So what's the different between Hyphanet and Freenet? Only some anonymity？
I have try the River chat. I'm not sure how to find a people chat in here. It's hard.
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.
> 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.
You're 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.
> 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?
"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."
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)
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".
> Though reusing the name for an entirely different project with a different codebase is disingenuous to say the least.
Same project, same goals, and it's not even the first time we started with a fresh codebase - we did it in 2008.
> That won't do his reputation any good, especially in a field where reputation matters.
This drama never comes up anywhere except HN where it seems to be the obsession of a small number of vocal people who never have anything to say about the substance of the project. I don't lose any sleep over it.
And yet I still haven't seen anyone explain how the goals actually differ.
Interestingly, there seems to be very little overlap between the people giving substantive technical feedback and the people most upset about a 3-year-old naming controversy.