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Grad Student Project Uses Wikis To Stash Data, Miffs Admins
Anonymous writes "Two graduate students at the Ivy League's Brown University built a P2P system to use abandoned wiki sites to store data. The students were stealing bandwidth from open MediaWiki sites to send data between users as an alternative to BitTorrent. There was immediate backlash as site operators quickly complained to the University. The project appears to be shutdown, but many of the pages still remain on the web. The project homepage was also taken down and the students posted an apology this afternoon." The same submitter links to two different forum discussions on the project.
Google Cache still has the old data.
http://209.85.173.132/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A//graffiti.cs.brown.edu/
C&P of page text (in case the cache updates quickly):
Graffiti Networks
A Subversive, Internet-Scale Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Model
Abstract:
The proliferation of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocols is due to their efficient and scalable methods for data dissemination to numerous users. But many of these networks have no provisions to provide users with long term access to filesafter the initial interest has diminished, nor are they able to protect users from malicious clients that wish to implicate them in incriminating activities. We present a new file sharing paradigm that harnesses the potentially unlimited storageof the Internet as a third-party intermediary for peers to indirectly transfer data with each other. We base our decentralized architecture on the premise that users trust file sharing coordinators, but do not trust any other user. Our key contributions in this paper include an overview of the design for a P2P system that implements our new model and a discussion ofthe challenges that such a system will likely encounter.
People:
* Andrew Pavlo - Brown University
* Ning Shi - Brown University
The students were stealing bandwidth from open MediaWiki sites
The fact that some "admin" abandoned a site, with open privileges to post on it, does not constitute theft. I manage servers and write code for a living, and while I'd put a stop to such practices on any site I managed, the use of the term "theft" is laughable.
This is very much reminiscent of Microsoft crying to the media that all their security problems were due to evil hackers, and not their abject failure to follow long-accepted industry practices for code reviews and architecture. My response: cry me a river, and congrats to the grad students for their innovative work in the field of distributed communications.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
...I want to hear more about these MILF admins.
Does no one appreciate outside the box thinking anymore? What a shame!
Khaaaaaan!
It's even less ethical than sending your BT traffic over Tor, and strikes me as much less safe. It doesn't seem like it would take many pissed off admins before someone thinks to forward their logs to the appropriate **AA.
...but it's far from ethical.
Most open wikis are left that way to encourage collaberation, and usually have a TOS somewhere that prohibits spamming. And even if the TOS doesn't prohibit this, it's bloody obvious that whoever runs the target site doesn't want a pile of meaningless content that isn't relevant and they can't use.
I say good on the university for pulling this project down, and whichever ethics committee approved this project should be replaced - they clearly haven't done their job properly!
Forget world peace, bring on -1 pointless
It's just stupid. "Hey, we noticed that three quarters of that privately owned parking garage over there isn't being used at any given time. Why don't we open up a car salvage business and store all the derelict junkers that we're parting out in their unused parking spaces?"
These are graduate students?!?
Apparently they don't know about SlashdotFS. This system uses an english hidden markov model sentence constructor to generate plausible comment text and save it as reply's on slashdot. The path through the markov model is variable having multiple word choices at each node so it can encode arbitrary data and can be decoded by replaying the message through the same network model.
It was just a toy till 2003 when a pair of graduate students realized the information density could be dramatically enhanced by introducing spelling, gramatical errors, typo's and l337-speak into the model.
Comments encoding these are usually late posts in the discussion threat and frequently replied to by grammar nazi's.
It's now one of the major Warez dumping sites since it is particularly useful for immutable data of low value.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Unlike ninjavideo who hides files on donation funded sites like archive.org
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
In the real world, good old meatspace, there are actually "abandoned" things and properties. Things that, save for a few extremists of the no-srsly-guys-property-rights-are-eternally-laid-down-by-god-no-matter-what school, we can agree don't actually have owners in any meaningful way. Various peculiar exigencies create them; but they do exist. Taking them over, and bringing them back into productive use, is a clear good.
