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MUTE: Simple, Private File Sharing
oohp writes "MUTE is a new file sharing network that provides easy search and download functionality while protecting your privacy. It does this by routing all messages through a network of neighbour connections, using virtual addresses and encrypting all the traffic (using RSA for public/private keys and AES for the actual encryption). MUTE's routing mechanism is inspired by ant behaviour. The program is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X."
...although CPD was able to find a few duplicate chunks.
The Army reading list
...with the same strengths (privacy) and weaknesses (slow).
My asymmetrical DSL connection just won't work well with a system like this. I don't have the bandwidth to act as a node that relays data for the sake of maintaining your anonymity. If we all had T3 connections in our home this would be great, but we don't.
An A for effort though. Implementations on most of the major platforms, with source code, and a neat analogy to how ants work to make it all understandable to the lay audience. Nifty.
(interesting that this story gets posted the day the federal appeals court forbids exactly the tactic by the RIAA this software attempts to work around.)
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
The way they explain things shows that the single reason for this software is to trade files that belong to the RIAA.
They might have wanted to think twice before doing that.
MUTE's routing mechanism is inspired by ant behaviour.
Rumour has it that the RIAA is secretly developing software that emulates a giant maginfying glass...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Well, I just installed it at home (thanks, VNC!) and did a search for "mp3" assuming that would generate a lot of hits but haven't seen anything happen. The docs are sparse, to say the least. "Is this thing on?"
Trolling is a art,
I know that we DO need one that both protects the user's identity, and one that does not pass your downloads through my asymmetrical connection.
Perhaps a web of trust is in order? Everybody exchanges AES256 keys, and only then can you transfer files on the network.
This is a much better approach than Legal or Court based ones. You can always count a crazy judge to screw things up. But good hard encryption and hidden internet paths are a much larger stumbling block to the likes of the RIAA, which is on the whole, technically incompetant.
Even IF they win the court battle with ISP's (they just took a hard knock in the last court case) there won't me much left for them to do if their ability to track is lost.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
How is this system different from Freenet in it's design?
Both seem to use a system of specilization for data, so that a specific node carries a series of data is one specific area, more than others. This is VERY useful, in that nodes can learn about what each one carries.
It also seems similiar in that routing is intelligent enough that nodes can hint to each other about a specilization, and share routing information..
I'm not knocking either project, I'm just not informed enough. What is the major differences? Wouldn't it be equally do-able to just replace the routing engine in Freenet, if that is the design goal?
The pacakage seems to be a very Freenet/Frost like utility, passing messages about the locations of keys around the anonymous ether.
-Colin
Colin Davis
All I got was a 404 when I tried to find the Crowds homepage (AT&T research labs), but it was one of the privacy-enhancing technologies I looked at while doing my thesis. It's a similar concept with connecting to many different nodes than directly with who you want to communicate with, download files from, etc.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
The RIAA hasn't learned that necessity is the mother of invention. While they try hard to shove substandard products down our throats (oh yeah I'm sorry, the last Brittany album is a "work of art", my bad") we try hard to pick the weat from teh chaff. Lets face it, if I could by an album with at least 5 good cuts on it, I woulnd't be spending my time taking the albums I own and making MP3 version of just he "good songs". If the Recording industry even paid the artists what they agreed to I might feel guilty about the occasional MP3 download. Since the recording industry has a regular habit of screwing their "artists", I don't.
PS: RIAA - can you prove that I didn't by that PIL album back in 1986, and am now just D/L ing a legitimate eletronique copy? If the encryption on mute is any good, the answer is no. Thankfully I still have my PIL vinyl in case I get dragged into court.
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
No matter what, you can ALWAYS see who you are connected to. If A gives a file to B, but it actually goes through C, D, and E, then if it is determines that the content is infringing, then C, D, and E are all responsible too. Ingnorance is no excuse. Of course, IANAL, but I think this would be great for the RIAA, since they could theoretically sue just about anyone who RUNS this, since they're essentially ALL uploaders.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
MUTE - a song sharing system for deaf people...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Well, thats a good point: sites with crappy upload speeds will not be valuable participants in P2P networks.
