I'm concerned that the ultimate usefulness of Freenet for truly protecting anonymity may be illusory. That is to say, I think it is mighty suspicious that upgrades to the latest version of Freenet's client software are forced. That is, the links (keys) now absolutely do not work if you try to use an older version.
If, hypothetically, the makers of Freenet have, for whatever reason, become adversaries to individual anonymity (by being paid off by snoops of whatever sort, or whatever else)--not saying you have, just go with me on this--then by forcing upgrades of the client software, you then have the power to force the client user to install a corrupted (backdoored) version of "Freenet", do you not? Yes, I know, the Freenet client is open source; but really! Come on. How many of us actually take the source code and independently compile it ourselves? And that is to say nothing of the necessary (and indeterminate) lag-time between the release of Freenet's latest client and the peer review that would be required to determine whether or not you are up to some nefarious agenda in the new version? Tor (The Onion Router, https://www.torproject.org), by contrast, doesn't work this way. They give you the freedom to run legacy clients of theirs and still be able to use the Tor network. They make it clear in their documentation that they do not recommend this, but they still give you the freedom to do it. Only once in my now seven years of using Tor has an upgrade been mandatory and that was because of a truly deadly security issue that had just been fixed at that time. Their usual policy however is that it is your choice to upgrade, or not--and the network is still usable to you if you decide not to. If you would allow more freedom to the clients to not follow any fixed standard operating procedure with regard to upgrades--that is to say, in particular, more backward compatibility between the network and its clients--it will make your network much more robust against the very sort of corruption that I have named here. Sincerely, Evan Grand _______________________________________________ Support mailing list Support@freenetproject.org http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.freenet.support Unsubscribe at http://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/support Or mailto:support-requ...@freenetproject.org?subject=unsubscribe
