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Anonymous, Open Source P2P with MUTE (O'ReillyNet)
O'ReillyNet looks at
MUTE, an open-source P2P application. "[Jason] Rohrer, a
26-year-old programmer from Potsdam, New York, found inspiration in the way
ants stream toward a food source. From observing the creatures' behavior,
he mapped out a networking method that functions similarly -- essentially,
a shared file is the food source, and clients on the network are the ants
seeking the food. He then wrote his own P2P program putting this theory to
practice and christened it MUTE. Developed entirely in C++ and released as
open source, the program runs on Linux, Win32, and Mac OS X."
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Anonymous, Open Source P2P with MUTE (O'ReillyNet) Posted Aug 13, 2004 21:11 UTC (Fri) by ccchips (guest, #3222) [Link] In related news, the United States Congress is considering a bill to outlaw ant colonies.
Anonymous, Open Source P2P with MUTE (O'ReillyNet) Posted Aug 13, 2004 21:37 UTC (Fri) by bilateralrope (guest, #23986) [Link] Since he is in the US, and he admits that this was desigened to break the law , I wonder how long before he gets sued ?
And, will he be made to pay for the copyright infringements of the users of MUTE ?
Anonymous, Open Source P2P with MUTE (O'ReillyNet) Posted Aug 13, 2004 22:19 UTC (Fri) by AJWM (subscriber, #15888) [Link] and he admits that this was desigened to break the lawWhoa, where did you read that? He says nothing of the sort. There are plenty of legitimate uses for P2P (for one, he mentions using MUTE for chat). This was designed as a research project, to apply the behaviour of ants to message passing (be those messages chat info or files) on the internet. Would you say Xerox copiers were designed to break the law?
Anonymous, Open Source P2P with MUTE (O'ReillyNet) Posted Aug 14, 2004 2:02 UTC (Sat) by bilateralrope (guest, #23986) [Link] <<Sure, many other P2P developers and companies blatantly lie about what their software is for, but I refuse to lie.>>
And i can't think of a legal use for anonymous p2p. Sure, i use bittorrent for some file downloads and direct connect for chatting on a lan, but neither of those make any attempt to hide your ip address.
Anonymous, Open Source P2P with MUTE (O'ReillyNet) Posted Aug 14, 2004 4:18 UTC (Sat) by lacostej (subscriber, #2760) [Link] So just because you don't see a legal use for anonymous P2P, it is illegal to make a program that allows it?There are many countries where using Internet is not authorized. Anything that protects the users from the too restrictive governments is good in those. And if P2P becomes a major way of trading free stuff on the Internet, why should we be forced to reveal our identities? For one I don't trust the surrounding world for not trying to catalog us as well as possible in order to bug us with this and that product. Stop with the idea that because one would prefer to remain anonymous, that they have something to hide. They might just want some privacy. That's the same reason I will avoid USA as much as I can, because of the way they treat tourists like potential wrongdoers, taking their fingerprints as first welcome step. Thank you, but there is a much lower rate of death by guns in many democraties outside of the USA.
Anonymous, Open Source P2P with MUTE (O'ReillyNet) Posted Aug 14, 2004 6:40 UTC (Sat) by bilateralrope (guest, #23986) [Link] I think i see your point for the use of p2p programs, but i doubt that i will ever make any legal use of MUTE as i have no problem with my ip being visible for legal purposes.
Recently I heard of a university who wrote a program that made it eaiser to see what people were sharing over a university lan (they shared through windows file sharing). As a large portion of the files he catologed were of mp3s, the riaa sued him and took all the money he had because he couldn't afford to fight the lawsuit. I am a bit skecthy on the actual deatiles of this though. Because of this, I can see the riaa comming at him with a lawsuit of some kind.
As i have never been to the US, I can see that i may be mistaken on this, I will just have to wait and see what happens.
Anonymous, Open Source P2P with MUTE (O'ReillyNet) Posted Aug 14, 2004 20:35 UTC (Sat) by msmelov (guest, #11243) [Link] yet you use bittorrent...is everything you download legal? Is it legal, but seem questionable? Like TV Shows with commercials cut out. If everyone did that there would be no shows. I honestly don't know the legality of the issue. So I myself would not want to download those shows using bittorrent as my IP is revealed to my peers. Suprnova is very popular and may soon be under the eye of the RIAA, if it isn't already. In which case they can connect to a torrent themselves, and extract IPs by the handful.
Some one at my old university had a simple interface to the campus windows/samba network. There were a few actually. One got sued because he had a gui program atop the interface to the database, he basically had to settle for the ~$12K USD that he had. He then had to take out a loan to pay for his last year. The ones with web interfaces were told to cease and desist. They now switched to a forum where people post what they want to share.
With your IP out in the clear, you take a big risk.
Anonymous, Open Source P2P with MUTE (O'ReillyNet) Posted Aug 15, 2004 2:34 UTC (Sun) by bilateralrope (guest, #23986) [Link] As i have not heard of the riaa going after anyone outside of the US, and that the riaa has only gone after the people who were sharing large ammounts, i believe myself to get not much more than a warning for the first time.
I have heard of people recieving letters from their isp's about them sharing vairous content through bittorrent, but that is all.
I also believe that the sites that list the torrents (like suprnova) will get into trouble before the end users do.
Anonymous, Open Source P2P with MUTE (O'ReillyNet) Posted Aug 16, 2004 12:07 UTC (Mon) by arafel (subscriber, #18557) [Link] I'm intrigued - on what basis did they sue him, exactly? Writing a program to catalogue the contents of shares isn't a violation of *anything*, as far as I know.
Anonymous, Open Source P2P with MUTE (O'ReillyNet) Posted Aug 16, 2004 14:36 UTC (Mon) by msmelov (guest, #11243) [Link] Do you really need to violate anything to be sued?The point is that you can't afford to defend yourself, so you settle and comply with their demands.
Anonymous, Open Source P2P with MUTE (O'ReillyNet) Posted Aug 16, 2004 15:03 UTC (Mon) by arafel (subscriber, #18557) [Link] If it's blatantly obvious that they don't have any basis to sue you on, how long would it take the case to get thrown out of court?
Break the law? Posted Aug 13, 2004 23:09 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] What? Is it now illegal to write code? I'm sure Dr Touretzky would appreciate this way of thinking: DeCSS has been held to be illegal since it was "designed to break the law". Yet nobody in their right minds can expect Jon Johanssen to pay for the millions of transgressions happening every day -- essentially, every time someone plays a DVD on a Linux computer. Touretzky and others have been brave enough to keep distribution sites up even on the face of legal threats.Sometimes groups of people use the law to limit others' rights; sometimes the law itself is unjust; but you should always have the right to speak (or code) what is on your mind.
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