i can't post this under the news section... sorry, says i don't got permission :P
Program Lets P2P Users Roam Free
02:00 AM May. 06, 2003 PT
A new "cloaking" application that protects individuals from network snooping is making the rounds among file traders, marking the latest salvo in the increasingly volatile battle between music labels and file traders.
Free software called PeerGuardian creates a personal firewall that blocks the IP addresses of snoops. They can see the names of files being traded, but they can't download the file to tell whether it's a copyrighted file.
The application, under development since late last year, comes to the fore at a precarious time for those using peer networks.
The recording industry has long said it would never target consumers with copyright infringement lawsuits, but that is no longer true. On April 25 when Judge Stephen Wilson of the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles ruled that a decentralized network such as Gnutella couldn't be held liable for any infringement occurring on its system, he paved the way for the music industry filing suits against consumers.
Music labels promptly launched a campaign that sent instant messages to 200,000 people warning them that they could be subject to prosecution for swapping unauthorized songs. Previously the Recording Industry Association of America had also filed massive infringement lawsuits against four college students, each of whom agreed last week to pay between $12,000 and $17,500 rather than face a lengthy trial.
"Top-level users want this application to keep out connections from outside sources, particularly after the recent judgment that decentralized systems are legal," said Jorge Gonzalez, founder of Zeropaid, a peer-to-peer developer site. "Users now have to think about defending themselves against attacks from companies coming after users."
The industry, though, isn?t relying solely on the legal system to clamp down on file swapping.
This past weekend, reports began surfacing that the five major record labels have been backing the testing of technologies that would stop people trying to trade music by freezing up PCs and deleting MP3s directly off hard drives.
PeerGuardian would help rein in such actions. The application currently blocks more than four million IP addresses, and users can continually update that list, according to Tim Leonard, the 23-year-old English developer behind the software.
Leonard decided to create PeerGuardian after Audiogalaxy, a popular file-trading service, shut down in June to avoid litigation from the RIAA.
"I was determined to do something in revenge, but something legal," he said. "I guess PeerGuardian is the closest I've come so far."
Among those companies blocked: the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Warner Music Group and network monitoring company BayTSP.
The software, though, doesn't provide complete protection for individuals, said Travis Hill, BayTSP's director of engineering. PeerGuardian's weakness stems from the fact that users must continually update the list of IP addresses that are blocked. As a result, network security companies like BayTSP can find holes in the PeerGuardian system.
"If they had documented one of our IP addresses correctly, which in this case is still a pretty big if, then we'd spill over through our (other IP addresses)," Hill wrote in an instant message.
Despite its shortcomings, the PeerGuardian software starts a new cat-and-mouse game between networks watchers and individual traders.
The next step for programmers working on cloaking programs is to obtain the IP addresses of security companies before they attack, said Leonard.
The real trouble for media companies, though, could come if file-sharing networks begin to integrate personal firewall applications into their latest versions and create auto-updates, said David Weekly, a computer programmer who came to prominence for reverse-engineering the Napster software.
"If you built PeerGuardian into a next-generation Kazaa, for instance, everyone in the network could be blocking the RIAA," Weekly said.
But that's not likely to happen any time soon, since the underlying technology behind firewall programs often breaks applications like e-mail and browser functionality, according to representatives from Sharman Networks, which distributes the Kazaa file-sharing software.
"The problem of adding firewalls to the application are the same as adding any filter," said spokeswoman Kelly Larabee. "It may not stop 'enemy' spamming, as parties will unlikely spam from their known IP range."
More importantly, such software can also block advertising pop-ups, according to Leonard, and pop-ups are the financial backbone of peer network businesses like Sharman Networks.
That doesn't mean file-traders will be left without protections from the RIAA and others. Instead, Larabee said, next-generation peer networks will likely include collaborative reputation systems, much like the eBay forum where buyers can rate the trustworthiness of sellers.
These systems would let users rate their experiences with other traders. Someone who only downloads files without ever offering uploads, for example, might receive poor ratings. People who send an inordinate number of instant messages could also be flagged.
Individuals could then block out those individuals who garner poor ratings, a category that would likely include snoopers who download massive amounts of music or fire off thousands of instant messages.
"Conventional thinking seems to be that collaborative reputation systems, where the users establish what is good and what is bad, are the way to go moving forward," Larabee said.
source:
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,58734,00.html
more info on PeerGardian:
http://xs.tech.nu/
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tim.leonard1/pg/index.htm
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