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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."
I can no longer copy and distribute music on a network I never belonged to.
Oh the injustice.
Does this mean I get a refund on my VIP membership? ;) Seriously though, I2hub was an awesome project while it lasted. The whole point of this network was to bring together college students using highspeed networks. While some students chose to share copyrighted files, a lot of others uses I2hub for legitimate and semi-scholarly purposes. I can't tell you how many times I've helped kids with their C++ and Java questions, found good game competitors, and reconnected with old friends. The whole point of the I2 network is to see what researchers and academics can do with large amounts of bandwidth. I2hub certainly explored that question. So... what's next?
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.
I was one of the ops on i2hub, and it was used for many legal purposes as well as the file-sharing. It will be missed, but RIAA can't get us all, no matter how hard they try.
It's only a matter of time before some college student starts hosting another Internet2-only DC++ server out of his/her dorm room. I personally have one restricted to the University of Kentucky IP block. The music industry doesn't seem to realize especially after napster that for every P2P network it shuts down, three more spring up.
But another concern is about the future of P2P. Grokster shut down last week, now i2hub has been forced out... what's next? BitTorrent? Kazaa? Ares?
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
What amazes me about the current copy paranoia is that PCs have been copying perfectly for decades. The Internet has been copying perfectly among strangers en masse for decades. It's been popular globally for a decade. Nothing has changed. The legal risks are exactly the same, our rights are exactly the same. Our laws protecting our rights are a little different, and the politicians are a new bunch. So I guess that's why there's a wild suppression running amok among the copyright industry. But they waited too long: the masses have grown accustomed to copying whatever we want. Momentum is against them - they might make some inroads, some local successes, but copyright was protected by inadequate tech for too long, and now has been exposed to disruptive tech for too long. The smart money is on the copyright holders who can harness the new distribution media, not those who fight it.
--
make install -not war
Information hates to be anthropomorphized.
Wasn't Internet2 supposed to be for academic uses anyway?
On noes! We can't clog up this incredibly powerful and incredibly expensive network trading terabytes of movies and music! The humanity!
Seriously now, the whole point of the thing was to move multiple gigs of data coming out of CFD simulations and the like, not to get the latest episode of Lost.
A P2P protocol that requires a centralized organizing entity, such as a hub, tracker or server, isn't really a P2P protocol. Decentralizing the bandwidth and the storage isn't enough to ensure unimpeded file sharing... the indexing needs to be decentralized as well. This way, there is no single point of attack to take down the P2P network.
This just isn't to protect music pirates from the record companies, but to protect legitimate distribution systems from malicious attack, either governmental or criminal.
SoupIsGood Food
The funny part about a well written P2P is that you shouldn't be able to shut it down. I envisioned P2P taking over where Napster left off as soon as they shut down Napster. I was partly right, but there's no reason to have P2P shut down. The fundamental flaw in P2P software today is that it banks on main servers for user list files. If instead, it simply kept a record of everyone's IP address on the client side, it could then:
A) Scan every single IP that was active last run. Not everyone has a static IP, but out of thousands of people, at least one person should.
B) As soon as you find someone with an active IP, you become on the network, and recieve a new list of IP addresses(all the active ones) from the client that's online. VOILA YOU'RE ONLINE WITH NO CENTRAL SERVER
The other fundamental flaw of P2P software is that the coders are very lazy, and use a single port. Once this port is identified to your software, ISPS can block that port and you're screwed. To be robust, it should use a variety of random ports of software that you're not using. I mean you can get really complex about what ports you're using: Up to and including scanning the computer for software so it knows which ports not to use... But that's getting crazy indepth, just a standard: Random number between 10000-30000 should do. And everyone keeps this port number along side your IP address in the list.
God spoke to me.
...would somebody post a link to a site with the news that the site had been shut down...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
site is shutdown, and then /.ed. nice. and if that's not bad enough, it will be /. again in a few days for good measure.
There's an internet TWO?!?!? I haven't even finished the first one!
A guy walks into a bar... well, I forgot the joke, but the punchline is that he's an alcoholic.
Why not put the index on more attack proof networks like freenet, and use a faster p2p app for the actual downloading.
Three problems.
1) If you use a random port, you have a harder time enacting a firewall. Unless I misunderstand firewalls, they close all ports except the approved ones. Won't you have to change the firewall every time you log-on? And wouldn't a simple program that gets authority to automatically open ports in the firewall be dangerous from a security perspective? Esp. since P2P is already clogged with viruses?
2) If every computer has the IP address of every other computer, then the RIAA can bust one guy, and if he isn't quick enough to wipe everything (and he may not get the chance), they have the master list of all the file sharers, who they can sue or send threatening letters at will.
3) It looks like this lets all people with dynamic IPs be leechers, and keeps them from sharing their files.
