Why is all that F2F software dying or not moving forward?

[mriedel]

WASTE has been dead for years (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=82356), even the WASTE again "active" fork seems dead (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=215539, http://wasteagain.sourceforge.net/).

TurtleF2F (http://www.turtle4privacy.org/new/en_newin15.html) has a completely amateurish "homepage", claims to have released a new version which is available nowhere, has its old versions available as .rpm or .deb for 32bit only and sources aren't available at all in any version.

GNUNet I don't know, it seems to be there, but it's not moving a long a lot. gnunet-gtk looks like it's been put together by a ten year old in about 20 minutes.

Why is that happening? One would think secure anonymous peer-to-peer networking would find a broad user base and interest. I suspect industry & government influence :P

[Polygon]

ive never heard of any of these programs or whatever...maybe they arnt moving forward bedcause there are better/more popular alternatives?

[mriedel]

There are none, that is the point (should've been more specific above).

[jomiolto]

What about Freenet (http://freenetproject.org/)?

[tbroderick]

One would think secure anonymous peer-to-peer networking would find a broad user base and interest. I suspect industry & government influence :P

I suspect most people don't like the idea of trading child porn.

[mriedel]

I suspect most people don't like the idea of trading child porn.

Are you saying that

a) everyone who wishes to avoid censorship and prosecution trades child porn

or that

b) such networks support the trading of child porn and should therefore be (morally) banned?

As to a:

My emotional reaction: You fail. Please go away.
My rational reaction: Please read up on the situation of governmental censorship and invasion of privacy.

As to b:

Privacy of (letter) correspondence (granted by law in many countries) has been supporting crime for centuries, yet it is widely considered worth that downside. Everything comes with a disadvantage.

[jomiolto]

I suspect most people don't like the idea of trading child porn.

Are you saying that

a) everyone who wishes to avoid censorship and prosecution trades child porn

or that

b) such networks support the trading of child porn and should therefore be (morally) banned?

I'm not tbroderick, but I think he might be referring to some of the networks (like Tor, I believe) that route other users' traffic through your computer, and the fact that that traffic might be anything, including child porn. Technically it's not your traffic, but it still means that criminal material might pass through your computer and network connection.

[mriedel]

Only some of the F2F networks I mentioned do that (it's called data migration / distributed data). Tor is an anonymisation network and does neither migrate data to you nor relay other users' connection data through you if you don't explicitly set it up to do so (for which case they provide you with additional legal information).

Even with data migration enabled, that data is stored encrypted and, depending on the network, isn't even accessible by you.

[Barrucadu]

I would imagine they are dying because there are much more popular alternatives - such as BitTorrent with encryption enabled.

[mriedel]

There are no alternatives (that I know of). BitTorrent encryption is supposed to keep ISPs from throttling you. It doesn't provide anonymity and the encryption itself is weak.


Peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic makes up more than a third of total internet traffic.[2] Some ISPs deal with this traffic by increasing their capacity whilst others use specialised systems to throttle (i.e. slow down) BitTorrent traffic. Obfuscation and encryption make traffic harder to detect and therefore harder to throttle. These systems are not designed to provide anonymity or confidentiality.


The estimated strength of the encryption corresponds to about 60–80 bits for common symmetrical ciphers[16]. This is quite low for today's standards but one has to keep in mind that this protocol wasn't designed as a secure transport protocol but as a fast and efficient obfuscation method. AES was proposed as the encryption method but not adopted because it consumed too much CPU time and the required D-H keys to achieve a security equal to AES would have been much bigger or require elliptic curve cryptography, making the handshake more expensive in terms of used CPU time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_protocol_encryption

[tbroderick]

Even with data migration enabled, that data is stored encrypted and, depending on the network, isn't even accessible by you.

The point is if you are using freenet and some pervert wants child porn, freenet might pick your node to route the porn to the user. The data will be cached on your computer. It will be encrypted, but it's still there. That's a big hurdle for a lot of people, myself included. to overcome.

If you want to share music, movies, etc. Use bittorrent or gnutella.

[mriedel]

I'm not looking for filesharing as such. I'm looking for Friend-2-Friend secure networking software or rather, I suspect it's not a coincidence most of that software isn't moving along.