Freenet - A Free Net

[Scientist]

"What is Freenet?
Freenet is free software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship. To achieve this freedom, the network is entirely decentralized and publishers and consumers of information are anonymous. Without anonymity there can never be true freedom of speech, and without decentralization the network will be vulnerable to attack.

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. Unlike other peer-to-peer file sharing networks, Freenet does not let the user control what is stored in the data store. Instead, files are 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 in the data store are encrypted to reduce the likelihood of prosecution by persons wishing to censor Freenet content.

The network can be used in a number of different ways and isn't restricted to just sharing files like other peer-to-peer networks. It acts more like an Internet within an Internet. For example Freenet can be used for:

* Publishing websites or 'freesites'
* Communicating via message boards
* Content distribution

Unlike many cutting edge projects, Freenet long ago escaped the science lab, it has been downloaded by over 2 million users since the project started, and it is 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."


Firewall/NAT/router problems? http://freenet.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=faq#firewall

I think this net has a lot of potential and can help us to spread knowledge.
It's quite slow when you first install it, but after some days it SPEEDS UP, so give it a chance to run on your computer for some days.

Check out the official website: http://freenet.sourceforge.net

[redbull]

I tried freenet and I'm unable to surf the freenet sites without getting more
than one page deep into a website before gettingcontent unavailable error
messages. It's a great concept but don't get your hopes up for any real
performance anytime soon. :(

[Scientist]

You have to wait for some days, but yes it's still slow then.

[tmp]

Scientist, I LOVE the idea of Freenet ! However, it seems there are many
technical and performance related problems that have to be overcome. They'll
just have to keep plugging away at these problems but the concept of a
network that is difficult for the free speech oppressors to impede or even stop
is AWESOME !

[megalomania]

I tried it out years ago and it was very archaic and cumbersome. It seems somewhat better now, but I will have to wait a few more days to see if the connection improves a bit to render final judgement.

They will have to make it much easier to use for it to be accepted. There are absolutly no instructions about how to use this thing on the official website. I had to search the web for almost an hour to find some mention of how to host your own website using freenet. They need some handy wizards and drag and drop boxes to publish your own website.

I think freenet might be a wonderful means of distributing all of the content of the FTP without having to run an FTP at all. The freenet literature says it works rather like bittorrent in distributing files, but all anonymously. The best feature of bittorrent is sharing bandwidth. The best feature of the FTP is getting just the file you want and being able to upload. A conversion of the two would mean anonymous hosting and distributed downloads of all the files with the FTP being used solely for uploads. A Forum Library using freenet could then be established with individual members being able to host various files from their computers, anonymously, while the general public would have unrestricted download rights to all of the content.

While freenet may be rather slow and annoying, such is the price for the free and anonymous exchange of information. An FTP, website, or bittorrent tracker can all be tracked and shut down by the authorities. Freenet can not be shut down. I am going to try and host a mirror of my website on freenet and see how it goes. After that we shall see...

[Scientist]

I'm using Freenet since 4 days now I think and it starts to work better.

[redbull]

How much hard disk space are you setting side for use with freenet, to get decent / good performance?

[Scientist]

I have set free 200 MB, but currently it's only using 25 MB.

The real problem is that my computer is too slow. It's only 700 MHZ and Freenet can be CPU heavy.

[aikon]

Freenet is a good way to stay anonymously, but it is a pain in the ass to download files. Imagine to download the 650MB Federoff, this could take a long long time. The FTP is always in danger of being erased by different dickheads but the download speed is acceptable. We should establish more FTPs and Torrents, but we're doing that anyway.

[Pb1]

Is there any chance of the contents of the FTP or maybe a site backup being put onto freenet anytime soon? I think it would be a good idea to get the information out in as many locations as possible before we're shut down again, possibly for good (we all know it'll happen one day. With the recent iDefence trouble, it could be one day soon.)

[megalomania]

I am willing to try anything and everything. The more the merrier so to say. According to the freenet propaganda file downloads can theoritically go just as swiftly as bittorrent. We could find out BUT I have not yet been able to download the freenet insertion wizard program :) I suppose this bodes ill for freenet if I can't even download the one file that should be quite popular. I don't suppose anyone has a copy of fiw.zip around? (version 0.6 please).

[nbk2000]

Have you tried using the Java version? It worked for me. It's in the E&W files folder you got. The icon looks like a bunny hopping on a blue square and it's an .exe.