Building the system would be easier than solving the problem of knowing who to put in jail when it gets infested with the usual junk that tends to end up in anonymous systems.
But it'd be useful, so please go ahead and solve it :)
Or, just maybe, a system such as this would prove once and for all that it just isn't worth trying to control, censor, and otherwise police the internet. A hacker can dream, can't he?
Well, -someone- is going to jail when The Authorities find illegal content (whatever that means, the concept seems to be expanding quickly) on your computer. Would you prefer it to be you, or the one responsible for it? Unless you can solve that problem, I'm pretty sure you're going to have trouble finding people to volunteer.
As for policing the internet, I think that personal responsibility for your actions needs to apply even when you act using a computer. The consequences of your actions should to be reasonable though, and not like what we're seeing now with file sharing lawsuits.
That kind of defense hasn't worked very well in filesharing cases (or has it? at least I'm under the impression that it hasn't), and is even less likely to work if the offense is more severe. Like when the infamous "terrorist networks" put things there, or the kiddie porn people. At the very least you'll get hit for aiding the baddies.
In freenet you generally can not see what is stored on your node (i.e. PC) because it is encrypted. To make this work, a freenet 'URL' more or less contains the key to decrypt the content it references.
Sure, but you're still helping someone do something by taking part in the network. If that someone is doing something illegal, you're well on your way to getting in trouble. Especially if most of the activity in the network is illegal, then it'll be hard to argue that you didn't know what could happen. It's pretty much what killed Napster, although in that case it was the company that ran the network that got shut down.
I suppose it'll have to be a serious problem for someone to make the effort of finding and decoding the data, but I don't doubt that sooner or later someone will decide that it's worth it.
If there's going to be processing of the data, and not just storage, the local node will need to have access to the encryption keys. That should make the work of the investigator easier. With enough cunning trickery it'll probably be hard to find them, but with access to the hardware I have no doubt that it's doable.
Hm. So the work needs to be done in a virtual machine that is given access to a local file storage and the freeserve (let's call it that, sounds nice) network. The vm needs to query the network for tasks to be performed, download the data for the task, process it, and upload the result.. Should be a fun project to design it.
Fairly simple. Except for all the technical and legal problems :)
You should have a look at the freenet documentation. They thought about all those problems already. (And your guesses about their solutions are partly right, partly wrong. For example your node does not have to know the keys and no VM is necessary.)
If you're going to do any processing on the data you're going to need to decrypt it, and then you'll need the keys. And unless you -really- trust random people on the net, you'll probably want to run that processing in some sort of sandboxed environment. I went one step further and put it in a VM, since that should be easier to close down.
Just running a Freenet node doesn't it of course, but I was thinking of the 'peer-to-peer servers in the cloud' thing.
> If you're going to do any processing on the data you're going to need to decrypt it [...]
You underestimate modern cryptography. Or to give a simplified model: Imagine you just had blobs of encrypted data that you served and the requester would do all the processing.
But it'd be useful, so please go ahead and solve it :)