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Communications Your Rights Online

I2hub Shutdown Due to Legal Pressure 333

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the dropping-like-flies dept.
djabbour writes "I2hub, the only p2p client that catered to internet2 users has shutdown today due to legal concerns. A few hours ago, any user on i2hub got a message which read 'RIP 11/14/2005. It was a good run. Forced to shut down by the industry.' The i2hub site has been shutdown, and new clients can no longer login to the i2hub server."
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I2hub Shutdown Due to Legal Pressure More

I2hub Shutdown Due to Legal Pressure

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  • Oh. No. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @12:10AM (#14032109)
    I can no longer copy and distribute music on a network I never belonged to.

    Oh the injustice.

    • Re:Oh. No. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Since when did using software that allows the direct transfer and query of data become illegal? Shouldn't "the industry" shutdown the people that distribute copyrighted material, or would that just (be more difficult|cost more money) than supressing the software?

      Bandwidth and cpu power will continue to increase, it's time certain groups realize that information can't be controlled in the same fashion as physical property. These strong armed tactics of shuting down services, instead of the actual source of t

  • I'll certainly miss it. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AndrewSchaefer ( 89406 ) * <andrew@@@schaefer...nu> on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @12:12AM (#14032119) Homepage
    Does this mean I get a refund on my VIP membership? ;) Seriously though, I2hub was an awesome project while it lasted. The whole point of this network was to bring together college students using highspeed networks. While some students chose to share copyrighted files, a lot of others uses I2hub for legitimate and semi-scholarly purposes. I can't tell you how many times I've helped kids with their C++ and Java questions, found good game competitors, and reconnected with old friends. The whole point of the I2 network is to see what researchers and academics can do with large amounts of bandwidth. I2hub certainly explored that question. So... what's next?

  • What a shame (Score:5, Informative)

    by XoXus ( 12014 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @12:12AM (#14032120)
    That's a shame. Especially with the speeds they would get, the bottle necks would shift back to the computers themselves, rather than the network.

  • RIP (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Professr3 ( 670356 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @12:12AM (#14032124)
    I was one of the ops on i2hub, and it was used for many legal purposes as well as the file-sharing. It will be missed, but RIAA can't get us all, no matter how hard they try.

  • It's only a matter of time. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Devil's BSD ( 562630 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @12:12AM (#14032126) Homepage
    It's only a matter of time before some college student starts hosting another Internet2-only DC++ server out of his/her dorm room. I personally have one restricted to the University of Kentucky IP block. The music industry doesn't seem to realize especially after napster that for every P2P network it shuts down, three more spring up.

    But another concern is about the future of P2P. Grokster shut down last week, now i2hub has been forced out... what's next? BitTorrent? Kazaa? Ares?

    • Re:It's only a matter of time. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Stevyn ( 691306 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @12:19AM (#14032160)
      What's worse is that the new ones are easier and faster to use. I wouldn't trade bittorrent for napster any day. Thank you RIAA for those fast linux ISOs.

    • Re:It's only a matter of time. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by digitalunity ( 19107 ) <digitalunity@yah o o . com> on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @12:28AM (#14032199) Homepage
      Kazaa and Grokster were networks. BitTorrent is a technology. Since it's free(in all senses of the word), BitTorrent will go away when it's illegal and not before then. Actually, even then BitTorrent probably won't go away. The fact that trackers are 100% decentralized and don't talk to each other(there is no single, homogenous BT network) means it cannot be shutdown with the legal pressure of a single company attacking another.

      They will have to legislate away BT if they want it gone. If that successully happens, we have a lot more to worry about than how to get free porn.

      • Re:It's only a matter of time. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by shmlco ( 594907 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @02:41AM (#14032738) Homepage
        "...means it cannot be shutdown with the legal pressure of a single company attacking another."

        Like, say, legally telling a large ISP to detect and kill the traffic running over its backbones?

        Repeat after me. The internet is not anonymous. Traffic, traffic patterns, protocols, and content can and will be tracked. BT will be legally shut down once they analyze the numbers and determine that only 5% of its traffic consists of those "legitimate" linux distros.

