Ok, so there has been quite a hoo-hah over this whole issue, allow me to
summarize, perhaps this can become the basis for something posted on the
website to address this issue:
Freenet does not, and has never claimed to, make it impossible for someone
to determine whether or not you are running a Freenet node. Having said
this, a number of people have suggested that we should investigate ways
that we can, even partially, achieve this (some have failed to grasp that
this was never an aim of Freenet and thus this can't be considered a flaw
- some failed to grasp this initially but have been reeducated ;).
It is a feature of the system that people can "fish" for Freenet nodes by
running a node themselves and harvesting node addresses, however they
would have little or no control over the addresses they obtain. There has
been talk of an alternative mechanism for finding Freenet nodes involving
port-scans, however it is very unlikely that this would be practical (and
would not work once public/private key crypto is incorporated into
node-communication).
The thing about this fishing is that since you have no control over the IP
addresses you can "catch", the chances are that even if you do have the
power to shut-down Freenet nodes within your country/state/island/home,
the vast majority of those you discover will not be within your range of
influence, and thus you will fail to have much of an impact upon the
network as a whole.
A recent Wired News article describing the antics of a
fuckedcompany.com-to-be called "Media Enforcer" got people thinking about
a situation where the DMCA (a fantastic fart in the face of our freedom at
the best of times) *could* be used by someone like M.E to persuade ISPs to
remove someone's internet connection for running a Freenet
node. Basically they would fish for node addresses, and (assuming that
the node they find is within the US) would request some copyrighted
material from that node. Since Freenet sometimes caches material on a
node through which some content was requested, they write to the ISP
claiming that this node is in violation of the DMCA (even though they are
actually responsible for the content being placed onto that node in the
first place!). While this is classic entrapment, and thus is very
unlikely to stand-up in court, it is possible that it would be sufficient
to persuade an ISP to take action and disconnect the user (since ISPs
have a reputation for being spineless in these matters).
There are several issues here. Firstly, in an environment where there is
healthy competition between ISPs, an ISP which is quick to cut people off
will only succeed in losing customers to their competitors. While right
now the broadband competition situation isn't great, there are powerful
vested interests working hard to open up that market (such as the
AOL-backed "Open Net Coalition" - http://opennetcoalition.org/). If
Freenet is widely deployed (as it would need to be to provoke this kind of
attack anyway), then it could make it in the ISPs interests to examine
Media Enforcer's (or whoever's) claim of infringement. It may even come
down to a court case, I am currently creating a non-profit corporation
which could serve as a focus for any legal action (as the EFF is with the
Decss case). Of course, this is only about broadband, there is
competition in the dial-up ISP marketplace, and in countries like the UK
with free-ISPs which you can sign-up to in minutes, getting cut-off by
your ISP is definitely not a big deal, and hurts them more than it hurts
you.
Another point, specific to "copyright.net" - the people who seem to be
working with Media Enforcer, is that they try to get content owners* to
pay them to protect their content, however they cannot protect specific
content in Freenet (in fact, their efforts will only serve to further
propogate the content which they request from the system so there are good
reasons why content-owners would NOT want to do business with them), all
they can do is try to attack Freenet in-general. This is why we should
keep an eye out for them on fuckedcompany.com.
* yeah yeah - can't own information etc etc
So anyway, Brandon suggested a way around this, which Mr Bad liked, but
neither myself, nor Scott, nor a few other people, think will work. My
belief is that there is no way to prevent node fishing, but the more
widely used Freenet is, the less effective node-fishing will be.
Ian.
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