Freenet Proxy Server
Help – Freenet
PhilosophicalWhat is Freenet? Freenet is a platform for censorship-resistant communication and
publishing. It is designed to ensure true freedom of communication over
the Internet. It allows anybody to publish and read information with
complete anonymity. Nobody controls Freenet, not even its creators, meaning
that the system is not vulnerable to manipulation or shutdown. Freenet
is also very efficient in how it deals with information, adaptively
replicating content in response to demand. For more information,
see What is Freenet? How is Freenet different to Tor? Can I access Google/Facebook/etc through Freenet? Freenet is a self-contained network, while Tor allows accessing the web
anonymously, as well as using “hidden services” (anonymous web servers).
Freenet is not a proxy: You cannot connect to services like Google or
Facebook using Freenet. However, Freenet has websites, filesharing, forums,
chat, microblogging, email etc, all anonymous and hosted within eenet is a distributed datastore, so once content is uploaded to Freenet,
it will remain on Freenet forever, as long as it remains popular, without
fear of censorship or denial of service attacks, and without needing to run
your own web server and keep it online other big difference is that Freenet has the “darknet” or Friend to
Friend mode, where your Freenet node (software on your computer) only
connects to the Freenet nodes run by your friends, i. e. people you know (and
maybe to their friends, to speed things up). This makes blocking Freenet,
e. g. on a national firewall, extremely ever, most people currently use Freenet in “opennet” mode (that is,
connecting automatically to whoever the network assigns, rather than
connecting only to their friends). This is much less secure than using
Freenet in “darknet” mode, and is relatively easy to block, as it does have
some central servers (“seed nodes”). Freenet has many unsolved problems, and is still experimental. Our objective
for Freenet is to build a global friend-to-friend darknet, which would be
extremely difficult to block, and would provide very strong anonymity and
censorship resistance. This will require further work on Freenet,
on usability, speed and security, but above all it is a techno-social
experiment: Will people know enough friends who are willing to use Freenet to
make such an anonymous friend-to-friend network possible? This is why Freenet
supports “opennet” mode: to let people try it out before they ask their
friends to is a little less experimental, and arguably is an easier problem; it may
provide better anonymity today, provided that it isn’t blocked, and of
course, Tor lets you access the internet as a whole, whereas on Freenet you
can only access Freenet content. However if you can use a large enough
darknet, Freenet already provides an interesting level of censorship
resistance, DoS resistance and the internet “anonymously” is not necessarily easy: Connecting to
Facebook through Tor doesn’t prevent Facebook from knowing pretty much
everything about you, and connecting to your (non-HTTPS) webmail account
through Tor may mean the person running the proxy (“exit node”) can steal
your webmail account eenet is a separate network, which does things differently, because there
are no central servers. This is why we don’t support Javascript, server-side
scripting etc on freesites: Everything must be rewritten to work on a
distributed network. But the advantage is there is no single server which can
be compelled to hand over your private communications or which can be shut
are still risks, for example, talking about your home town or internet
provider on an anonymous forum, or downloading files which Freenet can’t make
safe such as PDFs or word processor documents (Freenet will warn you about
this). Also, for web content in particular, it may be easier to upload it to
Freenet than set up a hidden server on Tor; you don’t need to keep your node
online for your content to be available, you don’t need to figure out how to
configure it safely, and most important, if you go away your site will still
be mmary:Tor (or I2P):
Lets you access the Internet (but be careful! ) you access anonymous web servers and other you host anonymous web servers, which need to be kept online, and can be
DoS’ed, but can run any dynamic or server-side content you ovides reasonable anonymityHas been blocked by several countries, with varying success. Even its hidden
bridges can be harvested and blocked with moderate somewhat centralisedIs more mature and has more users and developers
Freenet in general:
Only lets you access content uploaded to Freenet, including (static) websites,
email, filesharing, forums, microblogging, etc. All of which are anonymous
(or pseudonymous i. you create an untraceable identity) content in a distributed way: You don’t know what your node is storing,
any given content is distributed across many nodes. Ensures that popular content will be available older than Tor, but more experimental (arguably it’s a harder task).
Freenet in darknet mode: (friend to friend: connects only to your friends’ nodes)
Is very hard to block, and this can be improved further with transport ovides good anonymity, and with a bit more work it could provide very strong
anonymity (PISCES tunnels) fully decentralised: No central servers at all.
Freenet in opennet mode: (connect automatically even if you don’t know anyone
on Freenet)
Is relatively easy to ovides limited anonymityIs somewhat centralised
Unfortunately most people use Freenet in opennet mode currently. The big
question is can we build a global friend-to-friend darknet? Join us and find
out! PS for an example of how dependant Tor is on centralised hidden services,
see this
bust.
Half the hidden services on Tor were using a single hosting service,
whose owner has now been arrested. While we don’t approve of these sites,
it does illustrate the point: A centralised network is a vulnerable network.
Unfortunately, decentralised networks are hard, but in the long run they are
more is behind Freenet? Freenet grew out of a design for an anonymous publication system created by
Ian Clarke while a student at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Since
then many other people have contributed towards making Ian’s proposal a
yptographic signing of information allows people to prove authorship,
this technique is frequently used to authenticate authorship of emails.
Moreover, you can actually sign information while remaining anonymous,
thus having an anonymous persona. You can prove that you wrote different
pieces of information on Freenet, without revealing your identity. In this
way you can build up an anonymous reputation for I have to donate disk space and bandwidth? You aren’t really donating in the sense that you lose the disk space and the
bandwidth; but you aren’t really sharing either (at least not the same way as
with filesharing programs). It is more like pitching in to the common Freenet
resource pool. I don’t have to donate anything when using filesharing application X and I get to leech you get to do that anonymously? Freenet is designed with anonymity in
mind, performance comes my friends donate very little space and bandwidth. Should I donate more? If you are happy with what you are getting then no. But if you want more you
should consider donating more and running your node as close to 24×7 as
possible, and you should ask your friends to do the I donate a lot will my experience improve significantly? Your experience will definitely get better, but for a really great
improvement we need more people to start thinking like you. Bandwidth counts
more than Freenet legal? We don’t currently know of any prosecutions for merely using Freenet.
Some people claim that the DADVSI
makes Freenet illegal in France; the German data retention law might have
required logging, but
was struck down.
Also, the German supreme court has found that
not securing your wifi properly
makes you responsible for other people’s downloads over it; this might or
might not be extended to prohibiting anonymous peer to peer filesharing such
as Freenet.
ACTA might have
wide-ranging effects, including on Freenet, should it pass, and similar laws
such as IPRED2 have been tried in the past. There have also been attempts to
force peer to peer systems to provide wiretapping capabilities in the USA,
and there are
worrying developments
in the UK that might result in it being blocked, but not being made illegal
per se. As far as we know none of these things – apart from the first two –
have passed. Many of these are arguable either way (depending on how broadly
the legislation is applied) and will have to be decided in caselaw. The law
can be an ass sometimes. You can read the EFF’s (US-centric) advice to peer
to peer developers
here.
