On 6 Oct 2005, at 20:34, jrandom at i2p.net wrote: > "If the State decides it wants to bust some freenet users there is > nothing we can do to prevent it from achieving this objective - > as long > as Freenet is large enough for the state to bother with." > > I agree. > > The qualification you make is key,
Actually, the qualification Matthew made is largely beside the point, this being that Freenet's ability to protect users has limitations, this doesn't make it useless. > Now, you may be ethically fine with both accepting that and > promoting Freenet > for use in those regimes, knowing it doesn't offer individuals > protection. > I'm not. I do not recommend the use of any of the known anon comm > theory or > tech for the masses in hostile regimes, as we all know it is > insufficient to > protect individuals, and those people face consequences graver than > a slap on > the wrist. You are misunderstanding the nature of the problem. People in China are using tools right now that afford significantly less protection than today's Freenet or I2P, and which offer *far* less protection than Freenet 0.7 will. Our goal is to give them better options. The fact that those options may be less than perfect isn't the issue, so long as they are better than what they are using today. If someone was dying of starvation, would you deny them a Big Mac on the grounds that Big Macs aren't the perfect food? I suspect not, you would give them the best food available to you, regardless of whether it happened to meet your definition of prefect. Many people in the anonymity community have set themselves the goal of "perfect anonymity". In doing so, they aren't focussed on what users want or need, because most users I have met want "better", and will happily accept that in lieu of "perfect". Ian.
