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Japanese P2P Users Arrested, Creator Targeted
nutznboltz writes "According to a story on CNET Asia, two Japanese users of the Winny P2P application have been arrested for copyright violations, and the developer of the P2P software has also had his home searched by police. Winny was 'supposedly anonymous', and purported to be based on Freenet, although Freenet creator Ian Clarke is claiming that Winny is not really like Freenet, and that he's 'not concerned that the Japanese police have somehow found a way to compromise Freenet's security'."
This must stop! If this continues, the P2P world's supply of tentacle rape porn and mech video clips could dry up overnight!
You just voice anti-Slashdot opinion somewhere else, mister! We have learned to like our daily share of "same story, different country" posts!
1. p2p isn't piracy or crime, just like everything else it can be used to violate laws, so p2p != piracy.
2. copying software isn't theft or crime, it's just copyright violation (I'm not saying it's cool, it's just not a crime)
Considering the un-userfriendly state Freenet is right now (not being able to "search the [free]net") it would have been a huge accomplishment to completely base a P2P software on it. So my guess is that Winny more or less just mention Freenet for recognition purposes.
28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds... that is when the world will end.
"I'm not concerned that the Japanese police have somehow found a way to compromise Freenet's security," Clarke
"..but probably not those that allow Freenet to protect user anonymity." Clarke
I'm confused, it looks like Clarke said Freenet's compromised and he doesn't care, and that Freenet isn't compromised.
cant we make a software that is really designed for piracy? ie: users are really anonymous? i am afraid that the tentacles of RIAA might reach here in my country...
FEAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.....
Truth nowadays is based upon the general consensus of the many
Piracy is a crime and these folks were arrested for it. I don't see why this is news.
Uh, not quite. Software piracy may be a crime, but writing a P2P application, which has practical purposes for sharing files legally, isn't (as far as I know).
It's a sad day when writing a file sharing application is enough to get your house turned upside down by the police or get you thrown into jail.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
So - what did they intend to find? Or do they use it like intimidation of some sort?
Clarke wants to save his face, but it's well known in certain circles that freenet doesn't provide 100% anonymity if the attacker has enough resources, e.g. a large ISP or the gov.
It takes some time, but you can determine the IP and stored data of a user.
But I don't think that this is so bad, in free societies such anonymizer tools are often abused by criminals, spammers and perverts and in oppressive societies the use of the tool gets you in prison anyway. The Chinese gov is not so stupid to get caught by the "hahaha - my data was encrypted, you can't prove anything"-argument.
So it's really no loss there.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Stupid laws that cost thousands of extra police hours not only waste tax-payers money, they take police from their real job and priority number one which is keeping the peace. Not only that, but the RIAA is terrorising people with its tactics, it has become a mafia and should be shut down today. Whats going on here is a total inequality of justice. You cant choose people to make examples out of, and you cant have anyone in a cell for downloading music while there are muggers, murderers and rapists out on the streets. full fucking stop.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Since Winny is pretty much unknown outside Japan, here is some background information for slashdot readers: Winny is a P2P file sharing program created by a Japanese programmer, who still remains anonymous to this day. It came out two years ago as an attempt to share copyright-protected materials "safely" when somebody was arrested for using another P2P program (WinMX). Since the application was extremely well designed and almost anything is available on its network, from movies to software, it has become immensely popular in Japan, so much so that there are a dozen book available on how to use it and network traffic in the country was down 20% after the news of the arrest broke. As for the reasons why the police was able to identify those two people who were arrested, they used an extra bulletin board feature, which does not guarantee anonymity unlike its file transfer feature, to distribute a list of warez videos. Therefore, I don't think this news has anything to do with the validity of Freenet's technology, or with that of Winny's for that matter.
I am often amazed at the abilities of some. A 15 year old breaks a hard crypto for DVDs in what seems is a poetic 30 line program... And so many others who have contribuited to technology. But in my limited thinking I cannot see how a truly anonymous P2P network could ever be thought up.
...So it seems to me.
After all the encryption, all the routing and packet filtering... eventually we're always left with unavoidable IP addresses. There's always going to be, has to be, a destinaton and origination. If a computer program can find the location of a song, so eventually can a human.
