Is Freenet blocked by national firewalls?
The Chinese national firewall (Golden Shield) has blocked our website for many years, and was observed in 2005 to block the 0.5 protocol as well. This suggests China doesn’t like us, so be careful if you run Freenet in China. Some other countries such as the United Kingdom areseriously consideringforcing ISPs to block all peer to peer systems capable of sharing illegal files; this would probably include Freenet. Freenet 0.7 has some minimal defences against blocking; the protocol is relatively hard to identify (we will make this a lot harder in future), and it supports adarknetmode (i.e. only connecting to your friends) which makes automated harvesting and blocking of nodes very difficult.
