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Freenet is not "shady". In fact its purpose was the opposite of shady: to enable legitimate internet use without being spied on by others.

There are others, among them OneSwarm, created at the University of Washington.

These projects were intended to promote freedom and privacy. That isn't a "shady" goal. Though people who want to spy on you (like the government) try to pretend that it is.

Well, the authors have published papers and given speeches at conferences. I don't know if anyone else has written about it.

http://www.oneswarm.org/about.html

"Go one better than Tor and use I2P. "

No. What you want is OneSwarm.

Not only does it store data in an encrypted, distributed fashion, it makes sure that it is not even theoretically (today) possible to tell what nodes on the network are supplying any particular data. That puts it a step above most other solutions, because it protects the sources, not just the downloader.

"It's called Tor, and the more people who use it, the safer it becomes."

There's a potential problem with that.

While it is true that the more people who use it (or more accurately, the more people who host exit-nodes) the better, as it stands the government has been singling out those who use privacy-enhancing technologies, like Tor and encryption.

Bad, BAD Government! (Seriously, it IS bad. It's an attack on the whole "right to communicate privately" concept.)

Having said all that, the more people who use these technologies the better. I particularly recommend Tor and OneSwarm.

"Even there, however, the government can still potentially gain information on who you may be sharing the data with. "

Not with OneSwarm. It was specifically designed such that content is distributed throughout your OneSwarm network, and it is physically impossible to determine which node or nodes are supplying the data you are receiving via that network.

It might be theoretically possible for them to find out who is in your network, with a lot of effort. But even if they managed to insert a node into your network, they could not tell with whom you are communicating. By design.

"That means don't use "cloud" anything unless it's on equipment you own, run your own email servers, etc."

OneSwarm. Simple, secure "cloud" without external servers.

Sure, you have to establish your own "networks", but all other solutions I am aware of require that too.

It was developed at the University of Washington to address this very issue.

It's already there, and it's called OneSwarm.

Originally developed at the University of Washington, OneSwarm is a private P2P network system, storing files in an encrypted, distributed fashion. You can control who can access your shared files (if anyone). And if you do decide to share any files with others, the way OneSwarm works makes it impossible to determine the actual source of those files. They could equally be coming from anyone who is in that network. And you can set up and belong to as many different private networks as you want.

I get your point, and I'm not saying it's not valid. But P2P technically still refers to the network.

I'm not saying "download, don't upload". I'm saying give people control over what they download and upload. That's all.

A genuine P2P network that does this is OneSwarm. It is backwards-compatible with BitTorrent, but it allows you to create your own private P2P friend-networks, in which you have full control over uploading and downloading.

All very blah. Check out some screenshots of OneSwarm. Slick! Plus you can access the web interface remotely, and play video and audio files from the network directly in the web interface. And you can exchange keys with trusted friends automatically via Google Talk, and there's a gmail-esque friends request interface. The coolest thing though is the fine tuned control you have over distribution.. you can control which friends and which groups you allow which shares to route through.