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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."
...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
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
Do you really think the RIAA would change, even if all unauthorized copying stopped overnight?
DVD region codes were added to protect a business model, not to stop piracy. (I know that's the MPAA not the RIAA.) They didn't pay for laws like the DMCA to stop people copying, that was already actionable. They paid for these laws to force people to watch commercials at the beginning of disks, and keep from importing movies from North America to other regions before the theatrical release. In other words, they wanted the government to pass laws protecting their lazy business models. "We don't want to spend to money to make the product available in a timely fashion - please prevent anyone from filling this niche before we get to it."
The RIAA is just as scuzzy in different ways. They pay the radio stations to play their music, but they also provide extra incentives for stations that only play RIAA content. They're actively involved in shutting out any competition, they complain about how expensive their business is and how they can't afford to pay artists much, yet the music industry is fantastically profitable - they complain when the industry doesn't keep growing at the expected rate. They use accounting tricks to make it appear that they lost money, yet if you believe their figures they should be billions in the hole, not incredibly rich.
That's why I don't feel sorry for the effects of this - they could have played fair and they'd have gotten much more respect and cooperation for everyone.
As to why I feel it's fair to use a copyright (the GPL for instance) to protect code designed to break copyright it two-fold.
First, we must be free to break the law, or uphold it, or we have no freedoms. Many times, the actions seen as 'right' in a historical context have been illegal. The Boston tea party, the American revolution, the underground railroad, the underground railroad in Nazi Germany, the French Revolution. Some of these were undertaken for no more than financial concerns - the American revolution for example, but it ended up allowing a nation to self-govern.
The point is that freedom requires the freedom to do the wrong thing, and that that wrong thing may end up being right in retrospect. We can't allow a circumstance where people aren't allowed to tinker with their belongings, as is currently the case with DVDs. To tolerate this is to tolerate much greater future injustice.
Second, while I respect the stated intention of copyrights, "to encourage creators to create by providing a financial incentive", I see that this isn't free to society. Providing an unnatural monopoly (Unnatural in that it's natural to see what someone is doing or saying and incorporate those actions or words into your own. Ideas flow naturally.) costs society. We're intended to get "paid" for this by the new works being created which will eventually enter into the public domain.
Copyright law as it stands today is untrue to those stated goals and unfair to one half of the equation - the citizens who pay for these protections and yet see absolutely no benefit. Current copyrights last so long that nobody who is alive today's children will be alive when the copyright on this post expires. How is this supposed to "give back" when you could be slapped down in court for quoting more than a line, even in direct response to me? The protections are too long, the punishments for violation are unreasonble, and the agreement is getting even more lop-sided.
For these reasons I fight against the modern view of copyright as the divine right of big corporations to borrow any pre-existing content, yet forbid everyone from even thinking of basing anything on their content.
I'm not anti-copyright, nor are most people, but we are anti-overboard-american-copyright-and-dmca.
I'm not rich, so my voice on this issue is worthless in Hollywood and in government. I'm one person, and one vote (unless I get a job at Diebold), so nobody cares what I have to say. I have to act, and if that req
So why can I get a 1500 down/ 768 up line for a reasonable amount, but a 768 up / 768 down line costs me more, not less, money?
It's obviously not a problem with physical allocation of the DSL line bandwidth.