Darknet

$40,000 to fill an iPod?

Ars Technica: $40,000 to fill an iPod? One third of PCs use LimeWire instead.

CNET blogs: One-third of the people reading this are thieves.

RIAA pushes students to darknets

p2pnet.net: RIAA Pushes Students to Darknets.

As predicted here and by other industry experts, the harder the entertainment industry pushes consumers, the harder they will push back with more evasive technologies.

The renewed RIAA offensive on colleges is a perfect case in point. Students in particular are tech savvy, concentrated, and highly social, a recipe for a rise in darknets, or closed private networks, that cannot be monitored by RIAA and their agents. ...

Darknets live on after P2P ban at Ohio U

Ars Technica: Darknets live on after P2P ban at Ohio U.

Of darknets and mash-ups

I gave a talk Monday night at Malmö University in Sweden — the Shift Lecture series, it's called — on darknets and mashup culture. I expected perhaps 10 or 20 people to show up at the library along Malmö's scenic waterfront, but more than 100 turned out.

My talk and slide show explored the shift in media culture, darknets, Hollywood, the entertainment industry's business models, file sharing and even Sweden's Pirate Party (piratepartiet), which garnered 35,000 votes, though no seats, in national elections a week ago. One member of the Pirate Party was in the crowd, and he came up afterward and let me know about the Pirate Party's new U.S. outpost.

Also showed four videos of mash-ups, all of them illegal or infringing. Didn't encounter any pushback from the audience, which seemed inclined to allow this kind of experimentation, at least for noncommercial purposes. Afterward, I did an interview with Swedish Radio.

I also took a bunch of photos, but can't seem to get them off of my camera phone at the moment.

The future of darknets

Richard Hall, a professor in Missouri who attended the "Future of Darknets" panel I moderated at South by Southwest Interactive in March, has just posted a video of some of the session's highlights. He's using it in his classroom as well.

P2P steps into the Darknet

Linux Pipeline: P2P Steps Into The Darknet.

Freenet: The first scalable darknet

Slashdot:

The Freenet Project has just released the first alpha version of the much anticipated Freenet 0.7 branch. This is a major departure from past approaches to peer-to-peer network design, embracing a 'scalable darknet' architecture, where security is increased by allowing users to limit which other peers their peer will communicate with directly, rather than the typical 'promiscuous' approach of classic P2P networks. This means that not only does Freenet aim to prevent others from finding out what you are doing with Freenet, it makes it extremely difficult for them to even know that you are running a Freenet node at all. This is not the first P2P application to use this approach, other examples include Waste, however those networks are limited to just a few users, while Freenet can scale up almost indefinitely.

p2pnet.net: The first "pure darknet" alpha version of the completely re-written Freenet 0.7, a p2p network purpose-built to allow the free sharing of information online, is now ready for public testing.

SXSW videos

South by Southwest Interactive has posted videos of speakers and panels from last week, including Craig Newmark, Henry Rollins and the Darknets panel.

Ian Clarke on Freenet

I wrote about Ian Clarke and his Freenet Project extensively in Darknet — even have the $150 phone bill from the long-distance call from the US to Edinburgh to prove it (where were you, Skype?). Well, Ian has since moved back to LA, where he is guiding Freenet and working as chief scientist for Revver.

I had a great time at SXSW with Ian on my panel, and then hanging out with him and his girlfriend Janie at the EFF party there. Here he discusses Freenet, darknets, Revver and his move back to the States.

Formats: H.264 m4v for iPod; 44.2MB; 7:40; Ourmedia page | watch video; video quality: **** (out of 5)

MPEG-4; 30.9MB; 7:40; 320x240px; Ourmedia page | watch video; video quality: *** (out of 5)

Tags: Ian Clarke, videoblogging, video , journalism, SXSW, SXSW 2006, SXSWi, Freenet, Revver

Cross-posted to Real People Network.

Private torrent communities

Here's an interesting 4-minute video on one offshoot of darknets: Private Torrent Communities and Beyond.

Darknets, the MPAA and digital media

Monday's "The future of darknets" panel at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (here's the Digital Convergence track sessions) in Austin, Texas, was a highlight for many people, gauging by the reaction I've received. One woman came up to me at my book signing immediately afterward and said, "That was the most emotional, passionate panel I've ever seen!"

Credit goes to the audience, which was incredibly engaged and energetic. It turned out to be a sort of digital media revival meeting.

I led things off by showing this four-minute video about darknets, mash-ups and digital culture: All about darknets (11mb, MPEG-4).

