets real problem is the way it keeps data anonymous. For data to get from point D to point A it needs to copy all the data from D->C->B->A which uses all the bandwidth of C->B. It also limits the download speed to the slowest of C and B. On the other hand it distributes the traffic, so while A is getting data slowly from D->C->B, it's also getting it from X->Y->Z and maybe N->O->P. Multiplexing the download would be faster for A, but looking at the whole picture a lot of traffic is passing through nodes.
I think the biggest problem with FreeNET is that people compare it (unfairly) to Napster or Gnutella. I don't think it is trying to be these things, at least the design in it self doesn't speak that way. To me is seems like a robust system for keeping anonymous safe data, at the cost of speed and ease of use and resources.
-Jon
Re:Freenet is not complicated (Score:1)
Not so. Freenet does not pass traffic for every other node, only a small subset of nodes. Unlike Gnutella, there are no broadcasted messages. Freenet not only intelligently routes queries and query hits, it routes intelligently every message on the network.
While Freenet does pass file data in-band, this is a Good Thing (TM). I will agree that Freenet is unfairly compared to Gnutella or Napster; Freenet is an anonymous data publishing and retrieval system, while Gnutella and Napster are simple file sharing clients. Passing data in-band is what makes this anonymous, dynamic caching system possible. Agreed, it may be slower and use more CPU time, but many are willing to trade extra resources for anonymity.
One final point of note is that there is not an excessive amount of traffic on the network; data is passed through very few nodes on its way back to the client, and if the data is more "popular", it will be cached on a series of nodes, reducing the overhead further.
Kill your sig. [OT] (Score:1)
Now, as for that sig... Bullshit, complete and utter.
All those who want to run Windows-based games on Linux and are willing to pay to have them available on a timely basis will sign up with Transgaming. All who don't sign up with Transgaming don't want Windows-based games on Linux, or are unwilling to pay for having said privilige in the near future.
I "want games", but not necessarily commercial games -- Nethack, bzFlag and the results of the annual Interactive Fiction Competition provide all the entertainment I need. When I want to run commercial games, I'm generally happy with releases old enough that the main WINE tree will run them correctly. Your statement implies I don't want games to run on Linux at all -- bullshit, plain and simple. Someone who does want new Windows games to run on Linux soon but doesn't have the cash to subscribe on hand (or has higher priorities -- rent is a frequent one) can also exist; folks can also work towards this goal by contributing their time to mainline WINE rather than sending their dollars to Transgaming. Your attempt to place a sharp and incorrect division between two sets of people stops just short of offensive.
Freenet... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Freenet... (Score:1)
I assume you meant WWW, not Internet =)
(Then again, pr0n is often found in FTP, too... but let's not split hairs further, okay?)
Re:Freenet... (Score:1)
Digital Cable (Score:1, Offtopic)
Anonymous P2P systems (Score:2, Informative)
Anonymity has many more uses: censorship resistant systems often use anonymity. See, for example Free Haven or the following article on a new design
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~aas23/Anon_p2p2.ps
Please tell me why... (Score:2, Insightful)
So now I've paid money to buy bandwidth and disk space to set up a porn server, and I'm not even getting ad revenues.
As for protecting speach, couldn't a government just make the freenet software itself illegal if it wanted to?
I can't see it really catching on - apart from a few paranoid "lone gunmen" types and comic book store guy, who's it going to appeal to?
Just a question.
James
Re:Please tell me why... (Score:2, Interesting)
I started using Freenet for the technical challenge, a kind of Internet within Internet, which is a kind of neat concept, but there are also some interesting quite innovative sites on there. But danger Will Robinson, there is also some evil!
Has there ever been a time that you want to comment about something and protect you identity? Freenet [freenetproject.org] allows this.
With regards of duel posting. (Score:1)
The problem with Freenet... (Score:1, Insightful)
The second problem is the inability to find information. Even if it does exist, very few people know how to find it. Until the key indices are completed and a uniform naming system is accepted, information will just sit there, and be as good as lost.
I apologize for this being somewhat offtopic and please correct me if either of these problems have been solved. I'd really love to see Freenet take off, but it seems that it may be dead on arrival being too difficult to use for end users.
Re:The problem with Freenet... (Score:1)
Re:The problem with Freenet... (Score:1)
But seriously, it could be any number of reasons, please try the FAQ and the Freenet project website. There is also a support mailing list that is quite good.
Re:The problem with Freenet... (Score:1)
I think the new store is pretty stable. It croaked once on me, but it was a pre-459 running under a build 459 node, so I don't reall blame it. I think once 0.5 is out things will start to look pretty good.
Freenet overall... (Score:2)
The main problem is that it will never gain popularity. Freenet has mainly two target audiences: The file-sharing community (WareZ Groups etc.) and the people, who like the Idea of browsing anonymously.
