What is Freenet? http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
"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 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.
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