Cult of the Dead Cow Going P2P? 105
An Anonymous reader writes "The BBC is reporting that cDc is releasing a new Peekabooty software in July which will defeat totalitarian governments and law enforcement from their current monitoring efforts. The article states: 'A group of hackers are developing a web browser that it claims will make it easier for people to circumvent censorship and avoid the attentions of law enforcers.
The software, which is due to be unveiled in July, uses a combination of encryption and a Gnutella-like network...'" CDC of course is famous for tools like Back Orifice, which is mostly controversial because its a perfectly legit admin tool with a really scary sounding name, and the fact that countless crackers use it. This is just another P2P tool, but these guys have a history of making waves, so it'll be interesting to see what happens.
hehe (Score:1)
This is gonna be great. (Score:1)
Re:I always hated (Score:1)
a combination of encryption... (Score:1)
Re:times of old (Score:1)
Re:A 2nd Internet? (Score:1)
In theory, you'd be able to use your web browser, P2P client, FTP client, Usenet client, IRC client -- everything -- in the encrypted space without modification. In practice, everything would be slow and unreliable, and possibly open to exploitation (Who gets what encrypted Internet address? How do you know what you're connecting to? Can someone break out of the encrypted network to the regular Internet through your connection and run attacks through your computer on it?) Still, is there anyone out there with more knowledge about whether or not a system like this is possible, feasible, or already in development?
BTW: cDc rocks. I'm a good deal more warped for having read most of their material.
reminds me crowd from AT&T research (Score:2)
This seems to be quite similar to crows.
Crowds is an idea from Michael Reiter and Avi Rubin at AT&T. The basic idea is to become anonymous by joining a crowd, and to pass browsing requests to a random member of your crowd. In effect, every member of the crowd runs a proxy server for the benefit of the eveyone else. Read all about it at AT&T crowd central [att.com].
acz [mailto]
I thought you just said gnutella didn't work (Score:2)
Re:potential problems in other nations (Score:1)
personal freedom for everyone but nazis?
personal freedom for everyone but jews?
anyone have any examples of countries that value their citizens' freedom as an example for french people to move to?
Re:potential problems in other nations (Score:2)
Peekabooty and tools like it, are the last defense for citizens against the thought police. Just because the French know how to make wine doesn't mean their government isn't as dangerous as the one in the USA, or the one in ROC, or the one in EEC, etc...
Re:potential problems in other nations (Score:2)
Hmm.
For what platforms? (Score:3)
Does Peekabooty run on Windows/MacOS/Linux/*BSD/BeOS/etc?
Is the source available? Can we port it quickly?
I'll be interested to see their launch of this tool at Defcon this year...
How does it compare to the alternatives? (Score:2)
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Internet2.. duh. (Score:1)
Sounds like no publisher anonymity (Score:2)
Some comparison with prior work please.....
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P2P Bandwagon (Score:2)
Good luck!
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there is a c++ version too (Score:2)
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you are right (Score:2)
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freenet's publicity lacking? (Score:2)
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Re: (Score:1)
Locating content still the crux of peer networks (Score:4)
There are already a number of secure information sharing networks, like Freenet, Publius, Anonymizer, etc, etc...
The problem with these networks, and probably a majority of the net is locating the content you want in the first place.
They do not mention any details on the discovery mechanism Peekabooty uses, so perhaps they have covered this base as well, but I doubt it.
Napster, which is great for locating content, is quickly dying a painfull death. Gnutella and Freenet, which are more legally resistant are no where near as effective at locating content.
Gnutella is especially inefficient at this task, so I hope Peekabooty is not modeled after the Gnutella style discovery method.
At any rate, I wish a lot of the focus of peer based projects would shift from simply being Peer to Peer!!! into specific implementations of peer based functionality, like resource discovery, content transfer, etc.
Great idea but in practice... (Score:3)
There was a paper written recently (http://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/doc/gnutella.html) that details why Gnutella cannot scale well.
Many users (such as myself) with nice fast connections have bandwidth limits per month after which we start to pay. The moment the cable|dsl bill comes in the mail, little Billy's parents will be cutting off the broadband.
It's a great idea, but in practice it's popularity may be it's downfall.
grubbywow. (Score:2)
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great infowar tactic (Score:5)
Currently, freenet's the 500lb gorilla of these. Crowds is cool. Hell, bolt some new host discovery tools on gnutella and use stunnel, that should be fun.
