Read Pigdog Journal on Freenet

by Mr. Bad

2000-12-18 18:12:55

Liberty

At long last, the promise of PEER-TO-PEER PIGDOGGERY has arrived. Pigdog Journal is now mirrored in the Freenet for your viewing pleasure. The first major Web magazine to do so, by the by. But you knew that we'd be in there first, didn't you? Because we rock like Spock!

You may have read about Freenet in the pages of PDJ a few months ago, or in other less reputable publications since then. If you haven't, here's the scoop: Freenet is a network of machines, kinda like Gnutella or Napster. You can do peer-to-peer sharing of files and datur and all that sort of stuff.

The cool part about Freenet is that it's SECURE. It's anonymous, and it's crypto-tastic. This means that Freenet is not subject to the kind of witch hunts that we've seen with systems like Napster, where individuals with certain IP addresses were booted for distributing Metallica MP3s. They physically cannot tell where you are, if you're running Freenet. It's also decentralized, meaning there's NO SINGLE POINT of FAILURE that can be brought down by technical or legal means. No Bertelsmann deals, in other words.

Freenet is also very well architected, unlike bogus Gnutella. It's designed to scale up, so that popular stuff gets cached all over the place. Like, more people downloading means that your connections go FASTER. This is cool.

Freenet is more than just a system for sharing MP3 pHil3z, d00d. (In fact, it lacks searching ability right now, making it kind of hard. It's possible, though.) There are efforts in the works for making e-mail, BBSes, news, and search engines -- hell, just about everything -- all built around Freenet. This means that Freenet is going to become the new ALTERNATIVE INNURNET. OUR Innurnet, if you know what I mean. Screw the Man is the general principle.

So one of the things that the Freenet Project is trying to do is encourage folks to publish Web sites into the Freenet. Because the Freenet software comes with a Web gateway built in, you can pretty much browse the Freenet as if it was just another Web site. Which, like, beaujolais for that.

It's not easy, you have to know. I've been working for months trying to get Pigdog Journal into the Freenet. I ended up spending a lot of time hacking on mirroring software and stuff (in fact, if you've got a Web site and you want to publish on Freenet, you should check out freenetmirror, the tool I used to get us in Freenet). But gradually I've got the tools together to do it, and the network has become robust enough to support a real Web magazine with two-fisted hard-hitting journalism. And Pigdog on Freenet just went live, today! Hurrah.

So anyhow, the link below goes to Pigdog's splash page in the true Net of Freedom. You need Freenet running on your local machine for this to work -- if you don't have it, then go get it. And then click below, because there's a whole lot of Freedom going on, man.

Check it out yourself

vagrant@pigdog.org