<story><title>Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System (2000) [pdf]</title><url>http://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/clarke00freenet.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simcop2387</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve always loved the ideals and design of Freenet for what it does, but the main issues I always ran into when I&amp;#x27;d check it out were that discoverability was horrible and then once you did manage to dig into things and find content it was usually stuff I wouldn&amp;#x27;t want to find to begin with.  That&amp;#x27;s left a lot of bad impressions on people I think, and caused it to have a reputation for only illegal things on it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mirimir</author><text>Yes, the public Freenet opennet contains lots of horrible content. But then, Freenet&amp;#x27;s focus has always been censorship resistance. Content gets distributed and replicated according to its popularity. It&amp;#x27;s a lot like BitTorrent, but with serious transport encryption and randomized routing.&lt;p&gt;And arguably it&amp;#x27;s worked pretty well for that, given that there&amp;#x27;s been consistently lots of horrible content for 18 years. Content providers (and users) have been busted, but that hasn&amp;#x27;t eliminated much of their content.&lt;p&gt;However, being a pure P2P system, you only have &amp;quot;anonymity&amp;quot; through plausible deniability. And that&amp;#x27;s a dangerous game to play. Criminal investigators have used modified Freenet nodes to track chunks of illegal content, and have prosecuted users whose nodes processed those chunks.&lt;p&gt;The Freenet Project argues that it&amp;#x27;s impossible to reliably determine whether nodes are requesting those chunks, or merely relaying requests from other nodes. But if you end up in court, you&amp;#x27;ll need an expert witness to convince the jury of that. So you&amp;#x27;ll likely end up with a plea bargain.&lt;p&gt;So anyway, it&amp;#x27;s safest to run Freenet on anonymously leased VPS, and access its webGUI as a Tor .onion service. Just as you&amp;#x27;d prudently run a BitTorrent seedbox.</text></comment>
<story><title>Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System (2000) [pdf]</title><url>http://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/clarke00freenet.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simcop2387</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve always loved the ideals and design of Freenet for what it does, but the main issues I always ran into when I&amp;#x27;d check it out were that discoverability was horrible and then once you did manage to dig into things and find content it was usually stuff I wouldn&amp;#x27;t want to find to begin with.  That&amp;#x27;s left a lot of bad impressions on people I think, and caused it to have a reputation for only illegal things on it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yason</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s no wonder really. If you build a system that allows anonymity and untraceability you will end up hosting everything that can&amp;#x27;t normally happen without anonymity and untraceability.&lt;p&gt;Hackers marvel at the idea of complete anonymity and untraceability because it&amp;#x27;s technically exciting and fits so well with the hacker thinking. I mean, why &lt;i&gt;should you&lt;/i&gt; have to reveal who you are because of mere accountability? Everyone knows hackers don&amp;#x27;t cause harm and when they do it&amp;#x27;s only a good deed because the system they &amp;quot;broke&amp;quot; was obviously broken already. But the same technology is a much more prominent tool for criminals, molesters, and such. So that&amp;#x27;s what you will get on the anonymous networks and not so much hackers with good intentions.</text></comment>