
GNUnet 0.11.5 - kgwxd
https://gnunet.org/en/#gnunet-0.11.5-release
======
dang
Previous discussions include 2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15877908](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15877908)

2013:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961018](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961018)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194553](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194553)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5845435](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5845435)

2011:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2515519](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2515519)

------
CDSlice
What exactly is GNUnet? It says it is supposed to replace the old internet
stack, but that it also runs on top of it? It looks like it is some kind of
research project, so do I just not have enough background information to
understand what they are saying?

Can anyone ELI5 what GNUnet is and why I should care about it?

~~~
amatus
Here's a few things GNUnet replaces and why it's better:

Bittorrent is replaced by GNUnet "filesharing", it's trackerless, it provides
a search function, users can adjust their level of anonymity for publishing,
downloading, and searching.

DNS is replaced by "GNS", it covers the "decentralized" and "secure" points in
Zooko's triangle, it a pet name system.

VPN is replaced by GNUnet VPN, which is just VPN over GNUnet so it can take
advantage of the p2p network.

TCP/UDP/SPDY/QUIC is replaced by "cadet", takes advantage of the p2p network.

There's also a DHT.

And there's lots of other stuff that's in-progress.

~~~
ng0
We should maybe include a "GNUnet in 5 minutes or less" on the website. The
old LEGO analogy is nice, and lynX did a great comparison here:
[https://secushare.org/img/stack-
comparison.png](https://secushare.org/img/stack-comparison.png) We don't
really need the ISO OSI model here, but even this can be added, as we've
already used it throughout the years to compare to the GNUnet stack.

~~~
ng0
I think somewhere we mentioned before that gnunet does not require ISPs and
IXPs, but using them today is the de-facto default state.

~~~
no_identd
May I draw your attention to my old comment here, as well as (more
importantly), the entire thread of even older comments /it/ links to:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19959687](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19959687)

Which I shall also link to directly, but the above also has some relevance:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19864808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19864808)

See especially here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867532](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867532)

And here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867467](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867467)

~~~
ng0
Please give me a summary of what you intend to express here. I just don't have
the time to cherry-pick the information here.

------
amingilani
I found this 6-minute video from Oct 2018[0] which gives a great overview of
GNUnet and compares it to the existing internet layers. It's pretty cool.

I wish they'd write a tutorial or something so that I know how to get started
playing around with it.

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CdHfySAPas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CdHfySAPas)

~~~
some-username
Tutorials:

Install:
[https://gnunet.org/en/install.html](https://gnunet.org/en/install.html)

In a Nutshell usage (wip):
[https://gnunet.org/en/use.html](https://gnunet.org/en/use.html)

------
NelsonMinar
Worth noting GNUnet has been around in at least name since 2001, back in the
heady days when peer-to-peer was the new hotness. Was it the next Napster?
Competition for JXTA? An evolution of Freenet? The reality is it wasn't very
much of anything back then. I've got no idea how the project of today relates
to the project of the same name 18 years ago.

~~~
ng0
Would this help?
[https://docs.gnunet.org/#Introduction](https://docs.gnunet.org/#Introduction)

If anything could be made more clear, let us know as feedback.

------
bratao
I was a student in Google Summer of Code for the GNUnet project. I just want
to say that Christian Grothoff (one of GNUNet leader) is a wonderful mentor. I
own so much to him for many aspects of my technical and academic life. I
highly recommend to anyone who have an interest in distributed
systems/security to participate in this project.

------
nickik
I like GNUnet. Very great project. However trying to figure out how to use it
was a utter pain and no 'kiler app' for it exists. Its very researchy. But I
really like everything they are doing.

------
Y_Y
> Be aware that this project is still in an early alpha stage when it comes to
> software – its not an easy task to rewrite the whole Internet!

------
jokowueu
Anything that uses GNUnet ?

Can you use it by its self like i2p etc ?

~~~
meowmeownyaa
It's sort of like an arbitrary mesh with lots of layers of plugins providing
primitives like private key-based identities, a decentralized DNS alternative,
block storage, tunnels, etc, and these combine to build more complex tools
like filesharing, chat, etc.

It doesn't do onion/garlic routing, although that's planned to be added in the
future. It is possible to make a service available over GNUnet like you can
with i2p, and with the name system you can give it a convenient name and add
it to your address book like in i2p. That being said, this service in
particular offers no real anonymity at the moment, and is currently buggy.
Filesharing is its most mature application in my opinion, it doesn't have any
severe bugs I'm aware of and it is optionally anonymous (although the network
only has a few hundred peers at the moment so its anonymity isn't as strong as
it will be when more people use it).

~~~
ng0
A short addition: (1) various forms of onion routing are in active research.
(1.1) see for example the "big data, little data, no such data" presentation
of Christian Grothoff from 2017

(2) what we are still trying to solve here, mainly, is making it harder to
know the path of communication. Today, if User Lora with Node A talks to User
Charly on Node B, the data goes through N nodes. The N nodes between A and B
are aware of (parts of) the path, but the communication remains encrypted (in
very short terms explained).

(edit: no markup here)

