Again I will talk about some site that I had visited long long ago; actually this time it is not a site. It would be better to call it an "internet within an internet" as its creator calls it.
After all of these years, I remember the times that I was so paranoid about leaving my trail on anything on the internet. To this quest, I was researching about anything related to anonymity, secure communications, computer security and such. This may seem weird for some of you but those were the days when people have worries about giving their personal information to web sites, such as their emails. Nowadays, everybody seems to have forgotten about privacy. I wonder at which point this transformation has matured, clearly I missed it as I was not watching internet carefully after those years.
As I said
freenet is a P2P network which lies in the application layer of the internet. Its main argument is that without true anonymity freedom of speech cannot be exercised. This is mainly true. But there are some points that I don't understand in this view.
First of all, speech alone cannot organize people and cannot enforce governments to agree with people who have those concerns. You can say that with a medium that you can express yourself, you can build a virtual space that have its foot also in the real world. Yes, it is true. But when your organization grows any stronger it HAS to have some presence on the streets and this is where the real power struggle starts.
Coming to the technical details, I think it runs over TCP/IP. To join the network, you need to know three hosts already in the network. Ideally, these must be hosts that you actually know. But mostly this would not be the case, so you join a specific IRC channel and find three people randomly. Then your freenet node begins to communicate the freenet through your new peers, of course over time your peers will evolve. All communication is encrypted and routed anonymously to help protect your identity. Also the data that you temporarily store in your computer as a part of your cooperation is encrypted.
Actually, I feel like writing more about this issue. Maybe next week.
