More about FreeNet
The network has been buzzing with activity after
FreeNet got mentioned on SlashDot, I’m seeing a constant total
throughput of about 50 KiB/s from my node, split between about 35 KiB/s
upstream and 15 KiB/s downstream.
This means that the effect of “plausible deniability” is starting to make sense. This is the argument that I cannot be blamed for the things on my machine because I probably didn’t put them there myself. Or rather, it’s a defence against the case where someone requests some information from FreeNet and sees that my machine supplies it to them. Every node on FreeNet knows the IP addresses of it’s neighbours, and it know where it got each piece of information from.
But things work a little different on FreeNet than on most other networks. The mere act of requesting information moves it around the network, so just because you got it from my machine, it’s hard for you to justify your claim that I had something to do with it. It could infact be your request that made my machine go get the information from another node, so who’s to blame now?
It’s these questions that make FreeNet interesting from a teoretical point of view. If you’re interested in the legal implications of technoligies like FreeNet, then you should go and read this article from the UCLA Journal of Law and Techonology.
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