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Japanese P2P Users Arrested, Creator Targeted 205

Posted by simoniker from the stomp-the-miscreants dept.
nutznboltz writes "According to a story on CNET Asia, two Japanese users of the Winny P2P application have been arrested for copyright violations, and the developer of the P2P software has also had his home searched by police. Winny was 'supposedly anonymous', and purported to be based on Freenet, although Freenet creator Ian Clarke is claiming that Winny is not really like Freenet, and that he's 'not concerned that the Japanese police have somehow found a way to compromise Freenet's security'."
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Japanese P2P Users Arrested, Creator Targeted More

Japanese P2P Users Arrested, Creator Targeted

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  • This is an outrage! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Channard ( 693317 ) on Thursday December 04, 2003 @07:48AM (#7627129) Journal
    This must stop! If this continues, the P2P world's supply of tentacle rape porn and mech video clips could dry up overnight!

  • Freenet/Winny (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by TheJaff ( 714004 )
    Considering the un-userfriendly state Freenet is right now (not being able to "search the [free]net") it would have been a huge accomplishment to completely base a P2P software on it. So my guess is that Winny more or less just mention Freenet for recognition purposes.

    • Re:Freenet/Winny (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Troed ( 102527 ) on Thursday December 04, 2003 @07:55AM (#7627162) Homepage Journal
      You can search Freenet _exactly_ in the same way you can search the World Wide Web. If you use a messageboard/filesharing application on top of Freenet (like Frost) you can search with a nice little search box per board or in all of them.

      But please, why not post uninformed opinions on Slashdot and get modded up as Insightful :)

      • Re:Freenet/Winny (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You can search Freenet _exactly_ in the same way you can search the World Wide Web. If you use a messageboard/filesharing application on top of Freenet (like Frost) you can search with a nice little search box per board or in all of them.

        You just proved his point by thinking in the programmer mindset.
        "IF you use a messageboard/filesharing application on top of Freenet" - but not if you haven't. You need to download and install a whole program to do something as basic as searching. This is nowhere near "_e

        • Re:Freenet/Winny (Score:3, Informative)

          by Troed ( 102527 )
          ... another uninformed person getting modded as Insightful.

          Pray tell - how do you search the regular World Wide Web?

          Via som sort of service that knows webcontent since it spidered it - right?

          Guess what Dolphin's Freenet Index [localhost] is ... and there are others.

          So, no - I know perfectly well what I'm talking about. Freenet is just as searchable as the World Wide Web. Exactly.
      • Ok all I know is that when I tried out Freenet (admittedly some time ago but I DID actually install it and configure it) and downloaded some stuff you had to _know_ or _guess_ a tag corresponding to the data you were after. If this has changed in recent releases, I apologise for my alledged karmawhoreing.

        • Re:Freenet/Winny (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Troed ( 102527 )
          When you install Freenet and go to your local gateway-page there are not one but two search engines linked. That's how you search WWW - that's how you search Freenet.

          Or do you know of a way to search the World Wide Web that does not include using servers which have spidered the content? Please let me know.
          • [...] Or do you know of a way to search the World Wide Web that does not include using servers which have spidered the content? Please let me know.

            Ok I will! (Man I love people being this "helpful" with absolutely no hint of sarcasm/bitterness at all.)

    • If you want a "more friendly Freenet" you should know where to find one [stop1984.com].

  • First case of the Article not RTFA? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by The Uninformed ( 107798 ) on Thursday December 04, 2003 @07:51AM (#7627148)
    "I'm not concerned that the Japanese police have somehow found a way to compromise Freenet's security," Clarke

    "..but probably not those that allow Freenet to protect user anonymity." Clarke

    I'm confused, it looks like Clarke said Freenet's compromised and he doesn't care, and that Freenet isn't compromised.
    • Youre parser is broken. The first sentence can mean:

      'Security is broken and I dont care'
      or
      'I dont care because security hasnt been broken'

      His statement that FreeNet is not what the Japs were using indicates the second meaning is more probable.
    • It's hard to say what he means. However I wouldn't be concerned that some other programme paying lip service to the concepts of freenet means that freenet is somehow compromised as well.

