Freenet 0.7.5 build 1495 is now available.

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

This build improves four broad areas:

  • new users
  • user experience
  • performance
  • backend changes

New users

There is a new firsttime wizard for single-step setup, contributed by redwerk and finally merged after resolving dependency-requirements.

To further ease the start, the bookmarks are re-organized with "starting points" at the top.

User experience

For integration in browser extensions, TheSeeker added support for the schemes web+freenet and ext+freenet which do not need further allow-listing by browsers to use.

CometZ@6DtYG~ created a new theme sky-dark-static, a clean dark scheme, simpler than Winterfacey.

To enable more beautiful Freesites, Spider Admin, naejadu and vwoodzell extended the CSS filter to enable sticky, transition, and word-wrap.

The m3u-player is now only inserted into sites which contain at least one video or audio tag. When a part of a stream fails, it is now skipped, allowing for continuous playback without user-intervention.

Performance

For better lifetime of larger files, the healing size is increased from 16 to 256 MiB, so a 512 MiB file will keep working if accessed once every 10 days. To keep alive files explicitly, you can use the keepalive plugin. You can activate it from the menu via Configuration / Plugins.

And the pending keys optimizations by Eleriseth should reduce the CPU load on very fast nodes with many peers.

Backend Changes

  • merged the HashingAPI by unixninja92, a GSoC project that had gotten lost in the pull requests. This provides an easy and well-tested way to create and verify different types of Hashes from byte arrays, including Sha256 and TigerTree. https://github.com/freenet/fred/pull/258
  • merged announcement fixes by toad
  • upgraded unit tests to junit4, thanks to vwoodzell!
  • fixed the client getter method to honor the max size argument

A big thank you to all contributors and reviewers for getting this release in shape!

And thank you for using Freenet!

Contribute

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.

To get into development right-away, have a look at one of the Freenet-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.

What is Freenet?

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

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

That Freenet 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 Freenet nodes.

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

-- AB

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

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