The Free Network Project: Freenet Gateway

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES BROWSE FREENET THROUGH MICROSOFT INTERNET EXPLORER, IT WILL DESTROY YOUR ANONYMITY

We make no guarantees that fproxy will not allow content through to your browser that will cause it to fetch from the public internet and compromize your anonymity, and there are probably more bugs we haven't found with XPath or layers or CSS2 or something, but IE's misfeatures make it particularly easy to exploit.

Request Data

Key? :

Hops-to-live ? :

Insert Data

Key? :

Hops-to-live ? :

File ?:

Mime Type ?:

Help

Introduction

This is FProxy, it is a part of Freenet version 0.4, and allows you to access Freenet through your web browser.  Essentially it lets you surf Freenet as if you were surfing the World Wide Web.

Requesting keys from Freenet

To help you get started, we have supplied some links to some popular websites in Freenet, which will help you start exploring.  Note that some of these websites are published anonymously, and some link to information that you may find offensive - you visit these websites at your own risk.

Be aware that it can take up to a minute to request some information from Freenet. Your node will learn how to query the network more efficiently as you use it, and so you will notice that performance improves with time. Additionally, the more popular the key you are requesting the less time it will take. The reason for the delay is that Freenet must search for information in a manner that protects your anonymity.

If the NodeInfoServlet is enabled, you will be able to see some information about what your node is doing at http://127.0.0.1:8890/.

fproxy has been designed so that if you download a web-page from Freenet, the page can have hyperlinks to other documents within Freenet which fproxy will download as if you had just clicked on a hyperlink on the WWW.

Key

When you want to request some information from Freenet you need the exact key for that data, much as you need the exact URL for a webpage before your web browser can retrieve it.  Sometimes keys will be self explanatory, such as freenet:KSK@the_us_constitution.txt, but sometimes they will just look like a random collection of letters and numbers.  Fortunately, however, just as with the WWW, you can also retrieve a particular key just by clicking on a hyperlink. You can find some sample hyperlinks above.

Hops to Live

The "Hops to Live" determines how hard Freenet should look for your data.  Higher values will increase the chance that data will be found, however they will take longer to report failure and will place more of a burden on the Freenet network.  10 is normally a good value for this, anything over 25 will be reduced to 25 automatically.

File

The name of the local file that you want to insert into freenet. Keep in mind that inserting large files can take a very long time.

Mime Type

The Mime Type determines how browsers will display the file inserted into Freenet. If you leave this field at the default "Use file extension" fproxy will guess the type from the file extension. Normally this works fine.

Creating your own website in Freenet

There are a variety of useful free tools for creating websites in Freenet.  For Windows users, try Freeweb. For portable command line tools, try FCPTools Warning: Both of these links will take you to the World Wide Web


FProxy by Theodore Hong, Brandon Wiley, and Gianni Johansson
The Freenet Project