freenet - uh, what the heck? - P2P-Zone

alphabeater · 12-07-02, 07:18 PM

just downloaded freenet (direct download url) for that closer look i always promised myself i'd take, one day.

the program you get with it (fproxy) works using your browser, and can be opened by double-clicking the icon that freenet puts in your system tray when you run it. it makes freenet sites ('freesites', as they seem to be called) appear just like regular websites, albeit far more slowly. it reassures me, however, that

Quote:

it can take up to a minute to request some information from Freenet. Your node will learn how to query the network more efficiently as you use it, and so you will notice that performance improves with time.

reassuring, if slightly annoying. from what i've tried so far, 'the freedom engine' (linked from the fproxy start page) is the freesite that appears most reliably, and there are quite a few links to try there. most of them, however, seem to end in dead-ends.

after this initial experience of freenet, i decided to try a p2p/messaging client that piggybacks on it - the best known (or only one?) seeming to be frost (direct download url). i'm left quite mystified by that whole experience - it seems unwilling to actually do anything, except give me a list of files (lots of ebooks and, as if fate was laughing at me in some way, three christmas tunes labelled as being by andy williams) that i somehow managed to obtain but then failed miserably to download any of, and lots of seemingly encrypted messages.

frost seems to have all the bits in place to download files, but i couldn't for the life of me figure out how to share any with the thing.

my head hurts now.. to sum up the experience, i'm frustrated with the low speed and unavailability of freesites in freenet, and downright baffled by the filesharing. i'd be interested to hear anyone else's experiences..

JackSpratts · 12-07-02, 10:15 PM

freenet's a dream, a wonderful idea, an app that will change the world.. perhaps the most loved of all the filesharing schemes, it will enable human communication into and out of the most restricted places on the planet. the absolute worst, most repressive governments won’t be able to touch it. it will end political borders as we know them…yeah yeah yeah.

see the problem with all this tech stuff is that no matter what you come up with, no matter how creative and elegant and just plain brilliant your mechanical solution to a political problem, governments will always throw an infinite amount of stuff right back at you, from an infinite amount of angles (it’s a matter of pride with them), until you fold under the combined weight of it all. in the us and europe they use laws, civil suits and jail. they’ll get your isp after you, they’ll make your cd burner spit out discs, they’ll put a cop in your hard drive. they’ll make it such a pain in the ass to turn your computer on that filesharing will be the last thing you’ll want to play with. in other countries they use all that and more, like ball peen hammers and worse.

but I digress. freenet probably had to do too much and wound up not being able to do much of anything. every app has it’s own reputation. fasttrack “doesn’t return many hits”, winmx “has the longest queues”, blubster is “speedy” etc. well, freenets is “it just isn’t ready – and no one’s on”. hey, like most dreams, it's promise is more gorgeous than its' realization. still it’s sitting there waiting for another brainy coder to contribute that certain something that turns the corner. it is open source after all. so if anyone wants to take a shot, bon chance! btw, there’s a new “freenet” coming out next month. it’s not really freenet but it is something like it. this one is even supposed to work. it’s made by a bunch of supremo hackers (ones who’ve managed to stay out of jail this summer) so you know it’ll be good. you can read about it here http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,53799,00.html there’s also a new encryption application being released at the same time by the same group. this one automatically hides your stuff in innocuous files (like pictures of bunnies etc) and sends it out to the world, ready to battle the forces of evil on behalf of a grateful populace. you can learn about that one here too http://www.cultdeadcow.com/details.php3?listing_id=431 but you know, it’ll just be a matter of days before it gets cracked, before somebody writes some code that automatically scans files for steganography or whatever and ferrets out your stuff. sure, some things will get through but it’ll be undependable and scary and people will be afraid of getting caught so most won’t use it. it’s not a solution, and that’s the problem. because every time we get excited by the promise of technical solutions to political problems we become distracted and lose our way. sure, this stuff is fun and exciting and cool and it’s intoxicating to change the world in our heads and imagine a future free of old world restraints but it ain’t going down in our desktop. governments would turn off our electricity before they let that happen…

unless we happen to be the government! really. we have to have someone there representing our interests or someone else will be representing theirs. if we spent one percent of the time we spend online lobbying our reps instead, and getting our own people elected, we’d be living in paradise already. if p2p means anything, it means people to people - and that means politics. with the government working for you, you won’t need freenet. with a government working against you, freenet’s not worth a damn.