Until now Freenet has no popularity in both areas. The egoistic WareZ Groups don't even think about using Freenet, eventhough they really should contribute more to OpenSource projects, because they are the ones using them really heavily (think of LAME, MPEG2Decoders, etc.), and stick with old/insecure/closed Technologies like FTP, IRC and EDonkey.
Maybe all this would get better if we all start advertising freenet a bit more wherever we hang around (Boards, IRC, Weblogs) and promote it as a fast, secure, anonymous, stable, easy way to share files.
Re:Freenet overall... (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyway I think it is a great project and put all my (big)file releases up as a public KSK, simply beacuse it's a good, clean and simple way to share files.
Sorry, but I'm about to make this a whole lot more complex :) In the Freenet development cicle we have a saying:
DON'T USE A KSK!!!
KSKs are highly insecure, because you have no means of validating that the data is really the data that you orginally inserted. I suggest you migrate your old KSK data over to a subspace.
Until now Freenet has no popularity in both areas.
The MAME community has distributed quite a number of ROM images via Freenet. That has to count for something.
Re:Freenet overall... (Score:1)
GnuPG??? (Score:1)
I still can't beleive that encryption, digital signatures and random key generators can be both fast and secure in Java...
- Benad
Re:GnuPG??? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, you could use GPG to encrypt with a symmetric key and just not sign it, but you'd still need to build an infrastructure around it. Freenet wants "plausible deniability" for the hosting server, making it impossible for anyone to decrypt the data as its stored on the disk. A symmetric key with GPG would be immediately decryptable.
Re:GnuPG??? (Score:1)
But this is confusing me:
making it impossible for anyone to decrypt the data as its stored on the disk
How can you encrypt data with a non-public key system that anyone can decrypt except when it is stored on disk? If it is impossible to decrypt, then it's because you don't have the key. You seem to be highly confused about encryptions, and is, in turn, confusing me...
- Benad
Re:GnuPG??? (Score:2)
Thanks, but I'm not highly confused about encryption. In this situation, the discussion was about replacing Freenet's local file encryption with GPG. Freenet's intention is to distribute information to anyone who requests it via the client, while at the same time denying access to a local user trying to access the data as its stored on disk.
GPG offers two methods of encryption, public key and shared (or symmetric) key. When you use public key encryption, you encrypt data specifically for one person to decrypt. That's useless for this situation since you want to distribute the data to anonymous clients. When you use a symmetric key, you tell the recipient(s) the passphrase via another path. If GPG would be used in place of Freenet's on-disk encryption, then there would obviously be a symmetric key passphrase stored somewhere on the server to be read and used by the server code and used to encrypt and decrypt the data on the local disk.
Perhaps the setup routine for the Freenet server could include making up a random, 1024-bit symmetric key passphrase to be used only by the local Freenet node. You'd better hope that the encryption used to store the generated symmetric key passphrase would be strong enough to survive an attack by federal agents. Not to mention the feds could brute force the symmetric key passphrase... eventually.
My point was, if you replace Freenet's on-disk encryption (which is an unknown quantity to me at least) with a known-good system such as GPG, you need to consider the weakest point of that system. I would consider it to be the storage of the symmetric passphrase used to encrypt and decrypt all of the files in the main Freenet node's server space.
I'm a five year GPG user and I keep my keyring on my USB keychain hard drive. Am I still confused? Are you?
Re:GnuPG??? (Score:2)
Simply put, GPG and Freenet do very different things. I use both; those things GPG is good for (like signing email) Freenet doesn't do; those things Freenet is good for (widely distributing information which some party may wish to suppress, possibly using force of government), GPG doesn't do. Freenet also is useful for folks running a perfectly legal web site (say, an online comic strip) who can't afford hosting costs; with Freenet, the hosting costs are paid for by the users -- ideal! GPG has no relevance to this kind of situation at all.
I still can't beleive that encryption, digital signatures and random key generators can be both fast and secure in Java...
"Fast" is a relative thing. Even if it's 3x slower than a C implementation, if it's fast enough on a modern computer that the user doesn't notice, does the speed difference matter?
Re:GnuPG??? (Score:1)
Freenet needs encryption and digital signatures, GPG already does that. Even if their goals are different, a lot of code can be safely reused.
- Benad
Re:GnuPG??? (Score:1)
gnupg is pure C. It's well-written, highly readable C, with good internal documentation, but it's quite different. Its MPI implementation, for instance, has an interface which is entirely reasonable in C but which no Java coder (or other OO-literate person) would ever want to touch. Hence, a rewrite would really be necessary to make its crypto code be good Java (or, for that matter, good C++... if we were to acknowledge such a thing to exist).
The opportunity for actual code reuse between Freenet and GPG just isn't what you make it out to be.
Freenet Trademark (Score:2)
ttyl
Farrell
Re:Just tried it out (Score:1)
Re:not the freenet but.. (Score:1)