How to WASTE and want not

[R. A. Hettinga]

<http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/04/25/8454965>

Infoshop News -


  How to WASTE and want not

posted by j1o2n3a4s5 on Sunday April 25 2004 @ 05:14PM PDT
 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.


Source: http://p2pnet.net/story/1295



-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'