      After all, perhaps these guys thought they'd ditch some of the features to make P2P usable - Freenet would be hopeless for P2P because it is a performance slug (thanks to the number of hops etc. to fetch data) - and in the process compromised their own security. Or perhaps they were just idiots and boasted about getting wa

  • Uh oh! (Score:1, Funny)

    by akura_au ( 721352 )
    ...while the teenager is being held for making the game Super Mario Advance available online.
    Better ditch that copy of Space Invaders while I can!!

  • Searched by police? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ceeam ( 39911 )
    So - what did they intend to find? Or do they use it like intimidation of some sort?

  • Freenet is not save. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Krapangor ( 533950 )
    Clarke wants to save his face, but it's well known in certain circles that freenet doesn't provide 100% anonymity if the attacker has enough resources, e.g. a large ISP or the gov.
    It takes some time, but you can determine the IP and stored data of a user.
    But I don't think that this is so bad, in free societies such anonymizer tools are often abused by criminals, spammers and perverts and in oppressive societies the use of the tool gets you in prison anyway. The Chinese gov is not so stupid to get caught
    • The Chinese gov is not so stupid to get caught by the "hahaha - my data was encrypted, you can't prove anything"-argument.

      Erm, that's not the point of Freenet at all. The point is more like 'hahaha - my data was routed through 100 random IPs before it received you, has absolutely nothing to indicate who wrote it, and anyone on Freenet can read it. So go shove your fascist censorship up your ass.' If the government could get round it, it would be very unfortunate indeed.

    • Re:Freenet is not save. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Hobbex ( 41473 ) on Thursday December 04, 2003 @08:59AM (#7627390)
      This is a complicated issue without a clear answer.

      If you want to be theoretical, then yes, Freenet does not provide anywhere near "absolute" anonymity. In fact, it doesn't even provide the level of anonymity that is used when judging such things as anonymous remailers or mixnets.

      Basically, Freenet purports to be "anonymous" because you files do not recide on the computer of the person who uploaded them, and because all downloads and uploads are chained and tunneled through each host involved in the transfer. That means that the host you download a Freenet document from just knows it got it from some other node, which got it from some other node, which got it through some other node, all the way back to the person who uploaded it. It certainly makes tracking the people upload and download things more difficult then on networks like Kazaa (where it is, as we have seen, trivial) but in theory, and with enough resources, it is of course not impossible.

      It should be noted what Freenet does NOT provide however. Freenet does do what the serious mixnets reffer to as "Onion routing", which basically means that the message is wrapped in an onion of cryptographic layers, which are pealed off at every step. The idea behind this is only the very last node can see contents of the message, and only the first knows it came from you (and none of the other nodes know anything except where the message came from and where it went).

      If you request something from Freenet, your node will call up another node and ask it for that file - if that node is controlled by the Feds then you are busted. It is argued that there is plausible deniability, because it is possible that your node was not downloading the file because you asked for it, but simply forwarding it for somebody else. Given the state of the judicial process at the moment, I'm not terribly optimistic about this defense.

      Freenet also doesn't protect (at least not very well) against traffic and timing analysis, allowing one to track down the author of something using the timing and amount of encrypted traffic that nodes exchange. I don't know of any case of traffic analysis having been used (except maybe on the NSA hyper-spook level), but it isn't impossible.

      Another thing that Freenet does not "anonymise", and this is the most important IMO, is that you are running a node in the first place. Your Freenet node has to be public, so the feds could definitely "fish" the network for node addresses and start busting those who run them. Again there is an argument of deniability: you don't actually know what is in your nodes cache because it is encrypted, but again I don't have a lot of faith in this defense when the prosecutor will argue that you knowning acted in bad faith.

      Regarding Winny, however, I think I agree with Ian. It seems doubtful that Winny works in the same manner as freenet, for the simple reason that Winny works, and well, freenet, umm, doesn't. Any time you try to put anonymity into something, useability IS going to take a hit, because trying to spread and bounce traffic necessarily hits performance. I have a very hard time believing that Japans most popular P2P network could be based on tunneling everything - purely for performance reasons.

      (I have to run, so forgive typos and pitiful spelling errors.)
      • It should be noted what Freenet does NOT provide however. Freenet does do what the serious mixnets reffer to as "Onion routing", which basically means that the message is wrapped in an onion of cryptographic layers, which are pealed off at every step. The idea behind this is only the very last node can see contents of the message, and only the first knows it came from you (and none of the other nodes know anything except where the message came from and where it went).

