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freenet
I've just been reading about a wonderful thing called freenet. You can read about what it is, the philosophy behind it, its documentation, and download it from Sourceforge.
In a time where large corporations are trying to control more of the net, and governments (including ours in Australia) are censoring and spying on users, a development such as freenet is very timely.
It uses an encrypted, anonymous, distributed network, parts of which are cached on each user's machine instead of centrally in giant servers. In this way it returns to much of the original ethos of the internet as a resilient, distributed system. Addition of encryption and anonymity keep the user much safer regardless of which way the political wind might blow.
The file itself is tiny -- just slightly over 3MB. How the heck they managed to squeeze so much functionality into such a small program amazes me.
Additional:
Doh! Weird how time creeps up on ya. Although 3MB is small compared to many bloated programs of today, it is nevertheless three times the size of the whole Amiga Operating System. I must try to keep perspective.
On a slightly different note, while hanging out the washing today I was musing on why I find the freenet project so useful. It isn't what you'd think. I don't use chat programs as a rule (they end up wasting too much of the day), and most of the controversial stuff I prefer to post in plain sight because I want maximum visibility. I do some filesharing, but it is mostly a long term project to replace my existing paper books with electronic ones that haven't got locks on them, and I don't do porn (not because I think it is wrong, but because I don't have the time or the libido for it). So I kinda doubt I'll use freenet much... perhaps not at all.
What greatly interests me is that a while ago I was a strong advocate of making shared, peer-to-peer virtual worlds, where the worlds existed on the actual machines of many users instead of on centralised servers. This would avoid a lot of the problems associated with standard, gigantic, expensive virtual world servers, their bottlenecks, downtime, and fee-requirements. Seems to me that freenet could be used as the basis for just such a VR network.
The other thing that makes me smile is that I see just such a distributed communications system as being just the sort of thing that could break the telecommunications companies expensive stranglehold. But more of that in another post. :)
In a time where large corporations are trying to control more of the net, and governments (including ours in Australia) are censoring and spying on users, a development such as freenet is very timely.
It uses an encrypted, anonymous, distributed network, parts of which are cached on each user's machine instead of centrally in giant servers. In this way it returns to much of the original ethos of the internet as a resilient, distributed system. Addition of encryption and anonymity keep the user much safer regardless of which way the political wind might blow.
The file itself is tiny -- just slightly over 3MB. How the heck they managed to squeeze so much functionality into such a small program amazes me.
Additional:
Doh! Weird how time creeps up on ya. Although 3MB is small compared to many bloated programs of today, it is nevertheless three times the size of the whole Amiga Operating System. I must try to keep perspective.
On a slightly different note, while hanging out the washing today I was musing on why I find the freenet project so useful. It isn't what you'd think. I don't use chat programs as a rule (they end up wasting too much of the day), and most of the controversial stuff I prefer to post in plain sight because I want maximum visibility. I do some filesharing, but it is mostly a long term project to replace my existing paper books with electronic ones that haven't got locks on them, and I don't do porn (not because I think it is wrong, but because I don't have the time or the libido for it). So I kinda doubt I'll use freenet much... perhaps not at all.
What greatly interests me is that a while ago I was a strong advocate of making shared, peer-to-peer virtual worlds, where the worlds existed on the actual machines of many users instead of on centralised servers. This would avoid a lot of the problems associated with standard, gigantic, expensive virtual world servers, their bottlenecks, downtime, and fee-requirements. Seems to me that freenet could be used as the basis for just such a VR network.
The other thing that makes me smile is that I see just such a distributed communications system as being just the sort of thing that could break the telecommunications companies expensive stranglehold. But more of that in another post. :)