Should Gnutella developers work hard on measures to achieve anonymity on Gnutella?
 

Hello!

It feels good to be back here it was a while since the last time I was here.!

This is the story:

Some of you veterans here on the forum might remember my popular post I wrote back in July(Seems to be deleted by now) about me beeing a victim of an Interdiction attack from Warner Music.Meaning they started downloading lots of files at the same time to occupy all of my available upload slots so that no one else could download from me.It is a part of the record industrys last attempt to cause disturbance on Gnutella.Now it turned out to be more then that they where gathering evidence in an attempt to get me off line.They later contacted my ISP which resulted in that my ISP started spying on my connection.And when they found out that about 6000MB of data left my computer every day they decided to send me a notification about it and told me that it is in violation of their Terms of Use to use your connection for server purposes and that if I did not stop with my activitys they would be forced to shut me down.So I was forced to significantly cut down on the number of files I was sharing and create a system with lots of new folders(Shared Directorys) with maximum 100 files in each so that the amount of data that left my computer would not cause attention.And then shift between one folder at the time(I changed the Shared Directory/folder about once a week) so that all of my 6000 files still becomes available on the network just not all of them at once.

I have now moved to a different location and no longer uses that ISP instead I am on a ordinary Modem connection temporarily and I expect to get broadband again early next year.I will definetly change ISP and not use the same as before.

This problem would not have occured if WM did not notify my ISP of my activitys.So it seems that RIAA and Media Enforcer and the big five labels etc are turning the screws harder against big sharers that provides 90% of the content on Gnutella and other filesharing networks.This is potentionally becoming a major problem on Gnutella that can have a big effect because if many big sharers stop sharing and some of them starts to share less then the network will loose lots of its good contents and that will lead to loss of users because they no longer find the stuff they are looking for and then it becomes an evil spiral and Gnutella will die.

It is definetly time that all of you Gnutella developers out there starts working on the anonymity issue on Gnutella.Especially different measures to prevent anyone from finding out someones true IP number is important.

I hope that the future of Gnutella is a bright one!Cause I sure love it!

Hello Joakim,
Nice to see you around here again, good to know that you are still with Gnutella :)

Maybe you are wondering why no one takes your posts serious (either in the GDF or here). I will tell you why:

You are setting the aims for Gnutella too high.
Most developers (not Mike Stokes) are humans so they can't code everything you have in mind.

If you learn a bit more about coding (I'm sure you don't know how to code) then you will probably understand the problems...

Have fun.

A similiar goal can also be achieved by creating a list of all these organizations and their IP subnets and making sure that Gnutella clients update this list every time they are run and block access from these IPs.

Yes, it's not very secure, but it's simple to implement, or people may configure their firewalls to block these IPs.

I posted a detailed suggestion on how to do this, it's in the Limewire / Feature Requests forum. Basically, I suggested several things starting with spoofed UDP transmission of uploads.

Hello!

Sorry for abbandoning this discussion and never replied.That is simply because I forgott that I ever made this post.Strange!.But now I am back.And I have finally gotten a new broadband connection and this time it is faster then I ever had before I've got a 8Mbit/s VDSL connection and its truly amazing how good Gnutella works when you have such bandwidth compared to modem speed.

Quote:

Maybe you are wondering why no one takes your posts serious (either in the GDF or here). I will tell you why:

You cannot mean all my posts as in plural you must mean post as in singular.Because most of my post are quite informative and helpful.You must mean this post and a post I made in the GDF a long time ago regarding a Gnutella2 suggestion(a ridicilus post).

Quote:

You are setting the aims for Gnutella too high. Most developers (not Mike Stokes) are humans so they can't code everything you have in mind.

I do not agree I think that you cannot set the aims hig enough when it comes to Gnutella and it will continue to develop just as the web and the browsers did.The Gnutella clients and the protocol itself are in their infancy state just as the web was back in the year 1996-1997.And I think that most developers out there do take this problem whit anonymity very seriously because if people stop sharing their wonderfull baby/their creation all the work they have made on Gnutella would have been for nothing.I am sure that the issue could be solved somehow in the future it is just a question about when the situation will be urgent enough and when some genious will come up whit a brilliant idea for how it should be accomplished.

