p2p news / p2pnet: The first “pure darknet” alpha version of the completely re-written Freenet 0.7, a p2p network purpose-built to allow the free sharing of information online, is now ready for public testing.

“Before, Freenet did a pretty good job of preventing people from knowing what you were doing with Freenet, but in some situations, even the fact that you were using Freenet at all could be dangerous, irrespective of what you are actually doing with it,” Freenet creator Ian Clarke told p2pnet.

“This new version of Freenet will be the first scalable attempt to address this problem head on, and we hope that users can help us to refine and improve it by trying out this early release”.

Freenet 0.7 represents a major new approach to p2p network design, he says and, “To protect the network, and the user’s anonymity, users will now have the ability to connect directly to other people that they know and trust, together forming a “global darknet” making it extremely difficult for any third party, whether a government or another powerful organisation, to determine that a user is participating in Freenet, let alone what they are doing with it,” says the Freenet team.

The application now operates over UDP rather than TCP, can transparently operate through firewalls, and a new, even simpler, API allows the rapid development of third party software that interacts with Freenet, says Clarke.

“The new Freenet employs a simpler and more flexible routing model than previous versions, which in the future may allow diverse applications ranging from efficient search, to near-real time instant messaging and chat between anonymous participants,” say the developers.

“Initially, Freenet 0.7 will be a ‘pure darknet’ model, in that all connections must be trusted. However future versions will permit a mixed opennet/darknet approach where the user can opt to allow untrusted connections to their node, which will improve connectivity and convenience at the expense of security.”

Clarke warns this release is still very early alpha and users, “should neither expect it to be secure, nor user friendly. Rather, the purpose of this release is to facilitate wider testing, to inform people of the progress we have made, and to attract fresh development talent, both to Freenet itself, and to third party applications that use Freenet as a platform.”

Download Freenet 0.7 here.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 3rd, 2006 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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