        'Course hackers, cause they think they're so smart, will counter with another protocol... while will suffer the same fate. Soon a blanket order covering all illegitimate P2P use will be put into effect and enforced by ISPs, shutting down access and bouncing people off the net when they see it pop up.

        Downloading and owning said software will also be illegal. College nets will be monitored, because not to do so will endanger federal grant money, as well as getting the school kicked off the backbone if they don't.

        Watch. We're well into the first phase.

        All because a bunch of jerks were too cheap to pay for the music they actually wanted to listen to...

        • Re:It's only a matter of time. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by digitalunity ( 19107 ) <digitalunity@yah o o . com> on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @04:41AM (#14033119) Homepage
          I see your concern, and lawmakers may attempt to move in that direction. However, technologies like bittorrent probably cannot be legislated against directly. The media conglomerates will have to attack those who actually participate in the distribution process. Although it is easy to track infringement to a specific IP address, proving that the person who owns the IP address is actually the person engaging in the infringement is difficult as evidenced by the few defendants that have stood up to the RIAA.

          Your logic does contain a fallacy. Right now, P2P technologies are one of the driving forces behind widespread broadband deployment and that is not something ISPs are willing to give up. As evidenced by some of their recent attempts to shield their users from the RIAA's legal efforts, some ISPs are realizing the value of protecting their client's anonymity. ISP's currently have common carrier status meaning they are not responsible for the contents of the traffic they carry, this has been upheld by the courts. ISP's do not care what you do with your bandwidth, unless of course you use so much of it(think 'excessive use') that it affects the people around you or begins to degrade the stability of their own network.

          As far as college networks, you are probably correct. There are no guarantees that civil courts will find that college networks fall under common carrier provisions(especially private colleges). So they are in a special legal position in that they feel some legal liability to stop copyright infringement, especially when they are aware of what is going down on their networks.

          Downloading and owning said software will also be illegal
          That is highly unlikely as BitTorrent is a 'stupid' protocol in that it doesn't decipher/alter the data it is designed to transmit. If the BitTorrent protocol could be made illegal, then why not HTTP or SSL? SSL is only used by terrorists, you know... (sarcasm)

          Programs like DeCSS used for copyright infringement that have been attacked were not covered only by the Copyright Act(which actually didn't seem to have an issue with DeCSS because it could be used for fair use), but they were covered also by DMCA which is a whole other beast. With BitTorrent, I can send you an ISO of a CSS encrypted movie and it still doesn't fall under the DMCA because I haven't decrypted it for you.

          As you can see from this example, BitTorrent cannot be made illegal without significant changes to the laws governing your privledges. Notice I didn't call them rights, fair use is a privledge provided by the Copyright Act but with one amendment it could be removed. Even the most pro-corporate legislators won't do that, that would be political suicide of unimaginable proportions. So, I don't think BitTorrent software or the BT protocol are going anywhere. The media companies will have to attack the users of the software for specific acts of infringement, not just the technology itself. The fact that it's open source only means it's that much more resilient because no one can take it away from you now.
    • I was running a campus-only hub at the University of Toledo for quite a long time, but about a month ago it was shut down by UT's EIT department because they considered it a legal risk for them to know it exists on the campus. Colleges are cracking down on local P2P as well, so the only real option is a distributed network.
      • they considered it a legal risk for them to know it exists on the campus. Colleges are cracking down on local P2P as well, so the only real option is a distributed network.

        i think they were trying to tell you how to keep it alive without telling you.

        it would be a smaller community but run a VPN inside the school network allowing the big dogs and anyone else who really wanted to join to swap files, it would also hang a big 'no noobs' sign on the network.

  • Save As (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @12:15AM (#14032136) Homepage Journal
    What amazes me about the current copy paranoia is that PCs have been copying perfectly for decades. The Internet has been copying perfectly among strangers en masse for decades. It's been popular globally for a decade. Nothing has changed. The legal risks are exactly the same, our rights are exactly the same. Our laws protecting our rights are a little different, and the politicians are a new bunch. So I guess that's why there's a wild suppression running amok among the copyright industry. But they waited too long: the masses have grown accustomed to copying whatever we want. Momentum is against them - they might make some inroads, some local successes, but copyright was protected by inadequate tech for too long, and now has been exposed to disruptive tech for too long. The smart money is on the copyright holders who can harness the new distribution media, not those who fight it.

