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It's definitely do-able, although no solution would really be perfect.

What that completely ignores is the fact that there are many cases where you don't necessarily wish your opinions and information to be tracable. I believe that Slashdot has a rational behind the concept of the Anonymous Coward. Some information is just too important to be shared for people to have to worry about being tracked down for sharing it.

The downside is that people are more likely to say and do irresponsible things with anonymity. However, that is really a small price to pay to avoid the loss of freedom that comes when everything is monitored.

Basically, in the 20 or so previous DiscWorld books, Pratchett has built a very rich and detailed history through the events of the characters. However, as would happen with almost any author, there are small timeline mistakes and such that creep into the series, which very devout fans love to point out on USENET.

Thief of Time starts with the explanation of an event in the past of the DiscWorld that caused the Timeline to crash (which explains all the little inconsistancies, since it had to be patched back together). Since then, it's been up to the Monks of History not to merely record history as it happens, but to ensure that history continues to happen at all!

Main characters in the book are Lu Tze (a History Monk patterned after Lao Tzu), Susan Sto Helit (Death's grand-daughter), DEATH, Lobsand Ludd (Lu Tze's apprentice), and The Auditors.

Anyone who enjoys the sort of satirical humor that was present in Hitchhiker's Guide should check this out, and then read the rest of Pratchett's work.

More information about Terry Pratchett and his works can be found at

• L-Space
• alt.fan.pratchett

Project ELF - Anonymous Distributed Filesharing

Back in earlier days of the web, sometime around 1995 or 1996, I recall finding this on the website of the student who wrote it. At the time, I needed a personal webserver and I don't think that Apache had released a port to Win32 at that point (I may be wrong). Anyway, I installed this sucker and it ran beautifully. It also had a tiny little Illuminati pyramid that sat in the systray.

Interesting that M$ picked it up for experimentation. I would hasten to point out though that they are merely complying with the previous software license, since I doubt they would have used the GPL of their own accord.

Project ELF - Anonymous Distributed Filesharing

Any particular similarities between Transcendentalism and The Force are probably general similarities between philisophical systems, and may even reflect some amount of knowledge by Emerson in those Eastern Philosophies. ELF - Decentralized Anonymous Filesharing

An explanation of it's features (taken from the website) follow:

• In Brief

ELF is a software program that can be used to share and receive files across a network anonymously in order to allow the storage and sharing of information without fear of reprisal.

Key Features

• Anonymity
  All packets, including search and file transfers are routed through multiple clients with no traces to allow tracking of users
• File Autheniciation
  Files are identified by using the MD5 hash of the file to ensure that the file received is the file that was requested, and was not corrupted during download.
• Downloading from Multiple Sources
  Files are requested using their MD5 hash, and are simultaneously downloaded from all responding clients, in order to increase speed and reduce bandwidth use on individual file sources. Additionally, file downloads may be resumed later at the position the download was halted
• Real-time searches
  Searches are sent through the network of connected clients, who respond immediately with any results that apply. Additionally, search results are cached at each client for 5 minutes, which reduces the network load for common searches
• Bandwidth Limits
  Clients may be configured with bandwidth limitsthat control the data-throughput, so as not to fill the network pipe or cause flooding in other machines.
• Data Encryption
  Use of a seeded random number progression XOR encryption scheme greatly increases the difficulty of deciphering data using a packet sniffer. Additionally, an HTTP request header is used to mask the traffic as a webpage request.

• The Technical Details

ELF is a real-time, peer to peer file-sharing client uses a decentralized client network (known as ELFnet) to allow searching and retrieving of shared files. It bears some resemblance, both in concept and form design, to GNUtella, although the protocol layout and software design is actually quite different.

Commands are relayed between clients as an ELF packet, which is formatted data written onto a TCP/IP packet. The term "Packet" as used hereafter, will refer to ELF packets, NOT TCP/IP packets unless otherwise noted. Each packet is given a 6 byte unique id and an expiration time. The current expiration time is 5 minutes, but may be shortened or made user-configurable based on observed network behavior in future releases. The unique packet id is used to ensure that duplicate packets received from different sources are dropped. These ids are also used in reply packets to route them back to the sender, along the path of the packet that requested the response. Routing information at any given client only tells which connection sent the packet and where it went, NOT who the ultimate source or destination was.