This may actually benefit the network by weeding out those nodes which are asymmetric leech-only types.
I have DSL too, and it sucks hard not being able to use my inroute to help my downroute (Bittorrent), or to lose download capacity whenever someone hits my website.
If a decent ISP shows up with non extortionist pricing for symmetric connections, and static adressing (v4 or v6) then Im definitely switching.
I know what you mean and you shouldn't be modded as flamebait (well, it's debatable) but heres the thing: File sharing networks and a new(er) concept in the way we are implementing them now days. There is a lot of research at places such as MIT (and other up-and-coming, less known campuses) into P2P networks and such. It's a rather exciting field to be involved in right now with new ideas coming up all the time.
I haven't used MUTE but it sounds like they use onion routing or some derivation of it. To me, that's interesting. Perhaps they are doing something Freenet is not? Then again, perhaps not.
Anyways, if you're interested in networks, graph theory and have some creative energy then P2P network research may be for you. ALthough most systems we see today are not very practical, they seem to all be trying to head to a certain goal: anonymous, encrypted file sharing. We are seeing the bandwidth costs these have but I digress.
So, even though we may not practically need another file sharing protocol, it's important people keep working on ideas and implementations so we can move the state of the art forward. I think many of these pioneer systems are laying the groundwork for a whole field of study within computer science as one day we will all have many networked devices that need to share information and the pure client-server approach will just not do it.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Here, CPD isn't looking for plagiarism; instead, it's looking for opportunities for refactoring.
I've played Waste the encrypted private network tool started by Justin Frankel.
MUTE sounds similar. Has anyone tried both? How do they compare?
nuclear iraq bioweapon encryption cocaine korea terrorist
Dear File-Swapping Pricks,
You may try to avoid us as much as you like. However, we have other means to discover who you are and sue you into oblivion. We have already employed Miss Cleo and we are willing to unleash her fury whenever we want to! Yes, Yes! Oh god, yes! You cannot hide from Miss Cleo when she picks your name randomly from a phone book.
We are also aware that there is a great deal of high-speed file sharing going on at your "LAN Parties". We will begin to infiltrate your so-called "LAN Parties", so that you cannot hide from us even from there! So, please ignore the balding lawyer taking pictures of your computer screens.
FEAR US!
The RIAA grows stronger by the day. No longer do we just sue people about music, but we have teamed up with SCO to protect their copyrighted information as well. Today, we are officially launching lawsuits against all those that dare share Linux Distros through Bit-Torrent, at "LAN Parties" or over any other sharing method!
We will continue to sue you until you learn that you cannot live without buying every CD that comes out, even if its not music that you like! Yes! You will give us all your money or you will suffer our wrath!
Sincerely,
David Bowie
and the RIAA
Not to draw flames, but what use does anyone put these p2p networks to other than pirating copyrighted media? If there was a p2p network where you could be assured that the only available music/video available were by indie artists who WANTED to share, then that would be terrific. Unfortunately, the behaviors of p2p users have only strengthened the case for DRM. The architecture of this one is obviously meant to thumb its nose at the RIAA.
As their Sourceforge page says, it only aspires to pseudo anonymous P2P.
your right. it isn't anonymous per say. but if both you and i were nodes in this system then your TCP/IP logs and ISP logs would show that i downloaded something from you or vice versa.
however i may have been a stopping point for the data in a similiar way that proxy servers are a stopping point for highly requested html pages. so that can't say that "I downloaded it" because i may have simply just been relaying the request
One user mentioned a bandwidth concern, I would like a adress it.
I was working on a project like this, and am now looking into contributing to GNUNet, a similar project. My framework had peers moving data in a similar way as these ants. The way I looked at it was that most of the time I select some files, let them download, and come back later. I'm sure the downloading takes only ten or twentey minues, but I'm at work or busy otherwise. Once I'm done downlaoding my computer just sits there folding. The bandwidth is going un-used!