If you need legal advice, talk to a lawyer. Also read the next section
especially if you are in China; blocking the protocol may suggest the
authorities don’t like us! Is Freenet blocked by national firewalls? The Chinese national firewall (Golden Shield) has blocked our website for
many years, and was observed in 2005 to block the 0. 5 protocol as well. This
suggests China doesn’t like us, so be careful if you run Freenet in China.
Some other countries (e. France) are known to be hostile to peer to peer,
and may eventually force ISPs to block peer to peer networks (but right now
Freenet works fine in France and we have many French users! ). Technically, Freenet 0. 7 has some minimal defences against blocking; the
protocol is relatively hard to identify (we are working on “transport
plugins”, which would
make it much harder to detect Freenet.
Freenet supports a
darknet mode (i. e.
only connecting to your friends) which makes automated harvesting and
blocking of nodes very difficult. Note that many mobile internet providers
block all peer to peer networks along with other content, and many corporate
or academic networks may block Freenet (but even if they don’t, see
you shouldn’t run Freenet at work for non-work purposes! ) has been discussion in the US and UK of legislation to require
backdoors and presumably blocking of anything that can’t be backdoored. This
is unlikely to pass, especially in the US, where similar laws have been
proposed periodically and are probably unconstitutional. However, even if the
government came to us and demanded a back door, we would be legally unable to
secretly distribute a trojan’ed build, because Freenet is open source,
numerous people have contributed code to it, so legally we have to give you
the source code, including that for any government mandated back doors –
which wouldn’t be secret for long! If this happened it is likely that
Freenet Project Incorporated, the non-profit organisation that
runs this website and handles donations, would shut down, but the Freenet
network itself would live on just fine, the only difference being not being
able to pay full time developers as net neutrality and
the EFF or equivalent organisations in your country for
the politics of all this and how you can stop such I get trouble if I run a node? This is related to “Is Freenet legal? “. We have done everything we
can to make it extremely difficult for any sane legal system to justify
punishing someone for running a Freenet node, and there is little precedent
for such action in today’s developed countries. Many legal systems recognize
the importance of freedom of speech, which is Freenet’s core goal. Having
said that, there is risk in doing anything that your government might not
agree with; you should make an informed decision as to whether to take that
risk. Furthermore, your ISP or hosting provider may have a problem with
Freenet. At least one French hosting provider has been known to ban Freenet (
along with Tor and others) from their servers; please read your terms and
conditions to make sure you are allowed to run Freenet. Note also that
Freenet can use rather a lot of bandwidth, at least 20GB/month, and this may
be a problem on a cheap or shared connection. And of course running it at
work could get you into trouble too, unless it’s for work purposes! What about copyright? There are some excellent thoughts on this subject on the Philosophy page. Specific copyright-related laws may be a
problem, please read
Is Freenet legal? and
Is Freenet blocked by
national firewalls? about child porn, offensive content or terrorism? While most people wish that child pornography and terrorism did not exist,
humanity should not be deprived of their freedom to communicate just because
of how a very small number of people might use that freedom. I don’t want my node to be used to harbor child porn, offensive content, or terrorism. What can I do? This is a problem that sadly any censorship-resistance tool faces.
If the capacity to remove content existed, it might only be used to remove things one finds offensive, but it could be used to remove anything.
From a technological point of view one cannot have censorship-resistance with exceptions.
Freenet is merely a tool that by itself doesn’t do anything to promote offensive content.
How people choose to use the tool is their sole responsibility.
As a communication medium, Freenet cannot be considered responsible for what people use it for — just like Internet Service Providers, telecoms, or postal services cannot be held responsible for their users that files are encrypted and split into pieces.
They are not stored on your machine in their entirety.
Your instance of Freenet will likely have very few encrypted pieces of a given file, if any.
These pieces cannot be used as parts of the file they were made from without additional information.
Reassembling a file requires knowing both what pieces to use and the key to decrypt them, neither of which is included with each about encryption export restrictions? The Freenet Project has notified the US authorities that it will be exporting
crypto. As long as your country doesn’t prohibit the use of encryption you
are fine. Further, there is now an exception in the export laws for software
doing exactly what Freenet does! However, Oracle limits the encryption strength
available on the JVM that runs Freenet; you should install the Unlimited
Strength Policy Files for Java if possible to improve performance. Freenet
will however work even without this, by using its built-in encryption code. I have nothing to hide and don’t need anonymity. Is there anything else Freenet can offer? Yes, in fact even without the anonymity feature Freenet is very useful
because of the unique way it handles content distribution and information
load. In simple terms that means you can publish a website without worrying
about how big the site will be and without having to put someone else’s ad
banners on it. While it is unlikely that freesites will ever load faster
than regular websites, they do adapt to sudden surges of visitors better (
which often happen when relatively unknown sites get linked to from a big
site), and reasonable download speeds for big files are feasible too. Just
don’t expect very low nicalHow do I use this software? I downloaded it, but when I run it there’s no (the Freenet REference Daemon) runs as a daemon, or service, in the
background. You normally talk to it through a Freenet client. One built-in
client is fproxy, which lets you talk to Freenet with a web browser. Freenet
should have installed a Browse Freenet shortcut on the desktop and/or the
start menu, or a system tray icon (rabbit) with an Open Freenet menu item.
