I2hub Shutdown Due to Legal Pressure

djabbour writes "I2hub, the only p2p client that catered to internet2 users has shutdown today due to legal concerns. A few hours ago, any user on i2hub got a message which read 'RIP 11/14/2005. It was a good run. Forced to shut down by the industry.' The i2hub site has been shutdown, and new clients can no longer login to the i2hub server."

Comments

What a shame

[XoXus]

That's a shame. Especially with the speeds they would get, the bottle necks would shift back to the computers themselves, rather than the network.

Re:I'll certainly miss it.

[AndrewSchaefer]

Intra-campus you could see full 100mbit between machines, going offcampus 1mbit wasn't that unusual and sometimes much higher during non-peak hours. Like anything, it really depended on which school you were connecting to and how congested the network was when you were trying to pull.

Google Cache

[LaPoderosa]

Here

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[jdaomteys]

Internet2 doesn't require any crazy configs or anything to work. It's just an extra network connecting different universities. If I'm on a computer at Purdue for instance, and I access a computer at MIT (their webserver, a p2p client in one of their dorms, etc) it automatically gets routed on the private network. So any transfer on BitTorrent from an internet2 university to another internet2 university will use the faster network. i2hub was simply a modified DC++ client that connected to a host server that only let people within the proper IP blocks connect.

Re:It's only a matter of time.

[saskboy]

http://www.harveydanger.com/downloads/

Or you can listen to only free or shareware music like the latest Harvey Danger album. It's pretty catchy too, I don't know if it's hitting radio yet, but it should.

Correction to clarification

[atomm1024]

Internet2 is not a network. It is a consortium of participating universities, research organizations, companies, etc. The IP backbone in question, developed by Internet2, is called Abilene.

Re:Put the index on freenet

[atomm1024]

By the time you successfully download the index, the people with the file you want will probably have gone offline. Freenet is just too damn slow. It looks like they're doing some interesting things with the upcoming version 0.7, though, so maybe it will become more usable for things like that.

There is a strongly anonymous file sharing application under development, I2Phex, based on the I2P anonymous transport. Unfortunately, though, it's based on Gnutella, and the anonymous transport substantially reduces the speed, so once the network grows fairly large, it'll probably be congested to the point of being useless. Hopefully a program will be developed based on a more efficient algorithm like Chord or Kademlia.

Re:Okay . . . .

[chickenmonger]

GAH! Every time a discussion comes up about Internet 2, the same misinformed opinions get modded up. Internet 2 is not separate, in that it requires special research grants or whatever to use it.

I2 isn't really all that "separate". It's merely a series of high-speed routers and lines that interconnect member organizations. Being a well-minded student on an I2 connected school-owned network, I would love to have all my gaming and leisure traffic go solely over the commercial internet. It's just not possible. When you connect to other computers at I2 organizations, any and all traffic goes directly over the I2 lines.

So since kernel.org is hosted at Oregon State, I can download the latest and greatest over "Internet 2" with no special software or methods required. The commodity internet isn't even touched for such a transfer, and I can usually get between 1 and 3 MB/s, depending on the I2-connected server.

Hope that clears some misconceptions up. For more information, look at the tracert I did for kerneltrap from my I2 connected computer:

Tracing route to www.kerneltrap.org [140.211.166.45] over a maximum of 30 hops:

    5 13 ms 15 ms 9 ms abilene.tele.iastate.edu [192.245.179.250]
    6 26 ms 20 ms 28 ms dnvrng-kscyng.abilene.ucaid.edu [198.32.8.13]
    7 45 ms 45 ms 57 ms snvang-dnvrng.abilene.ucaid.edu [198.32.8.1]
    8 57 ms 57 ms 57 ms pos-1-0.core0.eug.oregon-gigapop.net [198.32.163.17]
    9 57 ms 57 ms 57 ms nero.eug.oregon-gigapop.net [198.32.163.151]
  10 57 ms 57 ms 57 ms eugn-core1-gw.nero.net [207.98.64.168]
  11 59 ms 59 ms 59 ms corv-car1-gw.nero.net [207.98.64.6]
  12 59 ms 59 ms 59 ms kt2.osuosl.org [140.211.166.45]

Trace complete.

See those .abilene. servers? There's a reason: http://abilene.internet2.edu/

Reason for i2hub shutting down

[KingBahamutX]

Hey, I was a representative of i2hub as well, and what happened was that the RIAA basically said to shut down or to face lawsuits. Despite what some people may think, our lawyer said we were highly likely to win if the RIAA were to sue us, so that wasn't the issue. The issue is that the expense of a trail against a cartel such as the RIAA would be immense, and that we simply could not afford such amounts. This is a case of consumer rights being trampled in favor of huge trusts with the bankrolls.