        I don't think so. How could Freenet do
        • I don't think so. How could Freenet do proper onion routing when you can not determine what route it will take?

          There was a negative missing there. Freenet does NOT do onion routing. Sorry (though I think it can be seen from the context what I intended.)

          Actually, the defense is both good and bad - the problem lies in the HTL - Hops To Live. As it is (or at least was, when I tried to convince them it was a bad idea) the maximum HTL is 25 (in node, no matter what the program requests). That is, if you requ
          • I would say that the benefit of a random factor is dubious here. If you have the capacity to compromise all the nodes in the routing table, then you probably have the capacity to scan their traffic to see if they have other peers (I mean, how else did you find all their peers?)

            1) Get one connection.
            2) Flood it with ARKs from other compromised nodes
            3) As new nodes connect, they too start sending ARKs for yet more compromised nodes
            4) It quickly doubles... 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, whoops 50 nodes which are all co
            • You are misunderstanding the way freenet (or at least the ARK thing) works. ARKs can't be fed to a node to replace other nodes in it's routing table. ARKs are simply a way of updating the information about nodes that are already in the routing table.

              If a node starts sending you requests, and those requests are successfully fullfilled, then you can set "DataSource" value on the reply to yourself or one of your other compromised nodes - this is the value that is actually added to the routing table. We called
    • Well it could be even worse:
      Security was not comprimised. But the developer was accused anyway. It would be hard to prove anything, but it would give a lot of troubles to the developer.

      And try to defend against "only people who have something to hide use cryptology"

    • Just because a criminal can use something doesn't make useless or 'bad'.

      Using your thinking, since criminals often abuse locks since they hide in houses, I guess then so what if the government bans the use of locks on your doors..

      Or they abuse the mail by sending kiddy porn.. so I guess that means its ok for the government to go ahead and read ALL Mail.. with no warrant..

      Your type is why we are loosing our rights that our forefathers fought and died for to gain. Get lost, you dont deserve the rights you
    • But I don't think that this is so bad, in free societies such anonymizer tools are often abused by criminals, spammers and perverts and in oppressive societies the use of the tool gets you in prison anyway.

      That is such a naive argument. Not only that, you certainly aren't a liberatarian (not to be confused with Americans who call themselves liberatarian--these guys are liberatarian-conservative).

      You either stand for freedom, human rights, liberty, security, etc--or you don't! There is no if's and bu
  • Stupid laws that cost thousands of extra police hours not only waste tax-payers money, they take police from their real job and priority number one which is keeping the peace. Not only that, but the RIAA is terrorising people with its tactics, it has become a mafia and should be shut down today. Whats going on here is a total inequality of justice. You cant choose people to make examples out of, and you cant have anyone in a cell for downloading music while there are muggers, murderers and rapists out on th

    • Re:This is the final straw (Score:5, Interesting)

      by squaretorus ( 459130 ) on Thursday December 04, 2003 @08:37AM (#7627291) Homepage Journal
      Stupid laws that cost thousands of extra police hours not only waste tax-payers money, they take police from their real job

      Couldnt agree more. But this isnt the main culprit. Globally more is spent on 'THE WAR ON DRUGS' and chasing criminals who only steal to feed their habits than on ANYTHING ELSE. Apologies for the caps - just trying to be sensationalist because Im talking about drugs - which we all know are REALLY SCARY AND BAD.

      Of course - these kids coul dhave been P2Ping to support a crack habit. It all comes back to wasted money on THE WAR ON DRUGS...
      • Have you ever had to live in a neighborhood destroyed by both the drug pushers and the addicted users?

        I thought it was pretty clear to anyone with a brain that drugs ARE scary and bad.

        Perhaps you have a favorite kind of drug which you do not consider to be all that bad? Like weed or meth perhaps?

        • Re:News to me (Score:3, Insightful)

          by paganizer ( 566360 )
          ANd why are the neighborhoods destroyed?
          Because the pushers are doing something very risky for very high profits; because the users have to pay a artificially high price for drugs. eliminate government interference, prices go down, it's no longer neccesary to have hired goons running around guarding the drug dealers, no longer worthwhile to KILL to protect your drug supply.
          Drugs are a problem. the Violence and crime associated with drugs is 90%+ the result of the war on crime.
          Don't believe me? think about t
        • Have you ever had to live in a neighborhood destroyed by both the drug pushers and the addicted users?