4) Yeah, I only had three in the beginning, deal with it. If you download the software from a mirror somewhere, how do you get this master list? For that matter, how does User #1 find User #2, User #3, and so on, on Day 1?
Here
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.
Yes, it is impossible to shut down true P2P. It's also impossible to control it. That means the RIAA/MPAA can easily infiltrate your network and setup honeypots and/or actively poison it.
What happens when the first "working" address is an RIIA machine that lies to you and gives you a list of hundreds of other RIIA machines. Everything looks normal, but you've just been pwned.
I was a rep for i2hub on the UMass campus (UMass is where the founder Wayne Chang went to school and i2hub was based out of Amherst). Working with Wayne was quite an experience. He was constantly thinking of new ideas and strategies. I have no doubt he'll be successful in the future. However, Wayne needed money to take the RIAA to court, and even with a solid defense he wouldn't have a chance without the resources.
The students I collaborated with on i2hub were some of the more motivated and intelligent students I know. I'm sure that their support and campus networking will help foster bigger and better projects in the future. Over 500 of the more active i2hub users still chat every day on IRC, which is a testament to the strength of the i2hub community. I hate to say this, but i2hub marketed itself as a "student collaborative network" but the closure of the hub by the RIAA might just prove to force i2hub into the true collaborative network we had envisioned.
"Man, I am so unbelievably stupid."
Oh no, where am I to get my warez now!? Whats that, theres still IRC, newsgroups, kazaa, bit torrent, emule, and hijacked FTP? Whew, there for a second I thought I was going to have to start PAYING for my digital entertainment.
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
- Winston Churchill
Warez sites come and go, I have little sympathy for them - they know it happens. But, I've been known to sample a new artist here and there *cough* and I like getting my movies, songs, books, and software through the Internet so I really do want copyright holders to get their heads out of their collective ass and wise up a bit. .wma file won't play on an ipod - something to do with .aac I guess? Seriously it's a mess from an average persons point of view) and then you're limited on how many your devices that can store your purchased copy of the information and millions of other little things that piss me off. What I'm trying to get to is content sources: make it friggin' simple. I want to go from ooooooh! shiny song must buy to got it in seconds with only a minimal amount of new payment complexity (swipe card; enter pin vs. fill out form 1074 in triplicate along with supplemental schedule B and maybe, just maybe we'll let you have a license to it...). Debits here, it works, make it go.
The Internet is the most amazing distribution system for Information ever invented by us and no matter how content is distributed be it bittorrent, gnutella, ftp, or http that is not the real problem the media companies are facing. The real problem is that they don't have a means of payment built into whatever communications protocol is being levereged at the moment to move data. iTunes, Napster to Go, and the like simply suck and I'm not going to bite because in my opinion I will only accept purchasing a copy of a high-quality content source with *no* drm so I could transcode it into an appropriate quality and format for the other devices I own, instead of forcing the purchase of the same content on multiple media types.
Here's how I see it, it's just like making a withdrawal at the bank, I go to a teller, swipe my card, tell her how much I want, and that's it. It's all simple and just works. Getting online information however is a daunting task as usually at the minimum a credit card is required. Then you have to know what format your music is going to arrive in wrapped in drm (which adds further confusion to the market as consumers scratch their head when their
Shh.
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.
Signature.
I have a length of CAT 5 lying around, anyone want to start an internet 3 with me? We can P2P to our hearts content that way.
The Direct Connect network at my small liberal arts college may only have 142 users logged and 6.08 TB of data being shared (small stuff compared to I2hub, I'm sure) but at download speeds of over 1MB/s it's worth it. (Sadly, we were never connected to internet two.)
All decisions like this force is networks to go further underground and localize tighter. Clearly 5000 users logged at once on dozens of campuses were far too many to keep their mouths shut. But smaller campus networks work nearly as well and are easy to setup. You don't need official websites or other big targets, just an no-ip.com server address shared through word of mouth.
I'm sure my school is not unique (I've heard another network like this exists for all the UC schools). It's pretty much impossible to stop students from utilizing nearly infinite network bandwidth. Commendable, perhaps, but hopeless.
err, no. Everything over 1024 is blocked by default by damn near every firewall I've ever seen. I think even the Windows XP firewall have it all blocked by default (if you turn on the firewall).
Better just to run it over port 80, so long as you aren't running a web server. But should you really be downloading pron and warez on your production web box? And port 80 is open for web traffic.
The problem with distributed lists though is distributed points of security breaches. Think if someone from the RIAA or Sony joined the party, all they would have to do is search for 1 song they hold the rights to and blamo, they have a list of IPs of every person who has that song. And I don't really mean every person, because the list effects would be huge.