There is plenty of bandwith sitting idle out there, so long as the ants are clever enough to avoid busy relays noone will really notice the drop in their performance. I think that they would have a similar approach (it seems it would work this way as a concequene of their ant design).
I sincerely hope that one of these true P2P private networks takes off in a big way, till then I will support them in every way I can.
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
Server1: Protect the Queen!
Server2: Server 2 thinks it's the master browser and is calling for an election. Which one's the queen?
Server3: I'm the Queen.
Server2: No you're not.
Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!
Server log ends.
From the log files it seems it wants to connect to monolith.2y.net. At first attempt, this failed to connect to any hosts because I had not setup my router to forward port 4900. Once I did this and manually entered monolith.2y.net under the connections tab, I have 5 hosts listed and a search for mp3 yields some results.
The software seems a little buggy tho. It has crashed twice on me once it is connected to a host and I have only been playing around with it for a few minutes.
telnet://zombiemud.org:3000
If you want your idle bandwith to be used, try using Bit Torrent. It generally works well and you upload as you download. Honestly, the fact that more systems don't have this approach is sad. People don't seem to understand the ideas behind a paged, data multiplexing system.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Besides which, some clients, such as Shareaza make use of multiple protocols (in this case, BitTorrent, EDonkey, Gnutella, and Gnutella2) in an attempt to unify those protocols. Not a bad idea, really. That said, I'm still waiting for them to add support for the WinMX networks.
--- Bwah?
For computers, if you really want anonymity, you use encrypted files, broadcast everywhere always, and always listen to every packet (which you have to do anyway to select out yours) and see if it's yours. If it is, you keep it, otherwise ignore it and pass it on. Granted, this will not find the "most direct" route from source to target, but it is the most secure.
Network speed / anonymity are conflicting tradeoffs with the current implementation of the infrastructure.
Observation: if everyone always captures the whole file - like what if you just copied and stored every single packet that came your way, and everyone did this - then how could "ownership" be enforced? Would this (assuming it's technically feasible) be a Good Thing? I'm not sure I know how to answer that one...
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
this is the ultimate product of RIAA's legal offensive. they have taken clear-text piracy, and driven it to encryption underground. it would be much harder for them to do anything about piracy with this in place.
More importantly, I can't believe how many people seem to think this is a valid approach to the problem.
First of all, anyone who writes FOSS should not be involved in developing these projects. Quite simply, this project is aimed at abrogating the rights of the copyright holder. If you develop FOSS, you too rely on copyright to protect your rights to distribute your code as you see fit. Why are you helping people to obviate the rights of other copyright holders? Doesn't this seem just a little antithetical?
Now, before the argument about how developers aren't responsible for how their software is used, well to a point I agree. But, I don't think that you can hide behind this with a clear conscience. Joe Sixpack can't write this software on his own, so if you aren't legally an accomplice, you are ethically and morally. As for the software being used for legal mechanisms, well and good, but that doesn't mean that you could not have built in safeguards to prevent it from being used for unlawful purposes...
Next, this is not the way to make the point to RIAA. For Joe Sixpack, the complaint is generally about the cost of music and so on and so forth. Well if Sears charges too much for _insert product here_ you buy it somewhere else. You don't go into Sears and steal it. Apparently this is simply because to do so means running a high risk of getting caught. So because the chance of getting caught is lower, that somehow justifies theft? Because that is what it is in the end. Rather than steal from RIAA, deprive them of income by lawful means, spend your money elsewhere. With all the artists in the world, I guarantee you can find some what create music you like, without having to resort to theft.
RIAA has proven that they will resort to the courts and legislation as their first considered reaction. Since most folk seem to abhor the legislation RIAA has had there hand in to date, why are you fueling that fire? Do you really think RIAA is going to relent? As long as you continue to abbrogate their rights, they will continue to lobby for more and more legislation. If you choose other alternatives, RIAA does not have a leg to stand on, what are they going to do, get Congress to pass a law forcing you to buy music only from their members? Not likely. If you vote with your dollar instead of voting by compromising your morals, perhaps some of those member organizations will reconsider their membership. But as long as people circumvent their rights, and deprive them of revenues thereby they will continue as they have to this point. If people vote to deprive them of income by exercising their other options, RIAA members will have little recourse but to reconsider their policies, which is what you all purport to desire.