The FBI tracked the release of an email virus to some upstairs apartment laptop with a temporary dial up connection in a third world country within three days of it's release. What was it, the I love you virus or something written by some tech students? I sat in wonder watching the news reports and the video of dirt streets and old third world buildings wondering how the hell they did it. How they knew it came from that upstairs apartment. Probably logged in just long enough to send it. Not just in three days, but probably sooner with them taking 1-2 days for the "public" release.
Then I consider a truly anonymous P2P file share and wonder if it is even possible. The song is going to be on a hard disk. That hard disk is attached to the net and will have a number representing it's network location. All of which can be traced. In my mind, again, if a program can find the song, even as difficult at it may seem, so eventually can a human.
Just like *they* can never make an unbrakable copy protection, Will *we* ever be able to completely anonymous while on the Net.
I'm just wondering....
or
(b) sex with a mare?
That's why Japanese users use the "Whinny" P2P system.
Here are the snippits from the spam.
Subject: Digital Music News: Don't Go to Jail
Music Industry Informs Internet Users of Risks Peer-to-Peer Networks Pose
STAY OUT OF COURT - USE LEGAL 'SHARING'
Staff Writer, The Digital Music News
The Recording Industry Association of America has filed 300 lawsuits against alleged file swappers. Don't want to become victim number 301? Then it's time to switch from programs like Kazaa and Morpheus to a legal music download service Songs purchased on legal services are more reliably of a higher quality than those downloaded from a peer-to-peer network where you're never quite sure if the file was properly labelled, ripped on an underperforming computer or contained a virus Below are the options that will help keep your life free of lawsuits To learn more about safe and secure ways of using the Internet http://www.riaa.com
The message then goes on to pimp for the various pay services. I have no idea if the RIAA actually paid for the spam, of if it is a joe job.
The speed of the legal system here is notoriously slow.
:)
And, I'm told, most people can escape imprisonment or heavy fining by just apologising well.
So, I'm not sure what kind of resolution the companies are expecting, but I'm sure it will be a long time til we hear anything
they 'mean', to secure themselves from responsibility for their felonious behaviours buy .controlling yOUR ability to respond to/commerce without, them.
Actually on this point I have a question. Isn't the problem with true anonymity when downloading from the net the connection between your system and your ISP? If nothing else, wouldn't your ISP be able to detect a massive upload/download bandwidth usage? Given the usual way thing work here, I imagine ISPs would be very open with dealings with the police if they came around asking questions. Right now in Japan they are starting to roll out fibre-optic cable connections to the net. Two people in my apartment complex have applied for it and the entire complex was given information on it. Currently they are offering 100Mb/s down and 2Mb/p up. I'm on Cable at the moment which only offers 10M down and .5M up and was thinking of getting it. After hearing about this latest arrest however a few of my friends who already have it are getting worried. They often download TV programs from Bit Torrent (Japanese TV sucks...) but after downloading some 5gig worth of some program they noticed they had uploaded 10gig. They are a little worried that that will ring a few bells back at their ISP.
Arrested!!!! Holy shit that could lead to Hara-kiri over Hanson.
Winny was developped by the Japanese developper called "47", and it was after WinMX user was arrested here in Japan, in 2001. It was the world-first arrest of P2P users. Japanese copyright law was amended in the years before to crack down infringement over internet, protecting "right of enabling sending copyrighted material".
Since then, among Japanese users and hackers, non-encrypted P2P which is still popular in the West today became things of past.
Since Freenet made of Java was very slow application then (not much improved today), he made Winny as native Windows P2P application, with encrypted storage distrubited across peers. According to the developper, Winny is good at the both anonymity and efficiency, but anonymity is slightly lower than Freenet. Because a receiver can't determine a sender is the one who originally inserted the file to the network or not, it was considered anonymous and then more secure than ordinary P2P network, say, Gnutella or eDonkey etc. Winny has other functions like forum system, and clustering by keywords combination set by its users which help users with similar interest mold cluster. Other remarkable difference from Freenet is it dosn't split files, but can do multiple-source download.
With the help of community and its own efficiency as P2P network, Winny become extremely populor in Japan unlike experimental Freenet in the West and consumed huge bandwidth.
