The Freenet Project

File Release Notes and Changelog

Release Name: 0.7.5-rc1

Notes:
http://freenetproject.org/download.html has up to date download links and various help on how to install it. You should always get the latest version as new builds are often not compatible with old builds. The builds here are purely for backup purposes, and are based on build 1217; the official release is based on 1218, which is almost exactly the same, but you definitely want 1218 if you are using Safari or Chrome. If you really want to use the files here:

Use the installer exe to install on Windows, otherwise use the installer jar. Normally you will want to use the installer rather than fetching the jars as there are other files. If you want to build fully from source, you will need to build freenet-ext.jar first from the contrib source code.

Changes:
9th June, 2009 - Freenet 0.7.5 release candidate 1 is now available!

The Freenet Project is very pleased to announce the release of the first beta of Freenet 0.7.5.

Freenet is free software designed to allow the free exchange of information over the Internet without fear of censorship, or reprisal. To achieve this Freenet makes it very difficult for adversaries to reveal the identity, either of the person publishing, or downloading content. The Freenet project started in 1999, released Freenet 0.1 in March 2000, and has been under active development ever since.

Freenet is somewhat unusual in that you can publish content to Freenet, and then disconnect from the network.  This content will remain available to other Freenet users, although it may eventually be deleted if nobody is interested in it.  Freenet will copy and move the content around the network according to demand, making it very difficult for an adversary to remove content.  Freenet will automatically create more copies of popular content to ensure that it will always be available.

Freenet 0.7 introduced the "darknet" concept, allowing users to only connect to their trusted friends (and thus to their friends' friends, and the entire network), greatly reducing their vulnerability to attack. You can use Freenet even if you don't know any other Freenet users, it just won't be as secure.

Freenet 0.7.5 beta 1 features major improvements to performance and usability, as well as improvements to security and robustness. In particular:

    * Freenet now uses a database (DB4O) to store longer-term data that must survive a restart.  This significantly increases Freenet's speed and reduces its memory usage. In particular, you can now have almost any number of downloads and uploads in progress without worrying about memory usage.
    * Improvements to the web interface make it clearer what you can do with Freenet, show progress when loading a page or file will take more than a few seconds, integrate search into the browse page, and generally improve usability in many areas.
    * Significantly improved performance for inserting and retrieving data, and also Freenet's initial connection to the network
    * A new installer for Windows which works with Vista as well as Windows XP/2000the (Freenet also works fine on Mac and Linux systems).
    * Many other optimizations
    * Lots and lots of bug fixes!

We need wider testing for 0.7.5 before we can declare it to be ready, so this is only a release candidate. If you are an existing or past Freenet user, or just want to get in before everyone else does, please test Freenet 0.7.5 rc1 (which is equal to build 1217). In particular we are concerned about possible bugs in the installers (for Windows and Mac in particular), but please report any bugs or problems you have downloading, installing, or using Freenet. General feedback on how usable and fast Freenet is would also be welcome. Hopefully 0.7.5 will be released within the next week. Please get your friends to try it out, and tell us everything that they got stuck on, but please don't slashdot us yet! :)

You can get Freenet from:
http://freenetproject.org/download.html

You can report bugs:
The bug tracker: https://bugs.freenetproject.org/
The support mailing list: support@freenetproject.org
Or talk to us on IRC: #freenet on irc.freenode.net

There is a lot of work still to do on Freenet, particularly when it comes to ease of use.  If you have Java programming or web design skills, and would like to help us improve Freenet, please join our development mailing list and introduce yourself. Also, if you can insert a full XMLSpider index anonymously, please do so immediately and contact us with the new key. Translators are also always welcome, if you can translate strings from English into some language that Freenet does not properly support yet, please contact us.