Difference between revisions of "Freenet"

Revision as of 17:22, 19 October 2007

This article is inacurate in many places. It needs to be changed.

Freenet is a decentralized censorship-resistant peer-to-peer distributed data store. Freenet works by pooling the contributed bandwidth and storage space of member computers to allow users to anonymously publish or retrieve various kinds of information. Freenet uses a kind of key based routing similar to a distributed hash table to locate peers' data.

Freenet is currently under development, and a version 1.0 has not yet been released. Freenet is considered by many to be fundamentally different from other peer-to-peer networks; it is more difficult to use, slower, and does not have integrated search functionality. According to the Freenet Project group, such tradeoffs are expected since Freenet's primary goals are neither ease-of-use, nor performance. Unlike other peer-to-peer networks, Freenet is primarily intended to combat censorship and allow people to communicate with near-total anonymity.

Purpose

Although many nations 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. Freenet is a network which, putatively, removes the possibility of any group imposing their beliefs or values on any other. In essence nobody is allowed to decide what is acceptable for anybody else. Tolerance for each others' values is encouraged and failing that, the user is asked to turn a blind eye to content which opposes his or her views.

Technical design

The type of network routing method Freenet uses is key based routing. While the idea emerged independently, Freenet's routing algorithm is similar to that employed by distributed hash tables (DHTs). The main differences are that Freenet nodes do not have fixed specialisations, and the routing algorithm is heuristic in nature. Therefore, it does not guarantee that it will find a given piece of data. Freenet can also be viewed as a small world network.

The Freenet file sharing network is designed to be highly survivable, with all internal processes completely anonymized and decentralized across the network. The system has no central servers, is peer-to-peer, and is not subject to the control of any one individual or organization. Even the designers of Freenet do not have any control over the overall system. The system is designed so that information stored in the system is encrypted and replicated across a large number of continuously-changing anonymized computers around the world. It is extremely difficult for an attacker to find out which participants are hosting a given file, since the contents of each file are encrypted, and can also be broken into sections that are distributed over many different computers. Even the participants themselves don't know what they are storing.

The end goal of the Freenet network is to store documents and allow them to be retrieved later by an associated key, as is now possible with protocols such as HTTP. The network is implemented as a number of nodes that pass messages among themselves peer-to-peer. Typically, a host computer on the network will run the software that acts as a node, and it will connect to other hosts running that same software to form a large distributed network of peer nodes. Certain nodes will be end user nodes, from which documents will be requested and presented to the human user. But these nodes communicate with each other and with intermediate routing nodes identically