| Freenet:- http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ Open Source (9.8 MB). Windows and Unix.
Freenet is free software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship. It allows anybody to publish and read information with complete anonymity. To achieve this freedom, the network is entirely decentralized and publishers and consumers of information are anonymous. Without anonymity there can never be true freedom of speech, and without decentralization the network will be vulnerable to attack. Communications by Freenet nodes are encrypted and are "routed-through" other nodes to make it extremely difficult to determine who is requesting the information and what its content is. Freenet, actually is a distributed information storage system designed to address information privacy and survivability concerns.
Users contribute to the network by giving bandwidth and a portion of their hard drive (called the "data store") for storing files. Unlike other peer-to-peer file sharing networks, Freenet does not let the user control what is stored in the data store. Instead, files are kept or deleted depending on how popular they are, with the least popular being discarded to make way for newer or more popular content. Files in the data store are encrypted to reduce the likelihood of prosecution by persons wishing to censor Freenet content. The network can be used in a number of different ways and isn't restricted to just sharing files like other peer-to-peer networks. It acts more like an Internet within an Internet. For example Freenet can be used for:
Publishing websites or 'freesites'.
Communicating via message boards .
Content distribution .
Freenet is somehow similar to Napster and Gnutella but the difference is that Freenet provides the file-storage service while these systems provide a file-sharing service. That is participants make files available to others but do not push files to other nodes for storage. Another difference is that they don't provide anonymity.
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Site of the Week:- http://www.freecodemomma.com/
This site provides the free source code, in-depth tutorials, and thousands of useful web programming resources. One can also get the free scripts, functions, classes, etc. for your programming project. The site is categorized into various languages (like ASP, PHP, Perl, Java, C/C++) and further categorized into Articles, Organizations, Source Code, Online Books, Tutorials, Tools and Software etc. for that particular language.
That's all for this week. See you next week.
Madhuresh Singhal
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