We then discussed darknets only peripherally, with the subject turning to piracy and Hollywood's outdated business models. Speakers like Kevin Smokler and Michael Verdi stood up and challenged MPAA spokeswoman Kori Bernards to explain why the movie studios are moving at a glacial pace. Others discussed Hollywood's miserly view of fair use.

I was moderating and couldn't take notes, but Medialoper and Derek Powazek blogged it and Chuck Olsen grabbed some good video. More from Sahu and analoghole.

Here's the hour-long podcast mp3 of the session.

Technorati tags: podcast, videoblogging, personal media, SXSW, SXSW2006, geeks, piracy, copyright, darknets, MPAA

Today's panel on darknets

In a few hours I'll be moderating a panel at South by Southwest Interactive called The future of darknets: Can Hollywood see the light? I came up with the title -- as a call to move the debate beyond the current stalemate -- and asked these panelists to join in the discussion:

- Kori Bernards of the MPAA
- Ian Clarke of the Freenet Project
- Heather Champ, community manager of Flickr
- Mark Ishikawa, president of BayTSP
- Dave Toole, CEO of Outhink

Will post here later with the aftermath. For anyone else blogging, using the tag "darknets" should suffice.

Darknets panel at SXSW

Hope to see many of you at South by Southwest this coming week. I'll be moderating the darknets panel at 11:30 am Monday. (They'll post podcasts of each session some time afterward.) I’m no fan of panels where they line up two Official Spokespersons from one side to face off against two Official Spokespersons from the other side. So you’ll forgive us if we try to move beyond the way this question is usually framed — file-sharing pirates vs. digital anarchists — and tackle more interesting questions, about the limits (if any) of online privacy, whether “lightnet” values can work in a secure private network, whether freenets can serve as a bulkwark against corporate interests, and whether artists can benefit from enclosed or public p2p networks.

We have some cool panelists, including Ian Clarke, in town all the way from Edinburgh, Scotland, and Kori Bernards from the MPAA.

AllPeers: Killer app for Firefox?

Tectonic: AllPeers: Killer app for Firefox?

For an application that isn't even publicly available, AllPeers – a Firefox plug-in being developed in Prague – is receiving a great deal of hype. Some are even predicting that this will be Firefox's killer app.

AllPeers is simply a peer-to-peer (P2P) technology that allows you to share digital content with a buddy list. Using Firefox as the front-end, AllPeers says that it will run cross-platform, allowing transfers between Windows, Mac and Linux, and possibly more in the future. And, like Firefox, it's going to be open source. ...

Skypecasting as a Darknet tool

Davis Freeberg at Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection: Will Skypecasting will be the next weapon for the Darknet?

As if Hollywood hasn't had enough to deal with over the last five years, it appears that the phone company is going to be a new threat to their closed distribution model. Andy Abramson at VoIP Watch noticed a cool little freeware program called Splitcam that allows you to broadcast video and music through a Skype or Yahoo Messenger connection. Splitcam can split a video file into 64 different channels that internet users could then stream over the net. I don't really see this replacing the P2P networks because you would have to schedule a time to watch a show instead of having it on demand, but it will present a new challenge to Hollywood as VoIP gains in popularity. People could use this technology to subvert blackout NBA games or delayed live events, but Abramson sees the technology as having a greater impact on the international markets.

"Basically when you add in encryption that Skype already has it becomes impossible to know what's going through the pipe. That means someone in London could in effect Skypecast English Premiere League Football to an ex-pat in the USA. Vice versa someone here in the USA could Skypecast NBA basketball, which has rights deals in other parts of the world, virtually anywhere.

For Hollywood this is akin to Kazaa or LimeWire in many ways. But much worse. First Skype makes things easy. Like a Mac almost. So with TV shows seen at least one year behind in foreign markets the Skypecasting market could blow holes in that approach very quickly. Given the growth of broadband around the world Skype could become the illegal distribution pipe with a technology like the one described by Stuart, or someone else's. Now with Video and codecs geared for it already resident in Skype, the issue is no longer if, but when." ...

Davis adds by email: "It looks like it is no possible for the darknet to share video and mp3 files through yahoo messenger and skype. I'm not sure how widely the [Splitcam] program has been used, but it's definetely interesting."

Darknets vs. lightnets

Great article by Jason Boog in Ziff Davis's Publish today: Darknets vs. Lightnets.

