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Comment by hiq | Hacker News Reader

> In 2019, Ian began work on a successor to the original Freenet, which was internally known as "Locutus." This project, a redesign from the ground up, incorporated lessons learned from the original Freenet's development and operation, and adapted to today's challenges. In March 2023, the original version of Freenet was separated into its own project, and what was known as "Locutus" was officially branded as "Freenet."

And https://freenet.org/faq#faq-3:

> Anonymity: While the previous version was designed with a focus on anonymity, the current version does not offer built-in anonymity but allows for a choice of anonymizing systems to be layered on top.

So what has been known as Freenet and the new Freenet are quite different apparently.

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It was not the first, either: See "Cleveland Freenet" https://cfn.tangledhelix.com/

The original freenet was the Case Western freenet; I still remember my email as it was issued sequentially as aa000 to zz999, skipping some. It was `freenet.edu`

Primarily used it for research and usenet, most of the time through uucp to get the updates.

Anonymity on Locutus: https://github.com/freenet/freenet-core/discussions/813

Just a note that this link is not by a Freenet developer.

Is there a 'sanctioned' option or do you have any pointers on how to layer anonymizing systems on top?

No design fleshed out at this point but algorithms like mixnet and dining cryptographers should be implementable on Freenet's primitives (if not we'll improve the primitives).

Locutus as in borged Picard?

Maybe, though it could also be that locutus is a Latin word that essentially means "speak". Adds another layer of meaning to its use in Star Trek. :D

It makes sense because the Borg chose Picard as a representative for all humankind.

and there are some reasons to believe the borg were running some kind of distributed system that was weighting certain nodes at various times.

Perhaps a future fork of freenet will become borgnet? Seems futile, but resistance often can be.

> locutus is a Latin word that essentially means "speak"

Or more precisely “spoken”, the (nominative masculine singular form of the) past passive participle. (In English, other Latin words from the same root get you locution, colloquium, etc.)

Usually Latin past participles are passive, but loquor is a deponent verb which has only passive forms with an active meaning, so locutus means "spoken" as in "I have spoken" rather than "the words have been spoken".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deponent_verb

Borg reference (decentralized architecture), and Latin "speaker" - but Locutus was just a working title for what's now called Freenet.

I think throughout Star Trek history the borg have proven themselves to be a noble collective worthy of naming your repo's working title after.

How do I join the collective chatroom? And of course I want to skip The Matrix. Been there, done that. If assimilation is painful, I'll endure.

cargo install freenet will work but not yet.

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