26 Facts About Freenet

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Ian Clarke's resulting unpublished report "A distributed decentralized information storage and retrieval system" provided foundation for the seminal paper written in collaboration with other researchers, "Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System" .

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.

Freenet has always been free software, but until 2011 it required users to install Java.

On 11 February 2015, Freenet received the SUMA-Award for "protection against total surveillance".

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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.

Every node on the Freenet network contributes storage space to hold files and bandwidth that it uses to route requests from its peers.

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.

In essence, the purpose of Freenet is to ensure that no one is allowed to decide what is acceptable.

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.

Freenet file sharing network stores documents and allows them to be retrieved later by an associated key, as is possible with protocols such as HTTP.

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.

Files on Freenet are typically split into multiple small blocks, with duplicate blocks created to provide redundancy.

Information flow in Freenet is different from networks like eMule or BitTorrent; in Freenet:.

Freenet protocol is intended to be used on a network of complex topology, such as the Internet .

Freenet protocol uses a key-based routing protocol, similar to distributed hash tables.

Freenet assumes that the darknet is a small-world network, and nodes constantly attempt to swap locations in order to minimize their distance to their neighbors.

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.

The scalability of Freenet is being evaluated, but similar architectures have been shown to scale logarithmically.

Furthermore, the security features inherent to Freenet make detailed performance analysis difficult to do accurately.

Freenet developers describe the trust needed as "will not crack their Freenet node".

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.

Freenet is modular and features an API called Freenet Client Protocol for other programs to use to implement services such as message boards, file sharing, or online chat.

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, and elsewhere.

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Freenet received the SUMA-Award 2014 for "protection against total surveillance".