Tor vs Freenet

Secure and anonymous are totally different things. Have you ever heard of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier? Anonymity means you can’t be identified, whereas security is more along the lines of encryption.

As for Freenet, it works the same way as Tor, torrents, and Bitcoin, and the point of it isn’t so much to remain anonymous as it is to prevent censorship.

Same technology, just marketed in different ways. All of these technologies are peer-to-peer (p2p) systems. Accessing the Tor network isn’t attractive because it’s secure – the reason we use it is to access the web in a different way that allows us to dig deeper into the archives of what’s available on the internet.

The reason Freenet was created is to keep a line of uncensored communications open worldwide. This is to prevent anyone from erasing or changing history.

It’s the difference between Napster and BitTorrent. The government was able to shut down Napster simply by shutting down its servers, but with Tor and Freenet, there is no server – everything is stored locally on each individual computer connected. 

Individual nodes can still be identified in both Tor and Freenet, but content can be encrypted to make it more difficult. The only difference between Freenet and Tor is Freenet passes information through a proxy, so basically I’d be accessing through an encrypted connection on your computer, you’d access through an encrypted proxy elsewhere, etc. It adds one extra step.

Keep in mind, however, all encryption is breakable if someone really wants to decrypt it and you’ll eventually be traced if you were to keep pushing the same button over and over.

Also, if someone were already remote-monitoring your computer, they’d see the keystrokes (either through a keylogger or any camera in your house) and know what you were up to anyway.

That being said, I’ve been pirating stuff for years and never got in trouble – legal protections are far more effective than technical ones. Math can’t be fooled as easily as a human judge.