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Freenet 0.5.1 Released, P2P Network Stabilizing
mids writes "With version 0.5.1, Freenet isn't only the most secure & anonymous P2P network, but also getting pretty fast!
Reliable downloading of files as large as 700MB from Freenet at average download rates as high as 100k/sec on a broadband internet connection are sighted (which compares quite favorably to more conventional P2P applications)."
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Freenets model is that data is transient. If some data is not used frequently, or used widely, it gets dropped eventualy. To insure avaiablilty you would need to constantly reinsert the data. Running a freenet node and inserting large quantities of data are two different things.
I run a node, because I can, and there is little effort involved in keeping it up and running. The quality of the software has improved dramaticaly. For a while it was a pain to run due to the java VMs sucking up all avaiable ram and frequent crashes. Now I check that is is running once every few days or so.
If more people start to setup nodes, and the software is idiot proof, this thing could take off.
Plus, it's not a sharing model, it's a publish model. You have to upload files to the network, a process that used to be a total PITA anyway, if you wanted it to propogate enough to be useful.
So FreeNet isn't useful for pirates. Which is cool. What it is useful for is things like load balancing - if you've ever been slashdotted, or ever found it hard to pay the bandwidth bills, freenet offers a way out. They were even playing with streaming radio over it a while ago, though I think really IPv6 multicast is a better solution there.
So freenet is about freedom of speech, load balancing, cool P2P experiments, lots of things - but not MP3 swapping.
What it is about is the ability to store anything, particularly items that may give the holder problems, like the film of a cop selling drugs to kids.
It isn't eDonkey, it isnt Kazzaa. With both of these systems you know what you are sharing, with Freenet you don't. With traditional P2P, MPAA can go round logging who is sharing LOTR and send them DMCA cease and desist notices. If you are living in Farkistan, you can publish your videos of police executions without fear that the police can track you down. Once you have loaded a file on the net with freenet, you don't know where it is, and neither does anyone else until they are given a hash key.
You just have some file storage assigned to the network which is browsable by a hash key through your local web browser. Freenet appears as localhost:8888 to your browser so you can access with a locked-down Mozilla or even IE (less wise because of the holes). People can know that you are running Freenet, but that is all (assuming you clear browser caches and so on).
The downside is because you can share anything anonymously, people do. However, unless someone is prepared to publish a reference to young Britney and her dog, nobody is going to find it.
The curious thing is that if you have a fairly static IP and are contributing space to the net, you have no idea what is stored on your machine. It could be human rights info, it could be copyright material, it could be very illegal pornography. You just don't know.
Also it seems to take a long time to get into the network. It is painfully slow to start and until it starts caching information locally, a letter may be faster.
They can't find out who initially contributed what, but it's quite easy to find out who is hosting what. Just look at the IP address of whoever is connecting to you.
Not true. For any particular freenet request you cannot be sure if the node contacting you is requesting the file, or is just passing along a request from a previous node.
The reverse is also true. For any particular file you're requesting, you can't tell if the file you're getting is from the node you're contacting or if it's passing on your request to another node.
It's a double blind. You MAY be getting the files from that node, then again by the very nature of freenet, and the large amount of information in it it is extremely unlikely that the information you recieved was actually on the node you requested it from.
Further, if the goverment finds something unsavory, and manages to somehow prove (don't ask me how) it was on your computer the caching nature of Freenet allows you to say "There's a damn good chance that file wasn't on my computer until the government requested it". At that point you have the dual defenses of reasonable doubt and entrapment.