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Japanese P2P Users Arrested, Creator Targeted

Posted by simoniker on from the stomp-the-miscreants dept.

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'."

3 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. Background Info by pario · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Background Info by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Mod parent up. This discussion can't go anywhere without the participants having proper knowledge of the background and workings of Winny.

      The reason that nobody's heard of Winny is that Winny has been deliberately kept off the radar of countries outside Japan by the author himself. He keept the source closed and only provided the program and documentation in Japanese.

      Winny is "based" on Freenet only to the extent that the creator of it consulted Ian Clarke's papers to design the network. The possibility of Freenet code being reused in Winny is pretty low, as Winny is a native Windows application and there's that issue with GPL code anyway.

      The architecture of Winny has some aspects in common with Freenet, but while Freenet was designed with anonymity as priority one and usability as backburner, Winny aimed to become both a usable AND anonymous P2P client. To achieve this goal, some of Freenet's anonymity features (such as the inability to know the data inside one's own node) was removed from the design of Winny, and some usability features such as searching within the program were implemented. Winny's design is not as modular or portable as Freenet is, either; Winny is a native Windows application tied to a GUI, more like "normal" P2P filesharing apps.

      Winny version 2 also includes an anonymous message board system, a bit like Frost's TOF; Due to the original Winny's immense popularity, The Winny message board became a lively place of discussion, also often used to request and announce up/download of illegal files.

      Presumably, it was this that the Japanese police used. Due to the way Winny implements the anonymous message board, reading and posting in the threads are anonymous, but creating a new thread is not. Both of the two people arrested were thread creators, and they announced the upload of files in their threads. As this was not anonymous, the police probably traced them using this.

      Any additions/corrections from Japanese Winny users are welcome

  2. Winny Background by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).