          Where would you rather live, a neighborhood with a liquor store, or one with a Mob run speakeasy and bootlegging operation?

          Lots of things are bad, but we don't legislate sensibility. Throwing ones life away is a basic human freedom.
          • What about someone whose life is important to other people -- i.e., the head of a large family who relies on him for income? I would think that someone like that would be able to kill themselves, but I don't think for a minute that they would be sanctioned for doing so. (I'm not talking about something like where he would kill himself so that his family could profit from the insurance money or something, but to follow the example strictly, someone drinking himself to death beacuse "that's his right.") I
            • What about someone whose life is important to other people -- i.e., the head of a large family who relies on him for income?

              Child neglect can take many forms, and is completely independent of whether drug use is involved. If "large family" you are talking about consists of the persons own children, then he should be prosecuted regardless of whether the children suffered because he did drugs, or because he gave all his money to charity.

              If the "large family" are not his children, then they are moochers wi
        • Have you ever known a person who used drugs, but because of various sociological, financial and personal reasons, didn't fuck up? It may sound amazing, but our coutnry is filled with fairly well-adjusted drug addicts, people who don't have to beg, borrow and steal to support their habits. Normal people with family and friends who also happen to use some drug(s). They may have a physical or psychological addiction to it, or they may not. Relatively intelligent people with a good family have polled off the
        • Have you ever had to live in a neighborhood destroyed by both the drug pushers and the addicted users?

          And what has the billion dollars spent on the drug war done? The drug market is even worse now because they are controlled by monopolies (drug cartles) as opposed to being a little bit freer... When alcohol was banned (20's), it was run by the mafia. And guess what? There was a ton of violence associated with it! How much violence do you see now (that alcohol is legal)? Yes there are addicts but the d
    • they take police from their real job and priority number one which is keeping the peace

      I just have to add a slight correction to your comment. A police officer's job isn't actually to keep the peace, rather to respond to less than peaceful actions, and to enforce law. They're actually different if you look at them syntactically.

  • Background Info (Score:5, Informative)

    by pario ( 675744 ) on Thursday December 04, 2003 @08:31AM (#7627264)
    Since Winny is pretty much unknown outside Japan, here is some background information for slashdot readers: Winny is a P2P file sharing program created by a Japanese programmer, who still remains anonymous to this day. It came out two years ago as an attempt to share copyright-protected materials "safely" when somebody was arrested for using another P2P program (WinMX). Since the application was extremely well designed and almost anything is available on its network, from movies to software, it has become immensely popular in Japan, so much so that there are a dozen book available on how to use it and network traffic in the country was down 20% after the news of the arrest broke. As for the reasons why the police was able to identify those two people who were arrested, they used an extra bulletin board feature, which does not guarantee anonymity unlike its file transfer feature, to distribute a list of warez videos. Therefore, I don't think this news has anything to do with the validity of Freenet's technology, or with that of Winny's for that matter.

    • Re:Background Info (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04, 2003 @08:50AM (#7627354)
      Mod parent up. This discussion can't go anywhere without the participants having proper knowledge of the background and workings of Winny.

      The reason that nobody's heard of Winny is that Winny has been deliberately kept off the radar of countries outside Japan by the author himself. He keept the source closed and only provided the program and documentation in Japanese.

      Winny is "based" on Freenet only to the extent that the creator of it consulted Ian Clarke's papers to design the network. The possibility of Freenet code being reused in Winny is pretty low, as Winny is a native Windows application and there's that issue with GPL code anyway.

      The architecture of Winny has some aspects in common with Freenet, but while Freenet was designed with anonymity as priority one and usability as backburner, Winny aimed to become both a usable AND anonymous P2P client. To achieve this goal, some of Freenet's anonymity features (such as the inability to know the data inside one's own node) was removed from the design of Winny, and some usability features such as searching within the program were implemented. Winny's design is not as modular or portable as Freenet is, either; Winny is a native Windows application tied to a GUI, more like "normal" P2P filesharing apps.

      Winny version 2 also includes an anonymous message board system, a bit like Frost's TOF; Due to the original Winny's immense popularity, The Winny message board became a lively place of discussion, also often used to request and announce up/download of illegal files.

