On 03/11/15 18:00, Ian wrote: > For those that appear to be craving a "bold new strategy", one thing I've > proposed in the past would be to put the main Freenet codebase in > "maintenance mode", and throw our resources behind http://tahrirproject.org/ > (possibly renaming it "Freenet 2" since Tahrir is a terrible name). > > Tahrir addresses several key concerns: > > - The people we actually want to help, those in China, Iran, etc, often > have very constrained bandwidth. Tahrir is designed for this, Freenet is a > bandwidth hog That is much less true now than it was when Tahrir was started. Lots of China has reasonable broadband. On the other hand, China is more than capable of blocking both opennet and darknet Freenet, and ditto with Tahrir.
Across the world, most people with Internet access have it on mobile
phones, and it's usually so restricted that even Tahrir probably
wouldn't work. Because last mile bandwidth, and even backhaul bandwidth,
is more expensive than advanced filtering. And because the devices are
designed specifically to talk to the cloud: Even if you reduce the
bandwidth requirements and somehow manage to run p2p on carrier
networks, you still have the uptime, storage and above all battery life
implications. Plus all phones have built-in government backdoors
(baseband attacks).
IMHO the solution to these problems is fixed nodes on home routers -
adapted Pi's or cheap but programmable home server boxes.
For emergency communications using ad hoc wifi (both disaster recovery
and political protest etc) there are alternative systems already being
built. One of the main problems is they need to root the phones, and
maybe deploy hardware, since it's strictly forbidden for a phone to have
mesh networking support.
> - Tahrir is designed for a Twitter/Facebook type use-case
> ("microblogging"), which has proven very powerful in terms of promoting
> political change
Sone is popular on Freenet. That sort of UI may make more sense in the
medium term. It's easier to make it scale, which could be important,
although Twitter in practice does need search as well as subscription.
For anything distributed, subscription is easy, but search is hard.
> - It's a fresh-ish codebase, much smaller, although needs some cobwebs
> blown off
Not necessarily a good thing, any more than it is for the dozens of
other projects reinventing the wheel.
> - Can incorporate a mixnet, but actually better suited to a mixnet than
> Tor because latency is less of an issue
Also true for Freenet. Inserts can reasonably be tunneled through
long-term Mixminion-style onion routing. At least on a darknet.
> Clearly, this would not be a direct successor to Freenet, it would not be
> backwards compatible, and would be designed for a different (but perhaps
> more current) use-case.
>
> Thoughts?
IMHO general file storage is important. Even for revolutions! How much
of the supposed technical contribution to the Arab Spring was videos on
Youtube?
I would like to see a prototype of Tahrir. I don't think it should be
called Freenet 2.0.
On 03/11/15 18:10, Michael Grube wrote:
> Bold indeed.
>
> Necessary, in my opinion. The complexity that the project will ultimately
> face due to disparate and poorly documented code will eventually outweigh
> the benefits even of holding on to current users.
>
> The currently complex code also means that Freenet may become a security
> joke, which is not acceptable.
I agree that Freenet is insecure. But I see this as an architectural
problem rather than a complexity one at the moment. Lots of security
systems are highly complex, and at least Freenet avoids the classic
problems of buffer overflows etc. Once we have solved the basic security
problems (including sorting out darknet!) we can move towards
stabilising it to a point where things like third party review would
actually make sense.
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