But those who were arrested the last month was arrested because they sent files directly, without being a bridge, or put some warez onto web page and running Winny beside it. Therefore it is still not clear whether just running Winny and sending cached files without modest deliberation means guilty or not.
Winny is really WinNY, with WinMX N is the next of M, and Y is the next of X.
The way annoymity works is that files are stored in a "cache" in a scrambled format with filename concealed, even to the local user.
:)
Winny knows how to descramble the name and data, and it can search on the P2P network a specific file using its filename or MD5 checksum.
When a file is found, it is either downloaded directly or through another random user (think proxy).
Files goes into the cache either by local upload, by downloading a file (which Winny will descramble for you, leaving a copy in the cache), or by files passing through your node. It is then available for further download by other people.
This provides a kind of load-sharing where more popular a file is, it will be found in more people's cache and more easily available. Downloading from multiple sources is also possible.
You can find out who your immediate neighbour is, but he can claim he doesn't know what the content of his cache contains an infringing file, but of course this requires him to remove the original on his disk
To give an incentive to people to cache files, # of simultanenous downloads is limited to # of uploads+1 with a lower limit of 2.
It is a very convinent system because winny has a function that let you specifies search parameters and you can just leave it alone and it'll download everything that meets the parameters, meanwhile donating bandwidth and cache space to other people on the P2P network.
This model can be possible only because Winny is closed source. Cracks have both appeared for both the download limit and cache descrambling. It is easy to see widespread use of the cracks will compromise the model (less files to be found on the network).
Fortunately normally people don't care (it is just spare upload bandwidth and disk space, which broadband P2P users usually have surplus of).
yes, it can be.
:-)
the clincher is that you don't know what it is you're sharing.
Freenet for example, doesn't work like typical p2p programs; you dedicate a portion of disk for it to use, and it's all encrypted, and you don't even know what you're sharing.
I don't know which is worse
that was the philippines, the i love you virus
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That is where the name came from, but nowadays it is just called Winny.
Have you ever had to live in a neighborhood destroyed by both the drug pushers and the addicted users?
I thought it was pretty clear to anyone with a brain that drugs ARE scary and bad.
Perhaps you have a favorite kind of drug which you do not consider to be all that bad? Like weed or meth perhaps?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Yeah. Sounds great the first time you hear it, but who's going to park his car there? I certainly wouldn't want to walk from the middle east to my appartment in New York every day.
Just because a criminal can use something doesn't make useless or 'bad'.
Using your thinking, since criminals often abuse locks since they hide in houses, I guess then so what if the government bans the use of locks on your doors..
Or they abuse the mail by sending kiddy porn.. so I guess that means its ok for the government to go ahead and read ALL Mail.. with no warrant..
Your type is why we are loosing our rights that our forefathers fought and died for to gain. Get lost, you dont deserve the rights you do have.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If you want to claim otherwise please explain how, given a particular CHK on Freenet, someone tracks down the author of that file. Please give details.
Just found a link to The Motley Fool that very much suggests that file-sharing isn't taking any revenue. If this is truly the case, how do they justify the restraint of freedom induced by laws and methods of enforcement? This appears to be less a case of protecting revenues as a simple imposition of unjustified power.
More musings on power and on civil disobedience. I should say that I admire the independent artist who chooses to share samples, and do not especially admire those who trade music illegally, but here, punishment is disproportionate.
Wikileaks, no DNS
I believe that the words "arrested for downloading..." should not be appearing in our lives because "arrested for downloading music" sounds very similar to "arrested for downloading political material" and this is exactly how a society moves from free to big-brother. Lets put things in perspective here: You are not gaining unauthorized entry to a remote system, you are not 'stealing' (as in bank notes) money, you are not diverting electronic funds to yourself. Flaim me all you want about what you 'are' doing but those facts remain.
What you are doing is partaking in an activity that may negatively effect a large economy. Now there is no definite case here, it could be that you were not taking a potential sale because you would never have intended to buy it in the first place, who knows? its a very blurry area and no-one can claim they know all the facts. Having said that there are allot of things in our society that follow similar logic:
Driving your car for example, now you may not contribute a significant amount to pollution yourself but everyone together does (this has more proof behind it than the case against music downloading). If you go get a drink during commercials then you aren't doing anything personally but if every single person got up during that commercial it would have a zero viewer figure (which leads to the question are the advertising companies doing their job if no-one wants to watch their adverts?). As a society we have deemed that some things are ok and some are not for whatever reason but if its deemed that filesharing is not ok then you will have put that over driving your car and a whole host of other things we do that are far worse, is that ok? its up to you.