From Napster LLC's dramatic legal showdown to HarperCollins Publishers Inc.'s plan to erect virtual walls around its digital library, Internet file sharing has always been presented as an either/or situation: Either the Napster generation would keep stealing content, or the monolithic corporations would figure out how to end peer-to-peer activity.

Recently, two prominent Web developers have initiated a conversation that could replace that zero-sum game mentality with the complementary ideas of "Darknets" and the "Lightnet." ...

A Darknet is a hidden Web nook where a small group shares digital files. Lightnet refers to a theoretical push towards an Internet where sharing and remixing files is encouraged.

In May, J.D. Lasica initiated the dialogue with his book, "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation." The Web consultant riffed on a 2002 research paper that studied how micro-networks illegally shared music, movies and other digital media—the biggest threat to creators' digital rights after the fall of Napster.

"A Darknet describes a space or environment for private file sharing," Lasica said in an interview with Publish.com. "The Darknet can be a force for good (at least in my book), when people act in a secure space to exchange files or information for legitimate purposes."

Ultimately, Lasica began to see consumers' desire to play with digital media in new ways: using MP3s as marketing tools, remixing digital music or sharing video clips. He concluded that these Darknets marked an irreversible shift in media relations.

"Customers are redefining DRM so that the 'rights' in DRM flow both ways, not just in the direction dictated by the media giants," he said. As these guerrilla networks evolved, something fundamental was changing—users were pushing for a more interactive relationship with media.

Let There Be Light…

At the Open Media Conference last October, Web developer Lucas Gonze imagined replacing covert Darknets with a file-sharing-friendly vision of a Lightnet. A variety of Webloggers and developers have since helped develop and circulate the idea.

"In a Lightnet world, New York Times audio and video will be about as accessible as text," Gonze said. "Anybody will be able to e-mail the link to a friend, incorporate the item in a playlist, comment on the item on their own home page, and perhaps make a derived work in the form of a remix, Podcast, or videoblog."

In Gonze's best possible scenario, every kind of media, from Hollywood movies to Wall Street Journal articles, would have an accessible URL so bloggers and Web users could play with the content.

Corporations may want to take their cue from The Washington Post, which recently began celebrating bloggers who circulate and link to Post articles, instead of burying articles behind an unlinkable subscription pay-wall.

The trick is convincing content producers to adopt these new modes of consumer interaction. ...

"Lightnet content will tend to be more popular than Darknet content," Gonze said. "Publishers will give away some content in order to be able to sell other content, and they will find new revenue sources when they become remixers themselves."

Web consultant Clay Shirky said he agrees with Gonze's market shift, and he took the message to his prominent clients, including Nokia, the BBC and the Library of Congress.

"What the corporations have to realize is that real revolutions don't involve an orderly transition from one business model to another," he told Publish.com.

Darknet: The Internet you didn’t know about

India Business: Darknet: The Internet You Didn’t Know About.

Behold the Lightnet

You've heard of the Darknet. Now try on its antithesis: Lightnet. An intiguing new meme from Lucas Gonze, with contributions by Mike Linksvayer and Peter van Dijck. I like it.

Darknets: The invitation-only Internet

Globe and Mail: Darknets: The invitation-only Internet.

Grouper, among the largest of the new services, hosts more than 100,000 private groups. Users can build their own darknets or request admission to thousands of publicly listed clubs whose members can browse through group folders, download files and communicate by instant messaging or group blogs.

A Bible group on Grouper, Deepthings, shares e-books and audio tapes. Needles and Pins offers sewing patterns; Skater Paradise posts skateboarding videos.

Grouper is currently a free service, and contextual ads in its group directory help generate revenue; soon the company will include video ads and the option to buy photo prints or CDs. The people behind Grouper say they hope to eventually offer a premium service stripped of ads and the ability to control a PC from afar.

Although unauthorized versions of copyrighted material do sometimes drift across the network, the company says it makes great effort to distance itself from illegal activity.

"Our intent is not to circumvent the copyright world," said Josh Felser, a co-founder of Grouper. "This is about personally generated content."

Felser and other advocates of commercial darknets think they are fulfilling consumer demand for what might best be called personal distribution, a medium whose potential content expands with every video-equipped cellphone and pocket-size digital camera bought.

"The big play for us is personal video," Felser said last month, as he toyed with a moviemaking digital camera in his office in Mill Valley, Calif. "Personal video is everywhere, and people are wanting to share video that they create."

Darknets as an early warning system

Tech Republic: How darknets can serve as an early warning system for network threats.