- js.

napho · 13-07-02, 05:01 AM

Right now it seems to be just a handful of odd sites and message boards. There's also a filesharing program called Espra that works with Freenet...OK, "works" is a stretch.

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12-07-02, 10:15 PM	#2
JackSpratts Join Date: May 2001 Location: New England Posts: 10,017	freenet's a dream, a wonderful idea, an app that will change the world.. perhaps the most loved of all the filesharing schemes, it will enable human communication into and out of the most restricted places on the planet. the absolute worst, most repressive governments won’t be able to touch it. it will end political borders as we know them…yeah yeah yeah. see the problem with all this tech stuff is that no matter what you come up with, no matter how creative and elegant and just plain brilliant your mechanical solution to a political problem, governments will always throw an infinite amount of stuff right back at you, from an infinite amount of angles (it’s a matter of pride with them), until you fold under the combined weight of it all. in the us and europe they use laws, civil suits and jail. they’ll get your isp after you, they’ll make your cd burner spit out discs, they’ll put a cop in your hard drive. they’ll make it such a pain in the ass to turn your computer on that filesharing will be the last thing you’ll want to play with. in other countries they use all that and more, like ball peen hammers and worse. but I digress. freenet probably had to do too much and wound up not being able to do much of anything. every app has it’s own reputation. fasttrack “doesn’t return many hits”, winmx “has the longest queues”, blubster is “speedy” etc. well, freenets is “it just isn’t ready – and no one’s on”. hey, like most dreams, it's promise is more gorgeous than its' realization. still it’s sitting there waiting for another brainy coder to contribute that certain something that turns the corner. it is open source after all. so if anyone wants to take a shot, bon chance! btw, there’s a new “freenet” coming out next month. it’s not really freenet but it is something like it. this one is even supposed to work. it’s made by a bunch of supremo hackers (ones who’ve managed to stay out of jail this summer) so you know it’ll be good. you can read about it here http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,53799,00.html there’s also a new encryption application being released at the same time by the same group. this one automatically hides your stuff in innocuous files (like pictures of bunnies etc) and sends it out to the world, ready to battle the forces of evil on behalf of a grateful populace. you can learn about that one here too http://www.cultdeadcow.com/details.php3?listing_id=431 but you know, it’ll just be a matter of days before it gets cracked, before somebody writes some code that automatically scans files for steganography or whatever and ferrets out your stuff. sure, some things will get through but it’ll be undependable and scary and people will be afraid of getting caught so most won’t use it. it’s not a solution, and that’s the problem. because every time we get excited by the promise of technical solutions to political problems we become distracted and lose our way. sure, this stuff is fun and exciting and cool and it’s intoxicating to change the world in our heads and imagine a future free of old world restraints but it ain’t going down in our desktop. governments would turn off our electricity before they let that happen… unless we happen to be the government! really. we have to have someone there representing our interests or someone else will be representing theirs. if we spent one percent of the time we spend online lobbying our reps instead, and getting our own people elected, we’d be living in paradise already. if p2p means anything, it means people to people - and that means politics. with the government working for you, you won’t need freenet. with a government working against you, freenet’s not worth a damn. - js.

13-07-02, 05:01 AM	#3
napho Dawn's private genie Join Date: May 2001 Location: the Canadian wasteland Posts: 4,461	Right now it seems to be just a handful of odd sites and message boards. There's also a filesharing program called Espra that works with Freenet...OK, "works" is a stretch.