No matter how you communicate over the Internet, what you send can often be intercepted, spied on, used against you, or censored by any number of governmental and non-governmental entities. One alternative is Hyphanet, which until last year had been called Freenet since its inception in 2000. It was originally conceived by Ian Clarke, who celebrates his 47th birthday today.
Clarke was born in Navan, Ireland. He was a great student, and won first prizes in the Irish national science fair. His first winning entry, in 1993, was a construction kit for building neural networks in the C language. He maintained his interest in neural networks and AI when he enrolled in the University of Edinburgh, and became president of the school’s Artificial Intelligence Society. His senior project was “A Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System.” He only got a B for the paper, but released the paper to the Internet and called for volunteers to help implement his idea — and that became FreeNet.
FreeNet is a peer-to-peer platform for anonymized communication. It includes a suite of tools including email, chat, messaging boards, and the like. You can even host a website (with some limitations) in the FreeNet network. It’s still in use, still in development, and has just recently been renamed “Hyphanet” because it “resembles a mycorrhizal network of hyphae” (don’t ask me; I think “FreeNet” is a better name).
Clarke has founded several startups, including Uprizer, to commercialize his FreeNet ideas, Cematics, which developed search applications, and ChangeTv, a collaborative music discovery system. ChangeTv was renamed to Revver in 2005 and introduced the first system of compensating video creators for their uploads.
He’s also created several open source projects, including LastCalc, an online calculator, and Swarm, a system for distributing computation across platforms without requiring any special programming. He’s currently working on NowDo, “the world’s simplest to-do app.” It’s “designed specifically to help procrastinators get things done.” The first launch was just a few weeks ago, and I’ll get around to downloading it sooner or later, I’m sure. He’s also just recently published an alternative to the “proof of work” mechanisms in cryptocurrency; he calls his idea “proof of trust. You can read about it here, on the FreeNet blog.