Quote:

If you learn a bit more about coding (I'm sure you don't know how to code) then you will probably understand the problems...

No I do not know how to code a Gnutella client but I know alot about Gnutella and their clients and I am a heavy user that have picked up alot of currents that indicates that more and more people are becoming increasingly worried about sharing on Gnutella and in other protocols and this can become a major problem if it gets out of control and alot of big sharer stop sharing anything.

Just hope that the RIAA and their affilliates dont win this battle and succeed in destroying even Gnutella.

It may be a difficult thing to code for but unless Gnutella changes so that the sharers ip address is not know to the receiver then Gunutella will slowly die out. I too like Joakim have had to stop sharing and will only be able to start again when my anonymity is guaranteed. I am sure we are not the only two that have had to stop sharing and the RIAA will be picking us off, at a thousand at a time now that Verizon have been forced to hand over the names of the sharers. The ISPs will only be too pleased to get rid of us, as want users but no traffic. Just blocking known RIAA ip addresses will not work as they can use any ISP and we cannot block the whole of AOL for instance. It may be tricky and will cut down the bandwidth but without it Gunutella is dead.

This is absolute priority. Wake up everybody that thinks it isn't!:D

I think it's not a priority nor do I think it's feasible.

And you still say it is not a priority. I don't agree with what they are doing but I am not going to risk £90,000 arguing with them.

i agree - it IS a priority
 

it's what the customers/consumers are going to demand - bet your money on it. i would and will conintue my limewire subscription but if something else comes out that gives me an anonymous connection for p2p i will move to that product even if i have to pay more. my reasons are NOT for what you are probably thinking but rather for the same reasons i don't need anyone snooping around in what library materials i checked out or what music i listen to in the car/elsewhere. i don't have a proble with the data if it's presented in AGGREGATE.

I don't know if this is the appropriate forum, but I'm not a coder and the thread seemed right. My apologizes if the mod feels a need to move it. I wanted to toss out an idea for anominity so that others with more skill could contemplate if it was practical, feasible, too bandwidth consuming, or whatever:

1st, when a file query is received, the receiver never, ever looks at the content of its own hard drive. Instead it queries only its immediate neighbors. Call it a temporary subnet. If the neighbor replies yes it has the file, then rather than connect the requester to the content provider, the middle computer acts as a NAT router to pass the file, but never reveals to the requester the IP addy of the source. If the immediate neighbors all say "No," then the request is passed along to one of the immediate neighbors, a new temp subnet is formed with its neighbors, and the process repeats. And since one of the immediate neighbors is the one that referred it, the hard drive that was originally skipped will get checked as well. Its kind of a mutual denied culpability. Infinately slow? Bandwidth hog? TTL failure ridden? I have no idea. But anyone who asked for a file could potentially receive it. And they'd never know from whence it came.

Justin,
What you're suggesting is known as "proxying". It would work great but it would also double the amount of 'non-final' traffic, i.e., it would reduce the amount of files that were actually transferred by at least half.

If you would just randomly proxy 50% of all connections it would be enough to make finding out the identity of sharers more difficult if you are simply searching for a file and attempting to download it. But even by proxying all connections you won't achieve total anonymity.
It would remain trivial to gather enough data to issue 1,000 subpoenas a week just by having 10 or 20 ultrapeers spying on their leafs.

Hiya... And, come on, guys...

paradog and 'trap_jaw4' (heh heh heh heh !) Are 100% correct...

It is NOT possible to do any form of sharing of anything without an address... The idea that so-called 'anonymity' is possible is ludicrous.

FACE IT, GANG... There are a few truly experienced and knowledgeable people trying - AGAIN and AGAIN, to tell you what the score is.

ONCE AGAIN, YOU HAVE HEARD FROM TWO OF THEM.

Save your anxieties and understand that this whole 'threat' business will pass, as it has before... Only this time, it will 'pass' even faster.

peace, boys and girls...

urs
:)

p.s. Check out the history of Philips and the MusicCassette.... There were attempts made within the stuctures of the United Nations to stop.... STOP cassettes from being manufactured...
HO HO HO... It's true history.

