In the past I’ve written articles on how to use TorPark to surf annonymously and privately, I’ve shared some knowledge about how to keep your PC use private and I truly believe that privacy is important in all aspects of life, especially our most powerful communication medium; the Interweb. Therefore I’m always on the look out for software that helps users stay secure, which has brought me to Freenet.
The Freenet Project puts out a piece of software called simply; Freenet. It’s a free program that lets you share and download content privately on the Internet. To protect Freenet from “the man” it is completely decentralized and to further protect all users, data transfers are done anonymously.
The Freenet Project believes in freedom of speech, which is the main push behind development and the main cause if it’s members…
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.
I’ve tried Freenet before, and although I’m pretty geeky and somewhat patient, I never stuck with it long enough to actually start using it as a source for new content or as a place to publish my own content. The problem always has been speed, or the lack therof as well as the high level of geekiness that the interface and logic requires. Turned off by the slow speed and lack of helpful documentation, I have historically dithed it for another solution always with the thought to one day come back and try it when it comes out of Alpha (which, with projects like these doesn’t really mean much)
Suffice to say I gave this last version about 3-4 weeks of my time, and gave up….again…without doing anything.
In the meantime use projects like TorPark to surf the existing web anonymously, and use secure IM plugins like Gaim-Encryption to keep your conversations private.
