On Finding Things, Part 1

This is going to be a two part post. This first part is about how I found what I found and the second part is about what I found.

So the other day I was stumbling across the web in my daily pilgrimage and noticed a reference to a project, which I'd heard of before, called Freenet. I was curious to find out more about this project/program/network so I looked it up and fount it to be awesome.

Freenet is a decentralized peer-to-peer data storage medium that is designed to protect the anonymity of people while still allowing for information to be shared. Each user acts as a node on the network and hosts information. Requests for information are passed along nodes until the correct content is found and then rerouted back to the origin of the request. Anybody can publish content onto Freenet once and it will remain there, living on nodes across the network even if the origin is shut down. I think this is really cool on a technological level as well as a more ideological level. The goal of Freenet is perfect free speech with absolutely no censorship whatsoever. This leads to all sorts of unfortunate content being distributed on freenet, the most despicable of which is child pornography. On the other hand there is all sorts of really neat (some of it slightly illegal) content out there too.
Browsing across the freescape is rather like wandering through a big city, everything is anonymous. There's content and information and interactions, but nobody really knows who anybody else is. It was amongst this mass of information that I found a story, intentionally distributed I suspect but I'll never really know.