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!
But what you say is not entirely true. There is much to love about companies burning cash on R&D. That's how a lot of greatness happened.
But what is wrong in the meta situation is that while Meta officially projects its 2026 AI capital expenditures to be between $130 billion and $145 billion, investigative reports indicate its true future liabilities exceed $690 billion once unlisted back-end deals and lease commitments are factored in. They have used shadow accounting in many places to hide these things. As it's a publicly traded company so if that goes south it hits a lot of 401ks. So that in a nutshell is why its kinda a bad thing. But you are still kinda right in that its not an existential threat and it's not going to wipe Meta out even though those numbers could totally destroy the vast majority of public companies.
Can you link to those reports? How reputable are the investigators? Financial market has great incentive to stay informed. Those 401ks are their bread and butter customers, and not every bank/fund is Meta's co-conspirator in its shady deals, if any.
Its in every 10-Q and 10-K. Original poster read 1 article in the WSJ and thinks he/they uncovered a massive conspiracy. Its disclosed exactly as it should be according to GAAP accounting. They went above & beyond to disclose them in the text narrative of the filings because the GAAP requirements require them not to include them in the numbers.
WSJ just needs to sound alarm bells so people keep paying for their crappy journalism, and thus everything they write becomes alarmist slop.
Ultimately, the equity is really cheap even today on trailing numbers. ~12x EV/trailing EBITDA excluding-RL losses and still growing 25%-34% in each of the last 4 quarters organically at $200B+ of scale.
One of my pet peeves is that people who dont understand business forbid these companies from making investments or starting new businesses now or in the future. Meta has been sitting on $50-100b of cash on the balance sheet for years, and people lose their minds when they start to meaningfully invest it. I think theyve earned the right to diversify
I have bad news for you. No matter what you do here it is probably not sustainable. Competing commercially with people who have so much more resources and ability to build is not sustainable. If it's open source you need adoption, and shouldn't care if people want to steal and remix your work as that will drive more adoption.
But from a fellow engineer's perspective we don't need another commercial solution in this space. Every major tech vendor is working on harnesses, and we will get ones that will run circles around yours for free. The open source ones that get popular will have mit/freebsd/etc permissive licenses. (or no one will adopt them) But coming at it from the angle you are indicates you haven't reasoned well about this. Please don't hurt yourself and those around you by starting a startup on this idea.
The scariest part of the interaction is the first video at https://x.ai/bot where the bot just snags your creds from the browser and takes over. So many people are going to give x all their data and creds.
AI Session Hijacking is such a dead end and I think this will be the thing that kills it. Just register these things in the IDP and let them sign into their own accounts.
Maybe if we give these things their own identity people will stop letting their AIs post as them in linkedin
Not sure I understand the point your are making. how is this unique for bots with their own identity? Bots hijacking a user session can also be blocked
Bots skinwalking their users inherit the behavioral scoring of that user. As a rule, they'll take a lot longer to get blocked than new bot accounts would.
Parallax error decreases significantly when lens are close enough and these are mm apart. They are close enough that you can probably just play a perspective trick and hide any artifacts.
There is plenty of room for open source models that "require" a subscription to be used or obtain working updated binaries. Same as any open source platform.
I'd be happy to pay a small monthly fee to license the model to run locally. I'm already paying for Claude, GPT, Gemini,etc.
I think it is funny that it's sewer, because a sewer is also a underground way around things, which is a good description of the out of band solution here. So the name checks out.
It should work in cloud environments, We tested it on EKS and digital ocean cloud so far, and it works. The kloak controller is deployed as privileged daemonset that have access to the underlying host and can perform eBPF attachment operations on all the pods on that host.
The obvious business opportunity here is for some lawyer to start running an AI service to do these kinds of things. Anyone who subscribes is a client of the lawyer, who owns the chatbot infrastructure, which would be protected under attorney client privilege.
The buisness opportunity is what they are advertising here, communication with lawyers is protected, continue to go pay real lawyers for every question and don't try yourself with AI, that is unfortunately not protected.
If any of the devs read this please find a better project to contribute to.
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