http://freenetproject.org


What is Freenet?

"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet.
Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where
were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?'"
--Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation



Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse and publish "freesites" (web sites
accessible only through Freenet) and chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Freenet is decentralised to
make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in "darknet" mode, where users only connect to their friends,
is very difficult to detect.

Communications by Freenet nodes are encrypted and are routed through other nodes to make it extremely difficult
to determine who is requesting the information and what its content is.

Users contribute to the network by giving bandwidth and a portion of their hard drive (called the "data store")
for storing files. Files are automatically kept or deleted depending on how popular they are, with the least popular
being discarded to make way for newer or more popular content. Files are encrypted, so generally the user cannot
easily discover what is in his datastore, and hopefully can't be held accountable for it. Chat forums, websites,
and search functionality, are all built on top of this distributed data store.

Freenet has been downloaded over 2 million times since the project started, and used for the distribution of censored
information all over the world including countries such as China and the Middle East. Ideas and concepts pioneered in
Freenet have had a significant impact in the academic world. Our 2000 paper "Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information
Storage and Retrieval System" was the most cited computer science paper of 2000 according to Citeseer, and Freenet has
also inspired papers in the worlds of law and philosophy. Ian Clarke, Freenet's creator and project coordinator,
was selected as one of the top 100 innovators of 2003 by MIT's Technology Review magazine.

An important recent development, which very few other networks have, is the "darknet": By only connecting to people
they trust, users can greatly reduce their vulnerability, and yet still connect to a global network through their friends'
friends' friends and so on. This enables people to use Freenet even in places where Freenet may be illegal, makes it very
difficult for governments to block it, and does not rely on tunneling to the "free world".





13th April 2011 - Freenet top anti-censorship tool in survey of Chinese users!

A report by Freedom House surveyed users in Azerbaijan, Burma, China and Iran for their
perceptions of and preferred tools for bypassing local government censorship. In China,
Freenet was the only anti-censorship tool to achieve 5 stars, and the third most widely
used overall.


7th December 2010 - Wikileaks and Freenet

There is a Reddit post about Freenet as a possible solution to censorship proof hosting.
Since Wikileaks has had problems with hosting lately as a result of government intervention,
people have been talking about distributed DNS. Others have suggested that Freenet is a
better solution.


24th September 2010 - Another large donation, and brief status update

Once again Google's Open Source team has donated US$18,000 to the Freenet Project to support
the ongoing development of the Freenet software.

In particular, we will use these funds to complete Freenet 0.8, which will be released later
this year, and will include additional performance improvements, usability work, and security
improvements. It will also include new ways to communicate over Freenet, including "Freetalk",
a forums discussion system employing a novel "web of trust" approach to prevent spam in an
entirely decentralized way.

In other news, the Summer of Code was a qualified success, with two of our students performing
very well. Support for ogg vorbis/theora will be merged soon, and the new more efficient
transport layer will be merged a bit later.

Freenet's user base has been growing fairly steadily, and we have over 20,000 regular users.
Our current work is focused largely on Freetalk and rewriting the load management code for
higher and more consistent performance.




http://freenetproject.org

 

I'm testing it,i'll review later

 

A really interesting idea, this type of software seems to have significant potential in light of current events.

Although... "Files are encrypted, so generally the user cannot easily discover what is in his datastore"

To me this is rather alarming. I really like the concept but is this just bit torrent software with encryption?

 

The Philosophy behind Freenet
By Ian Clarke

A Disclaimer
Suggested prior reading
The importance of the Free flow of information
Censorship and freedom
The solution
Isn't censorship sometimes necessary?
But why is anonymity necessary?
And what of copyright?
But how will artists be rewarded for their work without copyright?
Alternatives to Copyright
Fairshare

1. A Disclaimer

There are many reasons why people get involved in the Freenet Project. Some share the views outlined in this document;
some share variations of these views, which are also served by what we are trying to achieve; and some just enjoy the
technical challenge. These are the ideas which motivated me to architect the system in the first place, but not necessarily
the views that everyone involved in the Freenet project holds.

2. Suggested prior reading

For this document to make sense, you should probably know what Freenet is. You can get a good overview on the What is Freenet? page.

3. The importance of the Free flow of information

Freedom of speech, in most western cultures, is generally considered to be one of the most important rights any individual
might have. Why is the freedom to share ideas and opinions so important? There are several ways to answer this question.

3.1 Communication is what makes us human
One of the most obvious differences between mankind and the rest of the animal kingdom is our ability to communicate sophisticated
and abstract concepts. While we constantly discover that animal's communication ability is more sophisticated than previously assumed,
it is unlikely that any other animal approaches our own level of ability in this area.

