On Thursday 03 January 2008 03:01, niel wrote: > :-) > > I love the Freenet Idea, and this is a positive thread I have made. > > I have been reading the newest documentation for freenet 0.7, and as I > interpret it, freenet is not anomymous to use for me, and most other freenet > newbies, as we do not have any "friends" to exchange "reference nodes" with, > and we are not clever enough to use freenet as the few "freenet experts" can.
Sort of true. It's likely to be safer than the internet at large. It's more survivable than Tor. But there are a lot of possible attacks, and if you have (genuine!) Friends they are much harder. It may not be safer than Tor, otoh it's a lot harder to block, and anyway what it does is different. > > Freenet has become fairly easy to install and use, and it has become fast. Thanks! > > But, is It dangerous to use? Well, we try to warn people, but there's a limit to how much you can do. > > People may think they are in safe territory. > > This is how I believe it is, and would like to hear some comments on this MOST > IMPORTANT ISSUE, from the "freenet experts" - and to create some serious > debate, to really make freenet anonymous for ALL PEOPLE of the world. > > Until that time: Should ordinary people be told not to use freenet in an > anonymous way until a new safe freenet version arrives? Freenet is still an alpha, it is nowhere near 1.0. There are major possible attacks and there are major changes that will need to be made before 1.0 to make it safer. At this stage, I wouldn't rely on it protecting you if you're going to get into major trouble if found, but otoh it *is* safer than some other tools people use, even in oppressive regimes. While it is certainly useful, it is released primarily for testing and development; if there were no users, there probably wouldn't be any devs either. > > I do not say, that freenet cannot be used anonymously, but only for a small > exclusive group of smart people who know how to. > > I had hoped that freenet was a really free place to be for everyone, where > really free expression of speech and thought could be executed. There is no such thing as perfect security. Freenet is still under development, and the remaining major security issues will take some time to deal with. However, building a large, fast and useful Freenet will undoubtedly help in terms of anonymity: if there are only a few hundred, or even a few thousand, nodes, they can all be marked as low probability suspects and correlated with other evidence, ignoring any technical attacks on your anonymity. > > A really anonymous Freenet is urgently needed, now more than ever, and it > should at best be as easy to use as the ordinary Internet - Anonymity will always have costs. For example, you need to not make it easy to find you by giving away too much personal info. > > that would be a revolution! We're working on it. We need users to get where we are going. It's not perfect, but it's improving, and it's useful. 0.7, amongst other changes, introduces the long-term "darknet" feature, which will be critical to Freenet's long term security and survivability. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/support/attachments/20080103/a9c21e41/attachment.pgp>
