Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication

Re:Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resista... by kafkaIncarnate on Monday September 20, 2021 @12:07AM (#28590303)

There was a messaging system before Frost. You can go look that up, I'm not doing this for you because you are calling me a troll, which is a great way to end civilized discourse and end any attempt at reasonable conversation.

I never said that a central slave market was on Freenet. I don't even think the protocol would be a very effective way to do it due to how slow and unreliable the protocol is at retrieving things. What I meant was that images of this stuff were available in large galleries, and the previous messaging system before Frost would auto-find new forums for you at random. Frequently they would be large galleries of images of this stuff.

So have fun with whatever you are expecting me to pull out of 20 years ago links that are like however many 40+ hex digits long. I haven't used Freenet since I saw that stuff. Not really sure why you'd think I would keep links to it or I would have a photographic memory or even would actively seek out the stuff.

I'm not sitting here saying I contributed, I'm saying I would play around with Freenet, even submit some harmless static HTML pages for fun to test the protocol. After the messaging system started popping up forums that I didn't find acceptable, I deleted the client and never touched Freenet again.

The burden of proof is not on me nor you. This is a conversation on the internet not a spontaneous scientific journal nor an inquisition.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resista... by ogurechny on Monday September 20, 2021 @10:19AM (#28594052)

The problem is that in early 2000s you could find child porn, gore and the rest of “NSFW” stuff on the Web. It is also not wrong to assume that almost nothing you (or anyone) saw on Freenet had originated on Freenet (which also was a fresh tiny project without significant bandwidth or storage capacity back in the days). So, using your own logic, you had to disconnect from the Internet, and never touch it again. But you did not do that. It seems to me that you chose to shoot the messenger here, and remain in sweet ignorance provided by armies of third world grunts scrubbing “normal” services clean from all the unpleasant interactions.

Also, if we talk literally 20 years ago, Freenet was at infancy, still used arbitrary human-readable content keys that were supposed to be shared externally —

https://web.archive.org/web/20000817234626/http://unicast.or...

— and web pages were only a proposed option (with Javascript!):

https://web.archive.org/web/20010405191438/http://freenetpro...

You are probably thinking of more mature days of Freenet version 0.5, which, in its turn, was a network independent from Freenet version 0.7 (2008—present). I've seen 0.5 when it still ran in parallel, and can't remember the content being way too different in general. Still no child slaves for sale.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resista... by ArneBab on Monday September 20, 2021 @02:17AM (#28590803)

You might want to check again. If you use the indexes, the current forum systems (FMS) or the social network (Sone), you are very unlikely to find any of that stuff without actively going searching for it.

The days where many people posted stuff just for the thrill of being able to post something illegal and disgusting are long gone — partly because the communication structures in Freenet evolved, so such stuff will quickly make you invisible to most people (since most people subscribe to moderation that hides that).

[ Parent | on HN ]