Failing that, point your web browser to for the gateway page. Try clicking the various links
in the bookmark list to reach an initial set of is Freenet so slow? When you first install Freenet, it will be slow, and you may see Data Not
Found or Route Not Found errors for freesites. This is normal, and Freenet
will speed up significantly over time. For best performance you should try to
run Freenet as close to 24 hours a day as possible. This is why we install
Freenet as a bear in mind that Freenet is inherently high latency: it can take a
while to (for example) load a page for the first time, even if it is capable
of reasonable speeds (as anonymous systems go! ) for large popular files. You
can also improve performance for freesite browsing by using a separate
browser and increasing its connection limit. You should also
set the datastore size and bandwidth limit as high as possible. But
protecting your anonymity does cost a certain amount of performance. You can
configure how much to a degree by changing the security levels on the page
under Freenet searchable? Yes, there are a few different search mechanisms. To search the Freenet web
(freesites), you should be able to just use the search box on the homepage,
or go to Search Freenet on the Browse submenu. If it’s not there, go to the
Plugins page under Configuration, and load the Library plugin. Alternatively,
Frost and Thaw also provide searching for messages and files. Note that
searching on Freenet is a good deal more difficult than on other networks
because of Freenet’s different architecture and design do I get Freenet working with a Firewall/NAT? Mostly, Freenet should just work with a NAT. However, you should forward the
ports manually if you can. Click on the Connectivity page. At the top you will see a list of
ports used by the node. You should forward (for UDP) the Darknet FNP and
Opennet FNP ports. You may need to look up your router’s documentation to
figure out how to do this. Freenet should have forwarded them itself through
Universal Plug and Play, but this doesn’t
always work (and it never works if you don’t have the UPnP plugin loaded,
or have one router behind another) you have a dyndns address or other domain name pointing to the computer
you run your Freenet node on, tell the node about it. Go to the core
settings config page (in advanced
mode), and find the option “IP address override”. Put your domain name in
that box, and apply the I need a permanent Internet connection to run a node? No, but it is preferred. You can run the software and test it from a
“transient” connection (e. dial up/mobile modem), but for the network as a
whole to be most useful, we will need as many permanent nodes as possible (
most cable modem or DSL setups are sufficiently “permanent” for this). A
later version of Freenet may take better advantage of transient does Freenet only download 1 or 2 files at a time? Many browsers limit the number of simultaneous connections to something far
too low for efficiently browsing Freenet (since Freenet pages often have much
higher latency than web pages). This can usually be reconfigured. For
example, for Mozilla Firefox, type about:config in the address field of
the browser and replace the value of the following settings to the one
stated. Filter on
“connections” to get only the relevant 200
200
Note that these settings will cause mozilla to use more connections for all
your browsing, which may not be desirable from a network congestion point of
view. But you should ideally be using a separate browser for Freenet anyway,
for best can’t Freenet store data permanently? Because we can’t find a way to do this without compromising Freenet’s other
goals. For example, people often suggest that someone’s node could just never
drop data they want to cache permanently. This, however, won’t work because
even if the data is still available on their node, there is no way to ensure
that requests for that data will be routed to that node. We have considered
many other ways that Freenet could store data permanently, but they either
won’t work, or compromise Freenet’s core goals of anonymity, and ntent which is popular should persist indefinitely, for example most
freesites linked from the main indexes are still retrievable years later (at
least their front pages are). If the content isn’t very popular the best way
to keep it available is to regularly re-insert (re-upload) it. An interesting
option is the “Keepalive” plugin, which will do this for you – even if you
didn’t upload the file/site in the first place. Improvements are planned,
such as a special kind of request that allows us to probe whether a file is
available from a random point on the is Freenet implemented in Java? Opinions differ about the choice of Java for the reference implementation of
Freenet (even among the core developers). Ian Clarke and
several other developers are Java proponents and the choice for Java was
made. Even if everybody could be convinced to switch to a different language
reimplementing the current Freenet protocol would be quite a big task,
and take up a significant amount of time, while there is only a limited
amount of developer-time available. Flame wars on the development list about
the language choice aren’t welcome, people willing to implement Freenet in
other languages however are very much encouraged to try. Don’t underestimate
the amount of work do I allow connections to FProxy from other computers? If you want everyone to be able to use your node you have the following options:
Go to the web interface configuration page and enable advanced modeStop your node and edit manually
In both cases change the following
lowedHosts=*
Of course, this leaves your node wide open, unless you control access with a
firewall of some sort. If you’d prefer to use access controls within Freenet,
then you can use lines like
lowedHosts=127. 0. 1, 192. 168. 1. 0/24
Or even (find your IP address from ipconfig/ifconfig/winipcfg and substitute
it for 192. 1), 192. 1
And if you want to grant full access (i. change config settings, restart,
etc) to the node (WARNING: Be very careful who you give full fproxy access
to! )lowedHostsFullAccess=127. 0/24
What’s new? Is there a changelog? On every new build, a brief summary of all the main changes is posted to the
support and devl lists and the eenet board on Freetalk. This is usually
relayed to FMS and Frost too. Alternatively, for a much more detailed view,
check out the git repositories. Also,
you should check the developer blogs (from the default bookmarks, or over the
web, e. g.
toad), but be warned
they are often not regularly updated and frequently go off on rants on
unrelated topics! Why are there so many messages in my logfile with a backtrace attached? Freenet logs messages excessively during normal operation. It’s something we’re
aware of and are working on. I have Kaspersky anti-virus, and Freenet doesn’t install, or shows “Download/upload queue database corrupted! “Kaspersky can be a problem with Freenet. See here.
We recommend you turn off Kaspersky during install and during node startup, and exclude the directory you installed Freenet in (most likely C:\Program Files\Freenet or C:\Program Files (x86)\Freenet). I set a password and now I forgot it, what can I do? The password protects your downloads and uploads and the client-cache (cache
of what you’ve recently browsed on Freenet). It is stored in the file
There is no way to recover the password, but if you forget it
you can wipe your downloads and uploads and the client cache by securely
deleting the file See the question on private data and local
security for more eenet keeps complaining about clock skewFreenet will have problems if your clock is constantly being rewound. Usually
this happens when something is resetting your clock regularly in big jumps.
On Linux, you should run ntpd to make sure your clock isn’t too far off (this
isn’t vital but it’s helpful), but if you see clock skew errors, try adding
the -x option to it to avoid big backwards jumps. Also, running ntpdate on
startup so there is one big jump before Freenet starts is a good idea. This
can also happen on Windows sometimes, let us know how you managed to fix it… generally it’s not all that serious though, especially if big jumps in
the clock are only once a lishingIf I publish something in Freenet, how will people find it? Don’t they have to know the key I used? Yes, people will have to know what key you used to publish your information.
This means you will have to announce your key in some most common way to do this is to send a message, containing your key and
brief description of your information, to the author of one of the existing
Freenet sites. Most of the “portal” sites which are linked from the Freenet
web interface (fproxy) read the Freetalk or FMS forums, and there are boards
specifically for announcing sites (usually the boards are called “sites”! ).
You could also send your key to people by using the Freenet mailing lists, in the IRC channel ( #freenet),
by private e-mail, or by advertising your Freenet site on your World Wide Web
site. If you’re feeling extravagant, you could even try skywriting it.
(Graffiti is not recommended, for legal reasons. )How do I publish a Content Hash Key (CHK)? A Content Hash Key is based on the actual content contained within it – and
as such, the key will only be known after it has been inserted into Freenet.
To insert a CHK, simply insert it as “CHK@”, Freenet will tell you what the
actual CHK is once the insertion Freenet documents be updated / deleted? Currently, a document posted to freenet with the same name as one already
present may actually serve to propagate the existing document. there is also
currently no means of deleting a document from freenet. documents that are
never requested are eventually removed through ever, you can use an updatable subspace key (usk) to provide a form of updatable freesite:
your node will automatically look for later editions of the site (after you
visit it, or always if you bookmark it), and show you the latest version. you
can force it to search for the latest version by changing the number at the
end of the key to ntributingI have this great! First step: read the mailing list archives.
