Thanks for the response, and I understand your points. The problem is that with 0.7 you're asking potential freenet users to find people in real life that they trust, which didn't happen with freenet 0.5.
You're basically asking people to form rings called darknets. I'm sure this scares a lot of people away. Not to mention the additional effort involved in getting freenet going which also is a barrier to new users. I personally would never have joined freenet this way, and never will join any ring. There's a flaw with the concept: Let's say I'm a Chinese dissident. If I form a ring with other members in real-life, let's says they're my brothers and I trust them with my life. Even so, if one of us gets caught for whatever reason, most likely nothing to do with freenet, authorities will search his computer, and see that he's part of a ring. All other ring members are immediately discovered and will go down with him. It can be assumed by the authorities that other members of the ring were engaged in the same activity (i.e. Chinese dissidents). And that's just given that you have contacts that you trust in real life. But in reality people are not going to have real-life contacts with whom they want to share freenet. That means they're going to have to use the internet to find darknet peers. And that means that a any member of the governmnet can pose as a Chinese dissident and infiltrate freenet darknets. Being infiltrated only has to happen once, as soon as people find out, the entire freenet will collapse out of paranoia. So sorry if I haven't been reading the development forums, and others might have mentioned these points, but I don't believe there's a solution to this basic flaw in the concept, at least until openNet comes out (if that solves it?) and that's why many of us are worried about seeing 0.5 dying out. -------Original Message------- From: Matthew Toseland Date: 08/19/06 17:36:59 To: - Cc: support at freenetproject.org Subject: Re: [freenet-support] Freenet 0,5 and 0,7 The installer for 0.7 is way better than the (unmaintained) installer for 0.5. And we simply don't have the resources to maintain both branches in any meaningful way. 0.7 is an unstable alpha test, but 0.5 isn't much better. In many ways 0.7's security is better *now*, and it will improve further. Admittedly in other ways it may be less secure, but I don't believe that 0.5 is significantly more secure than 0.7, even with the fake-darknet topology that we use for testing now (with a few real darknet links and lots of fake ones from #freenet-refs). Many of the more powerful attacks against 0.7, such as correlation attacks, were also viable against 0.5. And there is content. As far as initial speed goes, 0.5 takes a week to get up to something vaguely resembling speed; 0.7 takes 10+ references to reach the same stage. Either way there is a big barrier to entry. On Sat, Aug 19, 2006 at 05:11:22PM +0200, - wrote: > Hi, > > I think you're making a mistake in forcing new people into the beta test > freenet 0.7 instead of the established 0.5. > > You're forgetting how _highly_ someone new has to be motivated to try > freenet, even version 0.5 which works and is not a beta test. Let's think > about what would motivate someone... > > I remember when I found freenet, I installed it spent hours reading over the > technical jargon. > It was incredible slow. I removed it thinking this is a pile of crap that > does not work. > > Only a few months later, did I again bother to go through this > complicated process and after waiting for three days with it on, it finally > started working. > > The reason I spent many hours and went back after throwing it out once, was > because I was _highly motivated_ for the anonymity and content. > > Here's the problem: > > If 0.7 doesn't offer the anonymity and the content, plus it's an unstable > beta test, > why would anyone new bother to join the community? > > Do you think people are nice enough to offer their time and computers to > beta test some random highly technical peer to peer application that > completely hogs your computer's resources? > > > > The problem with freenet (even 0.5) is, it just isn't user friendly. > A person who just stumbles on freenet does not know if it's actually going > to work. After seeing how slow it is, most people, like myself will just get > rid of it, not bothering to learn all the configurations, frost, fuqid, etc. > > If you took the time to create a simple, down-to-earth website and install > program without all the technical jargon, you would double or triple your > user base. > > The only NEW users you're going to get to freenet 0.7 are going to be > peer-to-peer programming enthusiasts. And how many of those are there that > don't know about freenet already? > > So instead of scaring all potential freenet users away, It would be wiser to > just ask members of the freenet community to do the beta testing, and create > a nice user friendly website for 0,5 until 0,7 is working. Even I would be > willing to help create this website, and I'm sure many other people also > would volunteer. > > Best Regards, > > Van > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Support mailing list > Support at freenetproject.org > http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.freenet.support > Unsubscribe at http://emu.freenetproject org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/support > Or mailto:support-request at freenetproject.org?subject=unsubscribe -- Matthew J Toseland - toad at amphibian.dyndns.org Freenet Project Official Codemonkey - http://freenetproject.org/ ICTHUS - Nothing is impossible. Our Boss says so. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/support/attachments/20060819/d40f203b/attachment.html> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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