Freenet Releases 0.7.0rc2

evanbd writes "The Freenet Project has announced Freenet 0.7.0rc2. From the announcement: 'Freenet is a global peer-to-peer network designed to allow users to publish and consume information without fear of censorship. 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.' Of course, for those of us who don't know anyone else running Freenet, or simply prefer it, there's also a non-darknet mode available."

Comments

Re:Freenet vs Bittorrent

[Neil]

Bittorrent doesn't allow you to publish and download anonymously. If you are seeding something (or downloading it) everyone who is allowed to connect to the tracker can find out your IP address.

A Freenet network ideally consists of a large number of nodes connected by sparse network of encrypted links. Many of the nodes have a big chunk of cache associated with them. The files in the network live in the caches. To request a file you ask your node to find a file with a specific hash signature. It passes the request to its peers in the network, they pass it on in turn, and hopefully it eventually it reaches a cache that has the file you asked for. Bits then start trickling back through the chain of caches. The important thing is that because your local node is an active part of the network and is sending and receiving stuff all the time, nobody knows whether a particular request or response that goes through your node relates to something that you asked for, or whether it is just something that you've been asked to "pass on" by a 3rd party.

If everything works as intended, even people who are fully connected to the network and participating shouldn't be able to identify the original publisher of a particular file, or identify who has downloaded a copy (though the fact that they've added the darknet mode suggests that that they aren't 100% confident about that!).

http://freenetproject.org/whatis.html

This has obvious anti-censorship, freedom of speech, freedom to whistle-blow type applications:

http://freenetproject.org/philosophy.html

It also has obvious undesirable applications (see the flood comments about child-porn and terrorism).

The other major practical difference to Bittorrent is that Bittorrent is designed to be fast. Freenet is definitely not the quickest way to get information from A to B ...

Re:And here's why it's doomed to failure:

[MikeBabcock]

Tor doesn't allow publishers to create content anonymously at all. It just allows you to fetch it anonymously.

Incidentally, running a tor node at home got my IP banned from Slashdot from users spamming said geek news site via tor and my machine inadvertently being a part of it.

Freenet allows you to create anonymous or pseudonymous identities to communicate with others or post content in such a way that others are unlikely to ever determine the source of said content. This is a very useful feature for various persons, including whistle blowers.

Certain recently discussed websites accepting submissions anonymously would do well to configure a FreeMail account for users to communicate to them with so they can receive tips and information from those wishing not to be identified.