Odds are good that someone else had the same idea and discussed it with the
group. Either a flaw was found in the idea, or perhaps it was decided to
postpone implementing the idea until later. Some examples of ideas already
discussed are storing information by content hash, key redirection, signed
keys/data, use of UDP, server discovery, URLs, document versioning,
and others. If you don’t see the idea discussed in the archives, by all means
bring it up in the appropriate
mailing I contribute to the Freenet Project? Absolutely. Even if you don’t have the time or skills to become a
co-developer of the project, you can contribute in other ways:
Help test Freenet by installing and configuring the server software on your
stall the client software on your machine to test retrieving information and
publishing your on the Freenet web site (including the FAQ). Contribute your ideas to the discussion anslate the user interface
into another language.
If you are a developer, you can help by working on Freenet itself,
or by creating other applications to run on Freenet. External applications
(such as FMS, the main forums system used on Freenet) use the Freenet Client
Protocol to talk to Fred. Another
possibility is writing plugins – these are written in Java and run in
Freenet’s JVM, and can be bundled with Freenet when they are ready. A popular
plugin is Sone, which is a microblogging/social app over Freenet. You can see
how to install FMS and Sone on e. the Freenet Social Networking Guide
you want to work on Freenet itself, see:
Source codeRoadmapDevelopment page
Improvements to this website, fixes for
spelling/grammar mistakes, new ideas (see the previous answer),
are all welcome. You may find
the wiki you have any questions about contributing, please contact us, via the developers mailing list,
the chat channel,
the support mailing list or anonymously via the freenet board on but not least you can donate to support our paid
developer(s) and cover server can I access the code and website? See our GitHub tools do I need to help develop? Building Freenet requires JDK 1. 8 or later. You can download the source tarballs on the
download page for a specific build, or use git to get an up to date copy of
the source, see here for details. Further
instructions for building and deploying the server are included with the code
itself. Generally speaking, joining our IRC channel is a good idea:
#freenet
on there a Help Site that goes deeper into the questions newbies may have about Freenet, and where people can contribute too? Have a look at our wiki. An older wiki,
which is now read-only, but has a fair amount of content so is sometimes
helpful is
here. There are also
several implementations of wiki’s over Freenet. The most recent one is called
Jfniki. There is a link in the default bookmarks on the Browse Freenet page
after you install can I report bugs? You can use our bug tracking system hosted by MantisHub or
send a mail to our
support mailing list. I’m a theoretical computer scientist/mathematician, how can I help? See curityCan I use my regular browser to browse Freenet? Freenet has a web interface: much of the content on Freenet is in the form of
“freesites”, and downloads, configuration and friend connections can be
managed from the web interface. However, because of weaknesses in current
browsers, we strongly recommend that you use a separate browser for
Freenet. Specifically, browser history stealing, in all its forms, is a major
threat if you share a browser between Freenet and the WWW at large: malicious
web pages will be able to probe which freesites you have visited, and report
this information to their ivacy/incognito mode may be sufficient, and Windows tray app will start a
browser running in this ‘t attack X break Freenet’s anonymity? Short answer: Probably, on opennet. Maybe, on answer:Freenet has a different threat model to Tor and the Mixmaster remailers.
Freenet is designed to resist censorship: The network must therefore be
robust, and content must be distributed without requiring a central server,
whether anonymous or not. Anonymity is important for requesters and
especially for those who upload content in the first place. The typical
example is a corporate or government whistleblower. Generally to find the
originator of some content, the attacker must be able to predict the data in
advance, must be able to move across the network relatively quickly, and must
be able to perform the attack while the data is being inserted; after that,
it is distributed across the network and is much harder to trace, and the
originator may have left the network. However, if by chance or by
overwhelming force the attacker is connected to the whistleblower (or e. g.
seizes the computers of everyone on the network), he may be able to identify
this much more quickly. All of this is vastly more difficult on a darknet,
where everyone connects only to their friends, where it is very hard for an
attacker to find nodes, and where to connect to a given node he must social
engineer its operator! Freenet does support opennet mode (plug and play),
but darknet is far more secure, and far more difficult to block on a national
on the other hand is designed to anonymise real-time data streams,
on the assumption that the list of nodes can be public, that there is a free
world where nodes can be operated safely, that the authors of controversial
content will be able to either host (hidden) web servers themselves or upload
it to other (hidden, but usually centralised) storage systems, and so on. And
Tor has a concept of a “client”, which is somebody who uses the service
without providing any value to it; on Freenet, every node relays data for its
neighbours. Hence the attacks on Freenet are completely different to the
attacks on Tor. Both compromise to some degree to enable more or less
real-time you can use the darknet, trust your friends, don’t reinsert files, always
use the “Insert a random, safe key” option, and change your anonymous
identity after some volume of inserts, you should be relatively safe using
Freenet. However this has not yet been quantified. If you can connect,
build up some trust in your anonymous persona, insert your controversial
content, and then disappear, again, you are better off with Freenet,
especially if the content is a website (but if you are connecting on opennet,
beware of seednode compromises). In some other cases, Tor is are still working on Freenet’s security and there are major security
enhancements which h
But Freenet is still around, although it’s too risky to use it, except via Tor…
> But Freenet is still around, although it’s too risky to use it, except via, I’m a Freenet developer of the past ~ 10 years, so I’d like to clarify upon this:)
(The project is still active, there was a release just this week! )While there technically were indeed lawsuits in the US, the situation is not as black and white as “it’s dangerous” is an anonymizing peer-to-peer network as well!
What is dangerous under certain circumstances is only one of the three modes to use it:
1) Opennet, where Freenet uses random strangers as peers.
2) Darknet, where you only connect to peers you manually select, e. g. your friends.
3) Opennet with some Darknet peers in addition (I’ll call it “mixed mode”) Opennet allows law enforcement to connect to your Freenet potentially and thus analyze your traffic.
Still, this does not mean that your Freenet will plainly tell its peers what you are downloading!
Traffic is always redirected across a random number of peers, none of which tells the others who requested it – which provides plausible deniability.
All traffic is encrypted, only the recipient can decrypt it.
So you cannot just watch traffic and filter out illegal JPEGs or LEA did then is to come up some math and then claim to deduct from it that there is a certain probability that the illegal downloads were requested by the people they claim it came from.
Their math is known and discussed by the Freenet core team, it may be addressed eventually – but from watching the discussion (not the math) I can say it should be taken with a grain of salt.
It’s not absolute proof that the claimed downloaders were in fact the downloaders.
