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Making Freenet Find Stuff Faster

Sanity writes "Many probably saw the recent announcement of Freenet 0.5.2. This release represented a vast amount of work - primarily in reducing Freenet's CPU and memory requirements. However, streamlining Freenet's current functionality isn't all we've been working on. I just finished an article that describes the most fundamental improvement to Freenet's core algorithm since its original design over three years ago, it is called "Next Generation Routing" and has the potential to dramatically increase the speed with which Freenet retrieves information. It could even make Freenet faster than the World Wide Web in many circumstances, all without compromizing anonymity and while remaining immune to the /. effect."

13 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good. by Ryan_Singer · · Score: 5, Informative

    it's running on my unmodified osx box. just use the unix version.-Ryan

    --
    Ryan Singer
  2. Easy update for existing freenet users. by anonymous+coword · · Score: 5, Informative

    Instructions for windows and linux and linux compatables.

    Windows : Right click the rabbit icon in your system tray, then click upate to latest snapshot build.

    Linux : run update.sh in the freenet directory.

  3. Re:Good. by freedom_leffo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well, just wait half a minute or so and then point your favourite browser towards http://127.0.0.1:8888 - and off you go! The Freenet-thingie is running in the background.

  4. It isn't search... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...at least not keyword searching as you find in Google and Kazaa. When they refer to searching they mean given a key (a very large number), finding the corresponding data.

  5. Immune to /., perhaps by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Immunity to ignorant masses of /. users it is not.

    I was in the first /. crowd of joining, and here is the etiquet/advice I have.

    Things to do if you plan on playing with freenet:

    1. Set it up properly.
    1a Set your IP in the config file, read the site for details, but it's freenet.ini
    1b Try to use DynDNS if you have a dynamic IP
    2c Leave it up 24/7 for a few days before you judge speed. You need to let the blood circulate :)
    2. Install a proper version of Java. I recommend the 1.4.2 beta. IBM may work better, I haven't tried.
    3. Fix your browser.
    3a Your browser will crash on some sites (even Mozilla not Opera) because of a GIF bug.. patch it.
    3b Set your number of simultaneous connections up a lot. You request a file from your local store, then it downloads it. You need to request as many in parallel as possible.

    Now, on to advice.
    Get Frost! Frost is like the news groups of the freenet. It's a great place to read interesting ideas.

    If you want to make a site, check out Fish tools, Fuqid and FIW.

    Be aware that there are 3 different kinds of sites, and two modes of getting information
    3 types include interval based, revision, and static. Static sites are one time shots. Revisions you create directories like /1/ /2/ /3/ and link to images from the future. If the image loads, you know there is a more recent revision. date based must be activated every time interval, or they die. Be very careful with these.

    There are SSK and CHK linking methods, which I still don't know a whole lot about, but maybe someone will reply and explain them.

    By /. effect immunity, they mean linking to a site will only make it stronger. Everyone on /. joining freenet is just going to slow it down, because basically, you are creating a great suction on the net without any data to give back. Even worse, when you quit off of freenet, everyone will be looking for you from their cache and not finding you. This is going to cause the most problems, but surely not everyone on /. are going to quit on the same day. ;)

    Get IIP, so you can realtime chat with people that run some sites on freenet. #freenet is dedicated to freenet chat and issues.

    Have fun!
    (Posting anonymously in respect of the freenet principals.)

  6. Re:It seriously needs it.. by yarbo · · Score: 4, Informative

    It takes some time to build up information on how to get around. It gets faster, be patient

  7. Re:Good. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I recommend using Frost for file transfers. The only thing I've ever successfully downloaded from a regular freesite (apart from graphics) is the Freesite Insertion Wizard.

  8. Re:Freenet is under corporate control, not 100% fr by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative
    The Bittorent mainpage is shut down from a DOS, then shutdown by its chosen government (FCC), and now its in shambles. Freenet can have the same thing happen.

    Uh, your really off your mark here. The Freenet web interface thingy comes with it's own mini webserver and the functionality to turn any non-transient node into a freenet distribution center. From the Freenet web interface, there's a link called Spread Freenet. (Link only works if you have Freenet installed and running.)

    Even if the main Freenet site got taken down, things would still be just peachy...

