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.

Comments

What the Page Originally Said

[Anonymous Coward]

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

"Abandoned" my pasty white ass

[GuruBuckaroo]

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.

Re:Theft?

[mlts]

Depends on the country you live in. Here in the US, criminal trespass is a crime, and can result in 6 months to a year in jail. Repeated offenses, or trespass with a weapon doubles that.