Freenet joins Google Summer of Code 2007
Last year, Freenet was part of Google's Summer of Code. Four students
worked for us instead of for the fast food industry over the summer. All
four delivered useful results, including the now widely used Thaw
filesharing utility, essential improvements to the installer and FEC
code, the resurrected and much improved Freemail and some simulations
that will inform decisions on load balancing and congestion control in
the near future and for years to come. Google paid them $4,500 and us
$500 each, and let us visit their HQ for a conference. This year we have
been accepted into the Summer of Code again. If you are a student and
want to work with us this summer, send an application in, and feel free
to contact us via email, IRC, or otherwise.
For more details see our wiki page on SoC 2007:
http://wiki.freenetproject.org/SummerOfCode2007
In the meantime, Freenet 0.7 continues to progress: Endless bugfixes
interspersed with a significant increase in performance around Chritmas,
substantial and ongoing improvements in memory usage, various security
improvements, lots of work on the datastore, and more. The network
continues to grow despite the naysayers and despite a major crypto bug
that was fixed in 1010, forcing a partial network reset. This year we
plan to implement opennet as well as further improvements to performance
(we have a number of leads as to what is going on). Opennet will mean
that new users no longer need to manually peer with total strangers -
like in 0.5, the network will do it for them. Once they are connected to
the network then they can add some of their friends ("true darknet
connections") to increase their security.
If you haven't tried Freenet since our last announcement, please try it
again. And if you haven't tried it since the first alpha release of 0.7,
you should definitely try it out again. We are not releasing a second
alpha because we want to deal with Opennet first.
And if you have any spare money, we always appreciate donations!
http://freenetproject.org/donate.html
