I've abstained form interfering until now... but have you honestly forgotten?

Please explain how "the new freenet" tackles censorship resistance.

https://web.archive.org/web/20001017133926/http://freenetpro... "Freenet is a peer-to-peer network designed to allow the distribution of information over the Internet in an efficient manner, without fear of censorship."

https://web.archive.org/web/20050201110519/http://freenetpro... "Freenet is free software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship."

https://web.archive.org/web/20150206152355/https://freenetpr... "Share files, chat on forums, browse and publish, anonymously and without fear of blocking or censorship!"

today: "Hyphanet is peer-to-peer network for censorship-resistant and privacy-respecting publishing and communication."

the new freenet: ?!?

Are there any success stories about Hyphanet's censorship resistance mattering? Beyond serving run-of-the mill copyrigh violations (and probably child porn) I never heard anything about the content on Hyphanet.

Even now when people in the US are organising against a fascist regime it's mostly WhatsApp and maybe Signal.

Thank you for the downvotes.

You've moving the debate here. The question was "How are the goals different?" from the project leader (who ought to know better), not whether moving them makes sense.

Well I guess you think the important part of the goals is to make censorship technically difficult, without regard to if the software actually facilitates political speech at all.

Others could argue that software nobody uses for its stated purpose has failed; but you are right that is technically a different discussion than the one you started.

> The question was "How are the goals different?"

A question you haven't answered.

There actually are: among the darknets, Hyphanet is the only one that has a main use for "deviant data resistant to censorship":

Example publication: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/135485651880663...

> What are the content patterns on Freenet? Four patterns were identified. Freenet is (1) an archive of deviant data resistant to censorship (2) a space dominated by content associated with masculinity, (3) a nonmarket space where commercial exchange is non-existent, and (4) an empty space with many requests not returning information, and many flogs abandoned. We asked a third question: How does the analysis of Freenet inform current understandings of hacker culture? Freenet, we suggest, can be understood as a type of digital “wilderness”. It is a singular darknet space, supporting a distinct set of hacker practices

Practically: people in Hyphanet blog about stuff they dare not blog about in the clearnet -- anything from radical politics (from all kinds, left, right, libertarian, …) over personal opinion pages to wilder stuff like magick (yes, in that spelling).

Not to forget the Russian Poet who’s posting daily poems with the goal (as he wrote) that those poems still survive after police knocked at his door.

(besides talk about hyphanet and privacy tech)

So yes: I don’t understand the downvotes either, because it’s a legitimate question with a pretty clear answer: yes.

> Please explain how "the new freenet" tackles censorship resistance.

Primarily through the same core mechanism as the original Freenet design: decentralization and relaying requests through multiple peers such that no individual peer sees the entire request path.

The new design also supports pluggable anonymity systems such as mixnets and onion routing. In some respects these are stronger than Hyphanet's approach because relay selection can be chosen intentionally by the user's node rather than emerging implicitly from network topology.

The main architectural change is that anonymity is no longer treated as a single mandatory mechanism baked into every layer of the system. Different applications can make different tradeoffs depending on their requirements.

First, thank you for creating this project. When I was a young high school student in China, I tried all different kind of tools to evade internet censorship, including Freenet (although admittedly with little success, there was never enough peers to connect to and/so it was too slow to download anything meaningful).

My question is whether freenet is designed to be resistant for active adversaries with deep packet inspection capability, particularly like the Chinese firewall that is also observed to do statistical timing analysis of packets? Is there any possibility to apply obfuscation to the peer to peer connection? And is there any mechanism to aide peer discovery (DHT?)

The original freenet design was replicating content as it was requested. You had no way of locating "all" the copies as they would get cached "along the way" elsewhere on the keyspace when you request them.

That property was useful both for improving availability AND censorship resistance: you could not attempt to "locate" where the blocks are without spreading them.

My naive understanding of the new design is that you can have contracts that are replicated... but they still cluster around the same place in the keyspace so any capable active adversary can actively deny access to content trivially. Did I misunderstand something here?

The two systems aren't that different in this regard, both replicate data along request paths.

In both systems data will tend to cluster on peers close to the data's location because otherwise requests couldn't find it.

The main difference is that in the new Freenet the content can be updated, with updates propagating through peers hosting the content.

"Anonymity: While the previous version was designed with a focus on anonymity, the current version does not offer built-in anonymity but allows for a choice of anonymizing systems to be layered on top."

https://freenet.org/about/faq/

How is offering the user more choice with respect to anonymity changing the goals of the project?

the _point_ of freenet was that you could anonymously share/store information. For better or worse, that was the point of it. It also drove the UX and tradeoffs for the network.

It was slower than Kazaa/bittorrent, but it was far harder to work out who was shareing what. (if memory serves it also chunked files up so they weren;t on the same machine, but that could be me misremembering)

yes, it chunks files, and aggregates multiple chunks per packet, and pads packets it sends around, so size analysis by the ISP cannot trace the path.

> the _point_ of freenet was that you could anonymously share/store information.

As you can with the new Freenet, you just get a menu of options instead of being forced to use a one-size-fits-all approach to anonymity.

I kind of see "focus" in the FAQ and "goals" in this thread as interchangeable.

It would surprise me if this would not be a common interpretation of these texts alone among the readers here.

As for the general reputation of the OG Freenet in this lineage, to the extent I'm aware, anonymity was pretty much the defining characteristic. More or less everything else in the user experience suffered to some extent compared to other chat and file sharing services because of this "focus".

If we're doing archaeology, my original 1999 paper was called "A Distributed Decentralized Information Storage and Retrieval System".

Fine. Page 6, which is Chapter 2, under the heading Aims, there is a numbered list. What is the second item in this list?

If you have a point to make you should make it.

I'll quote it then:

   2. It should provide anonymity to b oth providers and consumers of informa-
      tion

And? The new Freenet provides a menu of options for anonymity which is strictly better than imposing the same (imperfect) anonymity solution on everyone.