3.2 Knowledge is good
Most people, given the option of knowing something and not knowing something, will choose to have more information rather than less.
Wars have been won and lost over who was better-informed. This is because being better-informed allows us to make better decisions,
and generally improve our ability to survive and be successful.

3.3 Democracy assumes a well informed population
Many people today live under democratic governments, and those who don't, probably want to. Democracy is an answer to the question of
how to create leaders, while preventing them from abusing that power. It achieves this by giving the population the power to regulate
their government through voting, yet the ability to vote does not necessarily mean that you live in a democratic country. For a population
to regulate their government effectively it must know what their government is doing, they must be well informed. It is a feedback loop,
but this loop can be broken if the government has the power to control the information the population has access to.

4. Censorship and freedom

Everyone values their freedom, in fact, many consider it so important that they will die for it. People like to think that they are free
to form and hold whatever opinions they like, particularly in western countries. Consider now that someone had the ability to control the
information you have access to. This would give them the ability to manipulate your opinions by hiding some facts from you, by presenting
you with lies and censoring anything that contradicted those lies. This is not some Orwellian fiction, it is standard practice for most
western governments to lie to their populations, so much so, that people now take it for granted, despite the fact that this undermines
the very democratic principles which justify the government's existence in the first place.

5. The solution

The only way to ensure that a democracy will remain effective is to ensure that the government cannot control its population's ability to
share information, to communicate. So long as everything we see and hear is filtered, we are not truly free. Freenet's aim is to allow two
or more people who wish to share information, to do so.

6. Isn't censorship sometimes necessary?

Of course no issue is black and white, and there are many who feel that censorship is a good thing in some circumstances. For example,
in some European countries propagating information deemed to be racist is illegal. Governments seek to prevent people from advocating ideas
which are deemed damaging to society. There are two answers to this however. The first is that you can't allow those in power to impose "good"
censorship, without also enabling them to impose "bad" censorship. To impose any form of censorship a government must have the ability to
monitor and thus restrict communication. There are already criticisms that the anti-racism censorship in many European countries is hampering
legitimate historical analysis of events such as the second world war.

The second argument is that this "good" censorship is counter-productive even when it does not leak into other areas. For example, it is
generally more effective when trying to persuade someone of something to present them with the arguments against it, and then answer those
arguments. Unfortunately, preventing people from being aware of the often sophisticated arguments used by racists, makes them vulnerable to
those arguments when they do eventually encounter them.

Of course the first argument is the stronger one, and would still hold-true even if you didn't accept the second. Basically, you either have
censorship, or you don't. There is no middle-ground.

7. But why is anonymity necessary?

You cannot have freedom of speech without the option to remain anonymous. Most censorship is retrospective, it is generally much easier to
curtail free speech by punishing those who exercise it afterward, rather than preventing them from doing it in the first place. The only way
to prevent this is to remain anonymous. It is a common misconception that you cannot trust anonymous information. This is not necessarily true,
using digital signatures people can create a secure anonymous pseudonym which, in time, people can learn to trust. Freenet incorporates a mechanism
called "subspaces" to facilitate this.

8. And what of copyright?

Of course much of Freenet's publicity has centered around the issue of copyright, and thus I will speak to it briefly. The core problem with copyright
is that enforcement of it requires monitoring of communications, and you cannot be guaranteed free speech if someone is monitoring everything you say.
This is important, most people fail to see or address this point when debating the issue of copyright, so let me make it clear:
You cannot guarantee freedom of speech and enforce copyright law

It is for this reason that Freenet, a system designed to protect Freedom of Speech, must prevent enforcement of copyright.

9. But how will artists/developers be rewarded for their work without copyright?

Firstly, even if copyright were the only way that artists could be rewarded for their work, then I would contend that freedom is more important than
having professional artists (those who claim that we would have no art do not understand creativity: people will always create, it is a compulsion,
the only question is whether they can do it for a living).

Secondly, it could be questioned whether copyright is effective even now. The music industry is one of the most vocally opposed to enhancements in
communication technology, yet according to many of the artists who should be rewarded by copyright, it is failing to do so. Rather it has allowed
middle-men to gain control over the mechanisms of distribution, to the detriment of both artists and the public.

10. Alternatives to Copyright

Fortunately it won't come to this. There are many alternative ways to reward artists. The simplest is voluntary payment. This is an extension of the
patronage system which was frequently used to reward artists prior to copyright, where a wealthy person would fund an artist to allow them to create
full-time. The Internet permits an interesting extension of this idea, where rather than having just one wealthy patron, you could have hundreds of
thousands, contributing small amounts of money over the Internet.

We actually practice what we preach in this regard too, on the 15th of March 2001 the Freenet Project started taking donations, and within a week we
had collected over $1000.