Finally a technical post: Freenet

I've been reading about real P2P systems lately because they are tough nuts to crack, LOL. One can say that I am a bit obsessed with routing in unstructured p2p networks. Freenet is cool because it is classified as an unstructured distributed hash table (UDHT) but they have proven that they can find files with high probability in less than 10 hops. But they do aggressive caching which helps out a lot I think. I run FreeNet on my home machine and it's an interesting experience. Because I use the OpenNet model, I connect to about 28 random peers, it uses a good amount of RAM between 200 - 300 MB, but it works ok. FreeNet has done a lot of real work to improve routing in unstructured networks such as creating a small-world graph by connecting nodes with closer identities with a higher probability and so on. They also do encryption but that part is not so impressive and simply easy to understand. I think I am intrigued by the actual implementation work that they have done. I've lost my train of thought, anyways, FreeNet is cool, they are unstructured, they have UDHT, they use encryption, they try to emulate small world to acheive logarithmic routing, they provide no guarantee of finding a file that is actually in the network, and they have real users and is designed by some real smart people. P2P is hard and it's going to take me some time to become smart enough to actually get it (slooooowwwwwwwllllllyyyyyyy, but hopefully ssssuuuuuurrrrrreeeeelllllly).