S wrote:
I don't really agree with the idea that such a pr0xy would bring
exposure or users to Freenet. Joe Surfer, upon finding your gatewayed
content in Google, is going to click through, access the content, and
move on, not realizing that he's ventured beyond the confines of the
normal web. Useful to Joe Surfer, not to Freenet. Or worse, he clicks
through and gets some confusing message about "Route Not Found" that
makes absolutely no sense to him. No help to Freenet or to Joe Surfer.
My idea is to force visitors to go through an introduction page,
where I can explain what it's all about and where I can put some
warnings and disclaimers too. I should be able to do that without
cookies, just with a mod_rewrite rule "referrer !this_host rewrite->FAQ"
Also, I think you are looking too shallow into what's useful to
whom. According to me, if it's useful to Joe Surfer it's useful
to freenet, for the very simple reason that freenet is all about
disseminating information and none about keeping it confined or
restricted. At least that's what I gather from the project site;
it says nothing at all about an only-for-us-select-few club, it
only talks about as widely-used and accessible as possible.
Network resources are another issue. If suddenly there are thousands of
web users trying to reach Freenet content through a gateway, that's
thousands more requests flooding into the network, thousands of
"leeching" users, who aren't giving any resources back to Freenet.
Ah, but you forget that the p r o x y itself is contributing
back to freenet in exact proportion to what those leechers
leech. Therefore, the "victim" of the leeching is not freenet,
but myself. I think I should be able to handle that "loss"
and, if not, I'll just have to RTFM a bit more on iproute
and rate limiting.
This
symptom would likely be limited to some extent by your node's own
ability to handle requests. A caching pr0xy would resolve the potential
for network burden, but then you've got to deal with expiring cached DBR
sites, the legal issues of caching the plaintext content, ...
The apache proxy dosn't log (other than keys) and dosn't cache, but
fproxy does, in a way. I increased the store to 1 GB for now and
I could increase it a lot more if/when needed. That would lead to
more sites being local and less traffic outwards, yet nothing in
plaintext to compromise me or the user. Thus, I don't see any of
the problems you mention.
People have run public nodes before, but Google never indexed them
beyond the main Web Interface page, so their audience consisted of
people who a) were already Freenet users and b) knew exactly what to
search for in Google to find a public node.
Well, this contradics what you just wrote above. If you are right
on this point, then your fears about thousands of users leeching
and burdening freenet without giving anything back are unfounded
already because of this, even disregarding my arguments above. Or
vice versa. Of course, if you're right on this, then running the
thing would be fairly meaningless. However, as long as it's not
damaging, it doesn't matter much if it's meaningless; when I
realise that I'll just take it down.
They also don't have a
tendency to be very reliable. Bringing Freenet to the entire web would,
I imagine, have its own unique set of issues.
Of course it would. Reliability is not my main concern though;
Freenet itself is not very reliable either, and it's easy to reason
along the lines of "if you want it more reliable than I can offer,
then go run your own node". What worries me most is the legal/political
side of things.
To be precise: when the yellow press picks this up (not if; when),
they'll make angry headlines of it in the style of "And what is
the government doing? Nothing!" And of course the wolves will
then move in (Miguel, this is in reply to you too). From that
point on there are many possible scenaria:
A. My upstream cuts me off and the p r o x y dies silently
(along with everything else I host), or I move to a new ISP
time and over again until I find one solid enough to carry
the service.
B. I get a prosecutor's order to block one or several specific
and named freesites. The law says I have to comply first and
can seek reversal in court afterwards.
C. I get prosecuted for serving some specific freenet content.
D. I get sued in a civil lawsuit by someone who doesn't like
some specific freenet content.
Let's examine all this in the light of the purpose of freenet,
which I understand as "the promotion of free speech irrespective
of the content thereof". Please correct me if this definition
is skewed or incomplete.
To begin with, free speech in a solitary cell is no free speech
at all. You only have free speech if you can say what you want
*whenever you want and to whoever you want*, provided that they
want to listen. Thus, the notion of "let's keep it quiet so they
don't come down on us and crush us" contradicts the very purpose
it's supposed to promote. The greater the pssibe audience, the
freer the speech, and that includes Joe Surfer in the audience.
Of course, foolishliy provoking your powerful enemies when you
know that you'll lose is counterproductive too. As with every
kind of resistence, one needs to strike a good balance between
secret and open, based on what can be gained or lost. The utter
goal must be full openness though, or else there is no point in
doing anything in the first place.
Thus, edging the limits a bit, allowing Joe Surfer into freenet
- even if only temporarily, even if he actually doesn't care
about freenet content and will go straight back to msnbs and
cnn.com - does increase the degree of freedom of speech of those
who publish on freenet, as well as the degree of freedom to acquire
information of everybody. Therefore I'd say that in all four
scenaria above, the purpose of freenet would be served by a
p r o x y at least up to the day the wolves move in and,
depending on the amount and kind of noise that ensues, perhaps
also past that day.
