Glossary

Address Resolution Keys (ARKs) - A mechanism to allow nodes behind a firewall to inform other nodes in the network should their external IP address change. See here for more information.

Backed Off - on the My Connections section of the http://localhost:8888/darknet/∞ page, the connection status can sometimes be shown as BACKED OFF. This means those nodes are too busy to reply to you promptly.

CHK - Content Hash Key

Darknet - DarkNet

DBR - Date Based Redirect. A way of creating updatable sites. Not implemented in Freenet 0.7 as at April 2006, and the recommended way of doing updateable sites is by using USKs.

DNF - Data Not Found

FCP - Freenet Client Protocol

FNP - Freenet Node Protocol. The protocol used by freenet nodes to talk to each other.

Fred - The Freenet Reference Daemon. The Freenet program that runs in the background doing all the work of fetching and storing files. It is a reference daemon because it's possible that other people will write other competing programs that work to the same spec as Freenet and be compatible with it.

Hash - A hash is a small string of characters that is like a fingerprint of a file. A large file can have a hash of only 40 characters long, say. In theory, many files can share the same hash. However, given a file with a hash, it is very difficult to generate a different file with the same hash. Freenet uses hashes as a kind of index to the files. If you know the hash of a file, it's impossible for you to recreate the file it came from.

Key - the term key is used in Freenet in two different contexts. One is in the sense of a cryptographic key, which is used to encrypt or decrypt data. The other meaning is used in the terms Content Hash Key or Signed Subspace Key, where the meaning is more like an index or URI to the data. Although somewhat confusingly, these keys also contain cryptographic keys as their subcomponents.

KSK - Keyword-Signed Key

Node ref - node reference. This is a small file that contains enough information about your node to enable another node to connect to you. You can find your node ref at the bottom of the http://localhost:8888/darknet/∞ page. You need to swap node refs with someone else in order to connect to each other.

Opennet - OpenNet

Plausible Deniability - A reasonable expecation not to know something- Because all content in Freenet is stored encrypted, you can plausibly deny knowledge of the content that is stored in your node. Because a request coming through your node could be from a friend, or could be from someone he linked to, you have no way of knowing what he does.

SSK - Signed Subspace Key

SVK - Signature Verifying Key - these are obselete from Freenet 0.7 onwards.

TMCI - Text Mode Client Interface. A simple command-line interface to Freenet, which can be accessed by using telnet to port 2323.

Toad - Nickname for Matthew Toseland, Freenet's paid developer

TUK - Time Updateable Key

URI - Uniform Resource Identifier. The address that you see at the top of your browser, for example http://mysite.com/, or in the Freenet context: http://localhost:8888/SSK@AKTTKG...HZsXM,AQABAAE/file.html (middle snipped for brevity).

USK - Updateable Subspace Key