Difference between revisions of "Entropy (anonymous data store)"

Revision as of 08:06, 4 April 2006

For entropy in the context of thermodynamics, see entropy.

Entropy is a decentralized, peer-to-peer communication network designed to be resistant to censorship, much like freenet. Entropy is an anonymous data store. It pools the contributed bandwidth and storage space of member computers to allow users to anonymously publish or retrieve information of all kinds. The term "Entropy" is an acronym for "Emerging Network To Reduce Orwellian Potency Yield," referring to George Orwell's famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and its totalitarian thought police enslaving people by controlling their information.

Why not Freenet?

Freenet has two disagreeing schools of routing management, and a lot of code bloat. It was the first of its kind and suffers much of the lack of prior experience. Some problems, such as the unweildy FCP split file calculation, are handled automatically with Entropy, whereas Freenet requires every program to manually perform those operations.

Entropy was written somewhat in response to Freenet. It accomplishes the same task, and has the same interface, but the internal implementation is very different. Written in C, it is much faster, and easy on the computer's resources. It still has a large memory signature and multiple processes, but can be run without notice on a decent machine.

Any programs (Frost, Fishtools, Freenet Tools, FIW) that run on Freenet can be configured to run on Entropy since Entropy was designed as a working replacement for Freenet, and thus has the same interface. Entropy also has a web proxy built in for sending and requesting keys, like Freenet. Unlike Freenet, Entropy also has a built in news interface, for reading and posting on the latest frost message boards all without having to run any programs besides the data store.

Network development timeline (and trivia)

• 2004, 9 July: The main developer (Juergen Buchmueller, aka pullmoll) apparently resigns from his position, expressing doubts about the effectiveness and safety of some of the algorithms employed by Entropy. [1]
• 2004, 17 or 18 December: Pullmoll publishes in the Entropy network a two page proof for the Fermat's last theorem. This seems collateral to his mathematical interests about encryption algorithms.
• 2004, 22 December: A single-time scanning reveals a network composed by 22 nodes in different hosts.
• 2005, 21 June: New entropy version by pullmoll, entropy-rsa, with a number of major encryption algorithm changes. [2]
• 2005, 26-27 August: Users report that the network is composed by less than 15 hosts. [3]

See also

• freenet

External links

World Wide Web links

• Entropy home page
• Clients that work with Entropy
• Slashdot: Entropy Project Closes Up Shop (outdated article)
• Entropy Forum

Freenet links

Note: These freesite links cannot be viewed without prior set up. For explanation on how to set up a connection see ways to view a freesite.

localhost is assumed as the base for the freesite

• ENTROPY