Step back and take a deep breath. I'm not telling you to shutdown your
website and foundation and host your project on Tor' s site.
I'm questioning if the overhead of designing and maintaining yet another
anonymity protocol makes sense given Freenet's current situation. You
can concentrate on polishing Freenet UX and storage algorithms instead
and leave the anonymity to Tor. Its an intensive process coming up with
something that stands up against serious enemies. Tor gets most of the
academic community's attention improving against attacks all the time.
You get this for free by switching to their protocol for transport.
Not every developer that designed their app to communicate over Tor or a
socks proxy, stuck their software with theirs. It's a more sensible
decision than everyone rolling a custom anonymous protocol every time
they wanted such services. Just like crypto, its better to go with a
standard cipher checked the most by researchers than writing your own.
Again I'm not criticizing your effort but your wiki page on attacks
against Freenet does not inspire confidence in your target audience of
investigate journalists and whistleblowers.
On 2015-10-15 23:57, Ian wrote:
Software isn't like playdough, you can't take two different software
projects and just stick them together, and expect the result to make
sense
(even if the projects have related goals).
In terms of the benefits of an alliance with Tor I'm afraid you're
being
naive. From Tor's perspective, an "alliance" with Freenet would make
absolutely no sense. They'd essentially just be diverting developers,
users, and funding away from their own project. Don't get me wrong,
they're nice guys, but it would simply be irrational.
Tor and Freenet might be related at a high-level, but this whole idea
that
separate software projects should all be glued together into one huge
mass
of bloatware is very misguided. It's the polar opposite of the Unix
philosophy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy>. I wish
people
would stop suggesting it. It wouldn't solve any problem and would be a
massive waste of time and resources.
Ian.
On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 4:35 PM,
<salutarydiacritica...@ruggedinbox.com>
wrote:
I am a Freenet user and want you to succeed so look at my words from
that
angle.
You are missing out on an obvious natural alliance with Tor that can
bring
in many benefits from funding, users, publicity and manpower. The Tor
project also invested a lot in private client side applications like
the
Tor browser and Tor birdy that you can combine. Not to denigrate your
work
but its fact, their anonymity transport layer is more advanced and has
undergone more scrutiny and is trusted. I've talked with people who
love
the Freenet concept but are reluctant to use it because they don't
feel its
powerful enough to withstand NSA. I find it hard to convince them
otherwise
when there is a trickle of papers about Freenet's anonymity protection
and
no mention of it being a challenge to NSA like the Tor slides and they
trust what Snowden used.
With that said, Freenet's real power is resilient and distributed data
hosting, unmatched by Tor hidden services that were designed as an
afterthought. Together both technologies are a perfect fit. They
should not
compete.
My point here is to keep the parts of the protocol where Freenet users
can
automatically find each other and request data but to offload the
traffic
hiding part to Tor. Don't put users in a situation where they have to
choose between both. Each project does one thing well and together
they
give users the cypherpunk vision of freedom.
More users means more technical people who will become interested and
help
out. It becomes self sustaining. You've built it but you need to
integrate
it right and they will come.
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