  • Okay . . . . (Score:5, Insightful)

    by failure-man ( 870605 ) <failureman@gmFREEBSDail.com minus bsd> on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @12:19AM (#14032161)
    Wasn't Internet2 supposed to be for academic uses anyway?

    On noes! We can't clog up this incredibly powerful and incredibly expensive network trading terabytes of movies and music! The humanity!

    Seriously now, the whole point of the thing was to move multiple gigs of data coming out of CFD simulations and the like, not to get the latest episode of Lost.
    • Call it experimentation.

      What better way to test the long-term reliability and performance of a data network then to have thousands of users transferring large and often uncompressible files over it 24/7?

    • Re:Okay . . . . (Score:5, Informative)

      by chickenmonger ( 614989 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @01:34AM (#14032483) Journal
      GAH! Every time a discussion comes up about Internet 2, the same misinformed opinions get modded up. Internet 2 is not separate, in that it requires special research grants or whatever to use it.

      I2 isn't really all that "separate". It's merely a series of high-speed routers and lines that interconnect member organizations. Being a well-minded student on an I2 connected school-owned network, I would love to have all my gaming and leisure traffic go solely over the commercial internet. It's just not possible. When you connect to other computers at I2 organizations, any and all traffic goes directly over the I2 lines.

      So since kernel.org is hosted at Oregon State, I can download the latest and greatest over "Internet 2" with no special software or methods required. The commodity internet isn't even touched for such a transfer, and I can usually get between 1 and 3 MB/s, depending on the I2-connected server.

      Hope that clears some misconceptions up. For more information, look at the tracert I did for kerneltrap from my I2 connected computer:

      Tracing route to www.kerneltrap.org [140.211.166.45] over a maximum of 30 hops:

          5 13 ms 15 ms 9 ms abilene.tele.iastate.edu [192.245.179.250]
          6 26 ms 20 ms 28 ms dnvrng-kscyng.abilene.ucaid.edu [198.32.8.13]
          7 45 ms 45 ms 57 ms snvang-dnvrng.abilene.ucaid.edu [198.32.8.1]
          8 57 ms 57 ms 57 ms pos-1-0.core0.eug.oregon-gigapop.net [198.32.163.17]
          9 57 ms 57 ms 57 ms nero.eug.oregon-gigapop.net [198.32.163.151]
        10 57 ms 57 ms 57 ms eugn-core1-gw.nero.net [207.98.64.168]
        11 59 ms 59 ms 59 ms corv-car1-gw.nero.net [207.98.64.6]
        12 59 ms 59 ms 59 ms kt2.osuosl.org [140.211.166.45]

      Trace complete.

      See those .abilene. servers? There's a reason: http://abilene.internet2.edu/ [internet2.edu]
      • They would prefer that all traffic possible go out I2 links. I2 connections are much cheaper than I1 connections. Basically, it's a peering agreement. Indania U does need some money to keep the whole thing running but it's not the "you pay us for everything" setup like with I1. So, given that, you want as much traffic as possible to go over I2. People are going to do what they want with the net, so you deal with the traffic one way or another. Better to have as much of it as possible running on cheaper link

  • Kill All Hubs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SoupIsGood Food ( 1179 ) * on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @12:21AM (#14032170)
    A P2P protocol that requires a centralized organizing entity, such as a hub, tracker or server, isn't really a P2P protocol. Decentralizing the bandwidth and the storage isn't enough to ensure unimpeded file sharing... the indexing needs to be decentralized as well. This way, there is no single point of attack to take down the P2P network.

    This just isn't to protect music pirates from the record companies, but to protect legitimate distribution systems from malicious attack, either governmental or criminal.

    SoupIsGood Food

    • .... the indexing needs to be decentralized as well....

