Prologue: I started writing this article about two months ago. I was in the final stages of wrapping it up when Andy Beckett of the Guardian released an excellent article about “The Darknet” and specifically Freenet. Now, it’s not like I was scooped or anything. Freenet isn’t exactly new news. I just figured, “Damn… What he wrote is really similar to what I’m writing…” Oh well, information wants to be free and more information is always better so I decided to do two things. 1. Rework my article into something a bit different. 2. Hold off on releasing it for a few weeks. Anyway, here it is.

I’m writing about the subject of darknet. Why? Because I think that they’re just plain cool. I mean come on, totally anonymous, encrypted networks that are essentially untraceable! Tell me that doesn’t make every techno-thriller spy novel reading nerve in your body twinge in glee? Yes? Keep reading. No? Go here, this is the article that you want.

Before I really get going on this, I’m trying something different here. I’m gonna throw down some multimedia on this one. To stage this affair properly I’ve loaded up my Shoutcast Station with some creative commons tunes that are meant to put you in the mood for this post. It’s Darknet music. Tune in, turn off your lights so your bathed in the eerie glow of your monitor and start reading.

The term Darknet can mean a lot of things. If you look it up on Wikipedia, you’re probably not going to get what you should out of it. “Darknet” has unfortunately evolved from what once was simply a statement describing a disconnected network or a “friend’s only” club accessible through the internet. If you look up a definition of the term these days, you’re going to see that the terms tend to refer more to file sharing networks. Yes, this is certainly true, a great deal of the development of software with creating a Darknet as the underlying principle is dedicated to P2P file sharing.

That said, i don’t really want to write about that. Nobody wants to read about dark seedy world of illegal file sharing. Rather, I’m going to deal with a particular software application that creates the foundation for an entire dark internet. An application that opens the door to an anonymous, encrypted network complete with Web Sites, Email, Blogs, Indexes and more. All of which is ready and waiting to satisfy the paranoid masses. I am going to write about the Freenet Project. Not to be confused with the New Zealand, Canadian or German ISP’s using that name. Rather, the Freenet Project software developed by Ian Clark.

“Citizen, what is this crazy shit you’re on about?” – “Ha ha ha, I’m glad you asked Charlotte”

Freenet is Open Source community developed software that once installed on your PC allows you, through your usual web browers, to access sites and content on the Freenet. This essentially gives you access to a sort of second internet. One with decidedly fewer rules…

Freenet works like this. The software takes a chunk of your hard drive space for itself and creates what’s called a “Data Store”. When the software is running, your computer becomes a peer or node on the Freenet that connects to other Freenet users. As files and pages are uploaded (the term they use is Inserted) to the Freenet the network spreads encrypts the information and spreads it out all over the world in the “Data Stores” of Freenet users everywhere. You share your bandwidth nodes to create its Darknet infrastructure.

No more central servers, belching pages out to whoever asks. With Freenet, all the content is decentralized. This makes it less vulnerable to attack. When you request information on the Freenet, your request and is encrypted and is passed through several other nodes until it gets to its destination. The response, also encrypted returns to you via many nodes. This distribution of requests and responses through a myriad of different nodes makes it extremely difficult to figure out who is requesting information and what the information is.

What quickly becomes apparent when you install and fire-up Freenet is that its design was primarily taken with privacy and security in mind, unlike many of the P2P alternatives out there. There are tradeoffs with this; the big one being speed. Don’t expect Freenet to pull sites up as fast as the regular Internet.

Many of the tools we use on the net such as websites, downloads and messaging rely on direct sender – recipient (peer to peer) connections. Freenet on the other hand is designed such that the sender and recipient really have no idea where each other are and rely on node-to-node chains to relay the requests and responses through one another until they finally get where they want to go. You’re secure and anonymous, but the penalty is that it’s pretty slow. Patience grasshopper.

