Slashdot Mirror
New Wave Of File-Sharing Embraces Secrecy
twin-cam writes "There's an article over at The Inquirer that software developers are designing secret file sharing networks that will make it harder for the music and file industry to prove cases of piracy.
According to Reuters, three file sharing networks are being planned which its users think will make it a lot harder for
music industry to track and charge people on their networks. The first is Optisoft which runs on Blubster and Piolet, music-only file-sharing networks. Only a matter of time before the RIAA requests a data dump from the ISPs or just sues everyone using their network."
This was only a matter of time, and really the RIAA's heavy handed tactics, and the goverenments complacency with them have forced developers to take matters into their own hands. Now they're really screwed.
It's pretty easy to design a network that will at least frustrate attempts to recover identities of sharers. Now if only freenet would stop sucking.
They better start building one heck of a computer cluster if they want to break the encryption. If anything, the RIAA/MPAA will give up the fight, and turn their efforts to getting Congress to pass some sort of tax on media, media players, your computer, your stereo, your car, your dog, your dinner, and anything else which could possibly be related to music or movies.
Here's something to think about, the DMCA isn't just for big mega corporations. Put together a private peer-to-peer network using some kind of encryption and use a trusted invitation method (like maybe Orkut) to invite people.
Protect your network communications under provisions of the DMCA. Obviously if the DMCA knows what you're trading then THEY are violating the DMCA because the only way they would know is if they somehow got on and broke encryption.
Someone more technically more adept should be able to figure out how to pull this off but there HAS to be a way to establish a peer to peer network (which is still legal) and protect it via the DMCA.
I've heard of this program a couple of years ago. That, and there will always be the file-trading madness at nearly every LAN party. If the recording industry sees this as breaking news, no wonder they're losing the battle -- they're about 5 years behind the rest of the modern world.
I don't know how long the original mp3.com was around, but it was probably less than 5 years, and it probably put up mp3's at a faster rate near the end than near the beginning. But even at a uniform rate over the whole 5 years, it sounds like one web site was distributing more songs per year all by itself, than the entire CD industry released put together (1.7 million songs / 5 years = 340,000 songs/year). Add to that the number of musicians who distribute their stuff through their own sites, and it's clear there's a heck of a lot more music being released as gratis downloads than as proprietary CD's.
Some people blame diminishing CD sales on unauthorized CD copying; others blame it on technological obsolescence (people buy DVD's instead of CD's now); still others say it's because poor artistic decisions by record labels result in releasing uninteresting music that people don't want to buy. I haven't yet seen a connection made with authorized, freely downloadable music, that people can listen to instead of buying proprietary CD's, just like they can run GNU/Linux instead of buying Windows, Apache instead of IIS, etc. Sure, a lot of mp3.com downloads are crap, but lots of commercial CD's are crap too.
Anyway, it seems to me that most of the music even on these "secret" all-music p2p networks is likely to be freely downloadable.
(Note: this post mostly rehashes an earlier comment of mine from that other thread, but the statistic is interesting enough that I felt it was worth posting again).
I think the best way to keep the RIAA out would be to have filesharing networks based upon social networks (like orkut). You trade with your 'trusted' friends and their 'trusted' friends. You could set how many hops you were willing to spread.
... as far as I'm concerned, is the "VPN Name Resolution" service.
... I know of a fair few VPN's that are maintained with quite steady uptimes, all using plain ol' FTP as the internal-xfer-service of choice...
...
openswan and an IP address somewhere is all thats needed to 'bury a filesharing service'. It doesn't even have to be p2p
Its interesting that its come to this. Whats next - routers which won't route unless they know the protocols being encapsulated in the tund'd packets they're peer-transferring for? Sheesh, as if that will ever happen
(If anyone knows of some good VPN's, please share! heh heh...)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I proposed this solution about 4 years ago to one of the gnome-vfs guys at a Helixcode party in San Francisco "back in the day".
Basically you have a section of your local storage that is specifically set aside for this purpose, say a 5gb slice of your partition. This storage area is strongly encrypted with hashes that only you know (Blowfish, AES, whatever), via your own passphrase or private key.
When you send a file "to the network", that file is split into blocks, and encrypted with your public key, and those blocks are dispersed to everyone else on the network, in that encrypted fashion, and the "map" to reassemble them is dispersed likewise.
