If the installer did not do it for you, start Freenet and open a browser pointing to http://127.0.0.1:8888/
The Freenet Project is very pleased to announce the release of Freenet 0.7.0.
Freenet is software designed to allow the free exchange of information over the Internet without fear of censorship, or reprisal. To achieve this Freenet makes it very difficult for adversaries to reveal the identity, either of the person publishing, or downloading content. The Freenet project started in 1999, released Freenet 0.1 in March 2000, and has been under active development ever since.
Freenet is unique in that it handles the storage of content, meaning that if necessary users can upload content to Freenet and then disconnect. We've discovered that this is a key requirement for many Freenet users. Once uploaded, content is mirrored and moved around the Freenet network, making it very difficult to trace, or to destroy. Content will remain in Freenet for as long as people are retrieving it, although Freenet makes no guarantee that content will be stored indefinitely.
The journey towards Freenet 0.7 began in 2005 with the realization that some of Freenet's most vulnerable users needed to hide the fact that they were using Freenet, not just what they were doing with it. The result of this realization was a ground-up redesign and rewrite of Freenet, adding a "darknet" capability, allowing users to limit who their Freenet software would communicate with to trusted friends. This would make it far more difficult for a third-party to determine who is using Freenet.
Freenet 0.7 also embodies significant improvements to almost every other aspect of Freenet, including efficiency, security, and usability. Freenet is available for Windows, Linux, and OSX. It can be downloaded from:
http://freenetproject.org/download.html
If you have any difficulty getting Freenet to work, or any questions not answered in the faq, please join us on IRC in the #freenet channel at irc.freenode.net. Thank you.
This release would not have been possible without the efforts of numerous volunteers, and Matthew Toseland, Freenet's full time developer. Matthew's work is funded through donations via our website (as well as a few larger sponsors from time to time). We ask that anyone who can help us to ensure Matthew's continued employment visit our donations page and make a contribution at:
http://freenetproject.org/donate.html
Press enquiries should be directed to Ian Clarke.
On OSX, Freenet will create a configuration file at ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.freenet.startup.plist. On other unix-based systems, Freenet will create a cron job to run Freenet on startup. On Windows, Freenet is run by the rabbit tray icon, which starts on login from the startup folder. You should run Freenet as close to 24x7 as possible for good performance. It is however possible to remove the plist, to remove the cron job (with the remove cron job script in bin/), or to remove the startup shortcut (edit the start menu).
The easiest option is to use the system tray applet to launch Freenet. This will try to load a browser (Chrome or Firefox) in privacy/incognito mode. If the browser is in privacy mode it will tell you. Browser bugs might result in it not being in privacy mode so be careful of this.
You MUST use a browser in privacy/incognito mode, or ideally use a completely separate browser to access Freenet. The reason for this is browser history stealing attacks via CSS which enable malicious websites to probe what other websites - and more importantly freesites (on-freenet websites) you have been visiting. Many other browser-level attacks may also be possible, especially if you use a lot of plugins and add-ons, or other software that is accessed through localhost.
There are many potentially dangerous features in most browsers which you can disable. Most of them will be turned off by privacy/incognito mode, hopefully. Candidates include location-based services (geo.enabled) and GoBrowsing (keyword.enabled) in firefox, and probably a number of plugins. Note that this is not unique to Firefox - until version 9 or so, Internet Explorer had much worse problems. The most fundamental thing is browser history probing via CSS. This can be turned off globally and will improve your privacy, but it is probably still safer to use a separate browser, and the fact that you have turned it off will likely be detectable. If you do use a separate browser, you can do some helpful tricks such as turning off javascript, not loading any addons or plugins, turning off the cache and history, and setting 127.0.0.1:8888 as a proxy server for all protocols (set it explicitly for HTTPS even if you set it for all protocols), so that it won't fetch anything from the web.