Currently the landscape has 3 variables. Encryption to hide what's being said, neat discovery protocols to hide who's serving, and transport protocols to hide who's requesting/recieving. Combined, the protocols can serve to counter traffic analysis attacks.
These things have already been thought out. It's some pretty nifty math. But all the implementations of this scheme have some fundamental weaknesses (theory/practice all over again).
The first is assuming that people will actually use them. I seriuosly doubt many people outside the geek, IP and gov community even know about freenet, crowds or such nifty things. If only a few people are using it, then they are automatically suspect, and can be attacked in other ways (tempest, wiretaps, room bugs), thus defeating the scheme.
The second is the number of apps/protocols doing this. Name 4 version 1.0, ready for prime time implementations that have been deployed widespread for consumer use...thought so. For a repressive gov or corp, it's like playing whack-a-mole with only 1 hole for the mole to pop out of.
This is where cDc comes in. The fact that the people who keep the closest eye on this kind of thing (us) heard about it from BBC says a lot. This is going to be all over the tv news. Everybody's going to know about this. Where freenet and crowds work on integrity and discovery of information, the mere idea that cDc is working on this increases the availability of the information to the defensive player. This is done through manipulation of open information sources. Brilliant.
As a result, the others who've been working on this for a while are going to become more motivated to work on their apps so that cDc doesn't steal their fire. How would you feel if you did all the basic research for this, spent years developing it, and then a bunch of drugged out, ascii art typin' wierdo's pulled the rug out from under you? I think cDc's app is going to make it so the whack-a-mole game is a whole lot more difficult. There will be more than one app/protocol simply because all the current projects will get more attention. For example: look at the current p2p landscape post napster smack-down. The other protocols are doing quite well. I would say to the effect that even though judge Patel ruled in favor of RIAA, p2p won. Thank you, RIAA, for enforcing a move away from cruft. Now we are more able to thwart you.
I don't know what cDc's app will be like, but I do know that as a platonic perfect object, it's going to be a resounding success by filling in a lot of the weaknesses of the practice of encrypted p2p. With Freenet and Crowds having worked out the theory.
Yay cDc!
Re:Freenet? (Score:2)
Re:Freenet? (Score:2)
Ideally, one project would make everyone happy. But then we see things like microsoft... We're still in the early phases of the current P2P architectures (note the word 'current' -- let's not forget the 70s here, people). Different people will create from different paradigms, for different needs (cDc P2P--control any computer from any other computer?). We'll eventually figure out the central blob of features we need in every case, and the add-ons that each group prefers, and all will be happy.
I would hope that the freenet folks learn from the approach of the cDc folks, and vice verse. I presume cDc will be open source, as freenet is, so there can be code sharing to reduce duplication of effort.
So yeah, I guess my answer is diversity of features, but with a hope that people won't be stupid about it (the wheel already exists, don't reinvent it!) and a goal of a standard set of protocols and tools/features.
I must agree with the skeptics (Score:2)
The usefullness of this tool in countries like the US isn't really clear. If this tool will successfully redirect ip addresses for "secure" e-commerce sites, it is a MAJOR point of concern for online retailers.
This could be the script kiddies saftey blanket for online fraud like "carding" and creation of fake accounts for everything from software to porn.
I will not be surprised when users sit up and say "Why doesn't this forum remember me?" The nature of the user that this software atracts, is the half educated kid that doesn't really get it
On the other hand, cDc and L0pht have always produced tools that force security experts to stop being lazy and get back to making truely secure systems for e-commerce and the like.
Dissenter
Re:Freenet? (Score:1)
Amh. How come? Another project will always create duplication of effort, meaning that if the coders had worked on one project instead of many, that one project would be better than any of those many projects. What are the benefits of additional projects? And don't say "diverse features" or something like that, that's bullshit, I see no reason why all the features couldn't be in one client, provided the architechture is versatile enough. And it should be.
-Kaatunut
Re:Freenet? (Score:1)
if anyone can do it (Score:2)
Re:potential problems in other nations (Score:2)
But no matter who gets it done right, the very concept of the tool is outstanding, because it gets right at the heart of the issue; do people have a right to privacy, or not? For the French and others, REAL P2P erodes their ability to say "We respect freedom of speech and thought... Except for X, which obviously has to be stopped."
