diff --git a/hugo-site/content/people/_index.md b/hugo-site/content/people/_index.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..2dfb6fcc --- /dev/null +++ b/hugo-site/content/people/_index.md @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +--- +title: "People" +date: 2026-04-03 +draft: false +list_child_pages: true +--- + +The people behind Freenet. diff --git a/hugo-site/content/people/ian-clarke/index.md b/hugo-site/content/people/ian-clarke/index.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..cee9f901 --- /dev/null +++ b/hugo-site/content/people/ian-clarke/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,94 @@ +--- +title: "Ian Clarke" +date: 2026-04-03 +draft: false +--- + +Ian Clarke is a computer scientist and entrepreneur, best known as the creator of +[Freenet](https://freenet.org), a pioneering decentralized peer-to-peer platform designed to enable +censorship-resistant communication and data storage. + +## Early Life and Education + +Born on 16 February 1977 in Navan, County Meath, Ireland, Clarke developed an early interest in +computing after watching the film *WarGames* at age six. By age ten he had written his first +computer program. + +Clarke attended Dundalk Grammar School, where he won the Senior Chemical, Physical, and Mathematical +section of the Young Scientist Exhibition twice: in 1993 with "The C Neural Network Construction +Kit" and in 1994 with "Mapping Internal Variations in Translucency within a Translucent Object using +Beams of Light." + +In 1995 he enrolled at the University of Edinburgh to study Computer Science and Artificial +Intelligence, where he became president of the Artificial Intelligence Society, reviving it from +dormancy. + +## Development of Freenet + +In his final year at Edinburgh, Clarke completed a project titled "A Distributed, Decentralised +Information Storage and Retrieval System." After receiving his grade in July 1999, he released the +paper publicly and invited volunteers to help implement the design. The resulting free software +project became Freenet, attracting significant attention from both mainstream and technology media. + +Freenet was publicly released in March 2000 as version 0.1. Unlike contemporaries such as Napster, +Freenet eschewed central indexes and instead distributed encrypted data across participating nodes, +making the network resilient to shutdowns and tracing. The system achieved over two million +downloads. + +Clarke's foundational paper, "Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval +System," was published in the *Proceedings of the International Workshop on Design Issues in +Anonymity and Unobservability* (2001) and has been widely cited in research on peer-to-peer +architectures and censorship-resistant systems. + +In 2023, Clarke relaunched Freenet as a new project distinct from the legacy implementation (which +was renamed Hyphanet), designing it as a scalable, peer-to-peer drop-in replacement for the +centralized web. In 2024, he introduced [Ghost Keys](https://freenet.org/ghostkey/), a cryptographic +mechanism enabling anonymous reputation building via verifiable real-world actions, addressing +longstanding challenges in pseudonymous systems without compromising privacy. + +## Professional Career + +**Logica plc** (August 1999): Software developer in the Space Division at Logica, a London-based +consulting company. + +**Instil Ltd** (February 2000): Joined a London-based software startup. + +**Uprizer, Inc.** (August 2000): Co-founded in Santa Monica, California, to commercialize +Freenet-related ideas. In January 2001, Uprizer raised $4 million in Series A funding from investors +including Intel Capital. + +**Cematics LLC** (September 2002): Founded to develop distributed systems products. + +**Revver** (December 2004): Worked on video distribution technology. Revver, unveiled in November +2005, became one of the first platforms to compensate creators of user-generated video content. + +**SenseArray** (December 2006): Founded in Austin, Texas. Released the Swarm distributed computing +tool in October 2009. + +**OneSpot** (January 2012): Co-founded; also open-sourced LastCalc, a calculator application. + +**DataRobot**: Served as advisor, contributing insights on scalable data processing drawn from his +distributed systems background. + +**Mediator.ai LLC**: Austin-based venture exploring integrations of AI with decentralized +architectures. + +## Recognition + +In 2003, Clarke was named to the [MIT Technology Review TR35](https://www.technologyreview.com/innovator/ian-clarke/) +list as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. + +## Selected Publications + +- I. Clarke, O. Sandberg, B. Wiley, and T.W. Hong, "Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information + Storage and Retrieval System," in *Proc. International Workshop on Design Issues in Anonymity and + Unobservability*, 2001. +- I. Clarke, S.G. Miller, T.W. Hong, O. Sandberg, and B. Wiley, "Protecting Free Expression Online + with Freenet," *IEEE Internet Computing*, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 40-49, 2002. + +## External Links + +- [Freenet Project](https://freenet.org) +- [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=KMfLvOoAAAAJ) +- [GitHub](https://github.com/sanity) +- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/iancjclarke)