The Darknet as the great equalizer

The San Francisco Chronicle today has a story about Darknet titled, Underworld's 'Darknet' foments copyright revolution against Hollywood. (Chronicle photo by Deanne Fitzmaurice)

Just to be clear, Darknet advocates a personal media revolution and reform of the U.S. laws governing copyright. Excerpt from the piece:

Saying the 20th century's passive media consumer has been replaced by today's active media user, Lasica argues that the Darknet is a creative, democratic realm that will only grow in popularity to the extent that Hollywood doesn't get it.

"In a few years, technology will allow us to carry hundreds of movies or TV shows on a single keychain," he writes. "But will the media companies and their tech allies really get us there? I'm not sure." ...

"The excesses of copyright have gotten to the point where some of our traditional rights have gotten stripped away," he said. "As we're turning into more of a visual culture and we evolve from a print and text culture to a multimedia culture, are we going to have the same rights to quote from and borrow from and cite visual works as we had in the past?" ...

Pirates set sail to Darknet island

NY Times: Darknets: Virtual Parties With a Select Group of Invitees. I'm briefly quoted in the piece, as are Lawrence Lessig and Ian Clarke. Excerpt:

"Our intent is not to circumvent the copyright world," said Josh Felser, a co-founder of Grouper. "This is about personally generated content."

Mr. Felser and other advocates of commercial darknets think they are fulfilling consumer demand for what might best be called personal distribution, a medium whose potential content expands with every video-equipped cellphone and pocket-size digital camera bought.

"The big play for us is personal video," Mr. Felser said last month, as he toyed with a moviemaking digital camera in his office in Mill Valley, Calif. "Personal video is everywhere, and people are wanting to share video that they create." ...

The Register UK had this riposte today: Pirates set sail to Darknet island.

In the current era, one of the great expressions of friendship is sharing experiences, through snippets of video, personally recorded music and pictures. The record labels should be trying to harness this, not put an end to it.

Personally-created materials take time to be seen or listened to and this eats into the available time that the young today have to listen to copyrighted works. This is a far greater threat to content owners and a world where the power of P2P networks is used to create, index and share non-copyrighted works of high quality is only just around the corner.

One missing piece in both articles is the use of darknets as collaboration tools -- for artists, musicians and other creative individuals to share half-finished works and to trade them across the network as if they were collaborating in real time and real space.

Darknets are becoming a way of trading our media, not their media.

Newsweek on darknets

A bit of a disappointing piece in Newsweek International on darknets: "Tools to remain anonymous are fueling the surge in file sharing." Only six paragraphs long.

The reporter interviewed me on the subject two weeks ago, but none of my observations -- about darknets as a model for legitimate businesses -- made it into the article, likely due to space limitations.

Funny how publications like Newsweek still haven't discovered that the Web has no space limitations.

Personal media and darknets

In this 4-minute video interview, Outhink CEO Dave Toole discusses the personal media revolution and his company's free, secure collaborative application called SpinXpress (free download for this nifty application that lets you exchange files securely). Interview conducted at the Podcast Hotel conference in Portland, Oregon, on Sept. 7, 2005. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Cross-posted to New Media Musings.

Technorati tags: darknet, citizens media

Darknet business space heats up

The darknet business space is heating up.

In addition to the commercial darknet companies I wrote about here, particularly Grouper, ieem and Groove Networks, I've recently come across three more darknet companies.

This is where I think p2p is heading:

Version 1 (Napster, Kazaa) was about trading their media — copyrighted music and Hollywood content.

Version 2 (Blubster, WASTE) was about taking this activity into the Darknet.

Version 3 — which we're seeing in each of these new Darknet applications — is about collaboration among peers, in a secure, private fashion. It's about sharing our media and data — the video, music, audio files, photos and GPS data that we've created ourselves.

SpinXpress

First, a disclaimer: I met Dave Toole, CEO of Outhink, a couple of months back, and we quickly became friends. He's paying for his attorney to help Ourmedia achieve nonprofit status.

Outhink makes SpinXpress, a small app that has been around in corporate settings for a few years and is now being optimized and expanded in hope of reaching both the consumer and business market.

As the site says, SpinXpress is a free software app that lets you webcast (video, audio, or blogs) and collaborate with your friends, family or associates. I've already used it a half-dozen times with friends and business associates to share large files, given that Google Gmail and Yahoo mail cap the size of files you can send at 10 MB or less. You can transfer large files with Skype and most IM apps as well, but those don't always work smoothly. It's much easier to drag and drop, say, a dozen photos into the SpinXpress window and email a message to another party to alert her that she can snag your photos or videos without even having to download the application.

