Changes in Freenet since 2007
15 years in 15 minutes
Mitigating the pitch black attack
and other changes

For the Slides, see 15-years-slides.pdf. To get the sources, get 15-years.bundle and clone it with hg clone 15-years.bundle 15-years.

1999 Freenet started as a thesis by Ian Clarke, known to friends as sanity.

In 2007 it added its Darknet-Mode:

The Friend-to-Friend Darknet mode works conceptually like WhatsApp, where you give a Facebook server your friends’ phone numbers and then you can talk directly:

Different from WhatsApp, Freenet avoids the central server, so no one gets your friends’ phone numbers.

By building a network on friend-connections where others can find what you write even when you’re offline, Friend-to-Friend Freenet enables global pseudonymous publishing that is very hard to block.

The new Friend-to-Friend Freenet was presented by Ian Clarke and Oskar Sandberg at the 22c3 in 2005, and it showed a beautiful method for confidential communication and censorship resistance.

Then Christian Grothoff et al. found a flaw. And proved it.

For 14 years we lived in denial, because “Opennet works”.

That’s why now is the time to talk about the changes in Freenet since 2007. 15 years of continuous improvements to the Friend-to-Friend Freenet network.

Which is a Darknet, because that is the only privacy preserving way to make this work:

In 2005 Freenet showed that an Opennet with arbitrary connections cannot ever be secured well enough, but that a friend-to-friend model can be. In 2007 it was working, but the pitch black attack was published which showed how to utterly destroy that friend-to-friend network.

It would take us 14 years to mitigate the attack. During that time Freenet progressed a lot. And Opennet lived far longer than we expected.

Those 15 years — 14 years of development plus the one year since the mitigation was in place — shaped Freenet from a tool for the dedicated into an easy to use platform that covers the needs of most communication from Social networking over Blogging to Video-on-Demand without servers or central point of failure.

But let us begin with the lost: technologies that faltered.

In its 22 years of existence, Freenet has seen tools that did not stand the test of time — either because their model did not work out, or because they did not see maintenance or were replaced by newer tools.

Bachlor-thesis: Optimizing a distributed Spam Filter for Freenet (OadSFfF).pdf

• Linkageddon → nerdageddon
• Babbel flog-linking
• Enzos Index
• Spider → Clean Spider

structure: raw → cleaned

• Better routing? Embeddings that do not preserve the uniform keyspace
• Friend-to-Friend over tor and i2p? (needs UDP)
• Steganography Transport Plugins

No plan survives contact with reality, but a good plan provides set-pieces for the path you might actually walk.

• High-Impact Tasks (in Freenet)
• High-Level Roadmap — structured by major version
• Bugtracker-Roadmap — very detailed but outdated

• Fix a release-blocker for 8.0 from the Roadmap
• Packaging: Debian (info), Guix, …, beta-channel
• Plugin furbishing: Freemail, Keepalive, Freereader, Shoeshop, Floghelper, Flircp, JFniki: workflows enjoyable, cope with Freenet as proxy
• Port plugin buildsystems to gradle for easier CI (info1, info2)
• Decentralized programming: port infocalypse to python3, improve its WoT integration
• Content filters for modern codecs can make Freenet viable for live streaming: fix vorbis, opus for live audio ( stream into Freenet ), webm with vp9 (video) and av1 (video on demand)
• Freenet Mobile: ref exchange as with Icicle, spread via NFC and similar, improve FreeChat, spread via Messengers (WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Threema, DeltaChat, …)
• Enable clicking on freenet:...-Links (and magnet:?xt=urn:freenet:CHK:...) on websites. Browser-plugin needs allow-listing the freenet: schema (issue)
• Stream-into-Freenet GUI
• Revamp F2F workflow and communication (mobile first).
• Revamp initial page: help sections, links, official plugins.
• REST API (start with fresta) and API documentation, examples and documentation
• Simplify updating and changing dependencies over Freenet.
• Make the noderef parser work always, even if linebreaks are lost, unicode is mis-escaped, or email shows the user 7-bit ASCII encoding.
• Use Freenet. Talk about Freenet. Spread Freenet.

Can you imagine where Freenet will then be?

Will you help to shape it?

Let’s build a better future together!

→ freenetproject.org ←

I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet? –Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation

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