It’s just a probabilistic assumption, which may possibly be wrong because the way Freenet works is rather complex (>200 000 LOC) as Freenet stores content encrypted on random user’s machines (which is the advantage over Tor, Freenet is completely decentralized! ), it is imaginable that law enforcement accusses people who did not willingly download it, but just happened to store You can use Freenet in Darknet or mixed mode to be reasonably safe:
The more of your peers are not controlled by attackers, the lower the probability that a statistical attack can be conducted. Further, the said legal cases only happened in the US to my knowledge, and I’d argue that the legal system of that country seems a bit flawed.
Outside of the US you can just run Opennet and probably be at the same risk as some random non-exit Tor node.
You transport traffic which you cannot look into (because its encrypted) and store files which you cannot look into (because they are encrypted), so what’s illegal about it anyway?
Freenet – Wikipedia
Not to be confused with Free-Net.
FreenetFProxy index page (Freenet 0. 7)Developer(s)[1]Initial releaseMarch 2000; 21 years agoStable release0. 7. 5 (Build 1491) (May 2, 2021; 5 months ago[2]) [±]
Written inJavaOperating systemCross-platform: Unix-like (Android, Linux, BSD, macOS), Microsoft WindowsPlatformJavaAvailable inEnglish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, Chinese[3]TypeAnonymity application, peer-to-peer, friend-to-friend, overlay network, mix network, distributed data storeLicenseGNU General Public
Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free software for publishing and communicating on the Web without fear of censorship. [4][5]: 151 Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke, who defined Freenet’s goal as providing freedom of speech on the Internet with strong anonymity protection. [6][7]
The distributed data store of Freenet is used by many third-party programs and plugins to provide microblogging and media sharing, [8] anonymous and decentralised version tracking, [9] blogging, [10] a generic web of trust for decentralized spam resistance, [11] Shoeshop for using Freenet over Sneakernet, [12] and many more.
History[edit]
The origin of Freenet can be traced to Ian Clarke’s student project at the University of Edinburgh, which he completed as a graduation requirement in the summer of 1999. [13][14][15] Ian Clarke’s resulting unpublished report “A distributed decentralized information storage and retrieval system” (1999) provided foundation for the seminal paper written in collaboration with other researchers, “Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System” (2001). [16][17] According to CiteSeer, it became one of the most frequently cited computer science articles in 2002. [18]
Researchers suggested that Freenet can provide anonymity on the Internet by storing small encrypted snippets of content distributed on the computers of its users and connecting only through intermediate computers which pass on requests for content and sending them back without knowing the contents of the full file, similar to how routers on the Internet route packets without knowing anything about files—except Freenet has caching, a layer of strong encryption, and no reliance on centralized structures. [17] This allows users to publish anonymously or retrieve various kinds of information. [5]: 152
The Freenet 0. 7 darknet peers list.
Freenet has been under continuous development since 2000.
Freenet 0. 7, released on 8 May 2008, is a major re-write incorporating a number of fundamental changes. The most fundamental change is support for darknet operation. Version 0. 7 offered two modes of operation: a mode in which it connects only to friends, and an opennet-mode in which it connects to any other Freenet user. Both modes can be run simultaneously. When a user switches to pure darknet operation, Freenet becomes very difficult to detect from the outside. The transport layer created for the darknet mode allows communication over restricted routes as commonly found in mesh networks, as long as these connections follow a small-world structure. [19]: 815–816 Other modifications include switching from TCP to UDP, which allows UDP hole punching along with faster transmission of messages between peers in the network. [20]
Freenet 0. 5, released on 12 June 2009, offers a variety of improvements over 0. These include reduced memory usage, faster insert and retrieval of content, significant improvements to the FProxy web interface used for browsing freesites, and a large number of smaller bugfixes, performance enhancements, and usability improvements. 5 also shipped with a new version of the Windows installer. [21]
As of build 1226, released on 30 July 2009, features that have been written include significant security improvements against both attackers acting on the network and physical seizure of the computer running the node. [22]
As of build 1468, released on 11 July 2015, the Freenet core stopped using the db4o database and laid the foundation for an efficient interface to the Web of Trust plugin which provides spam resistance. [23]
Freenet has always been free software, but until 2011 it required users to install Java. This problem was solved by making Freenet compatible with OpenJDK, a free and open source implementation of the Java Platform.
On 11 February 2015, Freenet received the SUMA-Award for “protection against total surveillance. “[24][25][26]
Features and user interface[edit]
Freenet served as the model for the Japanese peer to peer file-sharing programs Winny, Share and Perfect Dark, but this model differs from p2p networks such as Bittorrent and emule. Freenet separates the underlying network structure and protocol from how users interact with the network; as a result, there are a variety of ways to access content on the Freenet network. The simplest is via FProxy, which is integrated with the node software and provides a web interface to content on the network. Using FProxy, a user can browse freesites (websites that use normal HTML and related tools, but whose content is stored within Freenet rather than on a traditional web server). The web interface is also used for most configuration and node management tasks. Through the use of separate applications or plugins loaded into the node software, users can interact with the network in other ways, such as forums similar to web forums or Usenet or interfaces more similar to traditional P2P “filesharing” interfaces.
While Freenet provides an HTTP interface for browsing freesites, it is not a proxy for the World Wide Web; Freenet can be used to access only the content that has been previously inserted into the Freenet network. In this way, it is more similar to Tor’s onion services than to anonymous proxy software like Tor’s proxy.
Freenet’s focus lies on free speech and anonymity. Because of that, Freenet acts differently at certain points that are (directly or indirectly) related to the anonymity part. Freenet attempts to protect the anonymity of both people inserting data into the network (uploading) and those retrieving data from the network (downloading). Unlike file sharing systems, there is no need for the uploader to remain on the network after uploading a file or group of files. Instead, during the upload process, the files are broken into chunks and stored on a variety of other computers on the network. When downloading, those chunks are found and reassembled. Every node on the Freenet network contributes storage space to hold files and bandwidth that it uses to route requests from its peers.
As a direct result of the anonymity requirements, the node requesting content does not normally connect directly to the node that has it; instead, the request is routed across several intermediaries, none of which know which node made the request or which one had it. As a result, the total bandwidth required by the network to transfer a file is higher than in other systems, which can result in slower transfers, especially for infrequently accessed content.
Since version 0. 7, Freenet offers two different levels of security: Opennet and Darknet. With Opennet, users connect to arbitrary other users. With Darknet, users connect only to “friends” with whom they previously exchanged public keys, named node-references. Both modes can be used together.
Content[edit]
Freenet’s founders argue that true freedom of speech comes only with true anonymity and that the beneficial uses of Freenet outweigh its negative uses. [27] Their view is that free speech, in itself, is not in contradiction with any other consideration—the information is not the crime. Freenet attempts to remove the possibility of any group imposing its beliefs or values on any data. Although many states censor communications to different extents, they all share one commonality in that a body must decide what information to censor and what information to allow. What may be acceptable to one group of people may be considered offensive or even dangerous to another. In essence, the purpose of Freenet is to ensure that no one is allowed to decide what is acceptable.
