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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'."

9 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. This is an outrage! by Channard · · Score: 5, Funny

    This must stop! If this continues, the P2P world's supply of tentacle rape porn and mech video clips could dry up overnight!

  2. Uh, not quite... by WIAKywbfatw · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  3. Re:Freenet/Winny by Troed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You can search Freenet _exactly_ in the same way you can search the World Wide Web. If you use a messageboard/filesharing application on top of Freenet (like Frost) you can search with a nice little search box per board or in all of them.

    But please, why not post uninformed opinions on Slashdot and get modded up as Insightful :)

    --
    it's in my head
  4. 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

  5. Re:This is the final straw by squaretorus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Stupid laws that cost thousands of extra police hours not only waste tax-payers money, they take police from their real job

    Couldnt agree more. But this isnt the main culprit. Globally more is spent on 'THE WAR ON DRUGS' and chasing criminals who only steal to feed their habits than on ANYTHING ELSE. Apologies for the caps - just trying to be sensationalist because Im talking about drugs - which we all know are REALLY SCARY AND BAD.

    Of course - these kids coul dhave been P2Ping to support a crack habit. It all comes back to wasted money on THE WAR ON DRUGS...

  6. Winny is more advanced than Freenet by News+for+nerds · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. And Winny is really WinNY, means the next of WinMX by News+for+nerds · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Winny is really WinNY, with WinMX N is the next of M, and Y is the next of X.

  8. 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).