As Americans, we reserve the right to mispronounce, misspell, fuck, or kill anything that crosses our path. This is why the French can't stand us.
-- The Compulsive Splicer
Ever wish you could go back to 1991 and get in on the ground
floor of the World Wide Web? Well you CAN'T. It's not gonna happen.
But what CAN happen, right now, is for you to get in on
the start of FREENET. Freenet! Can you smell the freedom!?
Now, far be it from me to GIVE UP on Freedom on the World Wide Web. Fuck that!
Despite the hassles, the endless lawsuits, the cease-and-desist orders, the
fucking MPAA and RIAA, the ubiquitous advertising, the evil legislation, the
patents, the domain-name squabbles, etc., etc., etc., it's still OUR WEB. We
built this city on Rock and Roll, is what I'm trying to say. There's way too
much good going on here to write the whole World Wide Squirrel off as a lost
cause.
But STILL... STILL... wouldn't it be COOL to have a NEW WEB where the mistakes
of the past can be rectified? Where the legal shenanigans of some bumblefuck DA
in Asswipe, FL can't destroy years of publishing and acres of information? Where
it's NOT NECESSARILY the guys with the most LAWYERS who win?Where, in fact, the
lawyers COULDN'T EVEN FIND the people they want to sue, in the first place?
Well, people, that's starting to happen. There's a new project out there called
FREENET, that's intended to start a NEW SYSTEM of World-Wide-Squirrel
publishing, without all the hassles of the current one. It's kind of a mix of
Usenet, the Web, and a RAID disk system, all fudged up into a super-crypto wet
dream.
Freenet is a web of servers running the Freenet software. The software is
currently written in Java, but there's an open protocol, so new implementations
are bound to come out. Documents are held in the system AS A TOTAL, and not on
any one server. Documents are located, not by the server they live on (like HTTP
urls, i.e., "http://www.pigdog.org/index.html") but by a unique key ("Pigdog
Journal Index"). And there's widespread encryption of data built in from the
get-go, so that on-the-wire reading of other people's fetches is probably going
to be difficult.
Tracking of usage is difficult, also, since no one server owns a document. And
the requests that are used to download a document are the same as the ones that
servers use to slosh the docs around between themselves, so it's like, who will
know?
You should download the Freenet software IMMEDIATELY and start using it! It's
great! There's not that much stuff on the Freenet right now, but who know? Soon,
you should be able to get Pigdog Journal on there. Whoopee, and all that! Go
check out the Freenet NOW! This is your ground floor opportunity!