Reports of Freenet’s use in authoritarian nations is difficult to track due to the very nature of Freenet’s goals. One group, Freenet China, used to introduce the Freenet software to Chinese users starting from 2001 and distribute it within China through e-mails and on disks after the group’s website was blocked by the Chinese authorities on the mainland. It was reported that in 2002 Freenet China had several thousand dedicated users. [28]: 70–71 However, Freenet opennet traffic was blocked in China around the 2010s. [citation needed]
Technical design[edit]
The Freenet file sharing network stores documents and allows them to be retrieved later by an associated key, as is now possible with protocols such as HTTP. The network is designed to be highly survivable. The system has no central servers and is not subject to the control of any one individual or organization, including the designers of Freenet. The codebase size is over 192. 000 lines of code. [29] Information stored on Freenet is distributed around the network and stored on several different nodes. Encryption of data and relaying of requests makes it difficult to determine who inserted content into Freenet, who requested that content, or where the content was stored. This protects the anonymity of participants, and also makes it very difficult to censor specific content. Content is stored encrypted, making it difficult for even the operator of a node to determine what is stored on that node. This provides plausible deniability; which, in combination with request relaying, means that safe harbor laws that protect service providers may also protect Freenet node operators. When asked about the topic, Freenet developers defer to the EFF discussion which says that not being able to filter anything is a safe choice. [30][31]
Distributed storage and caching of data[edit]
Like Winny, Share and Perfect Dark, Freenet not only transmits data between nodes but actually stores them, working as a huge distributed cache. To achieve this, each node allocates some amount of disk space to store data; this is configurable by the node operator, but is typically several GB (or more).
Files on Freenet are typically split into multiple small blocks, with duplicate blocks created to provide redundancy. Each block is handled independently, meaning that a single file may have parts stored on many different nodes.
Information flow in Freenet is different from networks like eMule or BitTorrent; in Freenet:
A user wishing to share a file or update a freesite “inserts” the file “to the network”
After “insertion” is finished, the publishing node is free to shut down, because the file is stored in the network. It will remain available for other users whether or not the original publishing node is online. No single node is responsible for the content; instead, it is replicated to many different nodes.
Two advantages of this design are high reliability and anonymity. Information remains available even if the publisher node goes offline, and is anonymously spread over many hosting nodes as encrypted blocks, not entire files.
The key disadvantage of the storage method is that no one node is responsible for any chunk of data. If a piece of data is not retrieved for some time and a node keeps getting new data, it will drop the old data sometime when its allocated disk space is fully used. In this way Freenet tends to ‘forget’ data which is not retrieved regularly (see also Effect).
While users can insert data into the network, there is no way to delete data. Due to Freenet’s anonymous nature the original publishing node or owner of any piece of data is unknown. The only way data can be removed is if users don’t request it.
Network[edit]
Typically, a host computer on the network runs the software that acts as a node, and it connects to other hosts running that same software to form a large distributed, variable-size network of peer nodes. Some nodes are end user nodes, from which documents are requested and presented to human users. Other nodes serve only to route data. All nodes communicate with each other identically – there are no dedicated “clients” or “servers”. It is not possible for a node to rate another node except by its capacity to insert and fetch data associated with a key. This is unlike most other P2P networks where node administrators can employ a ratio system, where users have to share a certain amount of content before they can download.
Freenet may also be considered a small world network.
The Freenet protocol is intended to be used on a network of complex topology, such as the Internet (Internet Protocol). Each node knows only about some number of other nodes that it can reach directly (its conceptual “neighbors”), but any node can be a neighbor to any other; no hierarchy or other structure is intended. Each message is routed through the network by passing from neighbor to neighbor until it reaches its destination. As each node passes a message to a neighbor, it does not know whether the neighbor will forward the message to another node, or is the final destination or original source of the message. This is intended to protect the anonymity of users and publishers.
Each node maintains a data store containing documents associated with keys, and a routing table associating nodes with records of their performance in retrieving different keys.
Protocol[edit]
A typical request sequence. The request moves through the network from node to node, backing out of a dead-end (step 3) and a loop (step 7) before locating the desired file.
The Freenet protocol uses a key-based routing protocol, similar to distributed hash tables. The routing algorithm changed significantly in version 0. Prior to version 0. 7, Freenet used a heuristic routing algorithm where each node had no fixed location, and routing was based on which node had served a key closest to the key being fetched (in version 0. 3) or which is estimated to serve it faster (in version 0. 5). In either case, new connections were sometimes added to downstream nodes (i. e. the node that answered the request) when requests succeeded, and old nodes were discarded in least recently used order (or something close to it). Oskar Sandberg’s research (during the development of version 0. 7) shows that this “path folding” is critical, and that a very simple routing algorithm will suffice provided there is path folding.
The disadvantage of this is that it is very easy for an attacker to find Freenet nodes, and connect to them, because every node is continually attempting to find new connections. In version 0. 7, Freenet supports both ‘Opennet’ (similar to the old algorithms, but simpler), and “Darknet” (all node connections are set up manually, so only your friends know your node’s IP address). Darknet is less convenient, but much more secure against a distant attacker.
This change required major changes in the routing algorithm. Every node has a location, which is a number between 0 and 1. When a key is requested, first the node checks the local data store. If it’s not found, the key’s hash is turned into another number in the same range, and the request is routed to the node whose location is closest to the key. This goes on until some number of hops is exceeded, there are no more nodes to search, or the data is found. If the data is found, it is cached on each node along the path. So there is no one source node for a key, and attempting to find where it is currently stored will result in it being cached more widely. Essentially the same process is used to insert a document into the network: the data is routed according to the key until it runs out of hops, and if no existing document is found with the same key, it is stored on each node. If older data is found, the older data is propagated and returned to the originator, and the insert “collides”.
But this works only if the locations are clustered in the right way. Freenet assumes that the Darknet (a subset of the global social network) is a small-world network, and nodes constantly attempt to swap locations (using the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm) in order to minimize their distance to their neighbors. If the network actually is a small-world network, Freenet should find data reasonably quickly; ideally on the order of hops in Big O notation. However, it does not guarantee that data will be found at all. [32]
Eventually, either the document is found or the hop limit is exceeded. The terminal node sends a reply that makes its way back to the originator along the route specified by the intermediate nodes’ records of pending requests. The intermediate nodes may choose to cache the document along the way. Besides saving bandwidth, this also makes documents harder to censor as there is no one “source node. ”
Effect[edit]
The effect of the node specialising on the particular location.