Toole says the application has super-military encryption borne out by tests in corporate environments. I look forward to Outhink building out the app to create a more inviting social space for media creation and collaboration.

WiredReach

WiredReach is both a darknet application and an open source platform that can be extended by anyone, says founder Ashish Maurya, who blogs here. As the site says:

The WiredReach Platform, built on a set of open standards and technologies (Eclipse, JXTA, RSS, RDF, XMPP), allows users to selectively share “content” with others in a completely decentralized and secure manner. We use the term “content” very loosely to include things like presence, blogs, bookmarks, documents, calendars, music, photos… virtually any type of social media.

Traditional content sharing and collaboration applications are typically built using proprietary protocols and/or as closed networks which limit their applicability and scope. Our goal, instead, is to take an open network approach and enable what we call the “User-Centric Web” - one that blurs the boundaries between the desktop and the web and that can be extended by anyone.

Navizon

Mexens Technology co-founder James P.W. Parsons says, "as P2P file sharing networks are to music, Navizon is to GPS data — except we're about a legal as it gets."

Navizon, released this week, is a revolutionary, P2P "wireless positioning system" that successfully blends GPS, cellular and wi-fi technologies -- together into one accurate "mobile geo-location" system and service.

If you have a GPS device, Navizon will map the wireless landscape (wi-fi access points and cell towers) everywhere you go and then this use this data to improve the accuracy and performance of your navigation within dense urban settings, indoors and even underground. GPS users now have accurate coverage in places they never did before and when they don't have their GPS devices with them. Once you sync your location data to the Navizon Network, it's available to all Navizon members worldwide.

If you don't have a GPS device, Navizon lets you accurately navigate cities, streets and neighborhoods using just your Pocket PC's wi-fi and/or cell capabilities — without having to purchase an expensive GPS device or to pay hefty monthly fees to a cell phone carrier network.

Membership in the Navizon Network is free and offers GPS, PDA and wi-fi enthusiasts, as well as the general public, such benefits as:

• the ability to upload and store your Location Data (with option to share or keep private);

• access to wireless positioning data that others around the world have collected and contributed;

• user preferences that let you specify any city, neighborhoods or areas of the world that you'd like to navigate using only Pocket PC wi-fi and/or cellular capabilities (no need for a GPS device).

Says Parsons: "You can check our coverage in New York City, Miami or Toronto — just a few of the cities where users have been contributing."

EFF contest for anonymous communication

The EFF announces a competition to design a graphical user interface for Tor, a software tool that lets people communicate anonymously online. In other words, a darknet.

Tor, which is currently being developed with support from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, helps anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features. Contest details here.

DMCA vs. the Darknet

Attorneys, scholars and academics are talking about darknets over at the Pickering moblog (though I'm not sure it's really a moblog if nobody's doing any mobile blogging -- still, an impressive gathering).

Participants include Julie Cohen, Wendy Gordon, Doug Lichtman, Jessica Litman, Bill Patry, Bill Rosenblatt, Larry Solum, Jim Speta, Rebecca Tushnet, Tim Wu and the EFF's Fred von Lohmann, who helped kick off this discussion with a 15-page whitepaper, Measuring the DMCA Against the Darknet (PDF, 15 pages).

Meantime, at Freedom to Tinker, Ed Felten says Congress should have foreseen the failtures of the DMCA.

Free to swap in the dark?

The Electric New Paper (Singapore): Free to swap in the dark? With strict laws in force, underground file-sharing networks - called darknets - use software to hide their activities.

IN the wake of the US Supreme Court's decision against peer-to-peer (P2P) applications from Grokster and StreamCast Networks, file-sharing networks are going deep into the darkest recesses of cyberspace to avoid prying eyes.

Recently, cyber-activists from the Freenet Project, a movement to create a totally anonymous file-sharing network, announced on their website that they were looking for savvy programmers to test a 'refined version' of their 'darknet' software.

Darknets are underground file-sharing networks that use software to hide their activities from outsiders like the authorities.

Unlike regular P2P networks where anyone can join if they download the file-sharing software, darknets are a by-invitation-only file-sharing community - those who want to share files on darknets must be invited by a member. ...

imeem darknet gets an upgrade

imeem, one of the darknet companies I wrote about here, announces several improvements to its service and the release of imeem 1.0. Says the company:

imeem is sleeker and handles smoother than ever before. With its integrated Roster and Viewer you can easily search, see what's new, and have all your friends at your fingertips.

