“Freenet isn’t just a file-sharing network designed to
resist censorship of all kinds. For the slightly crazed among us,
it’s actually a platform for writing decentralized, anonymous,
secure applications. For those that think of Freenet as another
Napster, this seems more than a little insane. But for those that
think of Freenet as another WWW, this seems insane but neat. Some
of the individuals in the latter category have come together in the
EOF (Everything Over Freenet) project to port all of the
interesting Internet protocols to work on top of Freenet.In this article, I’ll tell you how to write a simple, generic
gaming API on top of Freenet using the shiniest new Freenet APIs
and design patterns. Why write games over Freenet? Well, you can
play without a central server, without having to worry about
attackers falsifying moves and without knowing who you’re playing
against! Some people question the usefulness of these features. The
real reason is it’s more fun to implement than a relational
database, and I’m not exactly getting paid for this. But wait, is
Freenet real time? Is it fast enough to play a satisfying game of
anonymous Quake on top of it? No, it’s about as fast as e-mail or a
heavily loaded web server, depending on the weather. Remember the
part about us being crazy and not getting paid.”