GNUnet

[Tracy R Reed]

From http://www.gnu.org/software/GNUnet/

"GNUnet is an anonymous, distributed, reputation-based network. A first
service implemented on top of the networking layer allows
censorship-resistant file-sharing.

"Our goal is to provide an infrastructure for secure networking. All
communication in GNUnet is authenticated and encrypted. The reputation
model makes attacks on the network harder. GNUnet does not rely on any
centralized services.

"While our goals are similar to projects like Freenet, Gnutella, MojoNation
and others, we hope to provide a superior combination of features for
users that value security more than efficiency."

Some of you have heard me talk about Freenet in the past. Freenet is very
cool and has good minds working on it but I am concerned that they have
bitten off more than they can chew, that design mistakes have been made,
and that their choice of Java for a very complicated project is greatly
complicating their lives and slowing down development.

So I am happy that GNUnet has come along which does all of the same things
that Freenet does but does them differently. One of the big advances that
GNUnet has over Freenet is that GNUnet is actually searchable. I have a
feeling that this is going to be a requirement for any popular P2P
network.

GNUnet is written in C and has already achieved in a very short time
similar levels of functionality and performance that Freenet has now while
consuming far fewer machine resources.

There are only around 20 people (rough estimate) running GNUnet nodes at
any one time at the moment. I hope a lot more people take an interest in
this project so that it actually becomes a useful P2P network.

Of interest to Bob La Quey and related to our discussion a couple weeks
ago is that there is a section of the GNUnet white paper that discusses
using GNUnet as a distributed backup system. Of all of the P2P networks
that have come along so far, GNUnet seems to have the most potential in
this area.

-- 
Tracy Reed      http://www.ultraviolet.org
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