About Gnutella, P2P, Bit Torrent & Darknet

More About SECURITY

Bit Torrent

Ashwin Navin, former Chief Operating Officer and current President of BitTorrent Inc. announced BitTorrent's partnership with Warner Brothers.This arrangement provides them the license to sell Warner movies and TV shows at BitTorrent.

I watched c-span coverage on the net neutrality debate and they do not want to legislate anything "until it becomes a problem" - it's insane!!
yeah sure - as it they would ever protect the public once it's a problem - which it will become AND The real fight around net neutrality is that companies want to use your bandwidth to increase their bottom line.
This is what Web 2.0 means to the content providers. Lowering the cost of delivery to nothing while holding the line on prices, or finding new ways to charge for the same content are the only avenues the content owners seem to be able to find in order to satisfy shareholders with huge growth numbers in stagnant markets.

Bit Torrent FAQ
http://www.dessent.net/btfaq

Find index sites to download sites

Also Torrent search sites like the following:

Search for Torrent Files

(ex: type in Oceans 11 to see how it works)

Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111, USA

28 Jun 2005 The US Supreme Court has found against file-sharing software provider Grokster in a ruling that potentially leaves other peer-to-peer networks liable for any illegal content shared by users. In the case of MGM et al versus Grokster et al the court ruled unanimously in favour of the studios, stating that Grokster, StreamCast Networks and others can be held liable for any illegally copied material on members' PCs if they encourage users to break copyright law. Technology trumps everything. There is no practical technological means to stop arbitrary file sharing, since ultimately it's all just about moving bits from place to place, and that's what the Internet, or even telephone modems for that matter, are all about. Open-source file-sharing systems will continue to proliferate as will widespread music and film piracy, though the file-sharing developers may become anonymous, and various sophisticated "masking" techniques will be increasingly employed as these systems move "underground" e.g., file sharing can be encrypted and disguised to look like a VoIP stream, e-mail, or digital photos. Mike Godwin is legal director of Public Knowledge, a public-interest copyright-policy organization that co-filed an amicus brief in the Grokster case.

2007 As of June 1st, Jimmy Iovine will no longer be employed by Universal Music. He is ankling the firm to return to New York City to run LimeWire, the P2P service based on the Gnutella protocol. Mr. Iovine believes Ted Cohen's editorial in "Billboard" this week represents the tipping point. It's time to license P2P and see how it all turns out. Negotiating a fifty percent interest in the company, for his imprimatur, Jimmy is now the licensing point person. And smart money has him closing deals.

Gene Kan, a representative of the Nerd Herd Gnutella project
Original Story http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21559-2000May17.html
It is a more sophisticated version of Napster
The name Gnutella comes from a combination of Gnu, the popular suite of free Unix software, and Nutella, the chocolatey hazelnut spread that Frankel is said to favor.
Inventors Frankel, 21, and his good friend and software co-creator, Tom Pepper, another twentysomething Nullsoft employee, are virtual cult heroes.
Frankel, who grew up in Arizona, was always fiddling with some sort of computer program in his spare time and in fact had built Nullsoft on one of those projects, Winamp, a free online music player. He thinks everything should be free.
Frankel sold his company AOL for just under $100 million last fall. He still works at Nullsoft in San Francisco
Like an open source program their work is being refined daily by hundreds of young volunteer programmers around the world who hope to allow others to use Gnutella's , MAKING IT A FREE SEARCH ENGINE FOR THE MASSES.
Gnutella enthusiasts on Internet chat rooms called #gnutella and #gnutelladev.
Causing DECENTRALIZTION OF POWER A TRUELY FREE REALM WHERE NO INFORMATION GATEKEEPER EXISTS AND WHERE ALL PROPERTY IS COMMONLY OWNED.
IT BASICALLY SCREWS THE IDEA OF COPYRIGHT
Record companies, Book Publishers, Movie Makers and practically ANYONE with a stake in selling information--regard Gnutella as a device for thievery.
DARKNET INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE
Grouper You can invite up to 30 people into a private darknet. You can stream, but not download, music files. free. Ad-supported.

imeem A free desktop app that lets you create personal, private networks with your friends and family. Includes chat, file sharing, photo sharing, search, forums and more with an attractive interface. I've used it, but haven't mastered it yet. You can invite up to 30 people to join one of your private networks.Free. Advertiser-supported.

WASTE, an encrypted p2p application meant chiefly for secure communication rather than file sharing. Created by code wunderkind Justin Frankel, it has no business model. Which isn't a bad thing. Geek quotient: high.

Groove Networks: a secure encrypted corporate network founded by Ray Ozzie, who was recently named CTO of Microsoft.

Freenet, a project started by Ian Clarke when he was a student at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. The program, which is still in the early stages of development, has drawn attention because it deliberately makes it all but impossible to identify the source of a file.

