This One Will Be Hard to Shut Down
Published October 31, 2002
Here's an article from the NY Times touching upon the Freenet Project:
- The Freenet China project uses the publishing technology of a broader organization, the Free Internet Project, known as Freenet, to disseminate information about China on the Web. People who install Freenet software on their computers can anonymously place information in a global information library shared by the network of Freenet users. While users of the World Wide Web ordinarily make direct connections with Web sites to obtain information, Freenet users make indirect requests to other Freenet computers, which in turn send the request onward if they do not have the requested document.
Among the documents that have been released through Freenet China are the Tiananmen Papers, a compilation of transcripts of 1989 meetings among Chinese leaders about the protests.
Siuling Zhang, a Long Island-based developer of the project, said that it had received 10,000 requests for the Freenet China software. Since the program is small enough to fit on a floppy disk, she said, it has undoubtedly been copied many times over.
Because any computer can communicate with any other computer on the Freenet network, the Chinese government would need access to each individual machine to censor the entire Freenet library. "So far we haven't heard anything about Freenet being blocked," Ms. Zhang said.
- This One Will Be Hard to Shut Down
- Published: October 31, 2002
- Type:
- Section: Culture
- Writer: Eric Olsen
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