Lastly, I _KNOW_ why I dislike RIAA, and why I won't conduct business with their members. My problems stem more from being a creator as opposed to being a consumer. For those of you who are only consumers, when you choose options that give RIAA grounds to complain, you are quite succinctly stating that you make your choices based on greed, just like RIAA does. It all comes down to the old adage, two wrongs do not make right.
P.S. Doesn't anyone realize that SCO can point to these software projects as anecdotal "proof" that FOSS developers seek to undermine copy and property rights? Why give them more ammunition in their FUD campaign?
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
Say for instance I have a Metallica mp3 being shared out. What's to stop the RIAA from just downloading said mp3 and then using netstat to see who is sending them pieces of it? After that they could try to sue everyone who's providing even a small part of the whole mp3, couldn't they?
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
Let me preface that I'm neither a lawyer or all that knowledgable about networks...
If I read it correctly, the RIAA can still get subpoenas. It has to do so with a judge involved, tho, making it much more expensive and time consuming.
Having subpoenas on the cheap would allow them to put up an automated version of the client, pull a download, do a netstat, and then have someone that checks if a "valid" file arrived. If it did, they'd subpoena everyone that they connected to, and that would be that.
Now, they can't use a cheapo subpoena method. MUTE is actually perfectly timed.
Jonathan
24.49.37.195 208.191.148.152 131.155.229.140 80.161.130.57 68.49.20.146 216.180.213.130
Hey, i allready got like 5 people connected w00t my aim is daphreak07 my icq is 17654783 EVERYONE put alias's of your file folders in the shared folder Lets test this out I'm downloading at 20k some mp3's right now Working quite well My only complaint is the compete lack of msging, But I'm used to WASTE From what I can tell this is just a striped down Easier to use WASTE Personaly I like waste better but thats just me
come comment on the madness at http://slashdot.org/~phreak03/journal/
After reading the ant behavior thing I did an experiment. Let's just say releasing a smelly "pheremone" trail to the filing cabinet is a good way to make people not like you.
796F75617265616E65726400
Incorrect.
You don't say *I* have XYZ. You say, "Virtual Address A123B456C has XYZ". Only you know that YOU are A123B456C -- the best your neighbors can do is realize that A123B456C must be close to them, because they have strong hints to route through you to reach A123B456C. Similarly, you can't ever nail down who asked for the file, because you just start seeing packets that say "Z789 wants XYZ". You'd have to be able to sniff a huge part of the network to find out who started asking for it first with any degree of certainty, because a node can't tell if its neighbors asked for XYZ, or are merely relaying one of their other neighbors, or one of THEIR neighbors, etc.
The trick is that the system NEVER says WHERE A123B456C is, only who to route to in order to get "closer" to A123B456C. When you get packets headed for A123B456C, you (being the owner of address A123B456C) just happen to keep them, and not route them onwards. Even not routing isn't dangerous, because anyone who could observe THAT would just assume that your routing table has A123B456C as closer to the person who sent YOU the packet, and they have you as closer or don't know where it is -- that might tell them that one of you is A123B456C, but it might also mean that you just don't have good routing data either. Impossible to prove, that's the key.
Virtual addresses, whose owners never identify themselves, are the key.
And, of course, simply keeping all of the packets for A123B456C when you're NOT the owner of that address won't buy you crap, because you'd have to brute-force-decrypt every at least one of them against to determine the AES key (or the RSA private key, if you can somehow determine which packets were used for the key exchange). The RIAA doesn't have the resources to do that on any sufficient scale to make a difference.
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
Whoever developed this played Sim Ant a bit too much about ten years ago.
I found it interesting that mere days after Clay Shirky article was posted on slashdot, a program that essentially describes his solution is posted.
