Entropy Project Closes Up Shop 143
k0fcc writes "In a disappointing move to privacy enthusiasts, the Entropy Project's creator has released a statement that the project is shutting down. Entropy was a very popular, and some say faster, alternative to Freenet which supported a number of different cryptographic protocols. The creator alluded to the possibility that the project could continue if a new owner could be found."
GNUnet (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Erm (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Erm (Score:3, Informative)
Couldn't really say, since few people who use anonymous filesharing/messaging use their real names in said anonymous network.
Quickly scanning The Freedom Engine, I found Fahrenheit 9/11, IIP Revival (which tries to bring back the Invisible IRC), mirror of XBOX Linux, TrekLit (a collection of Star Trek novels in MS Reader .LIT format), various blogs, Freecraft (an open-sourced Warcraft clone which was cease-and-desisted off the Net), Bondage Fairies (fairy porn, kinky too !), a MAME ROM library, a few library freesites, a few movie freesites and, of course, lots of porn.
I really don't know if this is significant, but it proves that there is content in Freenet.
The development process could be better; currently people are throwing in new features before old ones have been debugged, and as a result the logs are full of NullPointerExecptions and other weird errors. And a bug which caused the node to always route to the worst possible choice went unnoticed for a long time during the switch to NGR...
Apart from that, I really don't see any indication of an ivory tower, especially when it's becoming increasingly clear that the freedoms we are enjoying now are not going to last. And the freedom of communication anonymously is the basis of all other freedoms; without it, you cannot know if your government is honoring the other freedoms, and thus it has no reason to do so.
Please explain your statement ?
Three (3) different indexes linked from the start page. And if you use Frost it has an internal search engine for files inserted with Frost.
[/un resists making a dig about people who have been spoiled with Google so they don't know how to find things by surfing anymore]
Considering the amount of NullPointerExecptions the logs contain, I'd say that this was a wise decision. A C program would render the network useless. Of course this might also give an incentive to actually fix those errors before implementing more features...
Just be sure to give the command "LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1" followed by "export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL" before running Freenet in Linux 2.6, because otherwise it will try to use pthreads, which will cause Sun JVM to hang.
Re:Erm (Score:1, Informative)
You obviosuly haven't throught this through -- Freenet and any other anonymous P2P protocol (including GNUnet) already guard against this type of information leakage by routing requests and searches through a number of nodes on the network. For a given server it is impossible to know whether a given node which makes a request is actually making the request itself or if it's being done on behalf of someone else.
Btw, GNUnet does allow search (it's not a search engine per se, but it does the job) and that's fully anonymous.
Re:Erm (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Erm (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Erm (Score:3, Informative)
sort of.
if you are talking dial-up, then it's going to take a while for your node to learn the neighborhood; you would probably want to turn it on and run FROST [sourceforge.net] for about an hour; you still are going to have problems getting to some freesites. You will also want to go into your default.ini file and change transient=false to true.
BTW, when people are saying FREENET is not searchable, they are mainly wrong; the Internet isn't searchable, or at least most search engines don't search it the way it would be searchable, by hitting every IP address. It's searchable because search engines go to known sites, index those, and follow the links it just found to other sites, rinse, wash, repeat. You have the same thing going on in freenet, with tools like spider [vrhome.com].
If you are expecting freenet to act like emule or gnutella, don't. it's not. If you mainly want to trade files, run frost, it's sort of like using USENET.
Freenet is actually still working pretty well, BTW.
The developers have a nasty tendency to come out with a working build, wait about 2-4 weeks, then come out with a non-working build. the last 6 stable releases have all worked about as well as any have in the past, and we are WAY overdue for the must upgrade non-working build.
Frost is even working pretty good; it has unnecessary libraries (why, exactly, do you need to format the messages in XML? what was wrong with TXT?), and is about 2mb more bloated than the may 9th, 2003 [vrhome.com] build which worked better, but it DOES work.