So by now you probably have a pretty basic understanding of Freenet and how it works. So now, how do you work it? Well it’s pretty easy. You just download the package from the freenet website, install it and go! I installed it on a system running Debian 5.0 which required jumping through a few hoops. That said, the windows install is very painless. You’ll need Java installed and then just run the installer.

Once it’s up and running, you just fire up your browser punch up your localhost on port 8888. This gives you access to the configuration page lets you start you journey with access to some of the big indexes that are out there: The Ultimate FreeNet Index & Freenet Activelink Index. Both great starting places.

The Indexes are in lieu of search engines. You can search from the start page, but it’s really slow. The indexes are just that, big lists of popular sites. Now, before you go “hog wild” and click on everything you see. I’m going to give you a bit of sage advice:

Freenet is the wild west of the internet. It’s the Mos Eisley of the digital world. Anything goes, whether it’s legal or not. You can very easily find your screen filled with stuff you really don’t want to see. As such, be… (careful isn’t the right word)  … Be smart…  Remember where you are and that the others here are anonymous and free from persecution from the authorities of their respective countries. The indexes generally don’t have any links to anything truly deplorable, but bad stuff is out there. So, be smart.

What should you expect from Freenet? You’re just going to have to go and explore it for yourself. Keep an open mind. The community that you will delve into when you start using Freenet is anonymous and therefore quite uninhibited. There are a lot of people writing decent material. Mainly on Flogs (the Freenet nomenclature for Blog) on which many subjects are covered ranging from political journalism such as censored news from Iran, political dissenters from China and Tibet.

Having said that, please note that just like the regular Internet, there is also a lot of crap on Freenet. First rate crap… I found myself reading things then thinking about how “I’ll never get that time back.” Another thing that I want to point out is that a lot of the pages seem to have been abandoned. I’m not too sure what happened but many authors just sort of gave up on things and left the sites deserted without any real wrap-up or notice as to why. Makes you think.  In fact the one biggest problem I see with Freenet at this time is a lack of interest and users.  It desperately needs new content.

The truly great power of the Freenet is its ability to open the lines of communication in places where the government stifles such activities and considers it a crime. In many countries like Iran and China, the government closely controls their populace. They censor and manipulate and stifle freedom of speech. Such countries have a lot to be afraid of when it comes to the darknet and applications such as Freenet. The potential here being that their citizens need not worry about reprisals as their location is untraceable and their anonymity remains sacrosanct. This is certainly the reason that freenetproject.org and other projects with similar ideals such as The Onion Router are blocked by the Great Firewall of China.

An article about Freenet simply wouldn’t be complete without talking about the vile evilness of certain content available on it. I guess what you need to remember is that Ian has given us a place to go where you do not need to fear retribution for what you say. There’s a “Gratis versus Libre” thing going on here. Freenet is both for zero price, and allows the user to have freedom and liberty through total anonymity. Just don’t forget that Freedom is a double-edged sword. Freenet gives you the power to do or say anything you’d like about anything you’d like; however it also give that same freedom to the Neo-Nazi wife beating child abuser who also downloaded the software.

Vile evilness aside, in a world that through government and corporate greed, is very gradually eroding your freedoms away one bit at a time, applications like the Freenet Project are a very, very good thing.

Epilogue:

I must say that my favourite Freenet site is the one called “Hooters! Boobies!! Tits!!!” It’s an excellent example of Polysemy.

Here is the link to the Andy Beckett article in the Guardian: The dark side of the internet.

Ian Clarke, the creator of the Freenet Project wrote a blog entry about the Guardian article about the same time it came out. It’s very interesting to read and the comments others posted are also quite interesting. Click here to enlighten yourself.

The one and only place you should download Freenet from http://www.freenetproject.org

You should also give them money so that they can continue to develop the Freenet Project http://freenetproject.org/donate.html

“Dew” image originally by Andreas-photography (Creative Commons by-nc) slightly modified by me.

Tunes courtesy of DJ Drinks licensed under a Creative Commons License.