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Old June 11th, 2002
Taliban Taliban is offline
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Join Date: March 13th, 2002
Location: Aachen
Posts: 832
Taliban is flying high
Default Re: Crimes

Quote:
Originally posted by Unregistered
7. But why is anonymity necessary?
You cannot have freedom of speech without the option to remain anonymous. Most censorship is retrospective, it is generally much easier to curtail free speech by punishing those who exercise it afterward, rather than preventing them from doing it in the first place. The only way to prevent this is to remain anonymous. It is a common misconception that you cannot trust anonymous information. This is not necessarily true, using digital signatures people can create a secure anonymous pseudonym which, in time, people can learn to trust. Freenet incorporates a mechanism called "subspaces" to facilitate this.
You cannot compare freenet with gnutella. Freenet was designed for text messages and small files, for small amounts of data, that could be distributed without having to fear censorship. It's rather a replacement for the world wide web than a file-sharing application.

Gnutella is a file-sharing protocol, designed to find and transmit large amounts of data over a serverless and very stable network at the highest possible speed. If freenet was the WWW, then gnutella would be the FTP servers.
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