Freenet

Freenet is a decentralized (hosted on many machines) network., It is censorship-resistant, which means it is not easy for anyone other than authors to remove content. The data is stored on many machines. Freenet was made by Ian Clarke. Freenet has a goal to provide freedom of speech and Freedom of information through a peer-to-peer network with protection of user's identity. Freenet works by putting together the volunteer bandwidth and storage space of member machines to allow users to anonymously publish (place or upload) or retrieve (get or download) different kinds of information. From a user's perspective, it can be thought of as simply a large storage device.

FProxy index page (Freenet 0.7.5)
Developer(s)	[1]
Initial release	March 2000; 25 years ago (2000-03)
Stable release	0.7.5 (Build 1492) (October 28, 2021; 4 years ago (2021-10-28)[2]) [±]
Repository	github.com/hyphanet/fred
Written in	Java
Operating system	Cross-platform: Unix-like (Android, Linux, BSD, macOS), Microsoft Windows
Platform	Java
Available in	English, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, Chinese[3]
Type	Anonymity application, peer-to-peer, friend-to-friend, overlay network, mix network, distributed data store
License	GNU General Public License
Website	freenetproject.org

Freenet has been under continuous development since 2000; a version 1.0 has not yet been released but current builds are usable. The project has already seen a ground-up rewrite (redoing of programming) for version 0.7.^[4] Freenet is free software.

Related pages

• Anonymous P2P
• Crypto-anarchism
• Cypherpunk
• distributed file system
• Entropy (anonymous data store)
• Freedom of information
• Friend-to-friend
• GNUnet
• I2P
• Osiris sps
• Tor (anonymity network)
• Share - the successor to Winny
• Perfect Dark - the successor to Share; it employs many of Freenet's principles.