Freenet / Hyphanet 0.7.5 build 1507 is now available.

Install Freenet / Hyphanet for Windows or for GNU/Linux, macOS and other *nixes. See the download page for more information and other platforms.

Main changes:

• reduced startup time
• improved privacy of probe requests,
• polished italian localization
• updated plugins
• last version to support Java 8.

Last build with Java 8 support

Since Debian no longer supports Java 8, even oldoldstable (bullseye) only has Java 11, we can no longer support a reliable, low maintenance build system for Java 8. Even now, releasing with Java 8 from the current release system is a bunch of hacks, that’s brittle and gobbled up more than half a day in debugging just to get he build to work again. And any update would threaten to break the system. That’s why we’re moving to the oldest Java available on Debian oldstable (openjdk 17). This also allows us to use var, switch expressions, pattern matching, and records, making Java code much more enjoyable to write.

If your Java install is older than Java 17, your node will not receive more updates after 1507 (we can still do emergency updates, but we hope we won’t have to).

If your Java install is at least version 17, then your node will use a new update key (as we did it for Java 7 in build 1481).

As usual, we distributed Shamir’s Secret Sharing Scheme Shares among core devs and longterm members to have a contingency plan. Should the new update key be lost (or if any other calamity happens), they can come together and recreate it by combining enough shares.

Improved privacy

We asked Cynthia and Blub to try and find weaknesses in Hyphanet and they found a bug in the anonymization of probe requests. The location randomization was simply missing. They reported it confidentially and this release fixes the issue by adding linear random noise of half the long distance connection minimum to the location (wrapped around in location space). While it took longer than expected to fix it cleanly, thanks a lot for the reports!

Startup time and user interface

Startup should be much faster: the randomized throttling of DNS requests that makes startup harder to detect could cause stalling on addresses without DNS entry. Now addresses without DNS entry (a hostname in ip address override) have a much shorter wait time and when you don’t have connections yet, the wait time is reduced further, so your node should connect more quickly.

Tristano improved the Italian localization (thank you!) and TheSeeker reported that bookmarks removed from the default set had their description broken (fixed now: thank you!). Bookmarks that are no longer in the default set now clearly state in their description that they were removed from the default.

When you open files as plain text (using "open the file as plain text" option on the download status page), they are now opened by default as UTF-8. This should reduce the amount of broken text display a lot. Bombe added tons of tests for this.

And the old, no longer updated statistics bookmark is removed. It mislead new users into thinking that there were no updates.

Also Bombe fixed persistent connection handling, ensuring that bugs in toadlets cannot stall the connection. And added lots of tests that ensure that the code in question stays robust from now on out. Thank you for making us compliant with §8.1.2.2 of RFC 2616 (HTTP 1.1 pipelining)!

Plugin updates

Thanks to Bombe taking it up, Freemail now uses UTF-8 by default, has a reliable Base32 encoder and uses its templates correctly.

Also WebOfTrust 20 is now the minimum accepted version and WebOfTrust 21 is recommended. The testing version uses 21 as minimum.

Misc

Fixed a math edge case and added to CONTRIBUTING that if you suggest code, you must actually understand it:

• ensure that you understand the change you suggest. You must not suggest code that you know you don’t understand.

That’s it: Thank you for using Hyphanet!

Contribute

Join our core.

If you want to help us get better, please chat with us in #freenet @ irc.libera.chat. And give us time to answer, we’re all volunteers and might not be in your timezone.

And should you get the chance, please invite friends to join you, either via Opennet or ideally via friends-to-friend connections, and meet up in Hyphanet, where no one can watch you read!

To get into development right-away, have a look at one of the Freenet / Hyphanet Projects or just get fred and fix something that annoys you.

And to take on something that makes a big difference, have a look at the high-impact tasks.

In addition to coding, spreading Hyphanet, joining the community, writing a decentralized website, and other ways to contribute within Hyphanet, you can join the awesome team of translators at localization lab. They are the reason why we’re able to support several different languages, the often unseen heroes who make our work accessible to those who need it the most.

What is Freenet / Hyphanet?

Hyphanet is the original Freenet,
a peer-to-peer platform for
censorship-resistant and privacy-respecting
publishing and communication.

• Host your own website that stays up when you’re offline
• Talk under pseudonym, collaborate via git and hg
• Connect with friends to talk confidentially
• Join infrastructure to preserve Freedom of the Press

I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet? --Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation

What about the name „Hyphanet“? See Freenet renamed to Hyphanet.

That Hyphanet can keep moving forward and help people worldwide to exercise their basic rights and freedoms is the work of amazing volunteers, both contributors and people running Hyphanet nodes.

Thank you for your contributions, and thank you for using Freenet / Hyphanet!

-- AB

Install Freenet / Hyphanet for Windows or for GNU/Linux, macOS and other *nixes. See the download page for more information and other platforms.