While the first generation of file-trading technologies fights over Napster's leavings, more radical Net programmers are still committed to building a wholly anonymous, virtually untraceable way of communicating and trading files online. Chief among these is Freenet, an open-source project viewed by many as the ultimate inheritor to Napster's original promise of free online file swapping.
For the first time, the largely volunteer effort has hired a paid staffer, Swedish student Oskar Sandberg, who will get US$2500 for two months of work, using funds from an online donation pool. Developers hope that allowing one of their members to work full time on the project will help the completion of a new release, the first in almost a year, that finally will make Freenet faster and easier to use.
"This release will move away from Freenet as a research platform," said Ian Clarke, the British programmer who originally conceived Freenet as a university thesis. "We never expected it to be used widely this early in its development."
Freenet is the most prominent, and perhaps the most ambitious, of a growing number of projects aimed at giving people the ability to communicate online without being tapped, traced or monitored by anyone--whether it be repressive governments or record labels looking for pirated MP3s.
Harboured in the loose online communities of open-source programmers, it is these projects that are now thought likeliest to emerge as tools that could permanently shift the Net's balance of power, as Napster and the first generation of file swappers did temporarily.
One of the newest radicals emerged last week, in the form of a Canadian project dubbed Cryptobox. Though Cryptobox is not as far along as Freenet, the academics behind the project are aimed more at keeping information and communications out of corporate hands rather than away from prying governments.
"The threat comes from companies," lead Cryptobox developer Nick Bobic wrote in an email interview. "Everyone's Web browsing habits will be under a microscope, and all of that information could end up for sale."
