This is a specialization of our general Technology section, focusing more explicitely on the 'true internet' or distributed P2P infrastructures.

• On the overall perspective of the P2P Foundation: What Digital Commoners Need To Do, a meditation on the strategic phases in the construction of a peer to peer world

Introduction

Projects we find worthty of support:

1. Open Source Mesh Networking projects monitored by Open Source Mesh
2. P2P and the Social Cloud. Rafael Pezzi: Part 1 and Part 2: programmatic statement on a truly open and non-proprietary internet infrastructure
3. Various strategies to achieve Free Fiber to the home
4. High Priority Free Software Projects: "The FSF high-priority projects list serves to foster the development of projects that are important for increasing the adoption and use of free software and free software operating systems."

Projects to decentralize/distribute the internet:

1. Bitcoin, a decentralized internet currency.
2. Diaspora will hopefully be a social networking community where users can run their own federated “pods”, thus owning their personal data and directly controlling what is shared with who.
3. The Dot-P2P Project, an alternative DNS hierarchy that resists censorship.
4. GNUnet is a framework for secure peer-to-peer networking that does not use any centralized or otherwise trusted services
5. OpenPGP encryption is based on self-issued certificates which gain authority as a result of a web of trust expressed via user- maintained keyrings rather than a hierarchical certificate authority system that can be centrally compromised.
6. Status.Net is a microblogging system that allows users to run their own Twitter-like site and federate selected streams with other systems.
7. The Tahoe Least-Authority File System, a highly fault-tolerant, secure internet filesystem.
8. The Tor Project, an anonymizing overlay network.
9. Unhosted: "Unhosted is a project for strengthening free software against hosted software. With our protocol, a website is only source code. Dynamic data is encrypted and decentralised, to per-user storage nodes. This benefits free software, as well as scalability, robustness, and online privacy."
10. YaCy is a search engine where many nodes share information to build a distributed index.

Distributed Technologies

P2P Network Computing

1. For the most fully distributed Peer to Peer Computer Networks at present, please check out Tribler ;Peerple ; Wipeer
2. Research into more fully distributed P2P systems for the future: Chord, CX Project, Farsite, Globe Project, Oceanstore, Pastry
3. Decentralized P2P software programs are monitored and indexed here; Flud maintains a list of Distributed Internet-based Backup Systemssuch as Tahoe

P2P Searching

1. List of Distributed Search Engines; [1]

Virtual Worlds

1. Peer to Peer Virtual Worlds: VastPark, Solipsis, Vast; see also: Multiverse

Resources

Key Articles

General Infrastructure

1. The Rise of the Stupid Network. David Isenberg's classic essay for locating intelligence in the periphery, not the core.
2. End-to-End Arguments in System Design: The best way to design a network is to allow the sender and receiver to decide what the data means, without asking the intervening network to interpret the data.
3. World of Ends: Doc Searls and David Weinberger summarize the key characteristics of the internet.

Broadband

1. Telecommunication expert Gordon Cook asks: Is Bandwidth Infinite?
2. Various strategies to achieve Free Fiber to the home

Free Software Infrastructure

1. Understanding Free Software, Open Source Software and Floss, thanks to this booklet

P2P Network Computing

1. Peer-to-Peer Networks as a Distribution and Publishing Model: the best introduction to the advantages of P2P Computing!

Wireless Meshworks

1. Wireless Networks as Techno-social Models. By Armin Medosch.

Key Books

• Internet Architecture and Innovation. Barbara van Schewick. MIT Press, 2010

Key Directories

1. Complete list of P2P Filesharing programs with comparative notes. + A list of free and open source filesharing systems
2. High Priority Free Software Projects: "The FSF high-priority projects list serves to foster the development of projects
3. Find Open Source Alternatives to commercial software in the OSALT directory
4. Top 100 Open Source Linux Applications
5. Open Source Living: guide to the best freely available open source software on the web
6. List of Wireless Community Networks Worldwide
7. Open Source Mesh Networking projects monitored by Open Source Mesh