Its society's job as a whole to decide the balance here, personally i think filesharing should be accepted and that it will lead to a positive change in the way things are done and the way music is made. Maybe it will lead to the downfall of the RIAA as we know it and music will suddenly become not a money driven thing but a enjoyment driven thing maybe like open source software, is that good? is society happy with the way things are now? are you happy with the way things are with the RIAA? because its the majority of the people that matter in a democracy not the richest and if you live in a democracy then thats the way it goes.
PS. It might happen that you dont live in a democracy or your democracy is broken and for example 2 million people all getting together in a park to demonstrate over something does not sway your PM's view atall even though it was one of the biggest demonstrations in your country's history. Or, your government openly receives funding from major corporations and just happens to churn out laws that suit those corporations and has now allowed one of those corporations to run its voting. If this is true for you then the above post means nothing, go back to your work, do what you are told and let it get worse. If you dont live in a democracy and dont want one than also ignore this post and i hope you have better luck than us and that we dont try and invade you anytime soon, if we do im sorry i had nothing to do with it.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Actually, just the size of the piece of content you are retreiving is very likely to tield enough information to identify exactly who retreived it, I'm afraid. So the "traffic analysis" is rather simple ... Be afraid!
The link in the parent post is quite important.
Actually, just the size of the piece of content you are retreiving is very likely to tield enough information to identify exactly who retreived it, I'm afraid.
Pieces of data in Freenet are padded to the nearest exponent of two, so this particular attack would be pretty difficult.
Winny is based on Freenet only on some of its ideas, not implementation.
Please direct your notes about the speed of the legal system to Nick Baker. Thank you.
If its so great ( even though we havent seen it in the west ) has anyone audited the code to see if ts really the 'next generation' or not?
If so, its time to let it come across the pond... and see if it flys or dies....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Its simple, use UDP, and use WiFi. Use a portable storage device to access WiFi. Suddenly you have an annonymous network with no IP addresses.
We just do not have enough WiFi access points to do this and still depend on ISPs
Onion routing is patented by some Jews, so you can't use it for anything or develop any new programs using it.
Still, the news has already partially killed winny and people are waiting/expecting another program to come out in it's place. The discussions over name has been amusing, since the "obvious" choice to keep incrementing the letters and call the next one WinOZ has aready spawned suggestions to name it dorothy instead...
As an aside, several people seem to make it out like winmx usage died completely when winny came out - I still see/use several large japanese opennap servers (most people used winmx for connecting to opennap servers, not for the built in WPNP sharing) although with those too most people no longer use english clients like winmx and instead prefer japanese language ones such as Utatane.
Well IANAJC (I am not a Japanese Citizen), but as a citizen of another known "democratic republic", I just have to wonder. Weren't we supposed to be pretending that government did something other than <>?
Just as a gas, I'm including a relevant clip from Japan's constitution. Reach your own conclusions.
Article 21:
Freedom of assembly and association as well as speech, press and all other forms of expression are guaranteed. 2) No censorship shall be maintained, nor shall the secrecy of any means of communication be violated.
It should be noted what Freenet does NOT provide however. Freenet does do what the serious mixnets reffer to as "Onion routing", which basically means that the message is wrapped in an onion of cryptographic layers, which are pealed off at every step. The idea behind this is only the very last node can see contents of the message, and only the first knows it came from you (and none of the other nodes know anything except where the message came from and where it went).
I don't think so. How could Freenet do proper onion routing when you can not determine what route it will take? As I have understood onion routing from mixnets is that you get the the public keys of the nodes in the path, then encrypt all the layers of the onion yourself. Then each mixnet node will unwrap a layer, and send to the next one. However, in Freenet there is no knowing which nodes are connected to which. You ship off a request to the first node, and that node decides what to do with it, return data, send it to another node or stop request. Which also means it must a) know how to determine if it has the data and b) know where it should route it next.
