Freenet

[Greg12]

What exactly is this, I found it but i noticed the manuals weren't clear?


Can this be used as a file sharing proxy? What do u do with it?

[The village idiot]

There are a few of those p2p programs out there. They all rely on everyone sharing portions of files. So if you don't share, it doesn't work as effectively.

[Greg12]

what?


I wanna know what freenet is and how it works.

[Conquest10]

What is Freenet?
Freenet is free software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship. To achieve this freedom, the network is entirely decentralized and publishers and consumers of information are anonymous. Without anonymity there can never be true freedom of speech, and without decentralization the network will be vulnerable to attack.
Communications by Freenet nodes are encrypted and are "routed-through" other nodes to make it extremely difficult to determine who is requesting the information and what its content is.

Users contribute to the network by giving bandwidth and a portion of their hard drive (called the "data store") for storing files. Unlike other peer-to-peer file sharing networks, Freenet does not let the user control what is stored in the data store. Instead, files are kept or deleted depending on how popular they are, with the least popular being discarded to make way for newer or more popular content. Files in the data store are encrypted to reduce the likelihood of prosecution by persons wishing to censor Freenet content.

The network can be used in a number of different ways and isn't restricted to just sharing files like other peer-to-peer networks. It acts more like an Internet within an Internet. For example Freenet can be used for:

Publishing websites or 'freesites'
Communicating via message boards
Content distribution
Freenet is not just theoretical, it has been downloaded by over 1.2 million users since the project started, and it is used for the distribution of censored information all over the world, including countries such as China and the Middle East. Ideas and concepts pioneered in Freenet have inspired hundreds of academic papers in the fields of computer communication, security, and law. Freenet has also received significant coverage in the mainstream press.

[tgpo]

You mean like this?

http://freenetproject.org/index.php?page=whatis

[The village idiot]

Just as I said... p2p with many nodes. You are a node if you share. It works best when everyone is a node!

And yes I had read a little about this. With the things I've said recently about kakaa, I thought I had better have done some research to back it up. About 3 hours searching the web. And after seeing nothing much more than theory, I gave up! There are at least 3 p2p that use this encrypted partial file over many (all) users' machines as a way to mask where the file actually comes from. It seems to have spawned from a college thesis, and spread from there. At least one wants to simply use your machine to forward the packets from someone else's computer, to its destination and back. So once again, if you aren't sharing then you are not helping. You would then be called a proxy, btw. Which also means that it can not be called peer to peer, as you won't be connecting directly to the end peer! I guess you could call it PPP (peer-proxy-peer) except that the end node is no longer your peer. Maybe INT (InterNodal Transfer?).

So once again, I will say that p2p must change or die!

OK so now I am rattling BS, and I'll quit.

[The village idiot]

Files in the data store are encrypted to reduce the likelihood of prosecution by persons wishing to censor Freenet content.

If it is encrypted, how do you use the file? If using the software automatically allows the files to be decrypted, then what would stop anyone from viewing those files?

As you can tell, I am really down on P2P. Simply for the lack of anonymity! Much of this could be done through a socks proxy, but good luck finding a socks proxy. And then you would have to configure some software to work.