Peer to Peer: We've Only Just Begun - Industry Trend or Event

Industry Standard, The, August 28, 2000 by Elinor Abreu

New distributed networks promise anonymous, censorship-proof posting. Is that a good thing?

AS THE FATE OF NAPSTER IS DECIDED in court, the wider saga of distributed "peer-to-peer" networks is playing out elsewhere. New networks are springing up not only to help people avoid copyright laws, but also to enable them to share all types of digital information, free from censorship.

And such systems, which allow the sharing of information from many computers rather than central servers, are no longer created solely by solitary misfits. Two of the most prominent new networks, Publius and Freenet, have sharply contrasting backgrounds. Like Napster, Freenet is the brainchild of an individual: in this case, a 23-year-old Scottish programmer. Publius, on the other hand, was developed by researchers at AT&T Labs. Peer-to peer is no longer a grassroots movement: It's becoming the province of big business.

Both Publius and Freenet are technically impossible to shut down because, unlike Napster, they don't rely on a centralized server to direct users to distributed material. That raises troubling issues that go beyond the swapping of the latest Eminem single.

Freenet and Publius mark the next steps in an evolution that began with private "re-mailers" like anon.penet.fi, which was created in 1992 by Finnish programmer Johan Helsingus. Anon.penet.fi stripped away identifying information and resent messages to their original destination. In 1995, after someone used Helsingus' brainchild to broadcast copyrighted information from the Church of Scientology, the Finnish courts shut it down.

Developed by Avi Rubin, a principal researcher at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, N.J., along with AT&T colleague Lorrie Cranor and Marc Waldman, a graduate student at New York University, Publius takes its name from the pseudonym used by the authors of the Federalist Papers. It's designed to enable people to anonymously post information online that can't be altered without the permission of the author. The system encrypts a document and divides it into fragments, or keys, that reside on multiple randomly selected servers. Though the document can be split into many keys, only a few are required to reconstruct the document so the information can be decrypted and viewed.

The host computers belong to volunteers who don't know what content they're hosting. Among the 50 computers hosting content for the Publius two-month trial, going on now, are servers at the Center for Democracy and Technology and Xerox PARC.

Rubin says Publius is ideal for corporate whistleblowers and dissidents in authoritarian countries who are barred from accessing or posting political material because the government controls Internet domains. Rubin says he was inspired to build the network by a beleaguered radio station in Panama under Gen. Manuel Noriega. The American broadcaster was forced to continually relocate his transmitter to avoid shutdown and arrest. Eventually caught, the broadcaster was rescued by U.S. forces. "If he had access to something like Publius he could have maintained a Web site," Rubin says. "He could have remained anonymous, and the government couldn't have shut it down."

Despite the system's apparent similarities to Napster, Publius is unlikely to create the stir the free-music exchange site has caused. In the current trial, which started Aug. 7, Publius limits data files to 100KB, effectively eliminating most audio and video files. That should appease recording companies and other copyright holders.

Still, Publius could be a haven for the distribution of libelous material or porn.

That possibility has prompted AT&T officials to respond that any technology can be misused.

"Napster's goal was facilitate access to information and music," says Michael Lamb, AT&T's chief privacy officer. "By contrast, Publius is designed to limit access and protect privacy. Our intent is that this technology not be used for illegal purposes but we can't guarantee that someone out there will not misuse it."

That risk will be considered in the decision whether to develop Publius on a commercial basis, he adds.

In the meantime, AT&T has been careful to keep some distance from Rubin's project. Lamb says that AT&T is "participating" in the Publius research, not "sponsoring" it. That's a distinction only a major corporation could love.

Neither Rubin nor Lamb would comment on Publius' commercial possibilities. An obvious choice: using the technology to enable commercial Web sites to withstand the sort of distributed denial of service attacks that shut down major sites last February. "If somebody were to bring down 70 percent of the Web sites on the Internet it wouldn't affect stuff published with Publius," says Rubin. "We view this as a sort of fault-tolerant Web. Your content is spread out in many redundant sites so it's a fail-safe, distributed backup system."

Ian Clarke is unbound by such considerations. Clarke, who is relocating to Los Angeles this month to work for a Web company called Uprizer, designed Freenet last year as his final-year project for a degree in artificial intelligence and computer science at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.