The imeem home site just got a fresh new look. With even friendlier graphics, cool colors, and a step-by-step tour, imeem.com has never looked this good!

Also, imeem has launched its new, streamlined blog site. Now you can publish blogs and photos to the Web at http://blog.imeem.com ...

Or, you can blog and share your blog posts or photos with only the people you invite in. It's peer to peer, so no uploading involved -- it all resides on your own computer.

Is anonymous surfing 'dangerous'?

The Sunday Times (Ireland): Irish tech pioneer Ian Clarke pilloried for file-swap software.

Gotta love this quote:

Conor Flynn, technical director of Rits, an Irish information security company, says Freenet will be used for “malevolent and malicious purposes” and Clarke knows that.

“The Freenet system group say it’s for sharing information and they can’t help it if people abuse it. They know damn well that it will be,” Flynn said. “The ability to remain anonymous while surfing the web is dangerous."

.

Darknets, copyright and trading our own stuff

From today's San Jose Mercury News: The new threat to Hollywood: Darknets.

Fresh from its victory in the Supreme Court Grokster case, Hollywood faces a new Internet threat -- the rise of ``darknets,'' or private, encrypted networks that allow the anonymous exchange of music, movies and other digital files. ...

Darknets are nothing new. Even before Napster popularized Internet file-sharing in the late 1990s, people traded files through Internet relay chat channels and early electronic bulletin boards of the Usenet, which predated the World Wide Web.

The recent court rulings prompted the creators of file-swapping networks to go back underground.

``In that sense, it's a continuation of what the Internet has always been about,'' said J.D. Lasica, author of `Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation. ``You can today trade files over e-mail or over Instant Messenger or any number of ways. Short of re-architecting the entire Internet, there's no way the authorities are ever going to stop this completely.''

I devote a chapter in Darknet to Ian Clarke and his Freenet project -- Ian is the centerpiece of this new wave of articles about darknets. But it doesn't make sense to me to tout this as a copyright-circumvention technology in any circumstance.

Developers will -- and should -- build legal, safe, secure, private darknets. It's not about trading Hollywood's stuff. It's about trading our own.

Stealth swapping coming soon

Agence France-Press:

Software enabling people to anonymously swap music and other files on the Internet could be commonly available by year's end, the head of the Freenet Project said on Wednesday.

A test version of the "darknet" software for engineers was made available for download at the Freenet website Wednesday morning, Ian Clarke of the project told AFP.

The software is intended to allow computer users worldwide to remain anonymous while communicating online data in a way that hides them from industry investigators and others, Clarke said. ...

Darknet, the future of P2P

Softpedia calls darknets the future of P2P file sharing.

And a related story from MTV: 'Darknets' Could Make File-Sharers Invisible To Authorities. Free-speech advocate [Ian Clarke] working on system to share information anonymously.

The new breed of darknets

John Markoff of the NY Times called a few days ago to talk about the new breed of P2P file-sharing technologies. Monday, the Times has his story: New File-Sharing Techniques Are Likely to Test Court Decision, and John quotes me briefly. Excerpt:

At a computer security conference in Las Vegas on Thursday, an Irish software designer described a new version of a peer-to-peer file-sharing system that he says will make it easier to share digital information anonymously and make detection by corporations and governments far more difficult.

Others have described similar efforts to build a so-called darknet that aims to shield the identities of those sharing information. The issue is complicated by the fact that the small group of technologists designing the new systems say their goal is to create tools to circumvent censorship and political repression - not to abet copyright violation. ...

Initiatives like Freenet [from Irish programmer Ian Clarke, above] are certain to complicate industry and government efforts to restrict the digital sharing of proprietary data.

To join a darknet, a potential user must be trusted by one of the existing members. Thus such networks grow as part of a "web of trust," and are far more restricted than open systems.

In June, Ross Anderson, a prominent computer-security researcher who was a pioneer in developing early peer-to-peer networks, published a technical paper detailing how it was possible to resist industry attempts to disable such networks.

He also published a second paper trying to anticipate the market reaction to curbs on file sharing like the Grokster ruling. The paper, "The Economics of Censorship Resistance," predicts the emergence of closed networks like the new Freenet, as well as "fan clubs" focused on specific digital content, which would be more difficult for the industry to combat.

Mr. Anderson, who traces peer-to-peer networks back to an ad hoc networking system called Usenet pioneered over telephone lines in 1979, said his research group was collaborating with computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a next-generation peer-to-peer network, to be unveiled in a few months. Like Freenet, it is designed to be impervious to censorship and to permit secure communications in potentially hostile environments. ...