Your best bet would be to use some sort of 6degrees of seperation and social architexture to get file lists. ie: Bob is "friends" with Jim and Jon. Bob invites Saley. Saley searches for a file, her search hit's Bob's (1 degree), Jim's and Jon's (2 degrees) shares, but not their friends. If Saley adds Jon to her "Friends" list, she would be able to search Jon's friends too.
Someone could (read: RIAA would pay someone to) exploit the system to make a huge listing. A bit of recursion and friend adding and you could rapidly dig up a pretty comprehensive list. And since the client is in the enemy's hand it would be imposible to prevent. The only bright side is that you could likely backtrack who the person was who sent out the invite to them.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
1) The port [range] could be user-configurable rather than random, meaning the user could change ports if their current range is blocked.
2) True, but anonymity wasn't the point of the original post. The point was creating a p2p network that is impossible to shut down.
3) You seem to want anonymity as per #2. It will be hard to implement any sort of karma system without tying it to identity, which can eventually be tied to an IP at the ISP level.
4) There have been p2p networks with similar premises in the past. One was GNUtella (or just had a client by that name, perhaps). You have to have the address of someone on the network in order to connect. That's simply a fact of life in a system like this. So you gotta join a chatroom, look on a webpage, check usenet, or just have a friend on the network to connect the first time.
Could it be that you aren't smart enough to figure out the difference in someone with a pro pirating agenda and someone who actualy uses the system for legal and reasonable uses?
You act as if someone records a radio program we should ban all tape recorders. You even act as if it is someone god given right to ban all tape recorders because some one taped a program. This attitude is bullshit. There are plenty of good uses for P2P that doesn't infringe on anyone copyright. You seem to think because someone just lost a tool they were taking advantage of(legaly) then makes a negative coment about the situation, they are automaticaly supporting piracy. You are wrong.
Rant and whine all you want. The majority of users are not pirates. some may be but if we followed these examples everywere we would ban car because some break laws or use them to steal from others. We would ban almost everythign. Of course that would be just fine with you wouldn't it?
I've known two people who made money off of pirated money. Now, one of them the RIAA isn't going to go after since all he did was trade pirated cd's for weed, but the other one is the type of person that the RIAA should be going after instead of all this p2p bullshit.
I had a co-worker who used to burn couple hundred cd's a week of pirated music and sell them online. He'd sell though amazon or whomever, would list them under mixed cd's. Now wouldn't it make more sense to go after the people selling pirated cd's rather than those who download stuff? After all there are people buying music, money exchangeing hands, without the artist getting anything out of it.
Strangely my co-worker quit doing this cause he got tired of burning cd's, not because he had any problem selling them or had any legal threats, he just got tired of trying to keep up with demand.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
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.
As much as I agree with you that banning open P2P is little different from banning any recording device, I believe it's wishfull thinking to believe that the majority of P2P users are not pirating. While there is a wealth of uncopyrighted content (from hillarious amature videos made purely to entertain the masses to no-name bands who want exposure), it has always seemed to me that almost all the content I've seen on the various networks I've perused, and the contents of the shared directories I've seen, are almost exclusively copyrighted music and movies. There are many exceptions, but I believe that is a minority. The main legal usage is most likely from peer-distributed software (such as WOW updates, etc), and given time legal usage WILL exceed any other use as use of these networks for efficient content distribution continues to spread into the mainstream.
I have no figures to back that up, and find most of the figures I've seen from both sides highly suspect. But from everything I've seen on p2p, everything I've heard from people using p2p networks, and all my personal experience in general, anyone would be hard pressed to convince me that the majority of p2p users are obedient law-abiding responsible citizens who's intentions (and hard drives) are wholly pure. It's human nature to take what you can get, when there's little guilt involved (and let's face it - who feels THAT guilty about downloading, especially those of us with a large collection of legally-purchased cd's and dvd's?).
That said, legislation and judgements aimed at restricting and even banning p2p are no different from big radio's attempts to block tape recorders throughout the 70's, or the even more brute-force attempts by Disney and others to block the sale of VCRs to the public in the early 80's... or attempts to "tax" all cd and dvd blank sales to compensate for piracy. It's misguided, it's shortsighted, and it's almost certainly going to be shortlived as far as laws go - judging by recent history.
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
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 @$$
Good. Public money is paying for your university links to be used for academic purposes, not sharing music and movies. If you want a Linux distro, ask your administrators to mirror the appropriate distro locally
Are you trying to get modded funny or are you stupid enough to believe that if you contact "your" admins, they will do something like that for you?
If the latter, you need to be beaten with a clue stick a couple dozen times.
And as for the whole "public money" bit, it would be a valid argument if
a. students didn't pay tuition (they do, just in case you didn't know) or
b. students weren't forced to pay a "technology fee" or "internet access fee" (especially when the fees exceed the cost of Internet access from a traditional provider)
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