Scenario A is the most likely and at the same time the most
difficult to deal with [1]. Censorship, which used to be a
task for governments and the target of political protest, is
rapidly being privatised. It's being moved from the law and
the courts and the political responsiblity that comes with
that to AUPs and to the quick judgement of unqualified and
anonymous abuse desks. Gone is the right to fair trial, gone
is the right to appeal, gone is even the right to defend
yourself [2]. And most governments, who see the great
advantages in this system for themselves, are promoting it
all the can under the motto of "self-regulation". The fact
that there is no "self" part whatsoever in ISPs regulating
the rights of their users is just a negligible detail in
the context.
The way I see it, the risks involved in A are well worth
taking. Any other approach would just confirm and reinforce
the regulatory powers of private businesses whose trade
is to carry bits, not to make law. I'd say let it happen,
use the results to create political noise, and hope that
something good comes out of it. At least there will always
be some ISPs (xs4all.nl is an excellent example) who profile
themselves by taking the opposite stance and can then profit
from that. Conversely, if A happens, no damage will be
caused to freenet itself or its content.
I see quite some advantages in scenario B. Establishing
that censorship is the job of the law and not that of ISPs
is one. Establishing that complaints need to be specific
and legally substatiated is another. Establishing for a
fact that the middle-man (be it an ISP or any other kind
of carrier) is not responsible for content and does not
have to monitor it and regulate it is yet another, and it
would benefit freenet itself too: it would establish that
a node has no responsibility for what it stores or shuffles
unless it has received orders to remove it *and* is capable
to comply. Heh.
In other words, I would welcome B as the best of all
scenaria and I would probably actively invite it. Of course,
when I say "establish" I mean it realatively; what might
be true in one jurisdiction will still not be true in
another. Yet, a "one down, 199 to go" situation is always
better than "200 to go".
Scenario C is very possible, but carries risks for both sides,
not only for me. If I lose, I go to jail and all ISPs become
responsible for what passes their p r o x i e s, their news
servers, perhaps even their mail servers and their downstream
dial-up lines. Of course, a precedent like that would make the
job of any ISP impossible. It would force ISPs to realise that
the "self-regulatory" tasks the have taken upon them backfire
severely, and it would lead to very powerful lobbying for a law
to change the situation, which is probably a good thing in the
long run.
If, on the other hand, I would be aquitted on the grounds
that I'm not responsible for what only passes a p r o x y
and/or because the prosecutor failed to serve me an order
as described in B, then a good precedent will have been
set and the whole thing will not have been in vain. The
advantages for freenet itself would be the same as in B.
Finally, scenario D would contain two parts: a request
for a court order to me to block access to a specifc named
page or freesite and, most probably, a demand for damages.
The former works exactly as B and has the very same effects,
so I don't see any damage there. In any case, the material
that gets blocked by the web-p r o x y continues to live
on freenet itself, so no censorship will have taken place
compared to not running the p r o x y in the first place.
As for the latter, well, I'm pretty much immune. A certain
"church" has seen to that, so all I can say is "please
stand in line, your turn to collect will be in approximately
380 years".
Don't let me sway you one way or another on the idea, it sounds like an
interesting project and would certainly be a challenge.
Yes, and I guess technically too. The people who hacked the
real Al Quaeda site and the Al Jazeera site etc are probably
capable and will be willing to hack me too. If this thing
ever goes public, I'll need a completely different approach
to security than I have now, even though my current approach
is not at all sloppy or light.
If you get it up
and running, it would be neat to see the pr0xy's stats, e.g. which
countries are sending traffic, which Freesites are viewed most often,
etc.
I'm afraid the only thing anyone can see is keys, i.e.
requested freesites. I don't log anything else, so nobody
can order me to hand out any other logs.
Now then, I might be good at arguing, but that doesn't
mean I haven't missed anything. Will someone please try
to still punch a hole in this discourse?
Z
[1] Google for 'flashback, sweden, upstream' and see how well
a few backbone ISPs managed to censor and completely destroy
the first free ISP in Sweden. Mind you, the controversial
content (one or two neonazi sites) was fully legal and had
already been examined and deemed legal by the public prosecutor;
nonetheless Flasback was kept off the air for a year or more
and could only return without its free hosting part (the partial
fucked-up mirror mentioned in the pages you found on Google
is mine and is still up and running on the same server that
the freenet p r o x y runs on). Flashback tried all the
possible legal avenues to fight back, including an anti-trust
complaint, but lost everywhere.
[2] Personally, I think that in a democratic society based on
well-balanced law, freedom of speech and anonymity are, to a
great extent, incompatible with each-other. Everyone should
have the right to say what he wants, but others (e.g. the
victim of libel) should also have the right to complain and
seek redress. Ironically, the promotors of completely one-sided
IP laws and of the privatised censorship I just discussed
are those who force free speech to rely on anonymity, and
thus end up frustrating their own goals: now not only is
what they wanted to avoid happening anyway, but they can't
seek redress either.
--
Framtiden är som en babianröv, färggrann och full av skit.
Arne Anka
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