On Tuesday 16 June 2009 03:18:47 Evan Daniel wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 7:14 PM, Matthew
> Toseland<toad at amphibian.dyndns.org> wrote:
> > I have done the first phase of deploying this, after discussions with Ian.
> > We use the new background and the new logo, but we waste a lot of space on
> > the top "line" with the banner, and we don't use the horizontal menu yet as
> > we need to implement the sub-menus. Also I have rewritten the What is
> > Freenet? page with some input from Ian.
>
> Looking at the new version, it feels like it's targetted to an
> academic who is interested in the theory of anonymous networks. IMHO,
> it should be targeted at a potential new Freenet user. What they want
> to know is what they can do with it. The first sentence is a great
> introduction; it says that Freenet does something to let them
> communicate anonymously and without censorship. At that point, I
> think the obvious question for a potential user isn't "How does it
> manage that?" but "What sorts of communication?" In the current
> version, a new user has to get to the fourth paragraph before they get
> any hint about what they can do with it, rather than how it works.
Okay. The homepage now says:
' Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse and
publish web sites, and chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Users are
anonymous, and Freenet is entirely decentralised. Without anonymity there can
never be true freedom of speech, and without decentralisation the network would
be vulnerable to attack. Learn more!'
The What is Freenet? page now says:
' Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse and
publish web sites ("freesites"), and chat on forums, without fear of
censorship. Users are anonymous, and Freenet is entirely decentralised. Without
anonymity there can never be true freedom of speech, and without
decentralisation the network would be vulnerable to attack.
Communications by Freenet nodes are encrypted and are routed through other
nodes to make it extremely difficult to determine who is requesting the
information and what its content is.
Users contribute to the network by giving bandwidth and a portion of their hard
drive (called the "data store") for storing files. Files are automatically kept
or deleted depending on how popular they are, with the least popular being
discarded to make way for newer or more popular content. Files are encrypted,
so generally the user cannot easily discover what is in his datastore, and
hopefully can't be held accountable for it. Chat forums, websites, and search
functionality, are all built on top of this distributed data store.
Freenet has been downloaded by over 2 million users since the project started,
and used for the distribution of censored information all over the world
including countries such as China and the Middle East. Ideas and concepts
pioneered in Freenet have had a significant impact in the academic world. Our
2000 paper "Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval
System" was the most cited computer science paper of 2000 according to
Citeseer, and Freenet has also inspired papers in the worlds of law and
philosophy. Ian Clarke, Freenet's creator and project coordinator, was selected
as one of the top 100 innovators of 2003 by MIT's Technology Review magazine.
An important recent development, which very few other networks have, is the
"darknet": By only connecting to people they trust, users can greatly reduce
their vulnerability, and yet still connect to a global network through their
friends' friends' friends and so on. This enables people to use Freenet even in
places where Freenet may be illegal, makes it very difficult for governments to
block it, and does not rely on tunneling to the "free world".
Sounds good? Try it!'
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