    While we're at it, what's this about the Bittorent mainpage going down? I know that a few popular tracker sites went down, but I've never heard of the main BitTorrent site going down. Click the link; it's up right now.

    Moderators: How the hell did the parent get modded +2 Insightful?

  9. Freenet not a panacea by acceleriter · · Score: 3, Informative

    A "rights" holder knows the freenet key of certain material. Can the holder not hust write a script hop onto Freenet, request that key (and only that key), and fire off C&Ds to all the ISPs whose allocations include the addresses that respond? Seems simple enough--even with blinding of requests, the intellectual "property" holder can still point to the nodes that respond as having distributed the material--just as the exit server from Mixmaster (or freedom.net, before it became a casualty of 9/11 hysteria), etc. is vulnerable to legal attacks.

    This might be able to be foiled with some kind of chaffing in which nodes respond even if they don't have a piece of the data in question, but that would introduce more inefficiency.

    In particular, those who are "willfully blind" to infringement losing safe harbor provisions, I don't see how Freenet will survive as a means of propagating "questionable" material. And since that's it's raison d'être, then it probably won't survive at all in the U.S.

    --

    CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.

    1. Re:Freenet not a panacea by SWroclawski · · Score: 3, Informative

      Your argument, if I understand it, is that given key A, then you find find the nodes that have it and shut them down.

      On Freenet this becomes a non-trivial task.

      First- all communication between nodes is encrypted. You'd need to do a real time decryption of the communication in order to spy.

      Secondly, nodes will often respond even if they don't have the data- that's the point. Even with NG routing- it's still onion routing. A node that responds that it has a peice of data may just be lieing. And by requesting the data in the first place, due to agressive caching- you're spreading the data across the network.

      As to then shutting down the nodes- you'd have to shut down nodes in places all over the world.

      Lastly, you could just make a second copy of a given data, new key and then then your plan is foiled.

      You should really read more of the Freenet docs- they explain all this.

  10. Re:Make Freenet Free! by John+Hasler · · Score: 3, Informative

    > It is a bit ironic that the Freenet project
    > doesn't run on a free system like Debian
    > GNU/Linux.

    Package: freenet-unstable
    Priority: extra
    Section: contrib/net
    Installed-Size: 1532
    Maintainer: Robert Bihlmeyer
    Architecture: all
    Version: 0.6+20021221-1
    Depends: kaffe (>= 1:1.0.6-4) | java-virtual-machine, adduser, debianutils (>= 1.6), net-tools, debconf (>= 1.2.9)
    Conflicts: freenet
    Filename: pool/contrib/f/freenet-unstable/freenet-unstable_0 .6+20021221-1_all.deb
    Size: 1273386
    MD5sum: f1e9f4ae9949f77f618bd1ff6d7a5220
    Description: A peer-to-peer network for anonymous publishing (unstable branch)
    Freenet is a decentralised network of nodes designed to allow for efficient
    distribution of information over the Internet. Freenet's goals are resilience
    to censorship, and anonymity for producers and consumers of information
    through plausible denyability.
    .
    This package provides the software necessary to run a Freenet node able to
    take part in the network used by versions 0.4 to 0.6. Content can be inserted
    and retrieved with a commandline tool, or via the HTTP gateway with any
    browser.
    .
    This is a snapshot from the development branch.

    --
    Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
  11. nothing about freenet prevents searching by Vitriolix · · Score: 3, Informative

    freenet is a *protocol*, not a client (though they do ship the http proxy client with the main distro). just like the http protocol doesnt have any search functionality built into it, neither does freenet. you can, and people do in fact use regular old web spiders to create searchable indexes of freenet.

  12. Mirroring websites on Freenet. by Myself · · Score: 3, Informative

    I've said this before!

    The only problem is that there's no one-click tool to mirror a website into Freenet, yet. Freenet's gateway has an anonymity filter which prohibits out-of-freenet links, and it also disallows a lot of things. If someone wanted to write a simple tool to clean up a site and hack the links to work in Freenet, it would make this a lot easier.

    By the way, using the http://127.0.0.1:8888/KEY@whatever style links is discouraged, because not everyone's freenet node is localhost, and not everyone runs it on port 8888! The preferred format is freenet:KEY@whatever which can then be handled appropriately by your browser.