On the interwebs, the situation is quite different. Since any "location" on the internet corresponds to an active server, actively sucking power and depreciating somewhere, there are no "abandoned" locations on the internet. There are locations that don't change much, or aren't visited much; but they all correspond to real hardware that real people are paying real bills for(though, it is conceivable that, for a short time, a piece of hardware might be lost between the cracks and unpaid for until it dies or the situation is straightened out and it is disconnected). Thus, any scheme that involves making use of "abandoned" location son the internet is a load of crap. At best, it is an obnoxious creative interpretation of a bunch of TOSes. At worst, it is arguably theft of poorly secured server resources. Most of the time, as in this case, it is probably just spam.
Now, on a slightly different topic, it could well be argued that, on the internet, abandoned data can and do exist. Here a more interesting case could be made for the ethical utility of salvage projects, "abandonware" websites probably being the best known example.
This project is possibly way too vainglorious for me to handle.
I found their garbage on my site yesterday. It's not a high-volume site, but it sure as hell isn't abandoned. And after all this apologizing, one of the students still has the complete list of wikis they used available on his student page. This was a serious case of lack of oversight and/or bad judgment.
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
But did they get a good grade on the project?
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
Shouldn't one of you be complaining about the Establishment pigs punishing kids for exploring? Or are you getting as tired of being rootkitted as everyone else?
This could be demonstrated just as well on sites that they own / control. For instance, with a single domain name, 100 pastebin clones, 100 wikis could be set up and configured differently (i.e. subdomains).
Some of them could have active SPAM policing, captchas, etc .. others could behave as though they had a lazy / dead admin. Others could just mysteriously vanish (i.e. domain expired, no longer hosted, etc).
The results are the same, either way. I wonder why they bothered going for external sites to begin with? All they needed was a cheap p4 and some scripts to automate mediawiki installs.
Why didn't they just stay in the sandbox?
This is the best school project I have heard of since I was at university....
The fact is that not all of the wiki sites they spammed were abandoned. Does that change your answer?
"...the students posted an apology this afternoon."
In the words of Vince Vaughn, "Apologize for what, baby? Being awesome?"
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
Posting links to 'funny stories' slurped from Slashdot stories on his monetized blog.
"The students were stealing bandwidth from open MediaWiki sites"
There were NOT stealing anything. They were merely using an abandoned resource. That is NOT stealing.
I remember 15-17 years ago people would surf around and find University FTP sites and setup temporary sites for exchanging files (not all legal). There would be lists of open FTP servers around the net and those would be traded on IRC. This is just coming full circle to happen again on the Web.
It's a result of storage always exceeding the limits of bandwidth.
Pretty easy to see through the whole "durr we are helping site owners secure their wikis" crap considering the original page said nothing about security, only a possible way of distributing files. The garbage about "abandoned" wikis is also transparently false, as the site makes no reference to even checking when the last edit(s) were made to the wiki through Recent Changes, as well as my own personal experience and several others. It's also a hilarious rationale considering wikis have pages-by-views counters built into them and any site owner would easily notice hundreds of peers downloading plaintext off a wiki regularly faster than they would the results of some graduate student's pet CS project.
It's a shocker, but some wiki owners like to allow anonymous edits, and they have the right to do so. It's equivalent to abusing other site resources like public uploads in everything but style. This "project" is not only unethical but now they're blatantly lying about (or at best misrepresenting) its purpose.
It's beautiful at the lake, baby.
He experimented further. In one class he had everyone write all hour about the back of his thumb. Everyone gave him funny looks at the beginning of the hour, but everyone did it, and there wasn't a single complaint about "nothing to say."
In another class he changed the subject from the thumb to a coin, and got a full hour's writing from every student. In other classes it was the same. Some asked, "Do you have to write about both sides?" Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence-building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else's. Classes where he used that coin exercise were always less balky and more interested.
As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn't have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.
That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything...from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.
He discussed this with a professor of psychology who lived next door to him, an extremely imaginative teacher, who said, "Right. Eliminate the whole degree-and-grading system and then you'll get real education."
From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
Squirrel!
I knew that Web 2.0 shit had to be useful for something. Coming soon: porn over AC
Just to sum up: this is similar to some guy you don't know storing materials in the empty space of your back yard.
