Following three years of development, the Freenet Project has announced the release of Freenet 0.70. As the project site notes, "Freenet is software designed to allow the free exchange of information over the Internet without fear of censorship, or reprisal. To achieve this Freenet makes it very difficult for adversaries to reveal the identity, either of the person publishing, or downloading content." Somewhat like proxy servers work, Freenet, which is fully open source, can allow anyone to post information anonymously online. Is this good news for people in censorship-heavy parts of the world?
Freenet is a decentralized lash-up of computing resources designed to foil censhorship on the Internet, and allow anyone to publish information anonymously from anywhere. It may be of particular value to users in censorship-heavy parts of the world such as China, where saying the wrong thing on a blog can lead to jail time. As you may recall, some of the first reports to the rest of the world about the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 came from online users breaking Chinese censorship laws.
Designed originally by Ian Clarke, Freenet is essentially a distributed, peer-to-peer environment that relies on storage and processing from member computers around the world. It uses key-based routing, so that when a file is stored on Freenet, a key that can be used to retrieve the file is generated. The newly released version adds several "darknet" features so that users can be more anonymous than they were before.
Google's open source team has contributed financially to the development of Freenet. Some see that as ironic, since Google has aligned itself with censorship laws in China. The company even currently reportedly faces shareholder motions regarding the censorship. If you look at the list found here, Freenet is even one of the words that Google Search reportedly censors in China.
Freenet is definitely not the first effort to help online users avoid censorship. For example, Torpark, from Hacktivismo, is a browser that can be stored on a USB stick, and is designed to leave absolutely no tracks when it is used. Hacktivismo is an offshoot of the long-standing hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow. Anonymizer is another application that has been used by many people fearful of censorship.
It is an unfortunate truth about many parts of the world that the free flow of information on the Internet gets heavily censored. From the perspective of freedom of speech, it looks to be good news to see more choices among them, and open source efforts improving them.
Do you approve of the open source community getting behind these efforts?
Comments
Add CommentSuch initiatives are absolutely great. There are several proxy services that are out there, but the quality is largely suspect or unknown. Having Open Source projects here absolutely make sense. When users are not in control of who is tracking them, they need to have the ability to determine that and protect themselves. With an Open Source offering, users can see what exactly is being tracked too, to make sure nothing is monitored without their explicit knowledge. The Tor project is another great Open Source application to obfuscate your tracks. There is enough unwarranted censorship and protection here is key.
Share Your Comments