But I bet the only way this thing resembles a "web browser" is in tunnelling everything through port 80 (and maybe 443). Now *that's* the way to hide in a crowd. I'm very interested in the technical details. They will actually have a lot to do with who uses it and how...
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Re:if anyone can do it (Score:2)
Peer 2 peer with built in h4X0ring trojan? (Score:1)
Sure you read the source...
Xix.
side notes (Score:2)
What will be nice to see is how governments and corporations will respond to this, concerning piracy, patent violations, the typical bullshit we've seen for the past few weeks.
Funny I posted this on my site [antioffline.com] days ago
Privacy links [antioffline.com]
World Free Web (Score:2)
1. World Free Web [sourceforge.net] - an attempt to connect browser caches to Freenet, creating a "backup web" that would be as anonymous and private as Freenet, but as easy to use as Mozilla.
2. FreeSQL [sourceforge.net] allows you to port your SQL-based apps to use Freenet as the underlying storage mechanism.
Re:times of old (Score:2)
Re:Sounds like no publisher anonymity (Score:1)
A new node every 3 minutes? How do you know that, considering the structure of the Freenet protocol? Is there a way of analysing the network, or are you just reading the node-list at octayne? If so, how many nodes are currently in operation?
Re:A 2nd Internet? (Score:2)
Distributed proxies and access to the web (Score:2)
The dailynews.yahoo.com link above is a good example, as it is likely that you couldn't easily visit it from a computer in China. To see what I am talking about, look at these:
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Punching Holes in Internet Walls, a New York Times article on various
attempts to circumvent access restrictions. (Here are the obligatory
partners [nytimes.com] and
channel [nytimes.com] links.)
- Beijing
Declares Victory But Chat Rooms Are Skeptical [nytimes.com], a New York Times article
providing background information on web discussion boards used and censored by
people in China. (Again, channel and partners [nytimes.com]
links.)
- www.realmapping.com [realmapping.com], (changing their
name to Quova), a company attempting to keep a database of IP addresses versus
geographic position. You can look at some technical information here. [realmapping.com]
What one gathers from the above articles is an on going tit-for-tat battle between the Communists (and other censorous governments, in conservative Islamic nations, etc) on one hand, versus the people of those nations, and those who would offer them information on the other. China and those other nations don't firewall based on the content of the data passing through; they just generally block connections to specific places, by DNS name and IP address. People found they could use a proxy service such as safeweb to get to the unfiltered Internet. Then the Communists found safeweb and blocked access to it. So safeweb started daily emailing out a new list of sites which were running the safeweb proxy, and the Communists would rush to block those and the safeweb folks would rush out new ones. Eventually the safeweb people came out with a way for any individual in the free part of the world to easily run a proxy that accepts connections and redirects you to safeweb, that is the Triangle Boy system. That's about the state of things now.A system or service like that described in the realmapping links might be used by gateway machines in China to broadly filter all sites outside the country, except for perhaps a select few. This is a real threat to the safety of the world. If Chinese grandmothers and high school students could easily and regularly read anything on the web, then China is much less likely to end up in a war with us or with Taiwan. The Chinese are not going to like America more or agree with our positions because they can read the propaganda and claptrap that our press spews out every day, but they will have a different sense of perspective (perhaps more cynical) and they will be less likely to get into a froth about some spy-boys getting a little rough with airplanes. I'm not going to get into the philosophy of it all, but suffice to say that I think that the more the people of the world can see and hear of each other, the safer the world will be. The Truth Shall Set You Free.
A system like Triangle boy [safeweb.com], which is a network of proxies run by volunteers to enable you to connect to safeweb [safeweb.com], is what we really need to solve this Internet filtering in foreign countries. An easier to use freenet/ gnutella from l0pft will be very exciting of course, but I think it may not be the right solution for the Communist censorship problem.
For a gnutella/freenet to have effect on the Chinese student who wants to read a New York Times article, it has to be undetectable by the Communist Firewall (because the Communists might decide to block all encrypted traffic, or find the student himself) and it depends upon someone in the free part of the world running a script to dump www.nytimes.com over into the gnutella/freenet system every day. I believe it would be much better to set up something like Triangle Boy but without the single point of failure of the central safeweb service, and doing something to hide and disguise the web page requests and content.
