[LUG] Freenet anyone?

[Simon Waters <Simon at wretched.demon.co.uk>]

Me again,

tried out Freenet over the weekend as part of my attempts to
catch-up on interesting Internet technology.

Freenet is designed as a kind of alternative to the WWW. The
chief differences being the alleged anonymous nature of both
publishing and surfing, and that data is cached and
distributed throughout the network.

Installation on Linux is trivial, I needed a later JRE (The
IBM one was recommended), the latest Freenet distro was
unpacked under a user home directory. The set-up tool asked
a few questions to which I agreed to defaults I understood,
and agreed to the ones I didn't understand in the hope they
were just as sensible *8). Only thing I needed to know was
how fast my Internet connection is. 

Then you just type ./freenet_server, and it is running.

Point a web browser at http://localhost:8081/ and as if by
magic your surfing the Freenet, using the fproxy gateway.


Despite the immense amount of publicity, the Freenet isn't
actually very big AFAICT. Navigation is via weird and
wonderful "keys" (Read funny URI), and a lot of the content
that does exist isn't obviously well structured (Maybe I'm
missing something).

By it's subversive nature a lot of the content is what might
be best described as dubious (copyright violations, porn,
and even some subversive texts). Little is here that can't
be found surfing the net, I suspect because of the size of
the Freenet the quality of content is quite high.

A lot of the indexing is done using JavaScript, and my
browser (StarOffice for various reasons) choked on this
indexing applet. Fproxy warns you if a page contains URL's
or Active content, as this could break your anonymity,
although doesn't yet give you an option to strip out the
suspect content.

A lot of the content seems to be pulled from the WWW, and
because it hasn't been restructured, many of the pages kick
up anonymity warnings.

At the moment it seems to be a bit of an interesting spin
off from a college project, with little user support, and no
content, so if Linux is anything to judge by should have
taken over 30% of the Internet in ten years time.

Curiously it isn't overrun with 2600 groups, so what is
wrong with it, or are they just a bit slow?
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