ArneBab

Summary:

1. takes unlicensed peptides, because the insurance declined to pay for what the doctor prescribed.

2. «“people generally don't try to quantify tail risks.” Among the people I talked to, this is true»

That’s a pretty bad outlook.

If you work in the AI industry, it’s time to preserve the engineering innovations you built -- before the risk of a bursting bubble skyrockets.

- Did you build libraries to efficiently analyze specific data formats? - Did you work on lean and fast serialization? - Did you create optimizing orchestration tools for GPU-bound tasks with dependencies? - …

… then please try to get them released as FOSS!

That way you ensure that even if the bubble bursts, the fruits of your labor will survive and their legacy can improve software for decades to come.

(you’re welcome to extend the list in the comments)

On Hyphanet (the original Freenet) there’s been working group chat via a Hyphanet-backed IRC server for over a decade (the server is named FLIP, the first working version was released in 2013, developed purely on Freenet/Hyphanet).

There was no public debate, but he did start to talk to devs 18 months before, and the devs told him quite clearly that they strongly object to repurposing the name.

And that repurposing the name would cause lots of damage.

yes, it chunks files, and aggregates multiple chunks per packet, and pads packets it sends around, so size analysis by the ISP cannot trace the path.

There actually are: among the darknets, Hyphanet is the only one that has a main use for "deviant data resistant to censorship":

Example publication: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/135485651880663...

What are the content patterns on Freenet? Four patterns were identified. Freenet is (1) an archive of deviant data resistant to censorship (2) a space dominated by content associated with masculinity, (3) a nonmarket space where commercial exchange is non-existent, and (4) an empty space with many requests not returning information, and many flogs abandoned. We asked a third question: How does the analysis of Freenet inform current understandings of hacker culture? Freenet, we suggest, can be understood as a type of digital “wilderness”. It is a singular darknet space, supporting a distinct set of hacker practices

Practically: people in Hyphanet blog about stuff they dare not blog about in the clearnet -- anything from radical politics (from all kinds, left, right, libertarian, …) over personal opinion pages to wilder stuff like magick (yes, in that spelling).

Not to forget the Russian Poet who’s posting daily poems with the goal (as he wrote) that those poems still survive after police knocked at his door.

(besides talk about hyphanet and privacy tech)

So yes: I don’t understand the downvotes either, because it’s a legitimate question with a pretty clear answer: yes.

Last I checked the Koch Brothers weren’t Israeli. Do read up on them. Oversimplified narratives are bullshit.

From the preface:

Why this book?

Providing a concise start, a no-frills, opinionated intro to programming from first define to deploying an application on just 64 pages.

What is Scheme?

Scheme is a programming language — a Lisp — that follows the principle “design not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary”.

Freenet / Hyphanet 0.7.5 build 1503 is now available.

This is a shared release announcement for 1502 and 1503. 1502 fixed an inserter tracing vulnerability and added several features while 1503 is a hotfix release that fixes regressions in 1502. The main changes are:

- fix vulnerability

- reduce visibility on the network

- support animated webp and more modern HTML and CSS

- enable direct linking to Freemail’s “New Message” page

- dismiss alerts and convenience

- substantial routing optimizations

- bug fixes

Hyphanet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant and privacy-respecting publishing and communication.

It’s beautiful how in the end he writes how this actually helps him.

My experience is that whenever I skip organizing my tasks with org-mode, I lose focus and time.

An example: While duplicating the gist of JIRA issues in my local org-file may seem wasteful, whenever I tried to leave it out, my completion time for tickets ballooned. I tried multiple times.

There’s just no other tool that worked for me, even though I’ve tried to use many over the years.

According to the Benchmarks Game, SBCL is roughly as fast as Node.

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

You don’t let your kids jailbreak their Switch. Because it’s a damn online system, so any leaked info and Nintendo can brick the Switch. And their game states are far too valuable for the kids for that.

Correction: that is used to prevent spam.

I nowadays mostly use a simple static website plus minimal Javascript, but I still have PHP sites.

It still works. And PHP today is at least factor 3 faster than PHP was back then — on the same hardware.

So maybe just use PHP and ftps or sftp?

Don’t you have a virtual server? I’m pretty sure that my managed webserver runs on some virtual machine somewhere on a bigger server, and when it is not doing stuff, other tasks are running there and using the CPU and bandwidth.

There is likely some fixed memory and disk space cost, but those are negligible with todays capacities.

Yes, these problems shouldn’t exist. But they do.

One of the big strength of the Web is the commitment of Mozilla „do not break the web“.

But this is hitting its limits, because the scope of Javascript is being expanded more and more (including stuff like filesystem APIs for almost arbitrary file access — as if we had not learned from Java WebStart that that’s a rabbit hole that never stops gifting vulnerabilities), so to keep new features safe despite their much higher security needs, old features are neutered.