      Presumably, it was this that the Japanese police used. Due to the way Winny implements the anonymous message board, reading and posting in the threads are anonymous, but creating a new thread is not. Both of the two people arrested were thread creators, and they announced the upload of files in their threads. As this was not anonymous, the police probably traced them using this.

      Any additions/corrections from Japanese Winny users are welcome

  • Ever *truly* Anonymous? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04, 2003 @08:33AM (#7627274)
    I am often amazed at the abilities of some. A 15 year old breaks a hard crypto for DVDs in what seems is a poetic 30 line program... And so many others who have contribuited to technology. But in my limited thinking I cannot see how a truly anonymous P2P network could ever be thought up.

    After all the encryption, all the routing and packet filtering... eventually we're always left with unavoidable IP addresses. There's always going to be, has to be, a destinaton and origination. If a computer program can find the location of a song, so eventually can a human. ...So it seems to me.

    The FBI tracked the release of an email virus to some upstairs apartment laptop with a temporary dial up connection in a third world country within three days of it's release. What was it, the I love you virus or something written by some tech students? I sat in wonder watching the news reports and the video of dirt streets and old third world buildings wondering how the hell they did it. How they knew it came from that upstairs apartment. Probably logged in just long enough to send it. Not just in three days, but probably sooner with them taking 1-2 days for the "public" release.

    Then I consider a truly anonymous P2P file share and wonder if it is even possible. The song is going to be on a hard disk. That hard disk is attached to the net and will have a number representing it's network location. All of which can be traced. In my mind, again, if a program can find the song, even as difficult at it may seem, so eventually can a human.

    Just like *they* can never make an unbrakable copy protection, Will *we* ever be able to completely anonymous while on the Net.

    I'm just wondering....
    • Jon Johansen did not break CSS, and it's not a hard crypto. He wrote the gui for an application using a normal decryption key. CSS _has_ been broken cryptogaphically, and has about 2^16 complexity. It's not even worth being called a crypto.

    • I cannot see how a truly anonymous P2P network could ever be thought up.

      It's only a matter of what do you mean by truly. Same thing as always - how hard are you ready to work, how much time and money to spend to approach a given task. If it's anonymous to a degree that in order to find the originator you have to physically obtain 10 PC from 10 different countries and interrogate (beat up) their owners so that they tell you their passwords - is it TRULY anonymous or not ?
    • yes, it can be.

      the clincher is that you don't know what it is you're sharing.

      Freenet for example, doesn't work like typical p2p programs; you dedicate a portion of disk for it to use, and it's all encrypted, and you don't even know what you're sharing.

      I don't know which is worse :-)
    • that was the philippines, the i love you virus

    • Re:Ever *truly* Anonymous? (Score:5, Informative)

      by shird ( 566377 ) on Thursday December 04, 2003 @09:14AM (#7627476) Homepage Journal
      Ever heard of onion routing? look it up.

      Bascially, there is no source and destination, just a bunch of message passing between random nodes, the 'destination' just keeps and eye out for something that belongs to them. Put very basically. Theres a bunch of asymmetric crypto involved also. Look it up for more details.
      • That's not how onion routing works, actually. With onion routing the "server" is known and the client is unknown. The client creates an "onion" with encrypted routing information.

        The communication is passed through a bunch of nodes each of which only know about the one before and after themselves.

        In a p2p situation the clients sometimes act as servers so onion routing is a bit pointless by itself.

    • Well, the low-tech solution to being anonymous is to use someone else's poorly-secured WiFi gateway :-)

    • Re:Ever *truly* Anonymous? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by caluml ( 551744 ) <slashdot@spamgoe ... minus herbivore> on Thursday December 04, 2003 @09:56AM (#7627736) Homepage
      Have a second internet with a completely different method of assigning IP address. NAT all traffic passing through your box.
      Hey presto, no-one knows if it came from you, or the person behind you, and there is no ISP that can be asked who "owned" an IP at a certain time.
    • You should look at the Freenet specification. A single server does not contain everything needed to recreate the file, nor do you necessarily know on which servers the file fragments are stored ahead of time. If you are the server owner, you cannot determine what's in the file fragments you carry, nor can you reconstruct the files without knowing the correct key, which Freenet will use to gather fragments from all over the network.

      Oh, and the fragments move across the network and expire, based on usage.