Both indicate that Freenet doesn't do onion routing. How could that be, when the only way you can know the public key of a node connected to the first node, would be through the first node? Or a node connected to that node again? It'd be trivially simple for the first node to make up a "virtual" onion route that you send to, where in fact the first node is sitting on all the decryption keys.
If you request something from Freenet, your node will call up another node and ask it for that file - if that node is controlled by the Feds then you are busted. It is argued that there is plausible deniability, because it is possible that your node was not downloading the file because you asked for it, but simply forwarding it for somebody else. Given the state of the judicial process at the moment, I'm not terribly optimistic about this defense.
Actually, the defense is both good and bad - the problem lies in the HTL - Hops To Live. As it is (or at least was, when I tried to convince them it was a bad idea) the maximum HTL is 25 (in node, no matter what the program requests). That is, if you request/insert something with HTL 25, it's *your* request/insert, noone else's.
I recommended adding a random factor to that, so that there was only a *probability* that you were the original requester/inserter. In fact, they have implemented exactly the same at the very low end - to avoid node probing. Though I got pretty much zero response. This alone makes Freenet's "anonymity" claims pretty much broken, if you ask me. I got some (arguably true) response that statistical attacks would still work - but it'd still beat the smoking gun you have now.
Freenet also doesn't protect (at least not very well) against traffic and timing analysis, allowing one to track down the author of something using the timing and amount of encrypted traffic that nodes exchange. I don't know of any case of traffic analysis having been used (except maybe on the NSA hyper-spook level), but it isn't impossible.
That is pretty well known, and also quite solvable. However, both sending bogus traffic and having random delay buffers (Freenet requests really can't work like a mixnet pushover buffer) would drain Freenet's already mediocre performance. Not to mention it requires some pretty damn huge resources to mount that attack from the outside.
A more insidious way would be to run compromised nodes, and hammer the node you wish to unravel with connection requests from other compromised nodes. If you already know your target, it might be possible to compromise all the nodes in their routing table (the more nodes you have, the more new requests for new compromised connections you can send). Also here, Freenet is pretty dumb in that it has a static 50 node limit by default. Once you've got 50 compromised nodes in contact with the target node, it's isolated from the ne
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The problem is not the drugs, but the fact that they are illegal, if they were legal, none of what you described would have ever happened...
Stories like the one you just told are way too common, and they have been around for a long time, and during prohibition it was alchohol instead of meth. Lawmakers realized that it was causing more problems to have alchohol illegal, than legal, and drugs are the same way, but people are so damn thickheaded that they can't see it...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Taking means the original isn't there. Copying isn't taking.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
I would say that the benefit of a random factor is dubious here. If you have the capacity to compromise all the nodes in the routing table, then you probably have the capacity to scan their traffic to see if they have other peers (I mean, how else did you find all their peers?)
1) Get one connection.
2) Flood it with ARKs from other compromised nodes
3) As new nodes connect, they too start sending ARKs for yet more compromised nodes
4) It quickly doubles... 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, whoops 50 nodes which are all controlled by you. 5) As long as you block any "foreign" ARKs (or he downloads a new seednode list), he'll never escape your grasp. You're now basicly acting like a transparent proxy between him and the real Freenet, able to log everything he does.
You don't need to have any monitoring capability, know any of his peers or anything. All you need to have is a target, and a Botnet good enough to flush his node list *once*. After that it's game over.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...c'mon!!!!!! get some sleep and just a tiny little bit of porn out of your life. We all know your friend and you got porn off the pipe, so dont excuse for poor tv programming, we all share that in the first place :)
Look at the fall of traffic at the end of November at a large Internet Exchange Point.
I am wondering about this myself. As a gaijin with a nice ADSL connection, there is a lot of BT goin on in my house. I think it is only a matter of time till some foreigner gets hard time for this kind of activity. Then there will be some REAL slashdot attention.
The nearest exponent of two could be smaller. I think I know what you meant.
The shareholder is always right.
Hey, sorry for commenting here but it's the only way I could get in touch with you (your email is not shown publically).
My email address is slashdot@quixote.us. I have some questions about Skype, you mentioned you used it in a previous post. I've been using it but in some cases it seems to blot out the sound of the other person talking (forcing us into a sort of walkie-talkie pause methodology) and at other times not. I'm wondering if you've encountered this problem.
Thanks,
Jason