I lost a decentralized comment system to similar changes.

I know why I no longer have a mildly dynamic website: the security risk of PHP is not linear.

That’s where Javascript shines: if you avoid comments (those are actually a hard problem: a social one) and server-side data (security risk), it actually has this linear increase in effort without the jump in security risk.

And this risk has increased a lot since the early mildly dynamic websites.

That’s why moderation must scale better than lies.

In the original Freenet (now Hyphanet) it does, because when several people you communicate with block something, it disappears for you, too. When that was added (years ago, because having no centralized power means it was needed much earlier), communication got much more friendly in a pretty short amount of time.

You can create a new ID to see it anyway — or explicitly make a spammer visible — but there’s usually no need, because you’ll actually not want to see stuff your friends identified as lies. And you can see who blocks what, so if you should doubt your friends (i.e. because something you like disappeared), you can stop their blocking from affecting you.

Did you see that there is nowadays information about abortion on the original Freenet (now Hyphanet)?

I for sure did not expect that this would be needed for people in the USA. But that’s what happened.

And centralized moderation tools gravitate towards favoring these lies.

Even worse: lies about climate change are nowadays being spread via paid Youtube advertisements. This kind of centralized power should never have existed in the first place.

This actually happens in the original Freenet (now Hyphanet): the communication tools use propagating trust and blocking. So if someone you communicate with regularly sees something objectionable and blocks it, it disappears for you, too.

But you can always create a new identity that does not trust the other person — or set your own local trust — to see the content anyway.

The important point is that this way resistence against disruption of communication scales better that the disruption (spam, libel, harassment, ...).

Most communication tools in the original Freenet nowadays have persistent identifiers, because the experience within Freenet showed that not having any moderation causes constructive communication to break down.

The experience there proves that the methods used there for decentralized moderation succeeded at keeping communication friendly without centralized power or forced identification.

For more background see https://www.draketo.de/software/decentralized-moderation

Blocking content is done on a higher level: on the level which links are shown.

The default bookmarks only include links to safe content and the core communication tools (Sone, FMS) have decentralized moderation with which people sharing horrific content get blocked without creating centralized power structures. If you see something you think should not be there, you block it, and it disappears for all who trust your judgement.

And yes, it took a lot of work to get to this point.

The advantage here is: as soon as no one accesses that horrific content anymore, it disappears. So this moderation actually removes horrific stuff. Because the original Freenet is not actually for perpetuity: when a media file is not accessed for a month, it is gone.

It’s not the same team. The Freenet Team is developing Hyphanet now.

Ian had not been active in Freenet development for over a decade (he managed the non-profit but didn’t interact with actual development) before he started Locutus. He initially started Freenet in 1999, but had long been absent.

The renaming was done against the explicit objection of the core development team. For further background, see the links in https://www.hyphanet.org/freenet-renamed-to-hyphanet.html

Hyphanet is the original Freenet and the next release is just blocked by finalizing the new signing setup for the Windows installer. See https://github.com/hyphanet/fred/releases/tag/build01498

Yes, Hyphanet is considerably safer and does not compete with a multi-billion Euro corporation about brand rights.

And from the start the maintainer objected strongly to your idea.

As did the whole core development team once this was announced. And most users.

I warned you that this would cause massive problems.

And I am still cleaning up the mess it created.

Freenet AG is now a pretty big mobile phone provider since it bought the biggest carrier-independent mobile phone contract provider.

Revenue about 2.5 billion Euro.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet_AG

0.5 didn’t support a friend-to-friend structure, so the privacy protection possible with it was much lower than with 0.7 released in 2007. Since 2007 Freenet / Hyphanet stayed compatible with content from previous versions.

A summary of the changes since 2007 can be found in the presentation “Freenet / Hyphanet: the long game”:

https://www.draketo.de/software/freenet-hyphanet-the-long-ga...

This is auto-translated from the German original which was presented at SUMA e.V.:

https://www.draketo.de/software/freenet-hyphanet-the-long-ga...

https://suma-ev.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/SUMA-Kongress2...

Check the prepared release news for the changes since last year: https://github.com/hyphanet/fred/releases/tag/build01498

Currently waiting for the new signing infrastructure for the Windows installer before turning the release to final.

Freenet 0.7.5 build 1498

This release resolves the last blocker for Freenet / Hyphanet 0.8 by providing an official Debian package. Additionally it optimizes the networking and data transfer core and provides many improvements for website authors and user experience.

Starting with this release, Freenet / Hyphanet has an official Debian package built automatically via github actions. This was the most important [high-impact-task][] and the last release blocker of version 0.8 in our [Roadmap][]. Big thanks go to DC!

With this finally realized, the next step is to get in contact with the many privacy focussed distributions which build on Debian to make `hyphanet-fred` available where it is most important. Once this is done, tools which build on Hyphanet — like FMS, but also jSite and tools from pyFreenet — can be packaged to work out of the box, using Hyphanet as an ordinary background service. That’s a step towards Hyphanet as decentralized, privacy-preserving communication backend for other applications.

