It's awful to see people still using this. Freenet was a terrible mistake, it achieved none of its goals, but it ended up being an amazing tool for pedos and child porn.
If any of the devs read this please find a better project to contribute to.
The true paradox of the internet is that the more private, the more anonymous, the more safe a platform is, the more likely it will attract pedophiles, criminals, and terrorists.
You either have to accept the legal and moral consequences that your platform will be used for illegal things, or make your platform less safe, private, and anonymous.
Lots of bold statements, zero arguments except the usual fear mongering. "Think of the children!!!"
Hyphanet (formerly Freenet) works, people are actually using it.
Meanwhile, almost every single day there is news on hackernews about the corporate surveillance dystopia that the regular internet has become.
Yet a project which provides actually private, anonymous communication and publishing, and has a track record of decades of doing so, is attacked with such vitriol.
You should rather ask yourself:
Are you doing society a service by trying to discourage the very few people who, as unpaid volunteers, actually provide an alternative to the adtech-funded walled garden that the internet is nowadays?
If you ever ran an actual freenet node and you looked at the content that flowed through it you realize that solution doesn't make the world better, and all your flowerly arguments are bs. Censorship resistance isn't a good goal... many countries have strong free speach laws, but even they put limits on it for good reasons. This is one of those reasons, and building a tool to deny justice (called censorship resistance) where it should be done is not a good thing.
The right thing to do here is probably not to encourage the developers to find something better to work on, but instead get the FBI to realize if they just got a warrant for every freenet node and they siezed that machine it would have child porn in the cache or local storage and you could arrest and prosecute a bunch of people for child porn who deserve it just for running a node even if they didn't make it or look for it.
There is no way this project does more good than bad. It's a pedo platform.
Firstoff: "looked at the content that flowed through it" – if you tried, you would have seen that you cannot do that (without downloading illegal stuff yourself, which would be illegal if you’re not law enforcement with the task to do that, so I sure hope you didn’t).
And no one ever got prosecuted for the encrypted chunks of stuff they cannot decrypt on their disk. So this part is just fearmongering.
And to quote 2023: ”Freenet / Hyphanet shows up on hacker news and the top comment is advocating against running it because “we don't need privacy against the police“.” – “in the year after many states in the US outlawed abortion and police used period trackers to find women who might try to get an abortion”.
And the Russian poet who shares his poems on Hyphanet so they survive when police knocks at his door definitely does need this protection.
In contrast, the pedo-criminals around Epstein communicated via email.
And looking at the recent pedo-bustings, those communicated via WhatsApp, Skype, Game platforms, Music sites, and HD streaming, and they traded horrible material in volumes that exceed the current maximum storage in Hyphanet by orders of magnitude, and had 100x the members of the total user count of Hyphanet. Some info:
https://www.infoportal-rg.de/2025/04/03/news-kinderporno-rin...
So the relentless fight within Hyphanet to not be a platform for pedo-criminals seems to work. It has moderation systems without centralized power but with sensible defaults.
You're still just hand wringing and fear mongering.
You presuppose that were not for freenet there'd be less CSAM on the internet. This is false. Your local politician is going to find their kiddie porn somewhere or another. If you care so much, why are you on the internet at all? You should be advocating to shut down the entire internet. After all, think of the children!
It's awful to see people still using this. Freenet was a terrible mistake, it achieved none of its goals, but it ended up being an amazing tool for pedos and child porn.
If any of the devs read this please find a better project to contribute to.
The true paradox of the internet is that the more private, the more anonymous, the more safe a platform is, the more likely it will attract pedophiles, criminals, and terrorists.
You either have to accept the legal and moral consequences that your platform will be used for illegal things, or make your platform less safe, private, and anonymous.
Lots of bold statements, zero arguments except the usual fear mongering. "Think of the children!!!"
Hyphanet (formerly Freenet) works, people are actually using it.
Meanwhile, almost every single day there is news on hackernews about the corporate surveillance dystopia that the regular internet has become.
Yet a project which provides actually private, anonymous communication and publishing, and has a track record of decades of doing so, is attacked with such vitriol.
You should rather ask yourself:
Are you doing society a service by trying to discourage the very few people who, as unpaid volunteers, actually provide an alternative to the adtech-funded walled garden that the internet is nowadays?
If you ever ran an actual freenet node and you looked at the content that flowed through it you realize that solution doesn't make the world better, and all your flowerly arguments are bs. Censorship resistance isn't a good goal... many countries have strong free speach laws, but even they put limits on it for good reasons. This is one of those reasons, and building a tool to deny justice (called censorship resistance) where it should be done is not a good thing.
The right thing to do here is probably not to encourage the developers to find something better to work on, but instead get the FBI to realize if they just got a warrant for every freenet node and they siezed that machine it would have child porn in the cache or local storage and you could arrest and prosecute a bunch of people for child porn who deserve it just for running a node even if they didn't make it or look for it.
There is no way this project does more good than bad. It's a pedo platform.
Firstoff: "looked at the content that flowed through it" – if you tried, you would have seen that you cannot do that (without downloading illegal stuff yourself, which would be illegal if you’re not law enforcement with the task to do that, so I sure hope you didn’t).
And no one ever got prosecuted for the encrypted chunks of stuff they cannot decrypt on their disk. So this part is just fearmongering.
And to quote 2023: ”Freenet / Hyphanet shows up on hacker news and the top comment is advocating against running it because “we don't need privacy against the police“.” – “in the year after many states in the US outlawed abortion and police used period trackers to find women who might try to get an abortion”.
And the Russian poet who shares his poems on Hyphanet so they survive when police knocks at his door definitely does need this protection.
In contrast, the pedo-criminals around Epstein communicated via email.
And looking at the recent pedo-bustings, those communicated via WhatsApp, Skype, Game platforms, Music sites, and HD streaming, and they traded horrible material in volumes that exceed the current maximum storage in Hyphanet by orders of magnitude, and had 100x the members of the total user count of Hyphanet. Some info: https://www.infoportal-rg.de/2025/04/03/news-kinderporno-rin...
So the relentless fight within Hyphanet to not be a platform for pedo-criminals seems to work. It has moderation systems without centralized power but with sensible defaults.
You're still just hand wringing and fear mongering.
You presuppose that were not for freenet there'd be less CSAM on the internet. This is false. Your local politician is going to find their kiddie porn somewhere or another. If you care so much, why are you on the internet at all? You should be advocating to shut down the entire internet. After all, think of the children!
Agreed. "Java version 9" says it all.