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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.
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.
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
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.
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."
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 @$$
I see your concern, and lawmakers may attempt to move in that direction. However, technologies like bittorrent probably cannot be legislated against directly. The media conglomerates will have to attack those who actually participate in the distribution process. Although it is easy to track infringement to a specific IP address, proving that the person who owns the IP address is actually the person engaging in the infringement is difficult as evidenced by the few defendants that have stood up to the RIAA.
Your logic does contain a fallacy. Right now, P2P technologies are one of the driving forces behind widespread broadband deployment and that is not something ISPs are willing to give up. As evidenced by some of their recent attempts to shield their users from the RIAA's legal efforts, some ISPs are realizing the value of protecting their client's anonymity. ISP's currently have common carrier status meaning they are not responsible for the contents of the traffic they carry, this has been upheld by the courts. ISP's do not care what you do with your bandwidth, unless of course you use so much of it(think 'excessive use') that it affects the people around you or begins to degrade the stability of their own network.
As far as college networks, you are probably correct. There are no guarantees that civil courts will find that college networks fall under common carrier provisions(especially private colleges). So they are in a special legal position in that they feel some legal liability to stop copyright infringement, especially when they are aware of what is going down on their networks.
Downloading and owning said software will also be illegal
That is highly unlikely as BitTorrent is a 'stupid' protocol in that it doesn't decipher/alter the data it is designed to transmit. If the BitTorrent protocol could be made illegal, then why not HTTP or SSL? SSL is only used by terrorists, you know... (sarcasm)
Programs like DeCSS used for copyright infringement that have been attacked were not covered only by the Copyright Act(which actually didn't seem to have an issue with DeCSS because it could be used for fair use), but they were covered also by DMCA which is a whole other beast. With BitTorrent, I can send you an ISO of a CSS encrypted movie and it still doesn't fall under the DMCA because I haven't decrypted it for you.
As you can see from this example, BitTorrent cannot be made illegal without significant changes to the laws governing your privledges. Notice I didn't call them rights, fair use is a privledge provided by the Copyright Act but with one amendment it could be removed. Even the most pro-corporate legislators won't do that, that would be political suicide of unimaginable proportions. So, I don't think BitTorrent software or the BT protocol are going anywhere. The media companies will have to attack the users of the software for specific acts of infringement, not just the technology itself. The fact that it's open source only means it's that much more resilient because no one can take it away from you now.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.