ANts: share files in safety
p2pnet.net News:- “ANts P2P realizes a third generation P2P net. It protects your privacy while you are connected and makes you not trackable, hiding your identity (ip) and crypting everything you are sending/receiving from others.”
That’s the promise of Roberto Rossi’s ANts.
Italy’s Rossi told us he came up with it because of his interest in ad-hoc networking/swarm intelligence systems.
ANts features:
- Open Source Java implementation (GNU-GPL license).
- Multiple sources download.
- Torrent download from partial files.
- Automatic resume and sources research over the net.
- Search by hash, string and structured query.
- Embedded support for etherogeneus data types (not only arrays of bytes…).
- Completely Object-Oriented routing protocol.
- Point to Point secured comunication: DH(512)-AES(128)
- EndPoint to EndPoint secured comunication: DH(512)-AES(128)
- Automatic serverless peer dicovery procedure.
- IRC based peer discovery system.
- IRC embeded chat system.
- Full text search of indexed documents (pdf, html, txt, doc etc) -> QUERY REFERENCE.
- Distributed/Decentralized Search engine
- HTTP tunneling.
If you’re aware of Jason Rohrer’s MUTE p2p application with privacy protection – YOUR privacy – as a primary feature, ANts may seem a little familiar.
MUTE’s routing mechanism is inspired by ant behavior.
“Rohrer’s idea was great and that was the reason I began to do research over this field,” says Rossi.
And the entertainment industry thinks it’ll eventually do an end-run on p2p?
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See:-
ANts Site – Gwren’s Home Page
Jason Rohrer – MUTE: new p2p file-swapping app, p2pnet, January 21, 2004
MUTE’s routing mechanism – Simple, Anonymous File Sharing
September 16th, 2004 at 11:33 pm
How is this different from WASTE…?
/dev/null
September 17th, 2004 at 4:08 am
Waste offers zero anonymity.
Every people on the network have to be fully trusted
because they all know each others ip address
and everyone can know who sends what to whom.
MUTE and ANtz provides anonymity by routing all data
without allowing the sender or receiver to be known,
thus allowing sharing between and through untrusted (or even hostile) parties.
MUTE and ANtz are like freenet in that they provide anonymity
for sharing and receiving content,
but freenet has different methods and implementations to acheive that goal.
http://freenetproject.org/
October 18th, 2004 at 8:22 pm
Ants p2p is pretty good. There are still at this point not enough users online at any one time, so finding the files you want is still a hit and miss affair. Get it, and run it, even if you’re not or can’t do anything much with it, the more people running it, the better it will be……at the moment, only about 30 users are running it at any one time – clearly not enough for it to be a really useful application, but this could rapidly change.
I have noticed a rapid improvement over the past few days, as more users come on board. Critical mass, so to speak, is needed for it to run well.
Download speeds are good, when you eventually find a file you want – speeds up to 50kb/s + are achievable, perhaps higher as more sources for a file become available on the network (bittorrent /multiple sources are used as part of the protocol), though speeds of 10-12kb/s or slower for any one file are at the moment more usual, (assuming a broadband connection.)
The program takes a longish while to load up and connect to the network of peers, so patience is needed until you get used to this slow loading of the system. Once up and running, the present release can seemingly run without crashing. Some of the interface is still quite technical and not user-friendly, so for some users, it will be a steep learning curve, but the irc chatroom lets you ask questions of other users about how to configure the program if you’re stuck. The program is regularly upgraded, and is still undergoing very rapid development, with new releases often every other day…..and it is definitely becoming more user-friendly with each subsequent upgrade, with less of a factory-prototype feel that the earlier releases had.
A couple of pointers I found useful_for the current release of Ants p2p – you need to configure your firewall if you have one up (and you *should* have one). How to do this is clearly explained on the ANTS P2P website, accessible through the program or by doing a google search for “ants p2p tutorial”
On settings, it sometimes helps to select “remember ip/hostname” values.
You also need to tell the program where your browser is located, by clicking through your directories, and selecting your browser.
The same goes for selecting a folder to put your downloads in – make a folder for this, name it, and then when prompted, point the program to move downloads to your selected folder. Selecting the browser and the download folder can be done by selecting the “settings” tab, and “change download location” or “browser location” respectively.
The present release (0.5.1 release 2.0) has a quirk in the search fields – if you click on a new query, it does not bring the new window to the front, you need to click on the new “query” tab that appears at the top, and this will bring it to the front.
- Anonymous Coward
aka Sensible Sam