Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
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Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
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submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Not on a daily basis, but I like to browse freenet occasionally. It's interesting that sites uploaded to freenet are up as long as people visit them, no matter if the original uploader is long gone. It acts as a decentralized wayback machine.

Beware that iirc, unlike Tor and I2P, Freenet leaks your IP, so I recommend to use a VPN.

Edit: I was talking about the "old" Freenet, recently renamed to Hyphanet. I haven't used the new Freenet, which apparently is different in design. https://www.hyphanet.org/freenet-renamed-to-hyphanet.html

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Beware that iirc, unlike Tor an[d] I2P, Freenet leaks your IP, so I recommend to use a VPN.

If it's using basic peer-to-peer tech, I suspect you may be right. Been awhile since I looked into it, and as I recall it wasn't really built for privacy so much as another way to share info with few limitations (hence the free in freenet), so it'd make sense if it did.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The opener version by necessity makes it apparent that you are running a node, but without some coordinated efforts to 'surround' you and be in control of all node points connecting to it nobody can verify what requests originated or ended at your host. It's a plausible deniability state rather than pure anonymity as far as the neighbors go.

Very simple comparison, shout to everyone in the room you want a file, if they have it they'll send it, if not they'll ask their neighbors, but they never tell the neighbors it's not for them they just ask for the file, this continues on until someone has the file and passes lt back to the one who requested it from them up the chain until the first person gets it. In this way even the second person who was the first peer doesn't know who originally requested it, just that this person asked them.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

I've been off and on since the way back times. It seems to be frozen for some while ever since the original dev 'Toad' went off to do his own thing a few years back. Conceptually it's a neat idea but suffers greatly from a 'slowest link in the chain' problem when looking to fetch sites since any given node only knows their immediate peer rather than the true source on either end of a request.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Just seeing the renaming bullshit they pulled off (really? renaming an existing project AND renaming a different thing to the old name?!?) is enough to avoid both projects. Anyone who creates confusion like that will also make other unsound decisions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Interesting, hadn't looked recently to see that. Ian Clark, aka Toad, wrote both though and likely just wanted to take advantage of the name recognition from Freenet without all the uproar that happened when they announced the 0.5 to 0.7 rewrite of Freenet. Back then, it was migrating TCP to UDP now it's moving from Java to Rust. Both though end up being an effective reset of the odd little sub-web we know as Freenet.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Never heard of it. Got a link?