Freemail

https://freenetproject.org/freemail.html

by luu • 12 years ago

74 44 12 years ago

freenetproject.org

flexterra• 12 years ago

Cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:150k8Y...

explorigin• 12 years ago

Honestly, the Freenet project scares me. I am a privacy advocate and always looking for darknet solutions.

But the problem with Freenet is the prevalence and availability of child pornography on it combined with the fact that the software can store some of this stuff on your hard-drive to maintain the network (I'm not sure if you have to visit/view the stuff first. I got too spooked when I saw it to stick around.)

I like the concept of Freenet, but it seems that the use of it could easily communicate to a jury "this guy is a pedophile" rather than "this guy believes in privacy" if you got hauled in for anything (legitimate or not).

upofadown3• 12 years ago

The "illegal bits" thing always seems to come up whenever anyone mentions Freenet. Has anyone ever actually got in trouble for possession of encrypted illegal stuff on their disk that they don't have the key for? It sounds like a legal case where lots of things could go wrong.

jayess• 12 years ago

Do you want to be the first guy to find out?

alyandon• 12 years ago

When it comes to child pornography, even the mere accusation makes you automatically guilty in the eyes of the public which can destroy your professional and personal life.

So, what happens if your IP address somehow become associated with trafficking child pornography? You run the risk of getting raided by a decidedly non-technical police force, having every electronic device you own confiscated for an indeterminate amount of time and being charged with a felony by a non-technical district attorney's office.

Even in the case where they eventually realize you didn't have anything to do with it and drop the charges your life has been turned upside down in the process. In the worst case, a district attorney could choose to try and take the case to trial regardless and then your fate is in the hands of a non-technical jury.

I just can't personally accept a risk like that in order to contribute hard drive space and computing power to a darknet project like freenet.

MrZongle2• 12 years ago

Well, that's certainly part of the issue.

But even if Freenet users were immune from prosecution for what's in the data store on their hard drives, does that make the possibility of aiding the distribution of child pornography any less repugnant? What about other material that goes far beyond simply being offensive?

api4• 12 years ago

I've never personally tried Freenet, and there's a reason for that. Everyone I've spoken with who has has told me that it's basically a kidporn network -- absolutely riddled with the stuff. If you dedicate storage to Freenet chances are more than half of the data you store will be child pornography. No thanks.

It's a problem you run into with any darknet, but Freenet seems to have it a lot worse than Tor .onions. I have trawled around onionland a few times and saw only a few links that seemed like they might point in that direction, and didn't follow them. Most of Tor seemed pretty free of the stuff, and most of the directories seemed to have a policy against it.

I think this is a special case of a more general problem with libertarianism. There are in general two kinds of libertarians: those who want to maximize freedom for humanistic reasons, and those who want to maximize freedom because they want to be free to bully and exploit people without supervision or interference. Child pornographers fit into the latter, a category they share with people who want financial deregulation so they can fleece investors with pump and dump scams or KKK types who want the Federal government out of our lives so they can establish local tyrannies and oppress minorities.

detaro• 12 years ago

In Germany, a retroshare user was found guilty of distributing copyrighted material when encrypted traffic went through their node.

Lots of things can go wrong in such cases, but in both directions.

alex_duf• 12 years ago

I tried it as well, had the exact same reaction. And I'm a privacy advocate as well...

shittyanalogy• 12 years ago

I'm not sure this is a legitimate concern and you're kind of just spreading FUD with posts like this.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

This is why technologies such as these need to become widespread quickly, otherwise you get tools such as these where "50 percent of their users are pedophiles" or whatever.

Even though the technology itself has no fault of its own (the technology is neutral, I'd say even more so than say guns, which are meant to kill people, one way or the other), the government/public will say it's "evil technology" helping bad guys. I mean they even try to do that with HTTPS now.

Imagine if HTTPS only came out now, and it could somehow be implemented in people's computers/browsers by individuals. Who would use it first? Probably the criminals, mostly. It would be too geeky for "regular people" to even want to do such a technical task. And they'd see no need for it. After all "who's going to read their email? Emails are private, right?"

