Matthew Toseland wrote: > Apologies for being the absolute last wrap-up! This year went really well, we > had 5 students, and they all (more or less) deserved their passes. We had a > much stronger selection process than in the first 2 years, requiring some > demonstration in the form of code: a new feature or a bugfix. So even though > most of the students were completely new to us, mostly they did pretty well. > One of our students had a work conflict, but this was resolved satisfactorily. > > For the Googlers reading this, Freenet is an anonymous peer to peer system > with support for forums, browsing the internal web, filesharing etc, with a > focus on security and the option of running in "darknet" or friend-to-friend > mode. It is intended (at least by me) for people in hostile environments > (China, Iran etc) to express themselves freely, but it is currently mostly > used in the West by geeks, filesharers, etc. > > infinity0 and mikeb worked together on a new searching plugin, which we have > now deployed. infinity0's work was primarily on a new index format (which > works, but the spider needs more work), and on distributed indexing (which > doesn't yet), and mikeb mainly worked on improving the user interface and > adding essential features (simple non-infringing page ranking algorithm, > booleans, phrase matches etc). kurmi worked on new filtering code for various > formats, particularly a vastly improved CSS filter, which needed considerable > work to sort out all the parsing perversities but is now merged (Freenet has > to be very careful not to send anything to the browser that might give the > user's IP away via a web-bug). ljb worked on more friend-to-friend > functionality, his work is included in current builds. sashee worked on > making the web interface more dynamic, including solving a long-running > problem with image loading blocking the browser (freenet has quite high > latency!), using Google Web Toolkit; this branch has not yet been merged, but hopefully will be inside the next 6 months or so, it needs some tuning and debugging for slow browsers. > > Some of our students achieved less than expected IMHO but in more cases there > was a lot more work involved in the project than I expected, and the students > did really well. I have talked to most of them in the last month, well after > the programme was finished, and hopefully some of them will continue to > contribute at least occasionally. Best year yet, many thanks to Google!
/me *claps* - Zero3
