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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!
...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.
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.
You're abusing TOR network, it was NOT meant to be used for high-bandwidth applications.
Please, stop doing it. Exit nodes do not have unlimited bandwidth.
because if you fill the onion tubes with torrents how are the pedos going to trade their child porn?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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.
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?
While I doubt it was the authors' intent, this could actually be useful for creating 'plausible deniability', e.g., you want to provide resources to host legally questionable content, but do not want to open yourself up to any liabilities.
The fact that the content is split between many sites in unrecognizable pieces would also provide legal cover to those wishing to plead ignorant victim rather than willful enabler.
It's sort of like steganography for bandwidth.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
This is the best school project I have heard of since I was at university....
When the chunks are encrypted there is no way of knowing who the appropriate AA is. As all you have is a little chunk it's impossible to decrypt because the underlying compression layer is missing important data and so you cannot even check your decryption.
You may be able to identify a piece of gzip by frequency analysis as there's a tiny bit of entropy left but a modern compression (7z, rar) will probably leave nothing to distinguish the particular chunk you have.
"...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
No, they weren't using "abandoned resources", they were using wikis with anonymous editing enabled so that they could experiment with what amounts to decentralized bandwidth leeching.
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!
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.
So it's only unethical if you get caught?
Best Slashdot Co
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.
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.