Freenet

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. 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. The distributed data store of Freenet is used by many third-party programs and plugins to provide microblogging and media sharing, anonymous and decentralised version tracking, blogging, a generic web of trust for decentralized spam resistance, Shoeshop for using Freenet over sneakernet, and many more. 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. Ian Clarke's resulting unpublished report "A distributed decentralized information storage and retrieval system" (1999) provided foundation for the seminal paper written in collaboration with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). According to CiteSeer, it became one of the most frequently cited computer science articles in 2002. 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. This is 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. This allows users to publish anonymously or retrieve various kinds of information. 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.