Invite Only Meeting For Song Swappers
Sounds Interesting...Did anyone go?
Quote:
These high-tech Cotton Clubs usually require users to be trusted or at least know someone inside. The files being traded, instead of out in the open, are encrypted -- the 21st century equivalent of hiding bathtub gin under a fake floorboard.
Internet file-sharers are operating much like any society that falls under attack. And the very technologies they are using as shields have long been employed by legitimate businesses to protect their data from prying eyes and hackers.
"The software that users are moving toward, it has characteristics that businesses need -- which is a high degree of privacy, a high degree of security and the ability to handle large files," said Clay Shirky, a professor of interactive telecommunications at New York University.
Three years after the Recording Industry Association of America's lawyers succeeded in shutting down the Napster file-trading service, the music industry's jihad against unauthorized digital music distribution is reaping an unintended consequence: better, easier-to-use software for exchanging data securely -- and even anonymously -- on the Internet.
"Thanks to the RIAA, ease of use surrounding encryption technologies, which was never a big deal before, is a big deal now," Shirky said.
An unbottled genie
The decentralized peer-to-peer technology that enables a computer user to share his or her music collection with strangers remains an unbottled genie -- and is now likely to evolve so ever more traffic becomes invisible not just to the entertainment industry's copyright cops but also to repressive governments, inquisitive employers and snooping relatives.
On the file-swapping front, current favorites Kazaa, Morpheus and iMesh are more decentralized and harder to sue than Napster. They are breeding more sophisticated stepchildren just as the RIAA goes after the swappers themselves with lawsuits filed against 260 alleged file sharers.
An upcoming release of the file-sharing program Blubster, for instance, not only makes users more difficult to identify. It also seamlessly encrypts files before they are transferred and decrypts them for the end user.
Another program, called Waste, can be used to set up an encrypted instant-messaging and content-sharing network of up to 50 users. Unlike traditional instant-messaging programs, Waste messages don't pass through a central server.
Waste was pulled by America Online shortly after its release by the company's Nullsoft division, but is still circulating online. Neither AOL nor Nullsoft programmer Justin Frankel returned calls seeking comment. Nullsoft also released Gnutella -- on which many of Napster's successors are based. AOL quickly yanked that program, too, but the damage was done. (AOL Time Warner is the parent company of CNN.)
Copyright crackdowns like those staged by the RIAA, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Business Software Alliance have succeeded on at least one front: Because higher security and anonymity tend to make software more difficult to use, fewer people are likely to be engaged in casual copying.
"To some degree, the effort has always been one of pushing down the piracy problem, forcing it down to the hardcore pirate," said Bob Kruger, the BSA's vice president for enforcement.
Source CNN(http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/interne....ap/index.html)