In such a case, law enforcement could quickly ramp up lobbying in Congress to warn about the "dangers of HTTPS encryption", which is used by mostly criminals. And it would probably get banned, before anyone at Google, Microsoft or Apple even gets a chance to look at it, and before it's used as a technology for e-commerce. It would get a "bad reputation" just like torrents and other stuff, before it gets a chance to develop a good one.

This is also why I'm hoping Firefox adopts a "private mode" to replace its incognito mode, that's powered by Tor. When tens of millions of people use Tor for everyday stuff, I doubt it will be "just pedophiles" using it. Pedophiles exist whether there is technology to protect their (watching?) activities or not, and it's something they do because that's how their mind works. So I doubt we'll all turn into pedophiles once we all get Tor.

innguest• 12 years ago

You make an excellent point. I also want to mention that while it's awful that there are victims of pedophilia, there are hundreds of thousands of times more victims of spanking, which is child abuse just the same, but not a peep about it ever do I hear.

So this pedophilia scare is blown out of proportion just so that abusive parents can think "hey at least I'm not abusing my kids". Like people say "I was spanked and turned out fine!". I'm sure between the mindset change from "f%ck anyone" to "only f%ck 18+" there were lots of people saying "I was abused when I was 14 and I turned out fine!".

In other words, forget the 10 pedophiles in your area and focus on the 90% of families in your area that treat kids worse than animals. Most families are violently abusing children (making the criminals of tomorrow) and we need to deal with this now.

It's easy to be against pedophilia but we must be against all child abuse.

mike_hearn2• 12 years ago

HTTPS most useful to criminals? Maybe .... but I'm not sure how. HTTPS clients are still connecting to a box whose ownership can normally be traced. If someone presents evidence of badness being hosted there, it's not so hard to prove who is behind it.

WRT Tor, the issue that gets the project the bad press is hidden services, not anonymous browsing in general. Tor's regular / most popular mode of use mixes your traffic in with a lot of abuse which gets exit nodes blocked, but it doesn't seem to be in the same league of controversy as hidden services are. So Firefox doing Tor in incognito windows wouldn't help much (I think they looked at it already, actually).

hackuser• 12 years ago

Can you send/receive email from non-Freenet Internet addresses, while maintaining anonymity? That would be a killer feature.

zidel• 12 years ago

Freemail only works inside Freenet, so to do that someone would have to run a bridge for you much like Tor needs people willing to run exit nodes.

Tombone5• 12 years ago

If you send mail to addresses outside of freenet I can't see why you would expect better anonymity than with any old throw away account.

acebarry• 12 years ago

A similar project is I2PBote[1]. It uses a similar DHT method for mail, but over I2P[2]. As with Freemail, this is inside of the Bote network only.

If the DHT doesn't suit you, I2P also runs a mail server in their network that can relay out to normal email. Ships with I2P by default.

[1] http://i2pbote.i2p.us/

[2] https://geti2p.net/

galapago• 12 years ago

Is there any similar approach for Tor?

TheSeekerFN• 12 years ago

Responding broadly to other comments here...

tldr; If an anonymous system is can't protect sequences of bits you abhor, it can't protecting your sequences of bits either.

Freenet is a solution to a problem many people refuse to believe exists, and therefore is mostly only used by people that are either at least a bit paranoid, or are actively persecuted. As long as people favor convenience over privacy, or have zero qualms about having their lives monetized by others while seeing little to no benefit from forfeiting their individuality, freenet will almost never be used for anything that is not frowned upon by the mainstream.

Yes, the first thing critics will do is point at child abuse because it's an easy straw man. But for a counter-point, check out some of the Japanese release boards on Frost or FMS. Byte for byte, there's probably more unoffensive anime raws being dumped into freenet daily than all of the CP that has ever existed on the network. The perceptive difference? There are no frequently updating freesites being created for those inserts, so you have to know where to look to find the keys.

The idea of the Darknet was supposed to keep people from feeling icky about Freenet. You only connect directly to friends, and you're not friends with pedos, right? User base never grew large enough to allow organic growth of the network that way though. Maybe with better tools...

The main reason people shit on Freenet while holding up Tor as some pure and noble effort is that they can buy and sell things over Tor, while Freenet has no profit incentive.

Freemail

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