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New "Dark" Freenet Available for Testing

Sanity writes "The Freenet Project has just released the first alpha version of the much anticipated Freenet 0.7 branch. This is a major departure from past approaches to peer-to-peer network design, embracing a 'scalable darknet' architecture, where security is increased by allowing users to limit which other peers their peer will communicate with directly, rather than the typical 'promiscuous' approach of classic P2P networks. This means that not only does Freenet aim to prevent others from finding out what you are doing with Freenet, it makes it extremely difficult for them to even know that you are running a Freenet node at all. This is not the first P2P application to use this approach, other examples include Waste, however those networks are limited to just a few users, while Freenet can scale up almost indefinitely. The new version also includes support for NAT hole-punching, and has an API for third-party tool development. As always, the Freenet team are asking that people support the development of the software by donating."

3 of 424 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Will this ever succeed in full? by Sanity · · Score: 5, Informative
    I wish there was a way that I could view websites without giving any IP or client information. However, that kind of information is important to webmasters and business.
    Check out Tor.
  2. Re:Will this ever succeed in full? by Slithe · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well, it is not a foolproof solution, but you can try using TOR: The Onion Router (http://tor.eff.org/). It will act as a random daisy-chain of proxies that pass all the information (except for the final hop) encrypted.

    Failing that, you could always buy a laptop/PDA/etc. and a cheap wifi card and connect to random WAPs using a spoofed MAC address.

    --
    ---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
  3. Recent post on Freenet mailing list by moosehooey · · Score: 5, Informative

    On 31 Mar 2006, at 20:08:
    > This isn't about *technical* support, I just wanted to tell Matthew
    > thanks
    > for working on this project. The US government is really scaring
    > me and
    > I'm glad someone's working on this. You're doing a great job man.
    >
    > One question I have is that the paypal balance on the home page
    > usually
    > says something like a few hundred $, and I was wondering if it's
    > actually
    > generating the required $2300 per month, or if it's falling short.
    > I've
    > had a monthly donation set up for quite a while now, and I just
    > want to
    > make sure everything is going well financially for the project.

    We have been fortunate enough to generate just about enough to pay
    for Matthew for the past few years, but donations have been tailing
    off as we haven't put out any new releases in quite a while due to
    our work on 0.7, and the financial situation is actually quite
    precarious just now.

    Our hope is that with the 0.7 alpha release we will get some
    donations, but if anyone can contribute, now would really be the time
    (as there can be no guarantee that the 0.7 alpha release will
    generate the level of publicity we have seen for previous releases).

    Ian.