That's really hard to do. If you settle for a distributed system that doesn't hide and disguise the traffic, then you run the risk that the Communists will simply block all encrypted traffic or start trying to track down and harass individuals inside their country. Maybe you can depend on the difficulty of running that type of firewall on a whole country, and the fact so many people will use it even the Communists won't be able to throw them all in jail. Maybe you can also set up clever proxy and client combinations that hide their real traffic in the meta tags and comments of innocent looking web pages, or use other steganographic techniques, but you would have to be constantly upgrading them against Communist detection.
By getting rid of the central safeweb point, you also avoid any censorship due to cooperation from publishers on the free side of the firewall. This would have the effect of making it impossible for Yahoo to not display Nazi stuff to France, because they couldn't tell who was from France. This would make the IP ban that occurs after you modded down 5 times in 24 hours also useless. Yahoo and the French, the Communists, and Rob Malda will all have to come to the realization that anything they put on the Internet is on the Internet for everyone, no discrimination.
That day cannot come too soon. We need to get to work.
a vague reason (Score:1)
You're right: this is terrible grammar. Ordinarily, a group / company / country should be taken as singular.
So, Microsoft is planning world domination, as opposed to Microsoft are etc.
The second should have a possesive apostrophe: blah blah at this year's Defcon.
However. In spoken UK English, at least in London, you are more likely to say "A group of hackers are developing" than "is developing" because it allows you to roll the "are" sound into the end of "hackers" to make a "hack-erz-a" sound. The grammar rules have yet to catch up with modern speech, and many journos try to write as it they were speaking. It tends to read better that way, y'know?
Still, if they dropped the "A group of" then the singular verb would be correct. As it stands, the to-be verb should correspond to the primary noun which is "A group", and not "hackers".
/pedant
This is important... (Score:3)
CDC? (Score:2)
That's funny, I thought the CDC [cdc.gov] was more interested in wiping out Ebola and AIDS...
Of course, it could always be (successfully) argued that governments ARE, in fact, a disease...
Hmm...
Zaphod B
Re:if anyone can do it (Score:2)
Back that statement up. If you're going to make such a claim it requires an argument.
Anyone who provides tools to other people that help enforce their privacy from people who might wish to take it away can be considered freedom fighters in my book, and I'm sure most /. users books.
Rich...
Re:if anyone can do it (Score:1)
> > "freedom fighters" has more freedom than sense.
> Back that statement up. If you're going to make such a claim it
> requires an argument.
Well, if programmers are "freedom fighters" does that mean the revolution's over when the power fails?
Re:times of old (Score:1)
Re:A suprise would have been better (Score:1)
Moderation totals (Score:2)
Moderations Totals for CmdrTaco: Troll -5
Re:a vague reason (Score:1)
Intel are/is would not be misunderstood by anyone
forest is a collective noun replacing a plural for a singluar
Intel is both a group of individuals and a corporate entitity hence the difference
Re:Freenet? (Score:1)
We really don't need anymore code that tries to implement yet another anonymous, decentralized peer to peer network and comes up a little short of its potential.
What we really need is a good specification written in nice plain english.
Re:A 2nd Internet? (Score:4)
Re:crowds? (Score:1)
Whee, another relaying scheme. No seriously, I don't see why anyone would host potentially (more like probably) illegal connections for someone else. In the end someone has to pass the request to the destination server.
And the argument that - "If suspected of originating these requests, simply explain that you were participating in a crowd (regardless of whether you were or not!)" is hardly going to make any difference in a court, or against an ISPs terms of service agreement.
times of old (Score:5)
Re:P2P Bandwagon (Score:3)
Just think about the possibilities! This could be as big as Push technology and Portal sites!
Re:Is this the BBC? (Score:2)
/Brian
client or server (Score:1)
Re:A 2nd Internet? (Score:1)
Re:wow. (Score:1)
The way I read it, if the information you want isn't on the network a computer with more freedom will go and get it for you.
I'm curious as to how the communication works on a lower level. For example, if I'm behind a firewall that blocks almost all traffic that isn't going to a certain address (Bess), will this thing do me any good?
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"Great minds run in great circles." -fortune
A 2nd Internet? (Score:4)
One that would be much harder to filter ... and harder to regulate ...?
I could see this doing wonders for many large countries like China ...
makes you wonder
another hacking tool...open your eyes security (Score:1)
possible uses for this software include credit card fraud ("carding")...ok thats all i can think of...but that makes carding on any site completely safe. trace all you want. you cant go through 6 different home computers in time.