Packets types are as follows:

• Ping- Ping packets are broadcast packets used to request a Pong reply from all receiving clients on the network, in order to gather addresses of available hosts.
• Pong- Pong packets are routed packets, following the path of the ping, that relay the IP address, number of files shared, and bytes shared from the responding node. They do NOT reveal the names or types of files shared by the node, nor any information that could link them with any given search result or downloaded file. Additionally, the packet IDs of Pong packets are NOT cached, so they cannot be return-path-traced
• Search- Search packets are broadcast packets used to search for available files matching a search string. If a receiving client matches the search string with one or more shared files, they reply with a Search Result packet
• Search Results- Search Results are routed packets that contain information on files available for download that match a particular search. That information includes the exact file name, its length in bytes, and a MD5 value. This information is used to request a file.
• Broadcast File Request- Broadcast File Requests are broadcast packets that request a file to be sent by it's MD5. When client received a Broadcast File Request, it checks to see if it is sharing that file; if it is, it sends a File Acknowledgement, otherwise it broadcasts the request to all of it's connections. A file request packet contains only the MD5 of the file; it does NOT contain the name of the file.
• File Acknowledgement- A File Acknowledgment is a routed packet that follows the path of a Broadcast File Request. It contains only the filesize of the file requested (to insure that the responder actually has the same file).
• File Request- File Requests are routed packets that follow the path of a File Acknowledgement packet and request a 5000K peice of the file to be sent. A file request packet contains only the MD5 of the file and the byte position that it should start at. It does NOT contain the name of the file.
• File Transmission- File Transmission packets are routed packets that follow the path of a File Request packet and contain data from the file that has been requested. They are currently 5000 bytes long with respect to file data sent and also do NOT contain the name of the file.

All packet information is transmitted as binary in an attempt to both reduce packet sizes and obfuscate the packet data against real-time monitoring by packet sniffers. Additionally, transmitted data is also xor encrypted using a seeded random number generator to increase the security against monitoring. This is done so as to make it less obvious that the client is running ELF, NOT to guarantee that the sent data won't be decrypted if enough time and effort are spent. It doesn't matter either way, since the decrypted data doesn't contain information that would be useful in tracing who sent or received files.

• Alpine - Adaptive Large-scale Peer2peer Information NEtworking
• ANAP -- Anonymous Napster
• AudioGalaxy Satellite
• Bearshare -- Powerful Gnutella client
• Blocks -- open source distributed sharing client with encryption
• Carracho -- MacOS file sharing program
• CuteMX
• Direct Connect
• DFSI -- Distributed File Sharing over IRC
• Espra
• FileSwap
• Filetopia
• FreeNet
• Gnutmeg -- peered file sharing system
• gnutella -- distributed P2P file sharing tool
• Hotline
• IMesh
• Jungle Monkey -- open source
• KaZaA - Windows Media Desktop
• Konspire -- open source distributed client in java
• OFSI -- Open File Sharing Initiative
• ProjectELF -- anonymoys distributed sharing system
• SongSpy
• Spin Frenzy
• Splooge -- P2P file sharing by file extension
• Swapoo -- Napster like service for sharing video game ROMs
• Swaptor -- Online File Sharing Community
• VNN - secure file sharing app

Project ELF looks pretty cool. It uses "tag routing," in that each ELF packet (encapsulated in TCP/IP) has a unique 6-byte tag. I assume that each client remembers the incoming IP address associated with each tag. File requests sent to a client are broadcast (i.e. sent out to all known IPs except the one the file request came in on), and search hits are reverse-path-forwarded using tag routing.

My main concern about Project Elf is its scaling issues using "broadcast" packets for searches...what happens if there are a million clients out there?

There is a new peered sharing network, Project ELF, which allows truly anonymous sharing of any file type. The point of this system is actually privacy, rather than speed, but there are some features which will actually make it faster the larger the network gets, including downloading pieces of the same file from multiple sites simultaneously. Pretty cool!

ProjectELF is designed to eliminate this problem. It is completely secure from all prying eyes. This also makes it slow... hence the name, from the E.L.F. radio transmissions to submarines. Kind of a play on terms, since it is also designed for secrecy. check out their Statement of Principles for a view as to why they made such a thing. More than that, they actually kept working on it until it isn't really "extremely low frequency" anymore. In fact, if the network gets arbitrarily big, downloads should be very fast indeed.

ProjectELF is designed to eliminate this problem. It is completely secure from all prying eyes. This also makes it slow... hence the name, from the E.L.F. radio transmissions to submarines. Kind of a play on terms, since it is also designed for secrecy. check out their Statement of Principles for a view as to why they made such a thing. More than that, they actually kept working on it until it isn't really "extremely low frequency" anymore. In fact, if the network gets arbitrarily big, downloads should be very fast indeed.

Actually, there is a peered filesharing system that has some interesting design features which should help it scale better than gnutella. It also addresses a lot of the security concerns brought up by Napster and gnutella. ProjectELF is designed to be a completely untraceable and anonymous peered file sharing system. It is just at the beginning stages, but it already works just fine. Most of the remaining issues seem to be those of interface design and efficiency of coding. It is definitely worth checking out. Another cool thing is the author's use of a system that I have long advocated, namely sell everything at prices so low that piracy is more difficult that legitimate trade. He prices his product at a dollar. I guess he hopes to make it up in volume. That was always my theory. Sell ten million copies at a buck instead of a half million at $20.