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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
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.
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.
I think the big difference is that Freenet lets you push content out into the net, whereas MUTE still works with the standard client/server model where the data must first be requested before being transmitted.
It's good to have the alternative. It's been awhile since I've checked out Freenet, but one of the fears I had for the system was that it would be susceptible to spam. If everybody took to trading their MP3's using it, for instance, the remedy on the part of the RIAA would be to simply publish terabytes of nonsensical data. MUTE doesn't seem to suffer from this weakness.
(although there still is the problem of the file you downloaded actually being the file you requested.)
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
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
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
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I don't think it's fair, moral, ethical, right, good, proper, decent, or a Good Thing, but I believe there's legal precedent. I don't think you can go after ISPs, or, say, an entire country if the packets get routed all over the place, but if I give you a bomb and you give it to a terrorist, aren't you just as liable as I would be if I gave it to them directly?
If you have knowledge that the contents are likely infringing and you transmit them to someone else, you are liable. I believe that "Oh, I didn't know what I was routing" will hold as much water as "But I didn't know that 'share my 40 gig mp3 collection with everyone in the world'-option was turned on"
Why do you think that you are required to hold the entire file to be accountable for it? If that was the case, then you and your friend could each store half of each mp3 and exchange them back and forth so you never actually hold the entire mp3. No way, it's not going to stand up in court.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
RTFA -- the contents of the packets you are passing are encrypted. The only way to get around it would be for the RIAA to run the node hosting the file AND watch the packets reach your machine.
But if the RIAA is uploading the file, are you infringing if you download it?
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)
As a previous poster mentioned, ignorance isn't an excuse for one's actions in the eyes of the law. If you are stupid enough to allow encrypted traffic to pass through a node under your control, with no idea of what exactly you are allowing to pass, expect to face the consequences.
My ISP might have something to say about that...
The ______ Agenda
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.
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.
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?
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.
As a previous poster mentioned, ignorance isn't an excuse for one's actions in the eyes of the law.
"Ignorance of the law" does not mean the same thing as "plausible deniability".
If congress passes a law making it illegal to twiddle one's thumbs in public, and I do not realize this, then the idea of ignorance not giving me an excuse applies - The fact that I did not know about the anti-twiddling law does not exempt me from its penalties.
If, on the other hand, I run a shipping company (such as FedEx), no one could reasonably expect me to know the contents of every package I deliver. I have plausible deniability about knowing that I delivered, sone illegal package, and unless someone can prove that I knew the contents of that package and delivered it anyway, I would have no legal liability for its contents.
The same applies to file sharing and routing schemes such as MUTE uses. If I somehow don't know that trading (some) MP3s online violates the law, too bad, the RIAA can still screw me. If I allow my computer to serve as a waystation for packets, arguably for the same of overall network efficiency, why would I have any responsibility for those packets?
The word "waystation" gives me another good analogy - Harboring a fugitive breaks the law. Running a hotel that happens to unknowingly have a fugitive staying there does not.
>efnet #mute-net
/usr/local/bin/bash for MUTE/configure.
The conclusion of everyone who is talking in the channel is that this version is not usable due to frequent crashing. We can't tell if the routing works because the mesh constantly changes as clients crash.
Files are only shared if they are actually in the files directory, it does not search subdirectorys.
The connection list in the program often shows fewer connections than are actually open.
To compile on FreeBSD 5.1, you have to change all 'make' to 'gmake' and remove "typedef int socklen_t" and change the path of bash to
This uses broadcst search. It is disapointing that people keep reinventing the horribly inefficient original gnutella. Broadcast search will severely limit the search horizon (and probably overall size) of a mesh. We need a filesharing program that combines anonymity with an efficient search function, the state of the art is a distributed hash table with querys and results sent by UDP.
It is a pity that this ended up on slashdot now. If this had been announced when a working version is available slashdot might have given it the critical mass of users to get it rolling.
This has lots of potential and will be worth another look when it is stable