Every node with block #1, has a map which tells them how to get block #2, but not block #3. System with block #2 (which knows that block as block #1 to itself), knows how to get block #3, and so on. Sort of like the "Triad" mob system in Japan.
Your system requests a file, which is dispersed as a series of encrypted blocks, across hundreds, thousands, millions of other systems, and those blocks are reassembled, using those systems to find "The Next Block", and send it to you. You could also arrange it so that each "node" could know about the next 5 or 10 or 20 blocks, etc.
It is sort of a mesh between PKI + BitTorrent (which didn't exist when I came up with the idea), and the methodologies of common peer-to-peer networks.
You could further strenghthen the network by only accepting blocks from nodes you "trust" (via your own public keyring). Facilities to "swap blocks" across systems on a regular (or irregular) schedule, to keep the network "self-healing" would also be a good idea.. or keeping duplicate blocks in different parts of the "storage slice" for redundancy, etc. Storage is cheap.
In the end, this means that nobody can be accused of having "the full file", nor can anyone figure out what is in those encrypted blocks. Even if they had 1 block, there is no way to get all of them, or to accuse someone of distributing the material, since it would be moved around at irregular intervals.
What do you think?
You could have an anonymous P2P app that has network performance that is nearly as good as current networks, like Gnutella/Kazaa...
All you have to do is allow the source of a file transfer it to the client without the client knowing the source's IP address. To do this, you simply have the server sending files with UDP and a spoofed source IP address. Since few networks have any egress filtering, this should not pose a problem.
Now, the client has to be able to tell the server to send packets faster/slower, and which packets didn't get through. Well, first you must have a huge window size (TCP term, but applicable) so that the server will send a massive ammount of packets before the client has to send back any responses...
When the client does eventually have to send a few packets to the server, it does so by broadcasting them to all-nodes (just as searches are handled). So, everybody gets them, and everybody but the server involved can just ignore them.
I left out some details, like all servers generating a random 32bit Unique ID every hour or so, and sending it instead of their IP address with search results.
Now, that's only the anti-RIAA anonymity. It'll make things 99% more anonymous, but any foe with the ability to monitor the network will be able to see what is happening. To combat that, you could just have search queries include the client's public key. The results can include the server's public key (encrypted with the client's public key) in addition to the search results... That would keep you completely anonymous, even from resourceful snoopers that can eavesdrop on your own network.
The best thing about this is the speed compared to other anonymous networks. No longer would it take an hour to download a small MP3, because you don't need any intermediary nodes (except for small-message-passing), direct from source to destination, at full-speed.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
These guys just f**k up the internet for the rest of us.
What will happen is that the entertainment industry will leverage its weight to justify the broadcast flag and banning of "unauthorised" encryption for this reason, effectively painting any "encryption user" as being suspicious and illegitimate, and exerting greater control and oversight over legitimate users - leading to all sorts of privacy and data protection issues.
Isn't it about time that we all stopped stealing content from poor business models and started supporting content from newer business models?
Support the creation of a new and better world, not the plundering of an old and broken one.
In Canada you pay a tax on blank media, the assumption being you are going to use it to break somebody's copyright. They didn't even have to open a phonebook, a few well priced lobbyists (lawyers probably) managed to get them their own source of tax revenue.
I don't blame lawyers per say, but I do think that if political parties take coporate cash (Liberals in this case) you can expect that they are going to return the favor to their benefactors.
Instead of trying to go farther 'underground' why not add facilities to p2p networks for content verification and authenticity.
By this I mean, if your looking for a old Micky Mouse (copyright symbol) cartoon, you go into the Disney (copyright symbol) 'channel', search through their offereings and download what you want... except since you are 100% positive what your downloading is what it says it is... you are willing to pay a small fee (how about $1 dollar a download, size independent... or some sort of subscription service... I pay Disney Inc. directly to be able to download their verified and authenticated content).
This would elminate 'piracy' on the 'overground' network because why would you need to go 'underground' if you allready have access to all the content you wanted through a minimal monthly (or per download) basis (instead of cable telvision... we pay the content creators directly for their shows). This will greatly help artists... because they will be able to market and sell directly to the 'listener' (or viewer)... and bypass the recording industries web of middlemen.