Unlike users of Napster, Gnutella users can trade files without going through a storage center, making it impossible to shut down the system without unplugging every computer on the network and difficult to control by laws because there's no central authority.
It is the most advanced of a new generation of what are known as "distributed network" programs
Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape Communications and a former chief technology officer for AOL, compares Gnutella to a benevolent virus, a "revolutionary" program that spreads the power of publishing from an elite set of corporations to anyone who has a computer."It changes the Internet in a way that it hasn't changed since the browser," Andreessen said.
Shows how easily the Internet can be transformed or at least shaken by smart computer programmers who are barely old enough to drink or drive.
Freenet and Gnutella conform to the original vision of the Internet's architects, who imagined it to be a completely decentralized system. But then corporations came along and set up central information storehouses called "servers."
Gerald Levin, chief executive of Time Warner Inc., which owns the Warner Music label, who called on his AOL counterpart, Steve Case, to quash the Gnutella project.
Carey Heckman, a professor of law and technology at Stanford University, said the software could undermine the foundation of many multibillion-dollar corporations.
"It's about how information flows and who controls that system," Heckman said.
Being able to control storage and distribution of information, companies the ability to set prices, track the habits of users and block material they find objectionable.
Any computer running Gnutella, can search all the others running the program and retrieve information that the user makes publicly available.
The data still flows over the wires of the Internet, but the distributed network theoretically reduces the need for vast content repositories such as AOL.
Cloning the Program
Within two days of Gnutella's release, software developers who heard of its existence managed duplicate or "clone" the program, assuring that the project could never be bottled up.
Bryan Mayland, a 26-year-old programmer from Tampa, became the first to reconstruct Gnutella. He locked himself in his office, above an Irish pub on the outskirts of town, and ended up writing 973 lines of code. On March 16 at 8 p.m. he pushed a button on his keyboard to release his clone to the Web.
Ian Hall-Beyer, a 27-year-old systems administrator from Denver who considers himself the grandfather of the group; Spencer Kimball, 26, a friend of Kan's from Berkeley; and Nathan Moinvaziri, a soft-spoken 16-year-old whom many credit with being the first to set up a Gnutella Web site.
On a recent night, more than 10,000 machines were hooked up to the main Gnutella network and about 1.5 million files were available; those numbers continue to grow every day, and Gnutella's developers fervently believe that Gnutella will someday run through nearly every machine on the Internet.
Kan's group has been working with the Internet standards association to come up with a way to take the technology mainstream. Gnutella fans believe the program soon could be used to replace, or at least supplement, existing search sites such as Yahoo, Lycos and Google, which increasingly have difficulty keeping up with the explosive growth of the Internet and often contain links to Web pages that no longer exist.
Somewhere in the world, Gnutella will function as a real-time search engine.
As Gnutella's popularity grows, Time Warner's Levin and AOL President Bob Pittman suggested the technology could be harnessed, given time.
Security experts reason why the public's acceptance of Gnutella will be difficult: File-sharing tools are good cloaks for hackers who want to pillage entire hard drives or to pass on viruses or worms.
Many Gnutella developers brush off concerns about lawsuits and security, saying technological solutions, such as encryption tools to preserve copyright, will arise.
People who have started creating Gnutella interfaces with rotating advertisements.
Kan says none of the 400-plus people who subscribe to the various Gnutella developers' e-mail lists has dared to bring up business proposals, but he concedes that the idea is always looming.
Mayland received an e-mail offer from a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. There might be funding to build a version of Gnutella that could be used to create a private network.
Mytella - A peer to peer file sharing program based on the Gnutella protocol. Mytella is free and is designed to work with computers running Windows.
More Sites

Gnotella version 0.9.9 was released. Gnotella is a peer-to-peer, real-time search and file sharing program that permits users to search for and share files of any type through the Gnutella Network. New features add drag and drop integration with users' Web browsers for downloading files.

g10 Code / Moritz Schulte - The GnuPG Experts [Diese Seiten sind auch auf deutsch verfügbar] We provide support for the GnuPG suite of encryption and digital signature software as well as custom development, enhancements and audits of cryptographic software. We are pleased to announce the availability of Libgcrypt 1.2.0, which is the first stable release of this general purpose crypto library based on GnuPG code.
Note, that Libgcrypt is neither a replacement for GnuPG nor does it contain a library version of GnuPG. It is only of interest for developers of crypto applications with a need for crypto building blocks available under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Complete source packages:

ftp://ftp.gnupg.org/gcrypt/libgcrypt/libgcrypt-1.2.0.tar.gz (927k)
ftp://ftp.gnupg.org/gcrypt/libgcrypt/libgcrypt-1.2.0.tar.gz.sig

Patch against version 1.9.94:

ftp://ftp.gnupg.org/gcrypt/alpha/libgcrypt/libgcrypt-1.1.94-1.2.0.diff.gz
(246k)

Mirrors are listed at http://www.gnupg.org/download/mirrors.html.

MD5 sums are:

5c508072d8387ce17d1ab05075c2be40 libgcrypt-1.2.0.tar.gz
a1657523beebf926ca7992cc6b9ea9b5 libgcrypt-1.1.94-1.2.0.diff.gz

Except for one bug fix this release is basically equivalent to the last pre-release.
Napster and the Record Industry
Courtney Love gave an excellent unedited speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference, given in New York on May 16, 2000 on the creative math that the record companies do with regards to the artists. 6 pages long - good read. takes on record label profits, Napster and "sucka VCs." http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/index.html
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Courtney Love June 14, 2000

Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software. I'm talking about major label recording contracts. I want to start with a story about rock bands and record companies, and do some recording-contract math:

This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war band ever got a 20 percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my "funny" math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying I'm positive it's better math than what Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide.

WASTE

WASTE is taken from Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 where WASTE is a renegade underground postal system operating in plain sight of the status quo undetected. The acronym itself is "We Await Silent Tristero's Empire." Even the horn on a stamp icon used in the application is a nod to the stamps used by WASTE in the Pynchon story. http://p2pnet.net/story/1295

http://waste.sourceforge.net/download.html

According to Wikipedia, WASTE is a “peer-to-peer protocol and software, developed by Justin Frankel at Nullsoft. WASTE is an acronym for “We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire”, a reference to Thomas Pynchon’s novel “The Crying of Lot 49”.“

A few hours after being released, WASTE was pulled from their Nullsoft’s web site by its parent ~~AOL~~ Time-Warner.

Technology Area

About Gnutella, P2P, Bit Torrent & Darknet

More About SECURITY

Bit Torrent

WASTE