______
Re:Malda's double-standard.. (Score:1)
I assume cDc did the same thing but with p2p:
First an encrypted request is sent out, a certain number of users take the job of routing it. the person on the far end begins download and encryption. then the data passes downstream to the enduser. (the person who requested the html file in the first place.)
For any reason you might want to be anonymous, you could use this program. carding (credit card fraud), spam, useful for hacking maybe, i dunno, but basicly this is for withholding your IP for any reason.
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Re:Malda's double-standard..BO remote admin??? (Score:1)
this is just a hack of microsoft's BackOffice Remote administration tool! they took that program and made it into an embryonic trojan. any smart 13 year old script kiddie could slap that into another program without blinking twice. please show me your legit uses of this program, because im straining to see the light. damn optimists.
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Re:Great idea but in practice... (Score:1)
In my case, my cable modem downloads are 'unlimited' but if you exceed a 500MB upload in a single day (pretty tough to do, since they limit upload speed to 256kbps), they get TOS on your ass. I suspect that there's some point in the download that they'd decide you're abusing the system, but it's theoretically unrestricted. I wasn't aware that any cable companies were charging extra for bytes above some limit. I thought they just threatened to cut off your service.
Re:wow. (Score:1)
It presumably won't allow you to discover on what server the information resides. At least, that's how it sounds from the description in the article.
Re:I thought you just said gnutella didn't work (Score:1)
The way the article phrased it was, "Peekabooty will work like the Gnutella peer-to-peer network that has no central server." So the only stated resemblance to Gnutella lies in the lack of a Napster-like central server.The underlying implementation could be (and probably is) completely different. cDc must be aware of Gnutella's problems and presumably wouldn't be bothering to do this if it wasn't going to end up beng usable.
Re:a vague reason (Score:1)
Re:Interesting side-effect! (Score:1)
While I don't use Gnutella (and agree with you that it's questionable to try and cook up a legitimate use), I could see it being used for something like movie trailers, where it's more or less freely redistributable, but the server serving it could easily get Slashdotted as ever geek with DSL (and even some stubborn ones with modems) rushes over to see what the Matrix 2 is going to look like.
Re:Interesting side-effect! (Score:2)
If you've had the software around as long as Gnutella's been around and you're still trying to come up with a legitimate use for it, it's my opinion that you've already lost.
This could be like Crowds... (Score:3)
1) Strong encryption, ideally masquerading as SSL, to stop it being too easily blockable. Or better sill, MSN Messenger format messages.
2) Open source, and availiable on all platforms.
3) Something to allow all your HTTP traffic to be routed through the same machine for one session, so it is possible to access sites like Hotmail that forward you about a lot, and check your IP address.
4) More cow pictures.
Michael
Re:side notes (Score:1)
For really totalitarian governments this is easy to predict:
There will be a severe punishment for using these tools or encryption. Think about the third reich. Anyone caught listening to enemy radio stations was *severely* punished, up to the death penalty. Also, letters were censored. If you had somethiong written in obviuous code (encrypted), there would have been severe punishments as well. So, all you can transfer per letter is a few bits. For example, if my father had ever written a letter to my aunt where the date were underlined, this would have been very bad news. The argument is fairly simple: You only need to hide things when you are doing illegal stuff. People doing illegal stuff should be punished.
I would guess that it is much easier for the government to find out whether you are participating in encrypted/PeekAFoo/Gnutella Internet usage than whether you are passively listening to the "wrong" radio station. Therefore, I guess these things are not very effective in a totalitarian state.
Off course, the government will let things through it likes. For example, my father could read all the science magazines from the allied powers, so that he could build even better killing machines for the Gröfaz (Hitler). They came in via spain.
Not a good thing (Score:3)
Re:if anyone can do it (Score:1)
They've got great hackers/coders, and a great publicity engine.
They've got great publicity for sure, however I'm not so sure about the "great hackers". This instance of a "coming soon!" application sounds notoriously trivial (would any programmers out there who think writing a P2P encrypted system is difficult please raise your hands...okay please step out of the career because you're woefully underskilled), though I respect that they are doing it. BackOrifice, while still a notorious trojan that is responsible for a lot of neophyte computer users getting fuxored, did show Microsoft to be very hypocritical regarding SMS when they canned BO.