    • Re:Ever *truly* Anonymous? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I can imagine the network that allows share of any data but is difficult to be sued and would have to be practically banned to shut it down.

      Imagine the following system:

      1) Basic requirements from the system:

      Each computer in the network when signs to this software is commiting certain amount of disk space to store network data and certain amount of bandwitch to exchange storage information. The exchange of information consists of background traffic which is independent from the user and user request traff
    • Just like *they* can never make an unbrakable copy protection, Will *we* ever be able to completely anonymous while on the Net.

      Okay, here's the answer: No.

      Why?

      It's all about rescources:

      It's impossible to create "unbreakable" crypto because the processes needs to be reversible and given enough resources and time the proper decryption method can be found.

      Simlarly, it's impossible to be perfectly anonymous on an untrusted network like the internet because, given enough resources, someone can always

  • Its OK... the RIAA may be paying for spam. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Here are the snippits from the spam.

    Subject: Digital Music News: Don't Go to Jail

    Music Industry Informs Internet Users of Risks Peer-to-Peer Networks Pose

    STAY OUT OF COURT - USE LEGAL 'SHARING'

    Staff Writer, The Digital Music News

    The Recording Industry Association of America has filed 300 lawsuits against alleged file swappers. Don't want to become victim number 301? Then it's time to switch from programs like Kazaa and Morpheus to a legal music download service Songs purchased on legal services are mor

  • Speed of the Japanese legal system (Score:4, Informative)

    by chrome ( 3506 ) <chrome@stu p e n d ous.net> on Thursday December 04, 2003 @08:42AM (#7627313) Homepage Journal
    The speed of the legal system here is notoriously slow.

    And, I'm told, most people can escape imprisonment or heavy fining by just apologising well.

    So, I'm not sure what kind of resolution the companies are expecting, but I'm sure it will be a long time til we hear anything :)

    • Re:Speed of the Japanese legal system (Score:4, Interesting)

      by dbleoslow ( 650429 ) on Thursday December 04, 2003 @09:24AM (#7627523)
      And, I'm told, most people can escape imprisonment or heavy fining by just apologising well.

      Unless you're a foreigner [justicefornickbaker.org]

      I'm not saying this guy is innocent, but he got a longer prison sentence than most murderers. Japan has a conviction rate above %90 percent. They can also hold someone on suspicion for up to 21 days without so much as a phone call. My greatest fear is just being a suspect. It doesn't matter if you're guilty or not here. So I get a heavy fine and no "prison sentence." I could still be in prison for almost a month before charges are even filed.
      • What I said was purely based on what I've been told by people I trust (heresay nontheless). I don't know anyone who has actually had to go to court here.

        But yeah, unless you're a foreigner, you can get off easily.

        That goes without saying really.

        Actually, if he'd just "confessed" and apologised profusely, he still might have got a more lenient sentence. Maybe get out in a couple of years.

        In any case, its an unfortunate incident, I'm going to forward it to people I know here in Japan. I don't think the lo

  • Hara-kiri Over Hanson!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04, 2003 @08:55AM (#7627374)
    Arrested!!!! Holy shit that could lead to Hara-kiri over Hanson.
    • Holy shit that could lead to Hara-kiri over Hanson.

      You're saying listening to Hanson wouldn't drive someone to kill themselves *first*? Mind you, going by some of the J-Pop acts, maybe the Japanese have a higher tolerance.

  • Winny is more advanced than Freenet (Score:5, Interesting)

    by News for nerds ( 448130 ) on Thursday December 04, 2003 @08:59AM (#7627391) Homepage
    Winny was developped by the Japanese developper called "47", and it was after WinMX user was arrested here in Japan, in 2001. It was the world-first arrest of P2P users. Japanese copyright law was amended in the years before to crack down infringement over internet, protecting "right of enabling sending copyrighted material".
    Since then, among Japanese users and hackers, non-encrypted P2P which is still popular in the West today became things of past.

    Since Freenet made of Java was very slow application then (not much improved today), he made Winny as native Windows P2P application, with encrypted storage distrubited across peers. According to the developper, Winny is good at the both anonymity and efficiency, but anonymity is slightly lower than Freenet. Because a receiver can't determine a sender is the one who originally inserted the file to the network or not, it was considered anonymous and then more secure than ordinary P2P network, say, Gnutella or eDonkey etc. Winny has other functions like forum system, and clustering by keywords combination set by its users which help users with similar interest mold cluster. Other remarkable difference from Freenet is it dosn't split files, but can do multiple-source download.