As the legal consequences for file sharing become clearer, there will be a proliferation of systems with features similar to Freenet, according to a range of industry specialists. In Silicon Valley, start-up companies like Imeem and Grouper are already making it possible to create groups to share digital information.

"Darknets are going to be with us," said J. D. Lasica, author of "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation" (John Wiley & Sons, 2005). "Serious file traders have been gravitating toward them. There is just this culture of freedom that people feel they're entitled to, and they don't want anyone looking over their shoulders."

Legal Affairs article online

Legal Affairs magazine published a piece I wrote about the Prince of Darknet in its current issue and just posted it online.

If you're interested in the editorial process, contrast and compare this version with the largely unedited version, which appeared in my book.

Concept: darknets

The Darknet is a relatively new concept. The term was coined in a scientific paper four Microsoft researchers released in November 2002 at a computer conference.

The researchers defined darknets as “a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content.” But that's techie talk. They really were referring to the vast, gathering, lawless economy of shared music, movies, television shows, games, software, and porn—a one-touch jukebox that would rival the products and services of the entertainment companies.

The researchers' major conclusion was that media companies ought to use copy protection judiciously, because users don’t like digital locks, somebody will figure out how to pick them, and content will spill into the Darknet despite the best efforts to wall it off. The best way companies can fight darknet piracy, they said, is by offering affordable, convenient, compelling products and services. In other words, the most effective copy protection system is a great business model.

(In a terrific twist, Cory Doctorow traveled to the headquarters of Microsoft Research Group in June 2004 and gave a talk about copyright, technology and digital rights management, relying on the Darknet paper as Exhibit A.)

Soon afterward, the press picked up on the term and began using other definitions. The New York Times, for example, described darknets as private, invitation-only cyberclubs or gated communities requiring an access code to enter. At the same time, librarians have used the phrases Dark Web, Invisible Web, and Dark Net to refer to the information such as books and periodicals that reside inside walled-off online databases that are off-limits to search engines and indexing software robots. Others refer to the Dark Net as the world of cybercrime, spammers, terrorists, and other underworld figures who use the Internet to avert the law.

In this book, I use darknets as a catch-all term to refer to networks of people who rely on closed-off spaces—safe havens in both the virtual and real worlds where there is little or no fear of detection—to share copyrighted digital material with others or to escape the restrictions on digital media imposed by entertainment companies.

The capitalized Darknet will refer to these networks in a collective sense. For the most part, the Darknet is simply the underground Internet. But there are many darknets: the millions of users trading files in the shady regions of Usenet and Internet Relay Chat, students who send songs and TV shows to each other using instant messaging services from AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft, city streets and college campuses where people copy, burn, and share physical media like CDs, and the new breed of encrypted dark networks like Freenet that I report on in chapter 12. (Kazaa, Grokster, BitTorrent, and other aboveground networks won’t qualify for Darknet status until they provide users a true measure of anonymity. The copyright cops claim no one is anonymous on the Internet, but as we’ll see, they are blowing smoke.)

Darknets may sound sinister, but their roots can be traced to such all-American activities as trading and dubbing cassette music tapes in the ’60s and ’70s, as well as the computer club boom of the ’80s when people freely exchanged software on floppy disks, an activity dubbed the “sneakernet.”

The Microsoft researchers see darknets as falling squarely in the same tradition:

Students in dorms will establish darknets to share content in their social group. These darknets may be based on simple file sharing, DVD-copying, or may use special application programs or servers: for example, a chat or instant-messenger client enhanced to share content with members of your buddy-list. Each student will be a member of other darknets: for example, their family, various special interest groups, friends from high-school, and colleagues in part-time jobs.

The Darknet is less a place or a thing than an idea. On a mundane level, the Darknet is about getting free stuff. On a deeper level, it’s about millions of people engaging in a shared media experience and finding a clandestine way to detour around restrictions imposed by the entertainment industries.

Certainly, much Darknet conduct is illegal. Clearly, many underground activities are ethically dubious or flat-out wrong. But much of it is also understandable as people look for ways to restore balance to a system that has become stacked against digital culture. My intention is not to glamorize the Darknet or condemn it, but simply to help understand it.

What will the Darknet look like tomorrow? Ultimately, its dimensions will be shaped by the actions of entertainment companies and policymakers. If people are prevented by technology or law from being able to control their own media experiences, they will not fall back into passive consumer roles. Instead, they will journey underground. The Darknet may become the last refuge for the digital freedom fighters.