Philips were smart enough to not even try to patent-protect the 'MusicCassette'... They gave it to the world for free as they knew that that was the only way to immediately establish a global standard...

Think...

Remember, CD-Rs and CD-RWs are NOT manufactured by stoned freaks in dusty garages ! This is an industrial 'battle' on a global scale with VERY BIG PLAYERS.

Obviously you have never heard of Freenet. Just because the IP address is known doesn't mean there can be no anonymity.


Only if Gnutella wants to last longer then the first good p2p that does achieve anonymity.

Freenet may be anonymous (the original publisher of copyrighted material remains anonymous) but it's trivial to find out the IPs of users sharing copyrighted content later on. - And just because you are sharing automatically and Freenet doesn't allow you to look at what you are sharing, it doesn't mean that you can't be sued for whatever material you are sharing. I wouldn't feel too safe using Freenet if I were you.

How can you prove that a certain IP was actually sharing the content and not just proxying forward the request from someone else?

EDIT: Even if it can be proven, Freenet is so far ahead of the rest of the p2p community with anonymity that the RIAA would never think of trying to sue people using it. Not until all the other p2p programs are as hard to crack as Freenet is.

With FreeNet, Yes, you could search for a file and then accuse your proxies of 'distributing' it. But I don't think you'd be able to hold them liable for any legal responsibilities, not unless there's a sea change in the law. And it's certainly more defensible than traditional P2P, where you must manually select what files to share/re-distribute.

True, one judge has ruled that Aimster is liable for contributory copyright-infringement despite it's use of encrypted communications to shield it from knowledge of the contents. But, by that logic, phone companies would be liable for contributory damages anytime a criminal used their phone to plan a crime.

What's unique here (aside from the 'distributor' being a community of FreeNet/P2P users) is that the 'source' of a file can't be tracked beyond your immediate proxies. So, I wouldn't worry about legal liability when running a FreeNet node.

On the other hand, FreeNet is terrible at distributing large numbers of files, since they have to be cached/proxied by lots of Nodes (most of which will have limited disk-space allocated to caching).
____________________

Better might be the "UDPp2p" project, if they ever post any code...
http://udpp2p.sourceforge.net/

The DMCA sees only few exceptions where you would not be liable for caching (not proxying, btw) illegal content and they are explicitly meant for online service providers.

Unlike other p2p you don't know what you will be sued for, - from secondary copyright infringement to distribution of childpornography.

Telephone companies can easily prove substantial noninfringing use. Once people start using Freenet primarily for filesharing that would be hard to claim - but this is a competely seperate issue from users caching copyrighted content.

Won't work. The broadcasts will kill it.

How much of a threat?
 

I have a large library of music (over 2000 songs) and have stopped sharing it because I don't know exactly what I'm risking. I read that one person received an email telling him to stop sharing or else. If the first step is a warning, then is it safe to share until you get one? All the people out there that are turning off their sharing probably are as in the dark about this as I am, and if we knew that we don't have to worry until we get a warning then we'd all be able to share again. But does anyone really know what the tactics of the music industry are right now - and can they really successfully sue us - with no warning?

You need a lawyer, get one :D
Maybe you can use Hotline, there the downloader has to agree
a 'license' before he can download. Then you can be sure that
you dont brake the law.

An example:
By entering you promise dont to download anything

I use both a Gnutella client (Shareaza) and Kazaa Lite K++, KLK++ has the feature you mentioned above. But, when I shut down KLK++ to run Shareaza, I start up PeerGuardian, to do exactly what you say above. You can download it from following the following URL:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tim.leo...1981_setup.zip


I am surprised no one suggested this program before me.

I'm not. Actually I hoped nobody would suggest it because it doesn't work. BayTSP et al could easily be using proxies or a simple dynamic IP they rented from AOL to mask their identity.

PeerGuardian will NOT protect you. You may feel secure but you really aren't.

Not that it really matters anyway, since I am in Canada and cannot get subpenoa (sp?) from the various **AA, we don't have a lot of the stupid laws that they have in the US, although CIRA is trying...and at one point they -- Canadian government -- wanted to make their own version of the DMCA, there was a big outcry about that!!!


But, I will still use PG for other stuff as well, proxies or no proxies....