“I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she’s too young to have logged on yet. Here’s what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say ‘Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?’”
–Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse and publish “freesites” (web sites accessible only through Freenet) and chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Freenet is decentralised to make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in “darknet” mode, where users only connect to their friends, is very difficult to detect. more…
The install is a very simple one-click app for both Windows, Unix and OSX, that lets you access freenet through your webbrowser.
All communication between freenet nodes is anonymous, encrypted and very difficult to detect.
So when Freedom on the Internet is outlawed this is where you should go… The Freenet Project
If you want to get a taste of Freenet without having to install anything, then head over to http://anonynet.org for a beta Freenet Browser.
Now, I’ll bet you find yourself asking, “What is a connectome?”
A connectome is a comprehensive map of the neural connections in the brain of a given species.
In it’s ultimate form, it’s every single connection of every single neuron in the entire brain.
In the human brain this is a complexity that is simply mind boggling!
According to various estimates, the human cerebral cortex (aka “The Gray Matter”) consists of at least 10^10 neurons with the entire brain at about 10^11. These neurons are then linked together by between 10^15 and 10^14 synaptic connections. In comparison, the observable universe contains about 3 to 7 × 10^22 stars. (1 Billion = 10^9), and the entire human genome contains only about 25.000 genes!
Now if every synaptic connection could be represented by a single byte (which it can’t), it would take somewhere between 100 Terabytes and 1 Petabyte of data to store the connectome of the human brain.
The video link below gives a good visual understanding of the structure of the human brain. Zooming in from macro to micro structure, covering the low level function of single neurons and their intertwined activity through neuronal connections (synapses).
Regarding the state of present and future research in connectomics, Professor Sebastian Seung explains it all passionately in the TED|VID below.
He also puts forth the proposition that: “I Am My Connectome” and continues to speculates on the possibility of “Man’s Resurrection ”. Or to put it a little more precisely, wether the connectomes of the people, who have chosen to been frozen in liquid nitrogen after their death, still remains intact?
(The real question of interest, to me however, is still when we’ll se the dawn of the ever elusive NPU’s? )
”. Or to put it a little more precisely, wether the connectomes of the people, who have chosen to been frozen in liquid nitrogen after their death, still remains intact?