Slashdot Mirror
New File Sharing Networks
An anonymous reader sends in: "Most readers of slashdot have been following the exploits of the RIAA and their attempts to shut down Napster, KaZaA, Morpheus, etc. In response, it appears some live music fans have taken things into their own hands and started new file sharing networks made exclusively for trading live recordings of bands that allow that sort of thing. The main player, RNL has reached version 1.0, features a distributed architecture, supports linux, and is even GPLed. Another peice of interesting software is Furthur. Though still only in beta, Furthur has cool features like allowing a user to piggy-back another user's download to reduce the load of the uploader."
Small excerpt from their About page:
Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds. Freenet is:
- Highly survivable: All internal processes are completely anonymized and decentralized across the global network, making it virtually impossible for an attacker to destroy information or take control of the system.
- Private: Freenet makes it extremely difficult for anyone to spy on the information that you are viewing, publishing, or storing.
- Secure: Information stored in Freenet is protected by strong cryptography against malicious tampering or counterfeiting.
- Efficient: Freenet dynamically replicates and relocates information in response to demand to provide efficient service and minimal bandwidth usage regardless of load. Significantly, Freenet generally requires log(n) time to retrieve a piece of information in a network of size n.
-end excerpt-Current 0.4 version of Freenet is working fine and 0.5 will be released soon, which should be considered as stable for production use.
OS advocatists take note: Freenet has been written with pure Java, so if you can get a Java interpreter for your OS, you can run Freenet. And in this particular case, using Java doesn't always mean the software will run slow. It's all about the implementation.