Re:A 2nd Internet? (Score:3)
>using technology like gnutella over the current Internet?
In theory, yes; the problem is those last four words, "over the current Internet." If you want to get data to China, but China happens to be blocking packets which originated anywhere outside of China, good luck. It wouldn't matter what program, protocol, or network was involved; your data wouldn't make it.
Peekabooty looks like a good idea, and because China isn't yet at the point of blocking all foreign data, it's probably going to be effective. But I wouldn't be surprised to see some countries (I'm trying hard not to pick on China here; many middle east nations also filter net access) implement a cutoff from the "harmful outside world."
cDc's stuff is always useful and fun to play with - I don't think Peekabooty will let us down.
Shaun
Re:Locating content still the crux of peer network (Score:1)
Good points. Of course, these are the core problems of any network implementation. I'd say that, as an industry and as a science, we've done a poor job at developing robust discovery solutions that are both useful and resistant to degradation -- degredation due to malfunction, overloading, or black hat mischief.
This is another example of a situation where the availability of a flawed but usable solution creates de facto standards that are barriers to better solutions as they appear, and are disincentives to those who might invest effort to develop those better solutions.
JMHO - Trevor
Re:A 2nd Internet? (Score:1)
Also remember that leaks are not always network leaks. No matter how good the network blocking, no computer network will ever be able to stop someone from charging across a border with a backpack full of CD-Rs. (For that matter, how about a small, cheap unmanned glider plane with a CD-R or two inside?) And then, as you have pointed out, the data is inside and can be spread anonymously. The two ways to combat this are:
Which option do you think is more sane? Now which option do you think most governments will choose? And this can happen to any country, not just the totalitarian ones. One has to wonder if someday in the US there will be a war on information like the current war on drugs. The US is still one of the most free places on earth. But the trend is rather disturbing.
Re:Is this the BBC? (Score:1)
Article about anonymous p2p difficulties (Score:2)
Re:A 2nd Internet? (Score:1)
I mean, i didnt know the first years of the internet. When only universities were using it. When all the commercial stuff was more or less out of it. But as far as i know it i think it must have been great. So why not building a new one? Perhaps every 20 years or so, when the old one is fucked up, just create an internet[n+1]
Re:a combination of encryption... (Score:1)
Dont underestimate this.
And the arent bad at making nice GUIs, which is important too if a piece of software wants to get accepted. (hmm.. strange why napster was accepted, IMO
Platy
Re:Interesting side-effect! (Score:1)
~
Interesting side-effect! (Score:5)
- an ISP can't possibly feel itself justified in shutting down anyone shoving gigabits through the Gnutella port (you've already heard about this probably...), and
- so the Government can't try to stop Gnutella (company?) from distributing Gnutella software (it wouldn't matter if it did: Gnutella's already out there and since it's P2P the government can't do anything to get gnutella company to shut down the service, but:)
- Or worse, to try to go after the users and to make it illegal to use gnutella! (Which isn't so farfetched...)
The government or RIAA can say today, "Look, there's no justification for using gnutella since it's basically only used for piracy, so anyone that's shoving data over it has every reason to be denied that right."But if we could say: "Uh, actually, it's just a distributed internet surfing system with encryption, which also happens to work as file-sharing as part of its distribution scheme, since it doesn't differentiate between html documents and binary documents, which isn't a meaningful distinction anyway since you can MIME encode anything into html if you want,"
THEN the government will be forced to say: "well hot-damn. We can't have ISPs shutting down distributed information sharing, which is the only thing WEB-SURFING can be construed as, since it would be a denial of freedom of speech (denial of right to know. Freeedom of speech, although IANAL, only is a meaningful right as long as those who want to listen to you have the right to listen to you.)
There's little the Government or any ISP could say against "It must be encrypted so that the information becomes available to users under a totalitarian regime. It must be distributed so that that regime cannot shut down a web server and cause the source of the information to cease."
The upshot: the government, your ISP, the RIAA, etc, etc, will have NO way of keeping the ENCRYPTED, DISTRIBUTED, "stuff" that you share from happening to be pirated. They can shut down Gnutella of today to some extent by making the software illegal to own, since they would be fairly justified in saying that it is used almost exclusively for illegal purposes. If you started doing web surfing over it, there is no such argument.
For this reason alone, all of us should start doing all of our surfing through this new system as soon as it's featurey enough.
