Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
You couldn't be more wrong. When it comes to proof-of-concept research that illustrates a vulnerability, "If I didn't do it, somebody else would" is one of the noblest defenses known to man.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.