Initially, the locations in Darknet are distributed randomly. This means that routing of requests is essentially random. In Opennet connections are established by a join request which provides an optimized network structure if the existing network is already optimized. [33] So the data in a newly started Freenet will be distributed somewhat randomly. [citation needed]
As location swapping (on Darknet) and path folding (on Opennet) progress, nodes which are close to one another will increasingly have close locations, and nodes which are far away will have distant locations. Data with similar keys will be stored on the same node. [33]
The result is that the network will self-organize into a distributed, clustered structure where nodes tend to hold data items that are close together in key space. There will probably be multiple such clusters throughout the network, any given document being replicated numerous times, depending on how much it is used. This is a kind of “spontaneous symmetry breaking”, in which an initially symmetric state (all nodes being the same, with random initial keys for each other) leads to a highly asymmetric situation, with nodes coming to specialize in data that has closely related keys. [citation needed]
There are forces which tend to cause clustering (shared closeness data spreads throughout the network), and forces that tend to break up clusters (local caching of commonly used data). These forces will be different depending on how often data is used, so that seldom-used data will tend to be on just a few nodes which specialize in providing that data, and frequently used items will be spread widely throughout the network. This automatic mirroring counteracts the times when web traffic becomes overloaded, and due to a mature network’s intelligent routing, a network of size n should require only log(n) time to retrieve a document on average. [34]
Keys[edit]
Keys are hashes: there is no notion of semantic closeness when speaking of key closeness. Therefore, there will be no correlation between key closeness and similar popularity of data as there might be if keys did exhibit some semantic meaning, thus avoiding bottlenecks caused by popular subjects.
There are two main varieties of keys in use on Freenet, the Content Hash Key (CHK) and the Signed Subspace Key (SSK). A subtype of SSKs is the Updatable Subspace Key (USK) which adds versioning to allow secure updating of content.
A CHK is a SHA-256 hash of a document (after encryption, which itself depends on the hash of the plaintext) and thus a node can check that the document returned is correct by hashing it and checking the digest against the key. This key contains the meat of the data on Freenet. It carries all the binary data building blocks for the content to be delivered to the client for reassembly and decryption. The CHK is unique by nature and provides tamperproof content. A hostile node altering the data under a CHK will immediately be detected by the next node or the client. CHKs also reduce the redundancy of data since the same data will have the same CHK and when multiple sites reference the same large files, they can reference to the same CHK. [35]
SSKs are based on public-key cryptography. Currently Freenet uses the DSA algorithm. Documents inserted under SSKs are signed by the inserter, and this signature can be verified by every node to ensure that the data is not tampered with. SSKs can be used to establish a verifiable pseudonymous identity on Freenet, and allow for multiple documents to be inserted securely by a single person. Files inserted with an SSK are effectively immutable, since inserting a second file with the same name can cause collisions. USKs resolve this by adding a version number to the keys which is also used for providing update notification for keys registered as bookmarks in the web interface. [36] Another subtype of the SSK is the Keyword Signed Key, or KSK, in which the key pair is generated in a standard way from a simple human-readable string. Inserting a document using a KSK allows the document to be retrieved and decrypted if and only if the requester knows the human-readable string; this allows for more convenient (but less secure) URIs for users to refer to. [37]
Scalability[edit]
A network is said to be scalable if its performance does not deteriorate even if the network is very large. The scalability of Freenet is being evaluated, but similar architectures have been shown to scale logarithmically. [38] This work indicates that Freenet can find data in hops on a small-world network (which includes both opennet and darknet style Freenet networks), when ignoring the caching which could improve the scalability for popular content. However, this scalability is difficult to test without a very large network. Furthermore, the security features inherent to Freenet make detailed performance analysis (including things as simple as determining the size of the network) difficult to do accurately. As of now, the scalability of Freenet has yet to be tested.
Darknet versus Opennet[edit]
As of version 0. 7, Freenet supports both “darknet” and “opennet” connections. Opennet connections are made automatically by nodes with opennet enabled, while darknet connections are manually established between users that know and trust each other. Freenet developers describe the trust needed as “will not crack their Freenet node”. [39] Opennet connections are easy to use, but darknet connections are more secure against attackers on the network, and can make it difficult for an attacker (such as an oppressive government) to even determine that a user is running Freenet in the first place. [40]
The core innovation in Freenet 0. 7 is to allow a globally scalable darknet, capable (at least in theory) of supporting millions of users. Previous darknets, such as WASTE, have been limited to relatively small disconnected networks. The scalability of Freenet is made possible by the fact that human relationships tend to form small-world networks, a property that can be exploited to find short paths between any two people. The work is based on a speech given at DEF CON 13 by Ian Clarke and Swedish mathematician Oskar Sandberg. Furthermore, the routing algorithm is capable of routing over a mixture of opennet and darknet connections, allowing people who have only a few friends using the network to get the performance from having sufficient connections while still receiving some of the security benefits of darknet connections. This also means that small darknets where some users also have opennet connections are fully integrated into the whole Freenet network, allowing all users access to all content, whether they run opennet, darknet, or a hybrid of the two, except for darknet pockets connected only by a single hybrid node. [33]
Tools and applications[edit]
Unlike many other P2P applications Freenet does not provide comprehensive functionality itself. Freenet is modular and features an API called Freenet Client Protocol (FCP) for other programs to use to implement services such as message boards, file sharing, or online chat. [41]
Communication[edit]
Freenet Messaging System (FMS)
FMS was designed to address problems with Frost such as denial of service attacks and spam. Users publish trust lists, and each user downloads messages only from identities they trust and identities trusted by identities they trust. FMS is developed anonymously and can be downloaded from the FMS freesite within Freenet. It does not have an official site on the normal Internet. It features random post delay, support for many identities, and a distinction between trusting a user’s posts and trusting their trust list. It is written in C++ and is a separate application from Freenet which uses the Freenet Client Protocol (FCP) to interface with Freenet.
Frost
Frost includes support for convenient file sharing, but its design is inherently vulnerable to spam and denial of service attacks. [42] Frost can be downloaded from the Frost home page on SourceForge, or from the Frost freesite within Freenet. It is not endorsed by the Freenet developers. Frost is written in Java and is a separate application from Freenet.
Sone
Sone provides a simpler interface inspired by Facebook[43] with public anonymous discussions and image galleries. It provides an API for control from other programs[44] is also used to implement a comment system for static websites in the regular internet. [45][46]
Utilities[edit]
jSite
jSite is a tool to upload websites. It handles keys and manages uploading files.
Infocalypse
Infocalypse is an extension for the distributed revision control system Mercurial. It uses an optimized structure to minimize the number of requests to retrieve new data, and allows supporting a repository by securely reuploading most parts of the data without requiring the owner’s private keys. [47]
Libraries[edit]
FCPLib
FCPLib (Freenet Client Protocol Library) aims to be a cross-platform natively compiled set of C++-based functions for storing and retrieving information to and from Freenet. FCPLib supports Windows NT/2K/XP, Debian, BSD, Solaris, and macOS.
lib-pyFreenet
lib-pyFreenet exposes Freenet functionality to Python programs. Infocalypse uses it.
