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
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