Freenet project: future of internet?
Quote:
I disagree with what you say. But I will defend your right to say it.
(personal translation)
The Freenet project is a response to all the liberty of expression threats.
Founded on 1999, the goal of this peer to peer system is to create a free internet protecting the anonymity and a total liberty of expression for each users who can view or create free sites or documents without be traced.
In order to do it, the developers have implemented really interesting features:
- The anonymity is granted by heavy encryptions for all comunications and data.
- The network is decentalized like Gnutella. The result is that nobody can control or stop it.
- A system of duplication of data preserve the integrity of the network even if a part of it is destroyed.
- The search requests use really good alghoritms (the same than the Debian update system) in order to be more secure, faster and to use less ressources (for a network of size n, the research time will be of log(n))
Practicaly, you (the user) are a node. You have only to connect to your node with (for example) your internet browser (typing "http://localhost:8888/") and to go in the "free" world.
All that your doing is anonymous and, as a legal protection, you can't easily know what contain exactly the freenet data on your node.
As Freenet is not miraculous, there are some limitations and problems (yes, there's a cost to liberty):
- Freenet is not designed to big files.
- With all those security encryptions, the page loading is really longer on Freenet than on Internet.
- Freenet is still in beta-phase and there is about 1 new version per day. If you don't update frequently (about 2 or 3 time each month minimum), you will become incompatible with the rest of the network.
All the infos, downloads and analysis are on http://freenetproject.org (seems to work only when it wants! Retry if you have problems)
I want to say "thank you" to ACBM magazines with wich I have discovered this amazing anonymous p2p system.
I don't know for you but, personally, I will keep an eye on it.
