p2pnet.net News:- Think of the power of Kazaa (back when it was a genuine indie p2p app) and Gnutella without the ability for them to be interfered with, or even eavesdropped on. Encrypted communications, private network meshes and the ability to collaborate and message as well as transfer files.

WASTE would have to be pretty close to what you’d come up with.

WASTE provides a way for you to create secure ad hoc p2p mesh networks with little technical setup and iron clad communications via link level Blowfish encryption and authentication via RSA public key cryptography. It allows secure instant messaging, group chat, file sharing, browsing and transfer. Everything you need to get some substantive work done, not to mention students or corporate techies just needing to communicate without interference.

From the software itself, “WASTE is a tool that is designed to permit secure distributed collaboration and communications for small trusted groups of users.”

And it’s back – resurrected like Lazarus in January – even after the assembled might of AOL tried to shut it down.

This is how it was: Jonathan Frankel, the coding wunderkind, grunge poster child and “Benevolent Dictator” of Nullsoft, acquired in 1999, was behind its wildly popular free music player WinAMP (because it “really whips the llama’s ass”). For an encore, he came up with Gnutella the p2p network of choice for quite some time. AOL ordered him to kill of the project so he came up with something even better.

In a flurry of coding as artistic self expression and self-respecting hacker protest, he came up with WASTE. He GPLed it, put it online, sat back – and watched the fur fly.

WASTE was an instant hit. Downloaded, dissected and analyzed across the Internet, all reports were favourable. AOL was not, however, amused, claiming it its intellectual property rights were being infringed, shut down the site, chastised Frankel and posted an online page demanding that all code downloaded from the site should be destroyed because of IP violations. Frankel left AOL over the whole issue. You have to respect the guy.

But they were too late. WASTE was out in the wild, as well as example clients for windows and limited servers for BSD and OSX. It was only a short amount of time until the project re-emerged, re-implemented on sourceforge. Already a Mac OSX version 1.0 has been ported and has been available for download since September of last year. WASTE 1.4 alpha 3 hit the air April 15th. New documentation was added soon after that and 1.4 is shaping up nicely with new features.

Why call it WASTE ? Yet another nod to coolness.

WASTE is taken from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 where WASTE is a renegade underground postal system operating in plain sight of the status quo undetected. The acronym itself is “We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire.” Even the horn on a stamp icon used in the application is a nod to the stamps used by WASTE in the Pynchon story.

Defiant yells from the underground are all over the program, making you wonder whether software can’t be reclassified as the new legitimate form of popular dissent. Even the port WASTE uses for communications is a slap in the face of a growing repressiveness in the corporate monoculture. Port 1337 is hacker do0D speak for “Leet” or elite. An awful lot of subtext for a piece of software.

While the project hasn’t produced a huge volume of code lately, the authors state “We have been experimenting with technologies to create a more feature rich program instead of releasing betas.”

Even now, the WASTE clients to date are eminently usable and are providing even non-technical users who understand the basic concepts a way to create secure mesh P2P networks. There’s a clear wizard for key creation and a simple interface for connecting and interacting with the other members of your mesh. Version 1.4 promises even more features. If you’re worried too much bandwidth might give away file trading activities you can even throttle down the bandwidth to make your traffic indistinguishable from normal encrypted network traffic.

Students that have been beaten over the head by the RIAA and university administrators are now creating darknets – encrypted file sharing mesh network between themselves. Because the communications are secure, no one can tell what sort of files they’re trading, or even if it is files they’re trading even if they are RIAA or DMCA bloodhounds. But that’s not where WASTE’s true value lies.

The real potential is for activist groups, not-for-profits and people who need privacy in a world becoming increasingly more hostile to their activities. Like Zimmerman’s PGP before it, WASTE is another example of one of those empowering grassroots tools which provides a direct affirmation of personal freedoms, rights and the sanctity of individual privacy: a simple way for the technically unsophisticated to self-service ad hoc secure networks without a huge IT overhead and expensive hardware or software.

Activists can collaborate online in a secure manner in real time without fear of eavesdropping. WASTE is a holy grail for a number of organizations working hard to trying and make things better for everyone.

Make security transparent and easy to use, and everyone will be using it.

In a modern atmosphere that’ is growing increasingly hostile to individual privacy and tending towards the criminalization of legitimate dissent and protest, WASTE has the potential to be the next tool that levels the playing field for individuals and activists alike.

Want to get started ? You can download the latest binaries for Windows and Mac OSX or take a look at the source from sourceforge. A great documentation guide – in case you have trouble with WASTE – is also available from hummus and pita.

---

Daryl Manning is an enthusiastic activitist who recently moved back to Canada from France and who’s worked with Greenpeace International.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 24th, 2004 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 12409 times