Millions of people are in places where acknowledging that they want abortions[1] or miscarried[2] can pique the state's interest, along with people who are trans[3] or have trans kids[4].
We have police using web searches to prosecute women for abortion[1], we have states compiling lists of transgender individuals[3] and we have parents being investigated by the state because their kids were open about being trans[4].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/03/abortio...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/12/14/texas-trans...
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/23/texas-tra...
You may not, but many of us actually do. Naturally not every political opinion, and it depends on how you express it, but still.
> At the moment, freenet has a bad reputation for hosting very illegal content.
Why is that a bad reputation? Isn't that part of the point? ... Perhaps you mean unsavory, or immoral, or socially detrimental.
> but dont be suprised if the cops pay closer attention to you
Now that is a significant point in its disfavor, yes.
The next statement below totally contradict the first one above.
>"hat rep is so bad that if authorities ever look into your internet traffic, freenet connections are more than enough to get warrants that will rip your life apart."
If mere internet traffic will "rip your life apart" - that is a police state in my book.
Exactly. Anyone who thinks the US is not a police state has not been paying close enough attention, because the standard for getting a warrant is much lower than this. Moreover, cops will exaggerate the circumstances to get questionable warrants, and being served will absolutely ruin your day if not your life.
For some more details, see https://freenetproject.org/the-discredited-levine-2017-appro... and the links therein.
(Lol, got over v underestimate mixed up.)
Maybe you don't. I expect my country will turn into such a state mere days from now. A communist president will assume power next year and I have no doubt he will regulate the press and the internet to extents I didn't think possible. There's also a judiciary dictatorship installed with supreme court judges openly persecuting right wing political parties. Tools like these will be absolutely vital for anyone exercising political or intellectual freedom.
Something like the planned ChatControl,¹ but through a non-trustworthy third party most people have installed for convenience.
Nothing can fully protect against that.
Try being a communist in America. You will get fired and your life ruined for your political opinions.
These days you get people openly saying that capitalism is evil and major politicians insisting that ubi is the only way forward.
Unlike Tor, Freenet can't be directly used like a VPN.
Unlike Tor, Freenet nodes don't route to specific origin servers, but also provide storage to the network. Data is "inserted" to announce its presence, and then cached along the path of any requests. This is supposed to both provide robust access to popular data and provide plausible deniability against any given node operator being responsible for the data (the extent to which it succeeds at either aim in practice is a subject of quite some discussion).
I had to rewind a few times. Is Clarke saying the covid "lab leak" theory was censored and turned out to be true?
Freenet provides an anonymous, encrypted, and distributed cache that does not rely on the security of any one server. Stuff that’s not linked to could just as well not exist, because no one can access it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ
The interview -- like most of my interviews -- goes into depth about the entire space, and also touches on Locutus, his new project.
PS: I like to interview people on topics related to what we build at Qbix and Intercoin.
Freedom of Speech and Capitalism (with Noam Chomsky) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv5mI6ClPGc
Identity and Civic Engagement (with David Boulet) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRzVj2W9WGM
Free Cities (Patri Friedman, grandson of Milton Friedman) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lgil1M9tAXU
Community Economics (Thomas Greco) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXTn52kL0Yo
Crypto and Securities Laws (Sara Hanks) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocrqgkJn4m0
Therefore the overarching design goal of freenet is to make censorship as hard as technically possible. That’s the reason for - providing anonymity (else you could be threatened with repercussions - as seen in the case of the wikileaks informer from the army in the USA), - building it as free software network (else you could just shut down the central website, as people tried with wikileaks), - providing safe pseudonyms and caching of the content on all participating nodes (else people could censor by spamming or overloading nodes), - including good moderation tools (otherwise people could censor by just "flooding the zone with shit"), and even - the darknet mode and enhancements in usability (else freenet could be stopped by just prosecuting everyone who uses it, or it would reach too few people to be able to counter censorship in the clearnet).
One core difference between MaidSAFE is that Freenet provides communication. Content in Freenet stays accessible while people access it, without tracking accesses: When you upload something, you can imagine that a clock starts ticking. After a while (depending on file size) the content is no longer accessible. But if someone accesses it, their node "heals" that content, which resets that clock.
Also Freenet enables people to connect purely to their friends, so there’s no central point of failure or detection.
I once did a comparison to other projects for a funding proposal (that did not succeed, though) which should still give you an idea about the difference between Freenet and other systems: http://www.draketo.de/proj/freenet-funding/#sec-9
In case anyone doesn't believe me, here's the Freenet thesis which actually mentions both Gnutella and Napster in references. Hard to claim precedence when that's the case.
That paper isn't the original Freenet paper, it came later. This is the original: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Distributed-Decentra...
But I think it crippled adoption, it required far too much RAM for the computers of the time.
But when I've used it the experience was absolutely dreadful. It's difficult to find anything, and there's a lot of emphasis on trusted peers, but I don't know anyone who has even heard of this, and it's unclear how you'd find nodes to trust. Also it's horribly slow and the proxy server eats a ton of resources.
I think it's a beautiful concept with massive potential, but I'm extremely skeptical it will ever find widespread use
You’ll wait up to 30s¹ for a 100k html file nowadays. 1 minute for a 2 MiB website.
¹: if you have at least 10 peers. If you try to run with the lowest possible specs (5 peers), you won’t get a good experience, but with 10 peers it works pretty well (and the Japanese with their awesome connection speeds actually get 60 peers).