Another step towards this is accepting the Schema hypha[net] to simplify writing browser extensions that forward hypha:-links to Hyphanet.

The networking layer was optimized significantly. Searching packet types is often stopped early and common or cheaper checks are done before less common or time-consuming checks. This gives significant reductions of CPU load, especially for very fast nodes.

Juiceman fixed a bug limiting MTU to 1280 where not needed.

And recently failed and data not found cooldown times were reduced to 5 minutes and 3 minutes, reducing one of the big annoyances when accessing a site quickly after upload.

On the data transfer layer, healing was optimized. After 1495 strongly increased the amount of healing to keep large files available for longer, 1498 specializes healing to keys close to the node location. This reduces healing per file, but improves privacy, because healing inserts are then more similar to forwarding — they mostly send data close to the nodes location — and it reduces the network load of healing, because the specialized healing inserts need fewer hops to reach the optimal storage location in the network.

In addition to these changes deep down, there are a number of directly visible improvements.

The plugins KeepAlive and Sharesite are updated (the latter now uses the new Night Zen Garden style). The UPnP2 plugin is now visible in simple mode. It can replace UPnP and should work better. On the flipside the Library plugin is moved to advanced plugins, because it does not work reliably enough.

The plugin list is easier to navigate by removing the defunct option to download plugins from the clearnet and by adding better styling. Downloading from the clearnet was an unnecessary privacy risk since we’ve been bundling essential plugins with the installer for a few years now.

The noderef for friend-to-friend connections is shown in simple mode again, because it is robust enough with the changes in recent years. This should remove a barrier to adding direct connections and enabling fully confidential messages between friends.

There are new configuration options to allow connecting via local services. That’s a step towards making it easy to add a second layer of security, for example confining connections to a local network. Thanks goes to s7r for these changes!

When bandwidth detection fails, the upload bandwidth now defaults to 160KiB/s. Also the NLM config is now disabled statically. This was a testing setup which could still be active in old nodes, but it would break connectivity nowadays.

The default bookmarks include the Opennet SeedNodes statistics, the generate media site to create decentralized streaming sites, and the high-impact-tasks. The bookmarks are also re-ordered to be a better match for newcomers. Starting category: first steps, clean spider, Index of Indexes. For the software category ordered by ease of use from fproxy.

For website authors, more CSS elements, selectors and combinators (`:checked`, `word-wrap: anywhere`, `focus-within`, `^=`, `$=`, `=`, `>`, `+`, `~`) and additional HTML elements (`summary`, `details`, `<meta name="Viewport"...>`) are available. This strongly expands the possibilities of websites authors in Hyphanet, because Javascript or webassembly are no viable options in an environment where a privacy breach could put people at risk. We’ve seen with Java applets, that untrusted code will always break out of its containment. The CSS improvements in contrast provide a safe way to enable limited interactivity.

Streaming support via m3u lists was improved to allow accessing segments of up to 200MiB.

And using `-1` as version in a USK now properly finds version `0`, if this is the only existing version.

There were a number of Java 21 fixes, including all our tests (thanks to Bombe!), and improvement to the github actions (thanks to AHOHNMYC).

In addition to that there was a lot of polish. Bert Massop and Veniamin Fernandes replaced our homegrown CurrentTimeUTC with modern Java options. Alex fixed the pronoun used in strings. Bombe added getters for all direct field access in the node. Hiina reduced logging level of store warnings so no unneeded backtraces are created for node with large stores and Juiceman updated code to use more modern structures.

Time-dependence of compressor selection was removed. This caused non-determinism for inserts and could cause keys to be non-reproducible on systems with faster or slower network.

And finally the new [exe signing workflow][] we built to fulfill the requirements of SignPath, our new windows installer signing provider for the upcoming releases, runs the [verify-build script][] on every release to ensure that the jar we release has actually been built from the sources. This provides a second safety net, in addition to anonymous users running the script and posting the results (thanks to all who did this — please keep it up, otherwise people have to fully trust github). The release is not yet byte-by-byte reproducible, because the jar MANIFEST defines among other info the exact java version used to compile it, and the java version available differs by distribution and time, so it would get harder over time to verify the build.

A special thanks goes to Bombe for many careful reviews!

[high-impact-task]: https://github.com/hyphanet/wiki/wiki/High-Impact-tasks [Roadmap]: https://github.com/hyphanet/wiki/wiki/Roadmap [exe signing workflow]: https://github.com/hyphanet/sign-windows-installer [verify-build script]: https://github.com/hyphanet/scripts/blob/master/verify-build

So avoid that for giving lectures, I bought a refurbished laptop with Linux (Trisquel) pre-installed. In the past 5 years it did not give me trouble yet.