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."
Talkback
Quote: Our investigators are well-versed in what these technologies do and how they work
But they would say that wouldn't they?!
Couple the encryption system with proxy chains and you make it all the more difficult to track the individuals.
I live in "Rip Off" Britain, where we pay a ridiculous premium for music and movies, considering the manufacturing costs. It took a concerted effort on the part of the consumers to reduce new car prices, so why shouldn't the music/film industry suffer the same wrath?
Until the prices are reduced to a realistic level, people will continue to download music from P2P networks.
From talking to others about this issue, there seems to be an increasing trend in using P2P downloads to simply try before you buy. If you are serious about your music, an mp3 encoded at 128bit is far inferior to the quality of a true digital recording. I listen to classical music and have downloaded a lot of pieces via P2P. If I like the composer and performance, I delete the download and purchase the original because I prefer the high quality!
P2P is dead as is warez sites but there's lots of ways to "file swap" it's just that swapers are now more careful about how their doing it and who they tell how it's being done.