On Friday 27 February 2009 21:17:21 bqz69 wrote: > Dennis Nezic wrote: > > On Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:47:09 +0100, bqz69 wrote: > >> It is still quite difficult to use and setup for normal people. > > > > More details would help :P. In Gentoo Linux, I do "emerge freenet", and > > My main complain is, that is not possible to use Freenet anonymously for > individual persons (without "friends"), which really is the main idea of > Freenet.
This is simply a matter of having enough users. It is not possible to use Facebook, or LinkedIn, or Orkut, without "friends". But they work. Whereas with Freenet, it is very much possible to use it without "friends", but its security (and especially survivability) is vastly enhanced if you can connect only to people you (marginally) know and (marginally) trust. Even Opennet-based (network seclevel = low/normal) Freenet is considerably more secure than the unencrypted web! Future versions of Freenet (particularly 0.9) will have higher security, probably including on opennet. However darknet (connecting to Friends only) will *always* be vastly more secure against most attacks, because it is simply much easier to get a connection to an opennet node (it's a normal part of the process of announcement and path folding), than to a darknet node (the user must manually agree to connect to you). It will also always be much harder to block, for similar reasons. Freenet's security in general is probably weaker than many people assume. But the same is true of Tor. They have different threat models and different attacks are useful against the two systems (see the FAQ for more detailed info on this). It will improve, but at the moment we are more concerned about ease of use, performance and getting 0.8.0 out. > > You are rigth, the very Freenet is very easy to install. > > But in order to use Freenet at fullest capabilities, you need tools like > jSite - to publish your freesites > FMS - to announce your freesites etc > Freemail - freenet e-mail system > > These functions could be an integrated part of Freenet, as they are > imperative to have - and they are not very easy to setup - I have made a > Freenet minihowto (www.minihowto.org), and I can assure you it was not > very easy for me to pin it all together about how to use a Freenet system. > > The Freenet program might be something like one combined GUI (Graphic > User Interface) where everything could be done, in order to use Freenet > at its maximum capabilities - that's my dream. In 0.8, Freetalk will be integrated into the web interface; this is being actively worked on and rapidly approaching usability (posting and reading messages/threads works now, but changing trust settings has not yet been implemented). A lot more people use webmail than use traditional standalone mail clients, so there is no reason a web interface can't be user friendly. Last year we tried to get a Summer of Code student to build a web interface for freemail, but that didn't pan out; it would certainly be helpful. I agree that we should include a freesite publishing wizard, this has been discussed but nothing has yet come of it. > > I like -and admire the people who have made Freenet, but it just seems > to me, as if the project is not developing very much at the moment - and > I had a small hope, that my thread might awaken some ideas - that's all! IMHO the db4o branch is worthwhile. It may not be worth the enormous effort it has taken, but it should greatly improve usability for many users by allowing bigger download/upload queues without crashing, resuming requests immediately on startup, and reducing resource usage. Other changes made during the development of 0.8 have helped to improve performance, which IMHO is critical if we want wider use of Freenet. On Friday 27 February 2009 23:18:37 Dennis Nezic wrote: > What you are dreaming of is an entire newbie-freenet-platform, complete > with newbie publishing tools (that power users would hate), and newbie > newsgroup tools, and a newbie email client, etc etc. The reason why > Toad et al will never do that is because it is simply too ambitious :) > --there is /plenty/ of work that needs to be done on the invisible > internals already. Moreover, why lock users into a single publishing > tool (like jSite), or a single newsreader/email client, etc? > > Nevertheless, I do realize that that is precisely what is necessary if > one wants to attract newbies. First of all, as long as it's all > modular, and I can strip away all the guis and have a lean and > barebones installation, I'm happy. But, second of all, you already can > do what you're looking for :). It's essentially a packaging issue. Just > make your own special B69FreenetPlatform installer that installs each > of those components all pre-configured and integrated with one > another :). I disagree. Freenet can and should include plugins implementing usable web-based chat, mail, and a freesite upload wizard. Being plugins, they can of course be removed. bzq's talking about a single UI clearly demonstrates that just bundling the stand-alone apps is not a good solution. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 835 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/support/attachments/20090302/f7686a2c/attachment.pgp>
