Build Date: Wed Jan 7 00:20:06 2026 UTC
You can begin with good smart people and an unbound optimism and in no time at all, everything can disintegrate. Threats and blows can fly; men once tame and meek can bloody the faces of friend and stranger. It's pretty fucking cool.
-- Mr. Bad
Get in on the Ground Floor of FREEDOM
2000-02-24 13:16:53
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!
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