On Sun, Dec 06, 2009 at 04:58:21PM -0600, Ian Clarke wrote: > This guy raises concerns about uninstalling Freenet: > > http://truefalsebollox.blogspot.com/2009/11/freenet-users-watch-your-back.html
"First of all, there is talk in the scant guide offered with Freenet of ?a panic button? ? I imagined something to hit if the heavy jackboots start thudding up the stairs. What would the panic button do? Immediately wipe all Freenet-associated files from my hard disk? Hmm, I don?t know, because I couldn?t find the panic button in the copy I downloaded and ran. Even if there was one somewhere, the fact that it isn?t under my nose means it wouldn?t be much use in a hurry." The "panic button": - Shows up on the downloads/uploads page. - Doesn't show up in LOW physical security level. You already said you have nothing to hide, right? Maybe we should change this. - Wipes everything that might relate to incriminating data: the client cache, downloads in progress etc (but not files already downloaded to disk, only files downloaded to temporary space). IT EXPLICITLY DOES NOT DELETE FREENET ITSELF. Writing a portable without-a-trace uninstaller is a seriously nontrivial project which we are not competent to embark on, and it is outside our mandate. "The uninstaller provided with each download merely removed the program files from my Applications list into my Trash list. It did not remove them from the computer." This is some OS/X bull****. mrsteveman1 can you fix this? "Further, even though I was running my browser in ?Privacy mode?, links to Freenet ?keys? were stored in my browser Cache history." Then your browser is defective! Privacy mode by definition should not persistently store any trace of your browsing after you close it. If it does IT IS NOT A MEANINGFUL PRIVACY MODE. If anyone is aware of browsers which behave in this way, providing a dangerously false sense of security, please let us know and we can warn users against them. "This is particularly worrying if you don?t bother to check, since the advice from Freenet is to use a separate and dedicated browser ? meaning everything in your cache will be freenet related. No need for anyone examining your computer to sort through thousands of innocuous logs to find the Freenet ones." Any browser that stores cache or history on disk in plaintext for "privacy mode" is broken by design and SHOULD NOT BE USED. The advice we give is based on the simple fact that if you use the same browser, with the exception of a meaningfu,l non-history-preserving privacy mode, for browsing the internet as for browsing freenet, the internet sites you visit can probe your freenet browsing history. "Still, none of that is of as much concern as this: manually deleting Freenet from my computer was not as simple as emptying the cache and Trash files. The cache went into the trash, so to speak, but the Trash folder with Freenet files in it could not be emptied from the desktop no matter what I did. Some files had been automatically locked by Freenet, and the whole Trash application froze trying to unsuccessfully delete them. In short, I had to do a ?sudo? from the command line to forcibly remove them, a process that if you don?t know how to do you?d better learn if you plan on using Freenet in a hostile environment. I?d also say you?d better learn how to do it quick (maybe write yourself a script), because wiping all trace of Freenet off my computer took me the best part of an hour the first time I tried it." This is more Mac bullshit. We should work around it. HOWEVER, there is a deeper fundamental fact here: No portable application is going to wipe every trace of its presence when you uninstall it. It's just not practical in terms of the amount of deeply platform specific work involved. There are third party tools that may provide such functionality. Or is it? Most unixes have "shred" now?? All this is a matter of poor documentation. However, better documentation would involve more reading for the user and therefore put users off running Freenet at all. Thus it is a largely unsolvable problem, apart from the OS/X perversities which hopefully mrsteveman1 will have time to resolve. So we cannot expect to tell the user the full range of things they need to know to keep their privacy in the installer. The solution is to bundle a README file that nobody will read, and then when somebody gets killed because of our negligence we can say it was because they didn't read the README. Oh and we can make it prominent by e.g. making it available from the web interface. Thoughts? -- The theory that the earth is round has been repeatedly debunked. Therefore it must be false. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 835 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20091207/60094d54/attachment.pgp>