Besides, at the very least, if we started doing that, then whatever we do websurf will be hidden from our ISP by being encrypted, and documents will probably come over much faster under a distributed system. Well, static documents would at least. Maybe this system would also serve to route you around faster, mimicking IPV6, so we could still do better to use it than surf straight. There's no limit to how much good we could get from doing all of our surfing through a distributed, encrypted system, and since the fact that it would make piracy easy is an inherent but small side-effect, it would mean that no one could stop it.
Long Live the Freeedom to Rip Artists Off!
(Which I happen to disagree with, but to a far less extent than I do with the RIAA's trying to force us not to share our files. If artists included an address to send money to in the extended descriptions fields of their MP3's [yes, artists should distribute their own mp3s], I know that I for one would take advantage of it and give them their due. As it is, it's far too much trouble and far too much of what I would pay would go straight to the record industry's pocket. That reminds me of a joke [netfunny.com], which is actually a good analogy for why we share name-brand artists instead of no-name artists, even though name-brand artists are being whored out by the record industry.)
~
Re:wow. (Score:1)
Re:times of old (Score:3)
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Encryption in BO2K (Score:2)
Bow to the Cow, baby! (Score:1)
Ther harder you try and conform people to a standard the more they will nonconform.
You take away thier books, they will write there stories in the streets.
You take thier pens and paint, and they will write there stories in thier music.
You take thier voices and they will write there stories with thier blood.
This will never stop, as it is the natural order of things.
RA7
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Re:How can you people do this? (Score:1)
You're a liar. If you really protected artists they wouldn't be so thoroughly exploited by corporations-subsidized by your policies I might add. Copyright law is for business', not artists.
and you guys come along and simply slap up circumvention devices like there never was a problem.
There wasn't a problem until greedy morons like Bill Gates came along and made the Internet a commercial battleground. A battleground where your government gives money and infrastructure to businesses like Microsoft so they may succeed in this endeavor and control the entire Internet much like they already control the 'computers-sold' market worldwide. It's all about the market.
Why don't you government wogs ever give millions to artists every year? Answer: they don't pay for your campaigns.
Tell me this Smart arses:
BTW, impersonating a government official is a federal and international crime.
How do you think my corporate benefactors are going to treat me now that you've (in theory) stepped straight around the provisions in my new laws?? Don't you realize I'm going to have to send some Australians to jail for five years once they use this now illegal circumvention device.
That's right. Use the Internet and you could go to jail. Didn't take long for the powers that be to threaten the Net using public at large. How about this? You go to jail for misuse of the peoples funds and are banded from public service for being a brainless jerk!
______
jeff13
Re:A 2nd Internet? (Score:1)
Bravo cDc! (Score:1)
Demand liberty. Always
viva la revolucion (Score:1)
BO a legit admin tool? (Score:1)
Re:BO a legit admin tool? (Score:1)
Re:BO a legit admin tool? (Score:1)
"Sure, the functionality it provides IS useful, but you can't call a program which DELIBERATLY hides itself from users a "legit admin tool". It's a trojan, and it was meant to be a trojan."
BO2K does everything that MS System Management Server does, including the "stealth" option.
BO2K costs nothing and is Open Source. MS SMS costs about US$1500 or thereabouts, and is, of course, closed and propriatary.
SMS can be trojaned just as easily as BO2K.
Does that therefore make SMS a trojan or a legit administration tool?
Beleive me, if BO2K was released by Symantec or MacAfee or even MS, there would be none of this BS about BO2K being a trojan.
Re:if anyone can do it Yeah! (Score:1)
Re:BO a legit admin tool? (Score:1)
If I'm not mistaken, Microsoft's Back Office has the exact same feature to 'hide' itself from users. So does this mean it's not a "legit admin tool" either?
Re:if anyone can do it (Score:1)
They will be (and are) fought by analysts and diplomats:
Side A: "Our intelligence says you require this much power to keep your hospitals running. Either you release those prisoners or we launch these ICBMs pointed at these power stations"
Side B: "And? WHo says we didn't plant that intelligence? We anticipated your move, and have tripled military power output and redirected it to potential targets"
Side A: "Damn!"
Re:A 2nd Internet? (Score:1)
crowds? (Score:4)
jobs for the cDc abound (Score:1)
Re:jobs for the cDc abound (Score:1)
potential problems in other nations (Score:1)
Freenet? (Score:2)