UPDATE 02/21/08 Freenet 5 Still Works.
That's the good news.
The Bad News is that the Freenet Devs, In totally
predictable fashion, have released Freenet 0.7 Darknet-only,
and made it the main download on the freenet site; the really FREAKY and
unexpected news is that they haven't made it impossible to download Freenet 0.5!
Yup, the actual working build of freenet, with Privacy, anonymity, etc is
still
available! This is pretty much unprecedented in the annals of Freenet; every
time in the past where they pulled something out of a nether orifice and called
it freenet, it was essentially mandatory. But this time, it's still available;
Might have something to do with the vast majority of Freenet users refusing to
"upgrade"; at the time I'm typing this there are several thousand 0.5 nodes
happily, and anonymouse-ly, assisting people to actually HAVE freedom of speech
without reprisal.
Another thing that is going on is that I'm trying to put together a
alternative
download of Freenet 0.5; I posted on the freenet board in frost about this as "Devo",
and there was some interest, so I'm taking suggestions as to what should be
included; so far, people want build 5106, a spider, Fuqid (someone needs to
suggest a build, and send me a link), FIW, and the latest version of Frost. I'm
also asking for someone else to do a seednode file, as that just seems like a
pain; a noderef with nodes that could be expected to stay up and running
forever, with about 10 minimum refs, would be cool. My basic motivation on this
is the thought that: 1) They are going to take down the 0.5 download, or cripple
it, eventually; I'm wanting a self contained installer/zip that can be run
without webinstall (bad idea, people), and handed around on a CD, P2P, whatever.
2) It needs doing. if someone else wants to do it also, that's fine. SOMEONE
needs to do it. 3) the 0.5 build works; it works for anonymity, it works for
privacy, it works for free speech, it works for file sharing, it just works. if
people continue to have easy access to it, there is no particular reason build
0.5 of freenet can not continue to be used forever.
So, send me those suggestions to
real@changestorm.com or use freenet / frost / freenet board to contact me.
If anyone else wants to help, i'll set up a project site.
The Developers of FROST have pointed me in the right direction to getting the
FROST and FROST-WOT 050903 sources I was looking for...But they are seemingly
impossible to actually get. I'm done messing with CVS, if you can get it, fine,
zip it up and send it to me.
NOTE: Due to the apparent decision of the current FROST
developers to go with XML, which I have issues with, I'll be putting up a
library of pretty much every version of FROST since day one; I also plan on
doing a compatibility comparison, to see which ones work with what. If you would
like to comment on this, or help, I'm devo on FROST, or you can post to
this forum.
About the only thing I can say positively right now is that Jantho stated that
he thought it would be a bad idea to make the message format either HTML or XML
a LONG time ago, I recall, and they seem to be taking steps away from anonymity,
not a great concept in my book. Click here
for more on this.
Having problems getting this page or the files
on it? try the mirror.
You can get Freenet from Freenet at
Sourceforge; it's not real simple. and it's NOT private, they use a
webinstall system (for some idiotic reason, it's supposed to be ANONYMOUS
people; how can it be anonymous when you can't download the file from a site
other than those you have designated?), so you can download my version of Build 5096
or 5105 (the latest at 10/05/05) unzip it to a directory, run nodeconfig
get the default seednodes.ref, then
run freenet.exe.
OR...
I put together a working, don't-need-to-run-webinstall version of Freenet 5
build 5105, dated Oct. 8th, 2005. It's available as a
Zip or
installable EXE. Read the included vrhome_readme.txt for setup instructions.
Use at your own risk.
There are 2 versions of FROST for Freenet here; we have the
last
version (030315) of FEC enabled FROST which I think I understand the source enough to say
it's secure, and the last one I can say with
absolute assurance is secure; The most recent one that is PROBABLY safe
(and the one that actually works the best for file trading, if
you can convince people to use it instead of the newer version) is
FROST-WOT-050903 however, they are not fully compatible
with the versions commonly used, which means you will be able to communicate
with others using a similar build (both of them?), but not with the most users.
FreeWeb
(0.1.5) is also cranking along, and is perhaps the best way to do a Dailey
freesite.
The FMB Alpha4 is also
available (and pretty darn cool) and the latest mod version,
FMB-0.5.4.jar As is the latest
IIP. (Dead. there is a new IIP, but don't trust it)
The application called
spider (not sure who wrote it) will go out and fetch freesites for you,
giving you your own index of freesites.
A little warning: your anonymity comes with a
price, the learning curve is a little bit of a bitch. Note: YOU WILL NEED TO
HAVE A JAVA RUNTIME (JRE). Why do I only have the Win32 executables, not the
'nix stuff? because if you run 'nix, you can probably figure out how to get it
yourself.
The files you can download from this site
are the latest version we got to work without a hitch; there may be newer
versions, but they didn't work, or we haven't heard about it. use whichever one
you choose.
Check Out CofE
A note about FROST: I've got three old versions
for you; the May 29th, 2001 build, the Dec
14th, 2001 build (the one I use) & The Jan
14th, 2002 build (which I find almost unusable).
We're really not going to put a lot on this page; it would be
duplicating effort, and it's hopefully not going to be around long.
since 10/22/06
VRHOME
DARKNET
Why are we hating on Darknet? Why are
people refusing to use it? Here it is, in a nutshell: Freenet is about free
speech. If the Constitution was actually enforced, it would be a High Crime to
restrict anyone's speech or writing unless it would directly cause harm. As that
is not the case, Freenet needs to be anonymous, and free from government
censorship. Freenet 0.5 and earlier did this pretty well. With Freenet 0.7
Darknet, if someone arrests or closely monitors one of your Darknet
friends, they are going to be able to laughingly easily discover who YOU are,
and all that persons friends are, also. In other words, it only works if you
already live in a free society. We don't (except for you finlanders and a couple
others). This means that a terrorist could use Freenet 0.5 with relative safety
to communicate with others. It also means that a person could post flaws in
Diebold Voting systems, information about corrupt politicians, the latest
outrage from Haliburton, censored books, news from behind the great firewall of
china, etc, with safety. It Is Important.