Sunday, December 28, 2008

Trying out Freenet, finding the TimeCube theory, neonazi's and terrorist manuals?

Tonight I'm trying something called Freenet, (0.7) an anonymous encrypted network running over the Internet. I downloaded the 3MB file for Windows and ran the install. Then I removed the service following the instructions here:

Freenet is slow, really slow. After turning off the auto-start and running from my desktop, I gave up after 20 minutes of waiting. But before that, when it was running as a service, I found some info.

Freenet blogs are called flogs.  What do people blog about on an anonymous encrypted network? Some of the more eye raising examples of flogs in the text index:

There were plenty of boring sounding blog titles too. The only one I visited was Occam's Rasor. It runs in FireFox and looks like any other web page, but with a long URL pointing at your own computer.

I'll check out the TimeCube if I get it working again, but then I'll probably delete the whole thing since there is quite a bit of terrorist stuff.  I don't want to support a network that helps people learn how to make poisons and bombs, obviously.

But the point is, this exists. And the way it works, you supposedly can't track down who posted the stuff or who is reading it. This is only scary because we are still a morally primitive species.

Ah, the TimeCube site finally loaded. Mr. or Ms. Ray is paranoid and bigoted, but certainly someone who thinks outside of the box. Here is an interesting graphic from the site:

timecubeflierimg

Gene writes:
You are not allowed to know truth - that in one rotation of Earth, there are: ... There are 4 simultaneous 24 hour days  within a single rotation of the Earth.  You may be too damn evil to accept it. ... I lectured and debated at MIT, and have 2 hour video  proof. You are but mindless dumb asses. - freenet

No need for freenet, you can find this on the regular Interent as well.

Gene, the Voyager spacecraft and many other probes would have registered the time distortion as they left the Earth's time cube if your theory were correct. Please email me to arrange payment of my $1000. - Xeno

4 comments:

Caco_Patane said...

"No need for freenet, you can find this on the regular Interent as well."

You can find it on the "regular interent", but anyone can find that you find it -and there is really easy to do if someone _really_ wants to find people accesing a certain type of content- . The goal of Freenet is reach information without compromising you.

It's a matter of time that people start to upload content to Freenet that can be censored in the "regular internet", or start to create content inside Freenet knowing the fact that some type of content will be censored or the author of the content persecuted.

Try FMS or some of the messaging tools for Freenet. Let your node be up for a few days and you will expecience more considerable speed. Also try the global queue to download large files or upload your own Freesite. I'm really happy with the work of the Freenet developers, the only thing missing in the network is more people and content!

Xeno said...

I like privacy, so the argument is appealing. Government is out of control in cases such as where people are jailed for life for what an official believes they were thinking about doing. (They call it "plotting".) No one should put away as a terrorist for having a simple intellectual curiosity about how to build an atom bomb from spare car parts in his garage, for example.

I like the idea of Freenet ... but the flog titles I've seen make me concerned that by hosting encrypted distributed content on my computer, I'd be participating in a system that shares harmful information. Perhaps it is best that I do not have the option to learn how to extract uranium from topsoil using my washing machine as a centrifuge.

I've posted many conspiracy theory details on the open Internet over the last decade. Other than making it into the Harry Potter books as a cowardly oddball editor who is often disbelieved, no evil has befallen me.

As a result, my mild paranoia in the years just before and after 9/11 has been replaced by a more realistic view of human nature and of politics.

China needs Freenet now. We may all need it in the future. Keep it up, but some sort of peer voting for removal of harmful content would be an improvement.

Caco_Patane said...

As far as I know, you can call Plausible deniability cause you can't know what data you are hosting or not.

Xeno said...

I'm not acting in contradiction to my stated beliefs. I mean what I say about not wanting to contribute to hosting explosives recipes, even with PD.

I don't see a need for a completely anonymous network for myself yet because I can still criticize my government without fear of retaliation. I do not believe the same is true in other countries.

I set boundaries on this site. No spam is allowed, for example. Similarly, I think state law should beat federal law in most cases.