First, thank you for creating this project. When I was a young high school student in China, I tried all different kind of tools to evade internet censorship, including Freenet (although admittedly with little success, there was never enough peers to connect to and/so it was too slow to download anything meaningful).

My question is whether freenet is designed to be resistant for active adversaries with deep packet inspection capability, particularly like the Chinese firewall that is also observed to do statistical timing analysis of packets? Is there any possibility to apply obfuscation to the peer to peer connection? And is there any mechanism to aide peer discovery (DHT?)

The original freenet design was replicating content as it was requested. You had no way of locating "all" the copies as they would get cached "along the way" elsewhere on the keyspace when you request them.

That property was useful both for improving availability AND censorship resistance: you could not attempt to "locate" where the blocks are without spreading them.

My naive understanding of the new design is that you can have contracts that are replicated... but they still cluster around the same place in the keyspace so any capable active adversary can actively deny access to content trivially. Did I misunderstand something here?

There actually are: among the darknets, Hyphanet is the only one that has a main use for "deviant data resistant to censorship":

Example publication: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/135485651880663...

> What are the content patterns on Freenet? Four patterns were identified. Freenet is (1) an archive of deviant data resistant to censorship (2) a space dominated by content associated with masculinity, (3) a nonmarket space where commercial exchange is non-existent, and (4) an empty space with many requests not returning information, and many flogs abandoned. We asked a third question: How does the analysis of Freenet inform current understandings of hacker culture? Freenet, we suggest, can be understood as a type of digital “wilderness”. It is a singular darknet space, supporting a distinct set of hacker practices

Practically: people in Hyphanet blog about stuff they dare not blog about in the clearnet -- anything from radical politics (from all kinds, left, right, libertarian, …) over personal opinion pages to wilder stuff like magick (yes, in that spelling).

Not to forget the Russian Poet who’s posting daily poems with the goal (as he wrote) that those poems still survive after police knocked at his door.

(besides talk about hyphanet and privacy tech)

So yes: I don’t understand the downvotes either, because it’s a legitimate question with a pretty clear answer: yes.

Thank you for the downvotes.

You're moving the debate here. The question was "How are the goals different?" from the project leader (who ought to know better), not whether moving them makes sense.

the _point_ of freenet was that you could anonymously share/store information. For better or worse, that was the point of it. It also drove the UX and tradeoffs for the network.

It was slower than Kazaa/bittorrent, but it was far harder to work out who was shareing what. (if memory serves it also chunked files up so they weren;t on the same machine, but that could be me misremembering)

I kind of see "focus" in the FAQ and "goals" in this thread as interchangeable.

It would surprise me if this would not be a common interpretation of these texts alone among the readers here.

As for the general reputation of the OG Freenet in this lineage, to the extent I'm aware, anonymity was pretty much the defining characteristic. More or less everything else in the user experience suffered to some extent compared to other chat and file sharing services because of this "focus".