      Why not put the index on more attack proof networks like freenet, and use a faster p2p app for the actual downloading.

      • Re:Put the index on freenet (Score:4, Informative)

        by atomm1024 ( 570507 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @01:13AM (#14032403)
        By the time you successfully download the index, the people with the file you want will probably have gone offline. Freenet is just too damn slow. It looks like they're doing some interesting things with the upcoming version 0.7, though, so maybe it will become more usable for things like that.

        There is a strongly anonymous file sharing application under development, I2Phex, based on the I2P anonymous transport. Unfortunately, though, it's based on Gnutella, and the anonymous transport substantially reduces the speed, so once the network grows fairly large, it'll probably be congested to the point of being useless. Hopefully a program will be developed based on a more efficient algorithm like Chord or Kademlia.

  • Should be almost impossible to shut down true P2P (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CrazyJim1 ( 809850 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @12:23AM (#14032181) Journal
    The funny part about a well written P2P is that you shouldn't be able to shut it down. I envisioned P2P taking over where Napster left off as soon as they shut down Napster. I was partly right, but there's no reason to have P2P shut down. The fundamental flaw in P2P software today is that it banks on main servers for user list files. If instead, it simply kept a record of everyone's IP address on the client side, it could then:
    A) Scan every single IP that was active last run. Not everyone has a static IP, but out of thousands of people, at least one person should.
    B) As soon as you find someone with an active IP, you become on the network, and recieve a new list of IP addresses(all the active ones) from the client that's online. VOILA YOU'RE ONLINE WITH NO CENTRAL SERVER

    The other fundamental flaw of P2P software is that the coders are very lazy, and use a single port. Once this port is identified to your software, ISPS can block that port and you're screwed. To be robust, it should use a variety of random ports of software that you're not using. I mean you can get really complex about what ports you're using: Up to and including scanning the computer for software so it knows which ports not to use... But that's getting crazy indepth, just a standard: Random number between 10000-30000 should do. And everyone keeps this port number along side your IP address in the list.

    • Three problems.

      1) If you use a random port, you have a harder time enacting a firewall. Unless I misunderstand firewalls, they close all ports except the approved ones. Won't you have to change the firewall every time you log-on? And wouldn't a simple program that gets authority to automatically open ports in the firewall be dangerous from a security perspective? Esp. since P2P is already clogged with viruses?

      2) If every computer has the IP address of every other computer, then the RIAA can bust one
      • 1) The port [range] could be user-configurable rather than random, meaning the user could change ports if their current range is blocked.

        2) True, but anonymity wasn't the point of the original post. The point was creating a p2p network that is impossible to shut down.

        3) You seem to want anonymity as per #2. It will be hard to implement any sort of karma system without tying it to identity, which can eventually be tied to an IP at the ISP level.

        4) There have been p2p networks with similar premises in the p

    • Re:Should be almost impossible to shut down true P (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yes, it is impossible to shut down true P2P. It's also impossible to control it. That means the RIAA/MPAA can easily infiltrate your network and setup honeypots and/or actively poison it.

      What happens when the first "working" address is an RIIA machine that lies to you and gives you a list of hundreds of other RIIA machines. Everything looks normal, but you've just been pwned.

      • There are trust-relationship algorithms for dealing with the poisoning/honeypot problems. There are known methods from clustering research that are applicable in terms of bootstrapping without trying to go down a serial list of every possible active node, and for using distributed hashes such that nobody needs to know the entire content index at once. Real p2p is possible, it's just that nobody has yet pulled all the peices together to make it happen (which, in the p2p coders' defense, is a very complex p

    • Re:Should be almost impossible to shut down true P (Score:4, Interesting)

      by RingDev ( 879105 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @01:19AM (#14032430) Homepage Journal
      err, no. Everything over 1024 is blocked by default by damn near every firewall I've ever seen. I think even the Windows XP firewall have it all blocked by default (if you turn on the firewall).

      Better just to run it over port 80, so long as you aren't running a web server. But should you really be downloading pron and warez on your production web box? And port 80 is open for web traffic.