    With the help of community and its own efficiency as P2P network, Winny become extremely populor in Japan unlike experimental Freenet in the West and consumed huge bandwidth.

    But those who were arrested the last month was arrested because they sent files directly, without being a bridge, or put some warez onto web page and running Winny beside it. Therefore it is still not clear whether just running Winny and sending cached files without modest deliberation means guilty or not.

  • Winny Background (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04, 2003 @09:08AM (#7627443)
    The way annoymity works is that files are stored in a "cache" in a scrambled format with filename concealed, even to the local user.

    Winny knows how to descramble the name and data, and it can search on the P2P network a specific file using its filename or MD5 checksum.

    When a file is found, it is either downloaded directly or through another random user (think proxy).

    Files goes into the cache either by local upload, by downloading a file (which Winny will descramble for you, leaving a copy in the cache), or by files passing through your node. It is then available for further download by other people.

    This provides a kind of load-sharing where more popular a file is, it will be found in more people's cache and more easily available. Downloading from multiple sources is also possible.

    You can find out who your immediate neighbour is, but he can claim he doesn't know what the content of his cache contains an infringing file, but of course this requires him to remove the original on his disk :)

    To give an incentive to people to cache files, # of simultanenous downloads is limited to # of uploads+1 with a lower limit of 2.

    It is a very convinent system because winny has a function that let you specifies search parameters and you can just leave it alone and it'll download everything that meets the parameters, meanwhile donating bandwidth and cache space to other people on the P2P network.

    This model can be possible only because Winny is closed source. Cracks have both appeared for both the download limit and cache descrambling. It is easy to see widespread use of the cracks will compromise the model (less files to be found on the network).

    Fortunately normally people don't care (it is just spare upload bandwidth and disk space, which broadband P2P users usually have surplus of).
  • Just found a link to The Motley Fool [fool.com] that very much suggests that file-sharing isn't taking any revenue. If this is truly the case, how do they justify the restraint of freedom [slashdot.org] induced by laws and methods of enforcement? This appears to be less a case of protecting revenues as a simple imposition of unjustified power.

    More musings on power and on civil disobedience [slashdot.org]. I should say that I admire the independent artist who chooses to share samples, and do not especially admire those who trade music illegally
  • I believe that the words "arrested for downloading..." should not be appearing in our lives because "arrested for downloading music" sounds very similar to "arrested for downloading political material" and this is exactly how a society moves from free to big-brother. Lets put things in perspective here: You are not gaining unauthorized entry to a remote system, you are not 'stealing' (as in bank notes) money, you are not diverting electronic funds to yourself. Flaim me all you want about what you 'are' doin

    • "Its society's job as a whole to decide the balance here, personally i think filesharing should be accepted and that it will lead to a positive change in the way things are done and the way music is made."

      The problem here is that giving rights to one group (those who desire to have copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rightsholder) means taking rights away from another group (artists, poets, composers, writers, or anybody who would like to have a say in who can "share" their work).

      • I don't have a position on this issue yet. I'm as confused on this as anyone (even though I usually have opinions on nearly everything). The difficulty in arriving at a stance is described by your post. However, I do disagree wtih some of your points.

        The problem here is that giving rights to one group (those who desire to have copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rightsholder) means taking rights away from another group (artists, poets, composers, writers, or anybody who would like
    • That's a great post! One of the most eloquent and inspiring I have read on slashdot. You don't offer any concrete answers but you raise some important points...

      Someone mod this up plz...

      Sivaram Velauthapillai
    • And you just picked up a fan. Finally, someone who gets the damn point of everything and can see the world for what it is, not some candy coated corporate projected image. As you point out, this is a very bad first step down a long, messy road. It may not seem like much now, but let things like this go on for another 20 years, then another 50. See where society is. I can tell you, it won't be a very good place.

      Ok, it's illegal to download music. You're getting something for nothing, right? Even if you do
  • If its so great ( even though we havent seen it in the west ) has anyone audited the code to see if ts really the 'next generation' or not?

    If so, its time to let it come across the pond... and see if it flys or dies....

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