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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."
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.
.abilene. servers? There's a reason: http://abilene.internet2.edu/
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
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 @$$