Someone recently asked about Freenet, so I decided to try it out again. If you’re curi­ous about Freenet, the about page gives a good descrip­tion of it. It’s a WWW-​​like net­work — minus the dynamic con­tent and search engines — with the added bene­fit that it’s totally anonym­ous and uncensor­able. “Anonym­ous” is a bit of a mis­nomer: it’s actu­ally closer to pseud­onym­ous since, through cryp­to­graphic prim­it­ives, it’s designed around the idea of hav­ing iden­tit­ies not linked to real iden­tit­ies. The “WWW-​​like” is also a mis­nomer as it’s actu­ally a more gen­eral key-​​data sort of enorm­ous filesys­tem, but the WWW-​​like part of it is what most users see, espe­cially initially.

I played around with it years ago and I have to say it’s improved quite a bit since then. The biggest, and just about the only vis­ible, change is in per­form­ance. I haven’t dug into see­ing what they’ve done to help things, but most frees­ites load within a minute and there are very few “data not found“s. “Within a minute” may not sound very impress­ive com­pared to the WWW, but it’s really impress­ive con­sid­er­ing the nature of Freenet.

From a local resource con­sump­tion stand­point, per­form­ance is still quite ter­rible. I’ve been run­ning it for close to a day now and the load aver­age stays some­where around 0.3 even when not doing any­thing and can jump up above 3.0 when doing cas­ual brows­ing of frees­ites or Frost boards. This is unfor­tu­nate since you have to leave it run­ning 24/​7 for it to work well.

The same prob­lem is with Freenet that has always been there: con­tent. I agree with the gen­eral philo­sophies of Freenet: even “good” cen­sor­ship philo­soph­ic­ally has bad con­sequences and so it is nice to have a place like Freenet free from any sort of cen­sor­ship. Well, in prac­tice, that hasn’t really panned out. Freenet’s been around for close to 10 years now and still doesn’t have any com­pel­ling con­tent. I’ve poked around the major frees­ites (this link will not work if you aren’t on Freenet) and the Frost mes­sage boards and…nothing. There’s piles of con­tent, of course, but little of it of con­sequence, very little of it inter­est­ing, and none of it compelling.

The primary value of some­thing like Freenet in mostly-​​free coun­tries like Canada would be Wikileaks, I would think. Well there is some of that — for instance there’s a frees­ite devoted to the leaked Sarah Palin emails — but the fact of the mat­ter is that Wikileaks exists in the “real” cen­sor­able Inter­net and it hasn’t been cen­sored. Or at least not yet. There’s been pos­tur­ing that maybe it will be some day, we’ll see. But the fact that it hasn’t been yet takes away a niche mar­ket for Freenet.

What I see a lot of on the frees­ites is politically…disagreeable…writings. In this sense Freenet actu­ally does make sense. The Inter­net is becom­ing less and less anonym­ous. It used to be that you could set up a Geo­cit­ies sites and write about your love for Emma Gold­man, but these days ser­vice pro­viders (in the most gen­eral sense) are chomp­ing at the bit jump­ing all over them­selves at the oppor­tun­ity of passing on IP addresses and what­not. The polit­ical writ­ings on Freenet aren’t gen­er­ally illegal (well, maybe there might be one or two in a few coun­tries with severe hate speech laws, but those are the excep­tions), but they’re uncon­ven­tional enough that I can see people want­ing anonym­ity. It’s not so much about Freenet being uncensor­able as it is about Freenet offer­ing this very eleg­ant pseud­onym­ity. I sup­pose it’s nice to have a place where you can write and you know that it’s impossible for future employ­ers to track you down and find out that you secretly agree with Emma Goldman’s politics.

Well, I still agree with the the­ory of Freenet and I still acknow­ledge its prac­tical value in places like China, but…I still can’t see that it applies to me. I’d like to cre­ate a frees­ite to add more con­tent and get more people inter­ested in Freenet, but like most people, I can’t think of any­thing com­pel­ling to put there. I think I’ll just unin­stall it again and wish it well.

P.S. I’ve just learned that Frost has been obsol­esced by a new Freenet mes­sage board sys­tem called FMS. When I’d pre­vi­ously used Freenet many years ago, Frost was the big one, so I installed it out of habit. FMS looks actu­ally rather fant­astic (and it works with your exist­ing news­group reader like Thun­der­bird) and maybe I’ll keep Freenet around another couple hours to play with FMS, but I doubt the con­tent on there is going to be rad­ic­ally dif­fer­ent from the rest of Freenet.

