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Freenet Version 0.7 Release Candidate 1 Available
apostle5406 writes to mention that the "Freenet" project (a global peer-to-peer publishing network) has unveiled their first release candidate. "Freenet 0.7 is a ground-up rewrite of Freenet. The key user-facing feature in Freenet 0.7 is the ability to operate Freenet in a "darknet" mode, where your Freenet node will only talk to other Freenet users that you trust. This makes it much more difficult for an adversary to discover that you are using Freenet, let alone what you are doing with it. 0.7 also includes significant improvements to both security and performance."
Yes, it's faster. No, it's not fast, but it is usable.
There are some browser setting changes that help a lot; Freenet includes a Firefox profile with the appropriate changes for use when browsing Freenet. It won't ever be as fast as the web, but most freesites are quite usable. Plenty of people report success downloading largish files (isos, etc).
You'll want to leave your node connected for a while; it will get faster over the first few minutes / hours it's installed, and somewhat even after that, especially as your node begins to cache popular data. As always, having a fast network connection helps a lot.
Only the primary design goal of Freenet: make the people uploading and downloading the content anonymous! If you're using bittorrent, it's easy for the Bad People (government, isp, mafiaa) to tell what you're uploading and downloading. Not so with Freenet (it probably can be done, but it would take a *lot* of effort).
It is easy to tell that someone is running Freenet (still harder than bittorrent, though -- with everything encrypted and ports randomized, it requires traffic analysis). But it's hard to tell who's downloading or uploading what.
If you don't like darknet mode, don't use it. 0.7 has both darknet and opennet available.
There are lots of reasons why darknets are better, but if you'd rather use an opennet instead no one is stopping you. You can get to the network either way.