If you haven't read the article, you can find it here:
The Article
It's a pretty solid concept as far as defeating the RIAA for another round. I find it interesting that no matter what the RIAA does, someone always counters it. You figure they would adopt a new strategy, instead of just wasting enormous amounts of money on annoying everyone.
David Novosel "Two roads diverged, and I - I took the one less travelled by."
Maybe you should ask why your DSL is so asymmetric.
Why are asymmetric connections so much cheaper and more common? Data flow is not more expensive one way than the other. Is it the man trying to keep the masses consuming what he dishes out, and keep them from distributing their own content?
Even the screenshots on that site clearly show distribution of copyrighted material that shouldn't be there after all.
At the moment, I'm more concerned about the fact that I can't legally listen to CDs I've bought on my computer anymore. I'm pretty pissed about the fact that I had to return one CD back to the shop, that I bought few days ago. (And, yes I emailed BMG about this.)
Although the tool has a good design, the fact that there are no pre-defined routers makes the tool almost useless to most potential file swappers. It would be nice if there was a couple IP addresses pre-configured, or at least some mention of where to look for a start up group, i.e. an irc channel. The author basically expects many people to come together and share their own files with each other. Although this might have good intentions, the other sharing networks which all contain pre-configured routers and are ready to go "out of the box" are going to be used, not this tool.
-- "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong." -- HL Mencken
This is interesting. MUTE is created and coded by Jason Rohrer, the same Jason Rohrer who created and coded konspire2b. Now what is the relationship of these two programs, particularly from the view of their common author? Is he "dumping" k2b in favor of this all-new MUTE?
konspire2b came with a very intersting idea, but the implementation was less impressive. Especially the inability to deal with a "passive" Internet connection (behind NAT and/or firewall) is the reason that it hasn't gained a user base as large as it promised. It is simply a fact that many (if not most) private Internet users are using a passive Internet connection nowaday, and the procentage is even growing.
Now MUTE comes again with a very intersting idea, but as we know, problems of technical details can kill good ideas quite often. Obviously, the concept is in some points similar to Freenet. One of Freenet's biggest problem is, just like k2b, it's inability to deal with pass internet connection. I think this issue may be the corner stone for MUTE, too.
I am negatively biased against Jason, mainly because the "failure" of his k2b, and especially because of the document he published comparing his own k2b to BitTorrent, which earned quite some protests because many factual "findings" in the comparison seem wrong. To be fair, I must admit that since I am a member of the BitTorrent dev team, my opinion in this matter is biased from the start, although it has not prevent me to try out k2b, and will certainly not prevent me from trying out MUTE now.
I am not sure, but is there a reason that ISP's have to keep logs of who used what IP address? If they did'nt then it could make the whole issue dissapear.
from the page:
"your identity available to spies from the RIAA and other unscrupulous organizations."
If you are the one breaking copyright laws, i dont see how the RIIA could be the "unscrupulous" one. I mean if what everyone wants is to legally share legal files, gnutella would work just fine.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Only I have more specific questions. The major problems with WASTE are as follows, in no particular order:
This is the big one. I cannot specify (by public key) who can access an individual shared directory. Since it already doesn't have any anonymity between users of the network, you don't lose anything by implementing this.
WASTE was designed to be used without centralized management, but has no access control. This is dumb. It means that anyone on the network can add people who can then download your files and suck up your bandwidth when you would rather give priority to people you actually know and care about. As such it is only useful amongst very small groups of people who are all good friends.
