I seem to have a thing for plotting things.

Plot also available in SVG format. Both should be updated vaguely daily.

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.

Considering the reaction by the world’s governments to the most recent Wikileaks leak, I may have to reconsider Freenet’s role a little bit.

There’s this problem of having to have a password for every website you have an account with, which is a serious problem if you have an account on a lot of sites. OpenID was supposed to solve this problem by allowing you to—securely—share one account across multiple sites, but never took off due to a chicken-and-egg problem: almost no one uses OpenID which means almost no sites feel the need to support it. Most web browsers will store passwords for you, but that doesn’t do you any good if you want to access one of your accounts from a different computer.

You can use the same password—or the same few passwords—across multiple sites, but this is actually a real security risk and is something that should be avoided if possible.

So I put together a wee bit of Javascript to help manage passwords. You have to remember one base password—which should not be from the dictionary, but otherwise has no constraints—and from that password it will automatically generate what your particular password is for any given site. Your base password is never transmitted across the network. The generated passwords should hopefully meet the criteria of any site you come across: they all contain one uppercase letter, one punctuation mark and one numeric digit. If some unscrupulous website owner gets your password to one site, it is veritably intractable for them to determine your base password or your password to any other site. And it requires you to only remember one site.

I post it in case anyone finds it useful or wants to use it for their own purposes. If you do want to use it, follow these steps:

1. Steal my HTML document and change around the style, etc., to suit your needs.
2. Find a place to host the HTML document.
3. Come up with a base password, hopefully something harder to guess than “galvatron”.
4. Determine the SHA1 hash of your base password. You can find online SHA1 calculators, but from a security standpoint it would be preferable to calculate the hash on your home computer (e.g., on a Unix-based operating system with OpenSSL installed, one can do something like echo –n “galvatron” | openssl sha1 to calculate the hash).
5. In the HTML document, modify the Javascript variable password_hash according to what you just calculated.

The script will then give you passwords that you should use for sites you sign up for in the future, which you will then never have to remember.

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.

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.wizardlike.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.wizardlike.ca there’s also ipv6.projects.wizardlike.ca.

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.