This is from Danny O'Brien's 'This Virtual Life' column in the Doors section of the Sunday Times (UK) gleaned from www.sunday-times.co.uk
hope this helps Quine A few winters back, I remember the home secretary, Jack Straw, suggesting that Speaker's Corners should be set up in every town. I'm sure he will be pleased to hear that as he was proposing it, someone on the net was quietly implementing his idea. That plan is now close to fruition, so it will be interesting to see what Straw makes of it. The project is called Freenet, and it describes itself as "a single worldwide information store that stores and distributes information, based on demand". Its designer, Ian Clarke, wrote the software as his final-year project at Edinburgh University. Free-net is important because it permits the uncensorable, anonymous publication of documents on the net. What have been dubbed peer-to-peer systems, such as Freenet, have been used to publish copies of Stephen King novels, Chinese dissident papers, free computer software, and the digital equivalent of sex, drugs and free rock'n'roll Freenet is uncensorable, because it is radically decentralised. Contrast that with clicking on, for example, the news service www.cnn.com - to pick up your news, you end up plucking your web page directly from a box owned by AOL Time Warner. If somebody wanted to stop that news flow, all they would have to do is nobble Warner's box, or slap an injunction on the company. When you pick up a document on freenet.sourceforge.net, you are downloading it from one of your fellow Freenetters' machines. Any document is potentially shared between hundreds of people. The process is anonymous because you can never be sure which route the document took to reach those servers. It is as though every machine that uses Freenet is acting, in part, as a branch of Speaker's Corner. Whether you can trust what you read is debatable because, unlike Speaker's Corner, you can remain anonymous on Freenet. Clarke originally released Freenet in June 1999, to muted reception. Soon after, a new program called Napster hit the web, to rather greater acclaim. Napster, the MP3 file-sharing program, was about free music, which is far more captivating than free speech - especially for the profits-driven music industry, which immediately set about trying to shut it down. When Napster was clobbered by a US court last year, people realised that if you transferred your MP3 files to Freenet, it would be nigh on impossible to be caught, and suddenly a lot of people were very interested in Clarke's child. Systems such as Freenet have a chicken-and-egg problem. If they are too obscure, not many people use them, and if not many people use them, they do not appear to work very well. Nearly two years on, Freenet has probably reached critical mass. Last week, I tried - purely as an experiment, you understand - to drop some of The Big Breach, the spy book banned in the UK, onto Freenet. It worked like a dream. After this month's appeal court ordered Napster to stop infringing copyright, it began charging subscriptions, so even more reason to turn to Freenet. There might be a few hundred thousand Speaker's Corners blooming soon. Danny O'Brien co-edits the online newsletter Need to Know (www.ntk.net) ____________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.co.uk address at http://mail.yahoo.co.uk or your free @yahoo.ie address at http://mail.yahoo.ie _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl at freenetproject.org http://www.uprizer.com/mailman/listinfo/devl