Vulnerabilities[edit]
Law enforcement agencies have claimed to have successfully infiltrated freenet opennet in order to deanonymize users[48] but no technical details have been given to support these allegations. One report stated that, “A child-porn investigation focused on… [the suspect] when the authorities were monitoring the online network, Freenet. “[49] A different report indicated arrests may have been based on the BlackICE project leaks, that are debunked for using bad math [50] and for using an incorrectly calculated false positives rate and a false model. [51]
A court case in the Peel Region of Ontario, Canada R. v. Owen, 2017 ONCJ 729 (CanLII), illustrated that Law Enforcement do in fact have a presence, after Peel Regional Police located who had been downloading illegal material on the Freenet network. [52] The court decision indicates that a Canadian Law Enforcement agency operates nodes running modified Freenet software in the hope of determining who is requesting illegal material.
Routing Table Insertion (RTI) Attack. [53]
Notability[edit]
Freenet has had significant publicity in the mainstream press, including articles in The New York Times, and coverage on CNN, 60 Minutes II, the BBC, The Guardian, [54] and elsewhere.
Freenet received the SUMA-Award 2014 for “protection against total surveillance. “[24][25][26]
Freesite[edit]
A “freesite” is a site hosted on the Freenet network. Because it contains only static content, it cannot contain any active content like server side scripts or databases. Freesites are coded in HTML and support as many features as the browser viewing the page allows; however, there are some exceptions where the Freenet software will remove parts of the code that may be used to reveal the identity of the person viewing the page (making a page access something on the internet, for example).
See also[edit]
Peer-to-peer web hosting
Rendezvous protocol
Anonymous P2P
Crypto-anarchism
Cypherpunk
Distributed file system
Freedom of information
Friend-to-friend
Comparable software[edit]
Entropy (anonymous data store) (Discontinued)
GNUnet
I2P
Java Anon Proxy (also known as JonDonym)
Osiris
Perfect Dark – also creates a distributed data store shared by anonymous nodes; the successor to Share, which itself is the successor of Winny.
Tahoe-LAFS
ZeroNet
References[edit]
^ “People”. Freenet: The Free Network official website. 22 September 2008. Archived from the original on 21 September 2013. Retrieved 31 May 2014.
^ “Releases · freenet/fred”. Retrieved 20 September 2021.
^ Language specific versions of Freenet, GitHub: Freenet.
^ What is Freenet? Archived 16 September 2011 at the Wayback Machine, Freenet: The Free network official website.
^ a b Taylor, Ian J. From P2P to Web Services and Grids: Peers in a Client/Server World. London: Springer, 2005.
^ Cohen, Adam (26 June 2000). “The Infoanarchist”. TIME Magazine. Archived from the original on 8 July 2008. Retrieved 18 December 2011.
^ Beckett, Andy (26 November 2009). “The dark side of the internet”. The Guardian. Archived from the original on 8 September 2013. Retrieved 26 November 2009. CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) The Guardian writes about Freenet (Ian Clarke’s response) Archived at WebCite
^ “Sone: Pseudonymes Microblogging über Freenet”., german article, 2010
^ “Infoclypse: A Mercurial plugin for decentral, anonymous version tracking and code-sharing over freenet”. Archived from the original on 20 November 2011.
^ “Flog Helper: Easy Blogging over Freenet”. 7 February 2019.
^ “Web of Trust: A freenet plugin for pseudonymous, decentral spam resistance”. 7 February 2019.
^ “Freenet over Sneakernet. Freenet Key: USK@MYLAnId-ZEyXhDGGbYOa1gOtkZZrFNTXjFl1dibLj9E, Xpu27DoAKKc8b0718E-ZteFrGqCYROe7XBBJI57pB4M, AQACAAE/Shoeshop/2/”.
^ Markoff, John (10 May 2000). “Cyberspace Programmers Confront Copyright Laws”. The New York Times.
^ “Coders prepare son of Napster”. BBC News. 12 March 2001.
^ “Fighting for free speech on the Net”. CNN. 19 December 2005.
^ Ian Clarke. A distributed decentralised information storage and retrieval system. Unpublished report, Division of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 1999.
^ a b Ian Clarke, Oskar Sandberg, Brandon Wiley, and Theodore W. Hong. Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Designing Privacy Enhancing Technologies: Design Issues in Anonymity and Unobservability. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag, 2001, p. 46-66.
^ Clarke, Ian; Sandberg, Oskar; Wiley, Brandon; Hong, Theodore W. (24 March 2019). “Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System”. Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. : 46–66. CiteSeerX 10. 1. 10. 4919.
^ Singh, Munindar P. The Practical Handbook of Internet Computing. Boca Raton, Fl. : Chapman & Hall, 2005.
^ Ihlenfeld, Jens (4 April 2006). “Freenet 0. 7 soll globales Darknet schaffen”. Golem. Retrieved 17 September 2015.
^ release information for Freenet 0. 5 Archived 29 November 2014 at the Wayback Machine, last accessed 2015-09-17
^ release information for Freenet build 1226 Archived 29 November 2014 at the Wayback Machine, last accessed 2015-09-17
^ Freenet 1468 release notes Archived 29 November 2014 at the Wayback Machine 2015
^ a b SUMA Award, 11 February 2015.
^ a b recording of the SUMA Award Ceremony 2015, published on 14 April 2015.
^ a b SUMA Award für das Freenet Projekt Jo Bager in Heise online, 2015
^ “The Philosophy behind Freenet”. Archived from the original on 30 April 2011. Retrieved 20 December 2010.
^ Damm, Jens, and Simona Thomas. Chinese Cyberspaces Technological Changes and Political Effects. London: Routledge, 2006.
^ Terry, Kyle. The dark side of the web — exploring darknets. Salem, Baden-Württemberg: TEDx Talks.
^ Toseland, Matthew. “Does Freenet qualify for DMCA Safe Harbor? “. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 27 January 2013.
^ “IAAL*: What Peer-to-Peer Developers Need to Know about Copyright Law”. 10 January 2006. Retrieved 15 September 2015.
^ Clarke, Ian (2010). Private Communication Through a Network of
Frequently Asked Questions about freenet proxy server
Is Freenet still active?
> But Freenet is still around, although it’s too risky to use it, except via Tor. … So Opennet allows law enforcement to connect to your Freenet potentially and thus analyze your traffic. Still, this does not mean that your Freenet will plainly tell its peers what you are downloading!Mar 26, 2019
What is Freenet used for?
Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free software for publishing and communicating on the Web without fear of censorship.
Can ISP see Freenet?
ISPs may be able to identify Freenet nodes with some effort, although we make this fairly difficult: Freenet’s current protocol is designed to be hard to detect, and steganography will be introduced at some point.