Freenet will warn you when you try to download a file which may not be safe. Many file formats, for instance PDFs, word processor documents, and some types of video, can give away your identity. In some cases (such as HTML, PNGs, JPEGs and MP3s), Freenet can automatically make the content safe; a few file formats (such as plain text .txt's) are safe as-is. Freenet will warn you in all other cases. Sometimes using alternative tools, or up to date versions of the normal tools, to view such content will help. Another option is to create a virtual machine with no internet access, create a clean snapshot having installed the software you need, and then use it to browse the content. Once finished, reset to the clean snapshot. However, even this is not certain to be absolutely secure if there is a buffer overflow or similar severe bug: Breaking out of VMs is not completely unheard of; so you will need to secure the VM, or ideally run it on a disconnected machine.
You are responsible for your computer's physical security. In many hostile environments the most likely attack is people busting down your door and stealing your computer - perhaps because they know you are using Freenet, or perhaps because they got your name from one of your friends who was also a troublemaker! Freenet can encrypt your caches and active downloads/uploads, with a password if you set one, and with a panic button to get rid of the evidence quickly, but as soon as anything is saved to disk, Freenet can't do anything about it. Freenet can download files to encrypted temporary space ("Fetch" instead of "Download"), to limit this, but it will use a bit more disk space and is less convenient. If you can encrypt your whole hard drive, e.g. with Truecrypt, that is strongly recommended. Even if you can't, we strongly recommend you encrypt your swapfile (try "fsutil behavior set encryptpagingfile 1" on Windows 7), or turn it off. Note also that many types of file will be automatically saved to disk by your browser without you asking it to - mostly these are the kind of files that Freenet will warn you about anyway, but there might be exceptions depending on what you are using; it's always going to be safest to encrypt everything.
If your life or liberty depends on Freenet protecting your anonymity, you should seriously evaluate your options, including the option of not posting whatever controversial content it is you are thinking of posting. Freenet has not yet reached version 1.0, and several important security features have not yet been implemented; there are several known attacks which future versions will greatly reduce, and there are likely to be (and have been) serious bugs. If you do choose to use Freenet under such circumstances, you should enable the MAXIMUM network security level and add connections to your friends on the Friends page; connecting only to friends greatly improves your security, making it very hard to trace content back to you, and reasonably difficult to find out that you are even running Freenet, but you should only connect to people you actually know: You are vulnerable to those nodes you are connected to (hence in low/normal security, aka opennet mode, you have much less security). Plus, connecting to random strangers will reduce performance for the network as a whole.
A reasonably detailed explanation of how to use Freenet securely is included in the first-time wizard, which you see when you first install Freenet, at the bottom of the page asking whether to connect to strangers or just to friends. Mouse over it to read it. If you have already installed Freenet you can still see it here: http://127.0.0.1:8888/wizard/?step=OPENNET
This is the 0.7 rewrite of Freenet. This is largely rewritten from scratch, although it pulls in a load of code from Dijjer, and most of the crypto and a few other classes from the 0.5 source.
- Darknet mode: connect only to your friends, they connect to theirs, this forms a small-world network, which Freenet makes routable by location swapping. This greatly increases the network's robustness as it makes it much harder to find and block Freenet nodes on a national firewall, as well as improving security generally provided that your friends are trustworthy.
- Opennet mode (plug and play) is also supported. Just select network security level NORMAL or LOW in the first-time wizard.
- Freenet now uses UDP, mainly to improve connectivity over NATs and firewalls.
- Freenet now uses 32kB fixed block sizes, to improve performance and simplify the code.
- The Freenet Client Protocol is completely different, see the spec here: https://wiki.freenetproject.org/FCPv2
- Many more changes...
Freenet is under the GPL, version 2 or later - see LICENSE.Freenet. We use some code under the Apache license version 2 (mostly apache commons stuff), and some modified BSD code (Mantissa). All of which is compatible with the GPL, although arguably ASL2 is only compatible with GPL3. Some plugins are GPL3.