MUTE Grows In Popularity, Iterations

jcr13 writes "MUTE is a search-and-download file sharing network that uses ant-inspired routing to make both downloaders and uploaders anonymous. Version 0.2 was released today (change log). Since its mid-December 0.1 release, MUTE has risen from complete obscurity to one of the top-ten most active SourceForge projects. Several people have described MUTE as a "third-generation file sharing network," with the first two generations being Napster and Gnutella (and generation zero being the web---remember when MP3s were traded through web pages?). Each generation circumvents the tactics that the RIAA used to squash the previous generation. Alas, each generation is less and less efficient (though MUTE's dynamic routing works surprisingly well). MUTE was discussed in a previous Slashdot story. Oh, and if you are wondering, it's M.U.T.E., lady, an acronym, not "mute," and we had best not go into it any further."

Comments

Ants are all very well but..

[aurum42]

From what I can gather from the project page (which is almost entirely presented in the ant colony analogy), this is an interesting idea to ensure anonymity - essentially a routing protocol at the TCP or UDP level, using a probabilistic mechanism to determine reasonably shortest paths. However, I'm not certain what implications this has for bandwidth efficiency, especially for relatively isolated nodes which may have high bandwidth connections to certain NAPs but not others. Might be workable in conjunction with a bittorrent like model with sections of a file downloaded from multiple peers, but keeping track of upload credits might be harder in this case. I doubt this will be much of a barrier to the RIAA however, as they might just decide to go after the machines that are routing the file to their ultimate destination, as this is different from the ISP case (which is still being tried in the courts).

Just tried it out

[Apreche]

So I played with it for about 15 minutes and I found out a few things. First of all, it is really anonymous. There is no freakin' way to find out who anyone is. All you know are the IP addresses of the people who are directly connected to you on the network. You don't know which files they have or anything. And when you download or upload something you have no idea who is at the other end.

Here are the problems. First off, it is slow and unstable. Not to be unexpected for a non mature project. Another problem is the lack of search results. Searching for led zeppelin, a common band, returned 2 results when I was connected to 20 nodes. That's kind of sad. Last problem is that there are so few features. This is a raw bare bones client. Someone needs to make another client that has more stuff, like DC++ did for direct connect. For now I'll stick to DC for everyday quick p2p and WinMX for those rare hard to find files.