Why is Freenet being rewritten?
The existing version of Freenet doesn’t prevent people from knowing that you are running a Freenet node, this could be problematic in some situations. In particular, when you run a Freenet node, you broadcast that fact all over the internet. It’s easy for anyone to build a large list of people who run Freenet nodes; this is called “harvesting”. Powerful people with control over ISPs can then shut down those nodes, or national firewalls can block them. The whole point of Freenet is to build a system that can’t be censored, so this is clearly a big problem. The main focus of 0.7 is to fix that, using the concept of a “darknet” (see below).