The solution to p2p's central server problem

[sourcery]

All that's needed is a DNS-like system specifically designed to handle a) DHCP-assigned IP addresses, and b) dynamically-assigned protocol-to-port mappings that vary between hosts. Call it DDNS (Dynamic DNS.) DDNS would be legally impervious, since it would have nothing to do with copying files, nor would it be associated with any particular p2p client, nor specific to p2p in general.

DDNS would have lots of uses outside of p2p, such as enabling individuals to host web sites from computers whose IP addresses are assigned dynamically, and/or enabling services to be reliably published over any random port.

History of p2p at Umass and potential future...

[adrenalinekick]

I am currently a senior CS major at Umass Amherst (The place where i2hub was born thanks to graduate Wayne Chang) and as such I have witnessed the evolution of file sharing here at Umass in the past few years.

As a freshman there was a program called winscan and if my memory serves me correctly, it basically was an index of all windows netbios publicly available shares on campus. Obviously not the best method for so many reasons, but it worked well enough.

Then winscan stopped working and flatlan appeared on the grid, which basically seemed to work the same way, just with a flashier interface and a website to go with it. (I have a feeling flatlan was just winscan v2, but don't hold me to it I was only a freshman.) Something tells me that either winscan or flatlan or both was written by a student from RPI who was shut down by **AA at some point, but I don't feel like cross checking that comment for accuracy.

Sophomore year saw the rise of DC++. I no longer remember the name of the server, but there was basically a limited version of i2hub available to only those on the umass campus network. By the end of sophomore year this server had at least started its merge with another campus network server, and slowly the networks allowed into the server began to increase. First to other colleges in the area, and eventually into something resembling what used to be i2hub.

Junior year i2hub really sprang to life, rapidly gaining its own momentum and making the news on more than one occasion. The traditional DC Connect and DC++ programs were discarded in favor the the i2hub ad-ridden interface, new colleges and people joined daily, and subscriptions became available.

Then disaster struck. The RIAA started going after students on i2hub.

Midway through fall-semester of senior year: RIP i2hub.

My point? These networks at Umass have grown from small to big since I've been here. There have also effectively been 4 different filesharing/p2p networks since I've been here. All have dissappeared for various reasons, but a new one always popped up in its place. For a few years the trend was to grow larger and larger and become more and more public, but I expect in the next few years whatever new network pops up to replace i2hub will remain more private and centralized, possibly restricting use to only the Umass network once again.

I'd be willing to bet that some student is already hard at work on converting bittorrent or an old gnutella client or maybe dc++ (again) to restrict the network to users with internet2 addresses only. Hopefully this student will not make the same mistake as Wayne Chang made - going public with i2hub. As soon as I saw i2hub mentioned in the news and on slashdot, I knew it would be eventually doomed by some *AA.

I'm envisioning a future of invitation-only networks, limited to a certain 'degree of kevin bacon' mixed in somehow. Think facebook + p2p. The only people that can see you and your files are your friends, your friends' friends, your friends' friends' friends... etc to a specified depth level. This would have some limiting effects on availability but would *reduce* (not solve) the problem of trust. Add some basic crypto in there somewhere if you are really paranoid and the *AA lawyer trolls can kiss my @$$

Re:Oh. No.

[flyinwhitey]

Ok, Mr-I-Know-Everything.

WHERE DID I EVER SAY I WAS FROM THE UNITED STATES?

I didn't, so all the hot air you just spewed was wasted. Except it was funny to watch you troll along assuming things you don't know to be true.

I would guess that is how you approach life in general, judging by your post. Make incorrect assumptions, based on incomplete evidence, and then run with them because you're too a) stupid or b) stubborn to admit you may have screwed up.

But to completely make an ass out of you, and totally refute your statement, there's this.

If I was in China, saying this would get me killed.

"China and it's government are evil, are run by dictators. The people in charge are liars, and need to be imprisoned or executed."

While in the US, saying the same about the government and it's leaders is not only accepted IT IS PROTECTED AND ENCOURAGED. Boy don't you look dumb now.

"you have the opportunity to drive a SUV in china , and you can eat a hamburger in china ... and if you think that the political stuff is so not-free in china, go and try to push communism through in america (everybody rich,working and happy model), you will be killed on the first road that you cross on your way to parliament my friend ..."

Parliament? No, the US has "congress" which is the catch all, or "house" and "senate". How can you discuss politics when you're so massively ignorant about such details? And as another refutation, there is a US communist party. They are not any more restricted than the other parties, so again, I've made you look foolish. Or rather, allowed you to do it yourself.

So, apart from being demonstrably wrong about everything you claim, what was your point? That you're ignorant of politics and the world in general?

I guess since the Chinese can get more mp3's, that whole being in imminent danger of being shot JUST FOR WHAT YOU THINK isn't important.

PS, you're a troll, and this was fun, but it's obvious to all that you're just saying stupid shit for a reaction. This is the last one you'll get from me.