ZeroNet is a

decentralized Decentralization or decentralisation is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning and decision making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group. Conce ...

web-like

network Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer ...

users, created by Tamas Kocsis in 2015, programming for the network was based in

Budapest Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population ...

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the ...

; is built in Python; and is fully open source. Instead of having an

IP address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...

, sites are identified by a public key (specifically a bitcoin address). The private key allows the owner of a site to sign and publish changes, which propagate through the network. Sites can be accessed through an ordinary web browser when using the ZeroNet application, which acts as a local webhost for such pages. In addition to using bitcoin

cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...

, ZeroNet uses trackers from the BitTorrent network to negotiate connections between peers. ZeroNet is not anonymous by default, but it supports routing traffic through the Tor network. The ZeroNet website and bittorrent tracker are blocked in mainland China. Despite the censorship, however, it's still possible to access ZeroNet from behind the

Great Firewall of China The Great Firewall (''GFW''; ) is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People's Republic of China to regulate the Internet domestically. Its role in internet censorship in China is to block access to selected for ...

, even over Tor, by

bootstrapping In general, bootstrapping usually refers to a self-starting process that is supposed to continue or grow without external input. Etymology Tall boots may have a tab, loop or handle at the top known as a bootstrap, allowing one to use fingers ...

over

Meek Meekness is an attribute of human nature and behavior that has been defined as an amalgam of righteousness, inner humility, and patience. Meekness has been contrasted with humility alone insomuch as humility simply refers to an attitude towards o ...

, and connecting to peers directly. There is no way to take down a ZeroNet page which still has seeders, thus making such pages immune to third-party methods of taking them down, including DMCA takedown notices.

Hiatus and forks

Development has stopped for several months after stable release of v0.7.1 on Github. For a long period of time it was a concern that ZeroNet would stop working with Tor due to its lack of Onion-v3 protocol support. geeklessbr>implemented such a support
(thanking anonymoose and zeroseed for it) on 03.11.2021 i
his fork
Later on, ZeroNet Mobile Developer, PramUkesh announced a fork and implemented it with Tor v3 Patch and some fixes and released stable version of v0.7.6 on hi
GitHub Fork
which he intends to maintain if Tamas would abandon the project. As of February 2022, two of the three forks were active:
Zeronet-enhanced/ZNE
was the first fork with onion-v3 support, (and also includes performance enhancements), but its author seems to have left the project
ZeroNetX
pushes to get away from old infrastructure and eventually move on to

Rust (programming language) Rust is a multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language. Rust emphasizes performance, type safety, and concurrency. Rust enforces memory safety—that is, that all references point to valid memory—without requiring the use of a ...

code base
zeronet-conservancy
maintains existing codebase and adds features aimed at gradually migrating to a new p2p network designed from scratch

Development of the network

The feasibility of peer-to-peer online web-sites had been hypothesised for some time, with

The Pirate Bay The Pirate Bay (sometimes abbreviated as TPB) is an online index of digital content of entertainment media and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank Piratbyrån, The Pirate Bay allows visitors to search, download, and contribute ma ...

suggesting they would build a network, as well as BitTorrent Inc. which created the closed-source Project Maelstrom. Another application, Beaker Browser, uses the P2P DAT files protocol to allow the creation, hosting and serving of websites without need of a server. Sites on ZeroNet are known as "zites" by its users. ZeroNet supports

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...

, CSS and

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

. Server-side languages like

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. ...

are not supported, although ZeroNet can achieve user signup/login on

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

databases, that are also distributed via

P2P P2P may refer to: * Pay to play, where money is exchanged for services * Peer-to-peer, a distributed application architecture in computing or networking ** List of P2P protocols * Phenylacetone, an organic compound commonly known as P2P * Poin ...

. By default, sites have a size limit of 10 megabytes, but users may grant a site permission to use more storage space if they wish. With plugins and the ZeroFrame

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

, sites can communicate with ZeroNet calling

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

by JavaScript.

References

proxy Proxy may refer to: * Proxy or agent (law), a substitute authorized to act for another entity or a document which authorizes the agent so to act * Proxy (climate), a measured variable used to infer the value of a variable of interest in climate ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:ZeroNet Anonymity networks Application layer protocols BitTorrent Computer-related introductions in 2015 Distributed data storage Distributed file systems File transfer protocols Free network-related software Free software programmed in Python Internet privacy software Internet protocols Network protocols Overlay networks Peer-to-peer computing Tor (anonymity network) Web hosting Anonymous file sharing networks

Hiatus and forks

Development of the network

See also

References

External links