I won’t go over the back­ground of IPv6, but suf­fice it to say I think it’s rather keen and I’d like to see it catch on as it would sim­plify a lot of things. It’s got a ser­i­ous chicken-​​and-​​egg prob­lem: con­tent pro­viders don’t see the need to sup­port IPv6 until their read­ers are using IPv6; end-​​users don’t care about IPv6 until con­tent pro­viders do.

We’ve been using IPv6 (Jasna may or may not be aware of it) on our net­work for about half a year. Since my ISP, Tek­Savvy, doesn’t route IPv6 traffic I’ve had to resort to 6to4 for the time being to pre­tend that I’m part of the great IPv6 Inter­net. For IPv6-​​capable sites, I con­nect over IPv6 and for those that aren’t, I con­nect over IPv4. It’s all very trans­par­ent, so I checked my router stats to see how much of our band­width was actu­ally hap­pen­ing over IPv6 and it was only about 0.01%, very discouraging.

A large pro­por­tion of our band­width comes from Usenet, so I went to see if I could find IPv6-​​capable Usenet serv­ers to help fight the good fight. As it turns out, there are three free Usenet serv­ers which are IPv6 cap­able, all of them being in the Neth­er­lands. I tried all three and one of them actu­ally worked for me.

Finally, I decided to make this site, Wiz­ard­like, IPv6-​​capable. Well my host­ing com­pany, Dream­host, doesn’t sup­port IPv6, but there’s a friendly site, again in the Neth­er­lands, called IPv6Proxy, which will proxy any hos­ted site. Thus, if you want to con­nect via IPv6, you can no go to ipv6​.wiz​ard​like​.ca (note: even if you aren’t IPv6-​​capable, that site will still work. Due to how IPv6Proxy is set up, the host­name has to be IPv4 reach­able). The reason I cre­ated a sep­ar­ate domain for the IPv6-​​reachable site is that it can be rather slow. Con­sider:

If you’re like me hanging out in Canada, con­nect­ing to IPv6Proxy in the Neth­er­lands just so that it can con­nect to Dream­host in Cali­for­nia and then relay the web­site back to you is a little silly and adds about 100ms of latency.

In addi­tion to ipv6​.wiz​ard​like​.ca there’s also ipv6​.pro​jects​.wiz​ard​like​.ca.

With the recent announce­ment from Google regard­ing the release of Google Wave—slated for late Septem­ber 2009 — I finally decided to do some read­ing on it. I recom­mend watch­ing the abridged video of it to get an idea, though the abridged ver­sion leaves out some cool stuff about the protocol.

I love the pro­tocol. Both Google’s actions and words point to Wave being some­thing which is not con­trolled by Google in any way. The pro­tocol will be open and Google’s ref­er­ence imple­ment­a­tion will be open source. To start with, Google will be the world’s largest Wave pro­vider since they’re the ones who have developed the pro­tocol, ref­er­ence imple­ment­a­tion and have done the test­ing on it, but ideally organ­iz­a­tions will start offer­ing Wave accounts in exactly the same way they offer email accounts today.

If you watch the video, you get a very ambi­tious view of Wave: it will not only obsol­ete email, but also instant mes­saging, polling, blog­ging, pic­ture shar­ing and file shar­ing, wikis and even video games. Being a little bit famil­iar with XMPP — the tech­no­logy Wave is built upon — I have to say it was only a mat­ter of time before someone tried to do some­thing this ambi­tious. XMPP is a beau­ti­ful pro­tocol and open and extens­ible to boot. Wave seems like some­thing that had to hap­pen eventually.

Even if Google Wave sup­plants noth­ing other than email, it would be well worth it. Email has a lot of short­com­ings, as any­one who took my net­work­ing course should appre­ci­ate. Cryp­to­graph­ic­ally secure authen­tic­a­tion and encryp­tion end-​​to-​​end is required by the pro­tocol — it is impossible to send any­thing unen­cryp­ted with Wave — and that alone is some­thing to be pleased about.

The down­side to this all is I’m get­ting all excited now about it and I want to start work­ing on devel­op­ing a Wave cli­ent. I’m all adult and bor­ing these days with my “respons­ib­il­it­ies” and so it has to get thrown to the bot­tom of my to-​​do list along with all the other cool non – research-​​related pro­jects I’d love to do.

And I should say I have a hor­rible his­tory of pre­dict­ing which tech­no­lo­gies will catch on and which won’t. In my world, MSN and Face­book should be fail­ures; PGP and XMPP should have taken the world by storm. With that track record, I sup­pose Google Wave is doomed to be a spec­tac­u­lar fail­ure, which would be a real shame.