Darknets

This is where I think p2p is heading:

Version 1 (Napster, Kazaa) was about trading their media — copyrighted music and Hollywood content.

Version 2 (Blubster, WASTE) was about taking this activity into the Darknet.

Version 3 — which we're seeing in each of these new Darknet applications — is about collaboration among peers, in a secure, private fashion. It's about sharing our media and data — the video, music, audio files, photos and GPS data that we've created ourselves.

For more on what darknets are, see this backgrounder from my book, or Wikipedia's take.

Here are a few darknets worth a look -- private, encrypted spaces where social groups can communicate with each other and exchange files to some extent. Some are full-blown companies, other examples are just software apps written by coders ticked off at the courts for shutting down Napster.

Darknets

Grouper

Company: 15 people, headquarters in Mill Valley, CA; $1.5 million in funding.

Lowdown: PC World gave Grouper 4 stars out of 5; CNET, 5 out of 5. I met founder Dave Samuel at a Media Center event last fall. Samuel said the four “golden rules” of Grouper are:

- Share everything
- Play fair
- Don’t take things that are not yours
- Be aware of wonder

“One thing that always frustrated me was the [lack of] ability to share media with my friends, to share files. You can email some files -- but with constraints,” Samuel said. “With peer to peer and the nature of the broadband world, people naturally share many things, including media files.”

Limitation: You can invite up to 30 people into a private darknet. You can stream, but not download, music files.

Geek quotient: low. Normal people can do this.

Cost: free. Ad-supported.

imeem

Company: 10 people, with headquarters in Cupertino, CA

Lowdown: A free desktop app that lets you create personal, private networks with your friends and family. Includes chat, file sharing, photo sharing, search, forums and more with an attractive interface. I've used it, but haven't mastered it yet. Business Week Online was mightily impressed. imeem got a recent facelift for its version 1.0, which I wrote about here.

Limitations: You can invite up to 30 people to join one of your private networks.

Geek quotient: low

Cost: Free. Advertiser-supported.

SpinXpress

Outhink makes SpinXpress, a small app that has been around in corporate settings for a few years and is now being optimized and expanded in hope of reaching both the consumer and business market.

SpinXpress is a free software app that lets you webcast (video, audio, or blogs) and collaborate with your friends, family or associates. I've already used it a half-dozen times with friends and business associates to share large files, given that Google Gmail and Yahoo mail cap the size of files you can send at 10 MB or less. You can transfer large files with Skype and most IM apps as well, but those don't always work smoothly. It's much easier to drag and drop, say, a dozen photos into the SpinXpress window and email a message to another party to alert her that she can snag your photos or videos without even having to download the application.

Toole says the application has super-military encryption borne out by tests in corporate environments.

Limitations: More of a collaborative tool than a dark social space, there are no limitations on the number of people in a group you create.

Geek quotient: low

Cost: Free.

WiredReach

WiredReach is both a darknet application and an open source platform that can be extended by anyone, says founder Ashish Maurya, who blogs here. As the site says:

The WiredReach Platform, built on a set of open standards and technologies (Eclipse, JXTA, RSS, RDF, XMPP), allows users to selectively share “content” with others in a completely decentralized and secure manner. We use the term “content” very loosely to include things like presence, blogs, bookmarks, documents, calendars, music, photos… virtually any type of social media.

Traditional content sharing and collaboration applications are typically built using proprietary protocols and/or as closed networks which limit their applicability and scope. Our goal, instead, is to take an open network approach and enable what we call the “User-Centric Web” - one that blurs the boundaries between the desktop and the web and that can be extended by anyone.

Navizon

Mexens Technology co-founder James P.W. Parsons says, "as P2P file sharing networks are to music, Navizon is to GPS data — except we're about a legal as it gets."

Navizon, released in mid-August 2005, is a free P2P "wireless positioning system" that successfully blends GPS, cellular and wi-fi technologies -- together into one accurate "mobile geo-location" system and service.

If you have a GPS device, Navizon will map the wireless landscape (wi-fi access points and cell towers) everywhere you go and then this use this data to improve the accuracy and performance of your navigation within dense urban settings, indoors and even underground. GPS users now have accurate coverage in places they never did before and when they don't have their GPS devices with them. Once you sync your location data to the Navizon Network, it's available to all Navizon members worldwide.

If you don't have a GPS device, Navizon lets yo