I plan to test MUTE very soon, perhaps as soon as this evening, but it would be nice to know if any of these problems with WASTE are addressed in MUTE.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
Well I'll probably get a RTFA because I'm not sure this would work, but fundamentally, the more a p2p protocall/program/implementation maintains anonymity and encryption, isn't it just that much easier for the RIAA to pollute it with bogus mp3s? Couldn't they "log-out" and "log back in" or whatever the equivalent concept is, with different handles/user names/whatever each time? If this technique can't track a file source's IP address, which would seem to be the whole point of going through all the obfuscation so the RIAA can't figure out who you are and sue you, then how would you be able to "blacklist" anybody who's collection is full of bogus tracks...like say some server the RIAA sets up to pretend to be 100s of users. In fact, if the "neighbor encryption" concept is good enough that you can't tell which users are near which other users, it wouldn't even matter if the RIAA used a block of 100s of IPs all in the same domain. As long as they log-out and log back in say every 10 minutes, you'll never be able to keep your search from finding them again. You could download one test file before downloading a whole album, but 10 minutes later, you might find the same bogus user again on a new search.
Hmm...Downloaded it and installed it, but the seed hosts included with the program, katcher.2y.net and monolith.2y.net are not active on port 4900, which seems to be the default port this protocol uses.
The katcher.2y.net address resolves to 128.114.51.108, and monolith doesn't resolve at all. Reverse DNS lookup indicates that everything in that class C netblock belongs to UC Santa Cruz and nothing in there is talking on 4900. Seeing as how the seeders are not talking on port 4900 and there's no reference on the web pages for more of them, I'm going to guess that this program is more about a proof of concept than a serious contender on the p2p field.
-R
Oh fine, rape my cable connection. My address is 24.208.214.50, port 4900.
P2P systems that rely on the users manually bootstrapping to a second connection aren't going to catch on until a well known list of stable master servers is provided. This is too hard for the average p2p user when compared to the almost zero intellectual cost of entry to something like the fasttrack network. I remember edonkey2000 having some teething problems in this regard also.
YLFIOne god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
In theory, mute beats the problem of using queries and traffic analysis to see who's sharing what.
However, since we no longer have a way of identifying those we download from and blacklisting malicious hosts, we are more vulnerable to an old problem:
The file you think you're downloading could actually be a trojan that scans your shared directory and reports back to 'mama'. This along with a traceroute report to a known server and whatever it could conjecture are your personal details from productivity software, registration info, web autocomplete etc.
So some form of pseudonymous reputation management system could be built in to mitigate that problem.
OR, there can be an anti-malware app out there tuned to the kinds of nasties you'd find on p2p.
Ideally both should be used, as each results in an arms race.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Well, what with lack of seed IP's to get this whole thing started a few of us got together on efnet and setup a channel to try and get the whole thing moving. We have suceeded in transferring files amongst our selves at reasonable speeds now (we've seen 40-50K which ain't bad). SO come along and join us if you're interested in this new network. efnet #mute-net
These contents may be more useful than the defaults
202.52.36.144 4900
68.61.112.22 4900
24.208.214.50 4900
150.101.30.106 4900
65.71.169.148 4900
68.111.211.154 4900
In theory, mute beats the problem of using queries and traffic analysis to see who's sharing what.
Mmmf. I'm dubious.
This sounds like a really neat project to play with (I like to bat around P2P ideas as well.).
However, I'm going to assume (I can't tell from the routing document) that something here is incorrect.
The TTL mechanism is UtilityCounter. You attempt to obscure the real TTL by randomly moving it around. However, it's still pretty easy to simply send a number of messages until a TTL range 20 apart is reached. The host distance is then identified. Thus, a map of the MUTE network may be built, though it will take more packets than the GnutellaNet.
The main concerns I have with the MUTE protocol relate to flooding vulnerability. This is the same problem that GnutellaNet suffers from (and I have been working on in my own time). MUTE, however, is *extremely* vulnerable to flooding, far more so than GnutellaNet, for a number of reasons:
* MUTE shoves data packets through the MUTE network. GnutellaNet sends them directly.
* MUTE has phenomenally large TTLs, averaging 100.
One can probably destroy a massive MUTE network (unless I'm missing something in the routing protocol) with no more than a modem by flooding the network with data transfer packets of 32KiB (the largest the MUTE protocol allows) and bogus to virtual addresses.
I'd be interested in knowing whether there's an IRC channel for MUTE, since I'd be interested in poking at the design a bit. If any MUTE developers read this, would you point me in the right direction?
May we never see th