Lasse Penttinen
29 Aug 2003 13:15
The Freenet Project aims to produce an anonymous P2P (Peer-To-Peer) file sharing program, which would guarantee the users security and privacy. As we can see from the recent news items, there definitely is a huge demand for a solution that keep the users safe from the authorities’ actions.
So far Freenet hasn’t gained too many users, even though the project has received some media attention. The software is not ready to challenge more popular P2P clients (Kazaa, Direct Connect..) in terms of usability. Also, the high security routing method has been extremely slow.
But there is hope that the routing issue will be soon solved, which would definitely help Freenet to gain more users. The Freenet Project is now inviting advanced users to test their next generation routing. The new method promises to be possibly the most efficient P2P network ever seen and still maintaining the security and privacy.The core idea behind the Next Generation Routing design is to make Freenet nodes much smarter about deciding where to route information. For each node reference in its routing table, a node will collect extensive statistical information including response times for requesting particular keys, the proportion of requests which succeed in finding information, and the time required to establish a connection in the first place. When a new request is received, this information is used to estimate which node is likely to be able to retrieve the data in the least amount of time, and that is the node to which the request is forwarded.
Freenetproject.org