      The problem with distributed lists though is distributed points of security breaches. Think if someone from the RIAA or Sony joined the party, all they would have to do is search for 1 song they hold the rights to and blamo, they have a list of IPs of every person who has that song. And I don't really mean every person, because the list effects would be huge.

      Your best bet would be to use some sort of 6degrees of seperation and social architexture to get file lists. ie: Bob is "friends" with Jim and Jon. Bob invites Saley. Saley searches for a file, her search hit's Bob's (1 degree), Jim's and Jon's (2 degrees) shares, but not their friends. If Saley adds Jon to her "Friends" list, she would be able to search Jon's friends too.

      Someone could (read: RIAA would pay someone to) exploit the system to make a huge listing. A bit of recursion and friend adding and you could rapidly dig up a pretty comprehensive list. And since the client is in the enemy's hand it would be imposible to prevent. The only bright side is that you could likely backtrack who the person was who sent out the invite to them.

      -Rick
    • The Gnutella [wikipedia.org] network is based upon that concept.

  • Only on Slashdot... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jpetts ( 208163 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @12:25AM (#14032185)
    ...would somebody post a link to a site with the news that the site had been shut down...
  • One by one they all fall away.

    Maybe FreeNet will win in the end. Don't know how they can threaten that one, although I'm sure they're trying.

    Maybe yesterday will be remembered as a golden age in music when anything could be found and tried. I sure don't feel the same about the "legal" replacements I'm seeing coming to replace them. It still doesn't make me want to buy anything from Sony-BMG.

    • They can try to filter all Freenet traffic.

      Luckily, agile protocols can bail us out.
    • Is freenet really usable for piracy, though? Last I check (admittedly a while back) there wasn't even a search mechanism.

      Anyway, things like this and tor will probably be legislated away (more civilized countries than the US have required massive logs be kept from anyone acting as a service provider--tor and freenet certainly fall into the service category).

  • insult to injury (Score:4, Funny)

    by pintomp3 ( 882811 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @12:28AM (#14032200)
    site is shutdown, and then /.ed. nice. and if that's not bad enough, it will be /. again in a few days for good measure.

  • Wait a second there... (Score:5, Funny)

    by chriswaclawik ( 859112 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @12:29AM (#14032207)
    There's an internet TWO?!?!? I haven't even finished the first one!
  • I'm not sure that I would spend my time coding a massive P2P application for a network that isn't what most consider an ISP. .Edu networks are highly monitored and are not as "free" as the open, unfiltered networks provided to residential customers by ISPs.

    I went to a university involved with the Internet2 project and even before Internet2 was even introduced their, the network administrators were already cracking down on high bandwith usage due to high bandwith costs per month that needed to be justifi
  • The article claims the i2Hub network has been shutdown. Yet Wiki claims [wikipedia.org] i2Hub was a peer-to-peer filesharing program.

    I assume the i2Hub website is the only thing that's closed and that the software is still out there. And if it's P2P it should be able to operate regardless. Right?
    • Last time I checked, the i2hub software was nothing more than a rebadged and ad-infested version of DC++

  • Google Cache (Score:2, Informative)

    by LaPoderosa ( 908833 )
    Here [64.233.161.104]

  • working with i2hub (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tdmg ( 881818 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @12:58AM (#14032347)
    I was a rep for i2hub on the UMass campus (UMass is where the founder Wayne Chang went to school and i2hub was based out of Amherst). Working with Wayne was quite an experience. He was constantly thinking of new ideas and strategies. I have no doubt he'll be successful in the future. However, Wayne needed money to take the RIAA to court, and even with a solid defense he wouldn't have a chance without the resources.

    The students I collaborated with on i2hub were some of the more motivated and intelligent students I know. I'm sure that their support and campus networking will help foster bigger and better projects in the future. Over 500 of the more active i2hub users still chat every day on IRC, which is a testament to the strength of the i2hub community. I hate to say this, but i2hub marketed itself as a "student collaborative network" but the closure of the hub by the RIAA might just prove to force i2hub into the true collaborative network we had envisioned.

