Ants inspire P2P concealment
Published: 25 Feb 2004 15:40 GMT
Jason Rohrer was battling an insect invasion last year when he hit on an idea that he hoped would help file-swappers hide from the copyright police.
As ants marched with impunity through the home of the programmer, frustration turned to inspiration and Mute was born. The program, which seeks to hide the source of downloads by passing files between computers along twisting pathways, is gaining attention as an interesting solution to file-swapping's hottest problem: privacy.
"If you're going to be anonymous, you cannot use direct connections," Rohrer said.
Rohrer isn't alone in developing peer-to-peer privacy tools. In the past six months, the quest for anonymity on file-swapping networks has become the equivalent of a technological holy grail, thanks to a wave of lawsuits filed against individual file swappers by the Recording Industry Association of America.
So far, the RIAA, tracing digital fingerprints back to individual names, has sued almost 1,500 people who it claims stole music over file-swapping networks.
Peer-to-peer network developers have been working on improving privacy ever since Napster was first targeted by a skittish record industry, but the results have been decidedly imperfect.
That's because most peer-to-peer systems require some degree of openness to work at all. In order to download a song from another computer online, a file-swapper's computer must make some kind of connection to it. That leaves a digital record that can be traced back to a person's Internet service provider, and from there to the account holder.
At the very least, adding anonymity to peer-to-peer systems involves a trade-off in efficiency, creating performance headaches that bring a network to its knees. Some security experts go further, arguing that privacy is impossible to achieve in a peer-to-peer network, given that the technology requires creating direct connections between computers.
"The bottom line is that you just can't be anonymous on the Internet if you're going to have some kind of peer transaction," said Mark Ishikawa, chief executive officer of BayTSP, a company that tracks and identifies file swappers for music labels and Hollywood studios. "There is this myth that you can be anonymous. You can hide, but we can get you."
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