Freenet project
Originally created by Tails on #6078 (Redmine)
Can you insert the freenet project for anon surfing in the next release?
I doubt we do that this quick, patches are welcome! I suggest first checking how/if Freenet can be safely used with Tor.
Persistence would almost be a requirement for Freenet, and it shouldn’t have to go through Tor. The reason for needing persistence is because it takes literal days to get even 30 days worth of posts from services like Frost, more if you go farther back. It’s bets to think of Freenet as a complex, distributed Usenet service (with the Frost program being the literal implementation). When first setting it up you specify the amount of data you wish to provide to the network, a few gigabytes worth by default, that’s used as a cache to anonymously relay to other users upon request. Aside from relaying data to other users, the cache is also used to index the network for both local and relaying purposes. The bigger the cache the faster a local user’s network is, otherwise it’s painstakingly slow, and I couldn’t fathom doing it from scratch from each Tails bootup.
adrelanos wrote: I considered combining Freenet with Tor for Whonix. Details: Whonix + Freenet Summary: There are probable three options using Freenet with tails.
- Using an inproxy (gateway) to the Freenet network, I haven’t found any which are still working.
- Connecting to Freenet through Tor. That is tricky, because Freenet does not support TCP and requires UDP and Tor only supports TCP and does not support UDP. A hackish workaround would be to tunnel a VPN through Tor, thus allowing UDP over Tor. I successfully tested it.
- Direct connections to Freenet and opt-in. Just like i2p support in Tails. Do it the same way as Tails + i2p. Tor and i2p can coexist in Tails, direct connections to both networks will be established. Why not opt-in to directly connect to Freenet? The question "if Freenet can be used safely through Tor" does not apply here. You also didn’t ask "if i2p can be used safely through Tor".
Freenet would work best connecting directly to the internet, much like i2p, and would be best as an opt-in system like i2p. Storing freenet in the persistent storage would be required due to freenet’s design, and could allow freenets built-in update-over-freenet system to work well.
Freenet is worthwhile software to consider adding to tails in the medium or long term
Related issues
- Related to #17275 (closed)
- Has duplicate #10168 (closed)