Freenet 0.7.5 build 1507

2026-09-04

Freenet 0.7.5 build 1507 is now available. [overview]

This release reduces startup time, improves privacy of probe requests,
polishes the italian localization, updates plugins, and adds a lot of
cleanup. It is also the last version to support Java 8.

Last build with Java 8 support

Since Debian no longer supports Java 8, even oldoldstable (bullseye)
only has Java 11, we can no longer support a reliable, low maintenance
build system for Java 8. Even now, releasing with Java 8 from the
current release system is a bunch of hacks, that’s brittle and gobbled
up more than half a day in debugging just to get he build to work
again. And any update would threaten to break the system. That’s why
we’re moving to the oldest Java available on Debian oldstable (openjdk
17). This also allows us to use var, switch expressions, pattern
matching, and records, making Java code much more enjoyable to write.

If your Java install is older than Java 17, your node will not receive
more updates after 1507 (we can still do emergency updates, but we
hope we won’t have to).

If your Java install is at least version 17, then your node will use a
new update key (as we did it for Java 7 in build 1481).

As usual, we distributed Shamir’s Secret Sharing Scheme Shares among
core devs and longterm members to have a contingency plan. Should the
new update key be lost (or if any other calamity happens), they can
come together and recreate it by combining enough shares.

Improved privacy

We asked Cynthia and Blub to try and find weaknesses in Hyphanet and
they found a bug in the anonymization of probe requests. The location
randomization was simply missing. They reported it confidentially and
this release fixes the issue by adding linear random noise of half the
long distance connection minimum to the location (wrapped around in
location space). While it took longer than expected to fix it cleanly,
thanks a lot for the reports!

Startup time and user interface

Startup should be much faster: the randomized throttling of DNS
requests that makes startup harder to detect could cause stalling on
addresses without DNS entry. Now addresses without DNS entry (a
hostname in ip address override) have a much shorter wait time and
when you don’t have connections yet, the wait time is reduced further,
so your node should connect more quickly.

Tristano improved the Italian localization (thank you!) and TheSeeker
reported that bookmarks removed from the default set had their
description broken (fixed now: thank you!). Bookmarks that are no
longer in the default set now clearly state in their description that
they were removed from the default.

When you open files as plain text (using "open the file as plain text"
option on the download status page), they are now opened by default as
UTF-8. This should reduce the amount of broken text display a lot.
Bombe added tons of tests for this.

And the old, no longer updated statistics bookmark is removed. It
mislead new users into thinking that there were no updates.

Also Bombe fixed persistent connection handling, ensuring that bugs in
toadlets cannot stall the connection. And added lots of tests that
ensure that the code in question stays robust from now on out. Thank
you for making us compliant with §8.1.2.2 of RFC 2616 (HTTP 1.1
pipelining)!

Plugin updates

Thanks to Bombe taking it up, Freemail now uses UTF-8 by default, has
a reliable Base32 encoder and uses its templates correctly.

Also WebOfTrust 20 is now the minimum accepted version and WebOfTrust
21 is recommended. The testing version uses 21 as minimum.

Misc

Fixed a math edge case and added to CONTRIBUTING that if you suggest
code, you must actually understand it:

• ensure that you understand the change you suggest.
  You must not suggest code that you know you don’t understand.

That’s it: Thank you for using Hyphanet!

And if you get the chance, please invite friends to join you,
either via Opennet or ideally via friends-to-friend connections,
and meet up in Hyphanet, where no one can watch you read!