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
I remember 15-17 years ago people would surf around and find University FTP sites and setup temporary sites for exchanging files (not all legal). There would be lists of open FTP servers around the net and those would be traded on IRC. This is just coming full circle to happen again on the Web.?
I am sure that it surprises nobody that FTP sides are still being widely abused and lists traded....
music lover since 1969
So it's only unethical if you get caught?
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Next, using viruses to spread and stash data in humans.
Imagine when the relevant technologies involved get affordable and some kid thinks it would be cool/neat to do that.
Many people think that scientific progress requires allowing everyone to research whatever they want. To me certain research paths shouldn't be done _yet_, and left till later till humans and human societies are more ready to cope with the long term consequences and potential effects.
We are getting a bit close to the time when creating "The Big Red Button (That Kills Everyone)" becomes cheap enough to be some grad student's project.
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Fuck these guys.
They didn't hit just abandoned wikis. In fact, when they first started doing this back in January, they didn't leave any information about what they were doing, and they used proxy servers to hide where they came from.
Evidence, my wiki was hit and I had no clue what was going on.
On April 11 around 11:50 (all times EST) I noted yet another spammer, so I deleted and blocked him as usual. But there was something a bit unusual - the current asshole was actually nicer than usual and left an explanation URL, http://graffiti.cs.brown.edu/. So I went there and used some deductive reasoning to figure out the spammer's email address, and at 11:59 I sent him a one-line message:
At 12:56 I got a response:
To this I wrote back at 13:20:
I got no response and next I heard of this was on slashdot.
FTA:
"About: ... We use the term graffiti for our work since we are storing data in a way that non-network participants may regard as unsightly or unwanted vandalism. ..."
"Update: ... It was never our intention to maliciously deface sites, ..."
I don't blame them for changing their tune once they came under fire, but I'm surprised that they have both statements on the page at once. Or am I somehow seeing a contradiction where none exists?
The source code for their project is still available: http://graffiti.cs.brown.edu/download/ or svn co http://graffiti.cs.brown.edu/svn/graffiti/
Rather than complaining, the Wiki admins should have doctored the stored data, kind of like a guy did to people using his open WiFi access point.
This reminds me of a great April Fool's Day prank from the late 80s (IIRC--I cannot find a link). Someone posted a description of a wonderful new way to economize on backups, using UUCP. The idea was to create the backup and then uucp it back to oneself using a somewhat circuitous route, so that it would arrive back just when it might be needed (say, a fortnight hence). And thus no tape would be needed to hold the backup in the mean time.
(This was in fact an absurd suggestion, of course, since data transmission was very limited and expensive at the time, and the data would end up being temporarily stored anyway on the disks of one's neighbors.)
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I've watched three year olds imitate. Little children imitate all the time. Sounds much more like a simple erroneous presumption to support convoluted bullshit to support "Eliminate the whole degree-and-grading system and create a nonverifiable job for life" thing.
Oblig.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Stealing bandwidth and storage from Wikis, abandoned or not, is wrong. /. is good.
Stealing bandwidth and storage from companies unpopular on
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
That depends entirely on your jurisdictional ability to prosecute me.
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I wrote about this one year ago on March 3, 2008. This is just the tip of the ice berg, and it will change the internet and the web dramatically. (If you like the article, please come back and mod me up!)
I would give +1 for innovation of measuring Wiki in units of communication bandwidth.
Poor is hoping the toothache goes away.
God, yes. Thanks for the laugh.
I saw it on Wikademia.org, my wiki, and i thought that it was COOL. Just only little page..
Those admins need to chill out.
They didn't take any of your stuff -- they put their stuff into unused "pages". These were pages you left open, so that others could add things to your Wiki. Now someone adds something to your wiki and you are upset? Sure not clear how it's theft at this point.
Now it would be different if the active project was hosing your system, but I think they were doing research for a Proof-of-Concept type paper. I'd say their preliminary research indicates the concept may not be viable in its current form. :-)
You helped do research for a paper documenting how using "random" open wiki's for data storage would be a bad idea! Congratulations! :-)
http://isis.poly.edu/projects/parastore
http://isis.poly.edu/~parastore/volleystore.pdf
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