Now ofcourse the underground will still exists, but there will be no point going there... unless your looking for illegal (not pirated) content like child porn (and other nasty stuff). The bandwith costs of being a content producer are augmented through some sort of bittorrent like swarm download... where you are downloading parts of your content from other people who have also downloaded it. This will open up a whole new way to access media, eg. what if instead of going to the shitty theater (and paying a shitty price for shitty sugar water and burnt corn) you can wait until the release day... download a HD stream of that movie directly to your home theater. And since you have 24/7 access to all the content you want (and the downloads are fast because everyone has broadband or better (idlealy fiber)) there is no point of 'hordeing' all the content on your 400gig drive.
Computers slim back down in terms of hardware, and start to act more like what they should act like (for a typical consumer) vcrs. You turn on your fluxbox (I would like to call the system the 'flux') and on your screen is a list of stuff to watch, read, or listen to... and all you pay is a minimal monthly fee... (less than $50, and or pay per download)
Jon Bardin
More privacy can only be a good thing and I'm not about to launch into a rant about freedom vs. safety, but let's just look at some of the more ugly tactics people can use to subvert a P2P system.
/. one? Has anyone implemented anything like this? I don't know if it could be used alongside any privacy measures the designers implemented, but with enough work and balancing couldn't this be feasible? Imagine browsing limewire at a high threshold /. style and weeding out all those porn movies in disguise, incomplete files and mp3's with artifacts in them. There could be different ratings based on the node and the individual files and while the system could be abused I'm sure enough thought going behind it could make it fairly balanced and useful.
So anyone looking into stopping sharing of illegal material can't launch lawsuits anymore because they don't know the identities of the users. Fine, but they (or anyone malicious enough) can still flood the network with garbage and create so much noise that it will drive people away.
So how about a P2P moderation system similar to the
Just a though, slightly off-topic.
People toss the term "monopoly" around quite inaccurately, I think. I mean, of course record companies have a "virtual monopoly" on making records. But canned air makers have a "virtual monopoly" on canned air. Super glue makers have a "virtual monopoly" on super glue. So what?
Indie musicians release their music outside the traditional channels, and if you would like to make your own canned air, if you have the resources, no one is stopping you. But, if you want a piece of music (product) managed, owned, controlled by some major label, you have to give them what they want for it. It's their product; they manage it, own or manage the rights to it. They don't have to give it to you at all, if they don't want to.
If you buy a car off the lot, you don't tell the dealership what they are going to sell it to you for, they tell you. And, if you buy that car and start producing exact copies in your garage and distributing these copies, my guess is you will get a visit from a lawyer.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Forget Freenet. Both Kazaa and Gnutella work on this priciple, and they are going strong. Bittorrent just isn't a system that can be applied to real file-sharing networks.
Not as trivial as you think. You are connected to 4 nodes, and the 4 servers you are connected to are connected to 4 nodes, and they are in-turn connected to 4 nodes, etc.
So, you might be able to narrow it down to 1/4, but what good would it do you to know that? That's still just the address of a node that might be directly or indirectly connected to the server. You can't get that node to tell you what nodes are connected to it, and if you could, you couldn't get that node to only broadcast your packets to one of the connected nodes at a time, in sequence.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
And only for windows?
Neither facts instill confidence in them, that there isn't anything evil hidden away ( anyone remember earthstation 5? ), or its actually anonymous and hard to break its encryption.
Not ranting about 'everything needs to be open', but with stuff like this, it is important to know what you are dealing with. Before the man comes knocking on the door ( or you start broadcasting spam like crazy )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The receord companies were fined for MAP pricing, which was there to help record stores vs stores like Best Buy which sells a small selection of CD's for below retail so that people would come into their stores for music and buy a TV for a huge markup. This really cut into the profits, not of the record companies, but music only stores such as tower records. Lowering the price of music would not have helped this situation since the electronics retails are already taking a loss on every CD sale. SO to prop up the record stores they made MAP (minimum advertised pricing) which gave a kickback to the record stores for their advertising if they advertised the CD at a certain price or higher (that price was not the same for all companies or CD's). It was not really a big deal, while the record companies a fairly small fine and where told to stop MAP, it didn't come close to criminal price fixing like ADM, where people went to jail.