  • 0mG! /\/0 m0r3 w4r3z! (Score:3, Funny)

    by NVP_Radical_Dreamer ( 925080 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @12:59AM (#14032349) Homepage
    Oh no, where am I to get my warez now!? Whats that, theres still IRC, newsgroups, kazaa, bit torrent, emule, and hijacked FTP? Whew, there for a second I thought I was going to have to start PAYING for my digital entertainment.

  • Where's the damn Debit Machine (Score:3, Insightful)

    by headkase ( 533448 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @01:01AM (#14032357)
    Warez sites come and go, I have little sympathy for them - they know it happens. But, I've been known to sample a new artist here and there *cough* and I like getting my movies, songs, books, and software through the Internet so I really do want copyright holders to get their heads out of their collective ass and wise up a bit.
    The Internet is the most amazing distribution system for Information ever invented by us and no matter how content is distributed be it bittorrent, gnutella, ftp, or http that is not the real problem the media companies are facing. The real problem is that they don't have a means of payment built into whatever communications protocol is being levereged at the moment to move data. iTunes, Napster to Go, and the like simply suck and I'm not going to bite because in my opinion I will only accept purchasing a copy of a high-quality content source with *no* drm so I could transcode it into an appropriate quality and format for the other devices I own, instead of forcing the purchase of the same content on multiple media types.
    Here's how I see it, it's just like making a withdrawal at the bank, I go to a teller, swipe my card, tell her how much I want, and that's it. It's all simple and just works. Getting online information however is a daunting task as usually at the minimum a credit card is required. Then you have to know what format your music is going to arrive in wrapped in drm (which adds further confusion to the market as consumers scratch their head when their .wma file won't play on an ipod - something to do with .aac I guess? Seriously it's a mess from an average persons point of view) and then you're limited on how many your devices that can store your purchased copy of the information and millions of other little things that piss me off. What I'm trying to get to is content sources: make it friggin' simple. I want to go from ooooooh! shiny song must buy to got it in seconds with only a minimal amount of new payment complexity (swipe card; enter pin vs. fill out form 1074 in triplicate along with supplemental schedule B and maybe, just maybe we'll let you have a license to it...). Debits here, it works, make it go.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Internet 3? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @01:10AM (#14032390)
    I have a length of CAT 5 lying around, anyone want to start an internet 3 with me? We can P2P to our hearts content that way.

  • Still going strong at [omitted] (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Darth Cow ( 533706 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @01:13AM (#14032402)
    The Direct Connect network at my small liberal arts college may only have 142 users logged and 6.08 TB of data being shared (small stuff compared to I2hub, I'm sure) but at download speeds of over 1MB/s it's worth it. (Sadly, we were never connected to internet two.)

    All decisions like this force is networks to go further underground and localize tighter. Clearly 5000 users logged at once on dozens of campuses were far too many to keep their mouths shut. But smaller campus networks work nearly as well and are easy to setup. You don't need official websites or other big targets, just an no-ip.com server address shared through word of mouth.

    I'm sure my school is not unique (I've heard another network like this exists for all the UC schools). It's pretty much impossible to stop students from utilizing nearly infinite network bandwidth. Commendable, perhaps, but hopeless.
    • The problem is, if you're ever going to allow *anyone* onto your network, you can't stop malicious agents from getting in. Sooner or later some authority will pick up on the word of mouth around campus. Like so many people love to say around here, security through obscurity is not sufficient.

  • Wrong targets (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Jeng ( 926980 )
    I've known two people who made money off of pirated money. Now, one of them the RIAA isn't going to go after since all he did was trade pirated cd's for weed, but the other one is the type of person that the RIAA should be going after instead of all this p2p bullshit.

    I had a co-worker who used to burn couple hundred cd's a week of pirated music and sell them online. He'd sell though amazon or whomever, would list them under mixed cd's. Now wouldn't it make more sense to go after the people selling pirated

  • Reason for i2hub shutting down (Score:4, Informative)

    by KingBahamutX ( 931135 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @02:16AM (#14032655)
    Hey, I was a representative of i2hub as well, and what happened was that the RIAA basically said to shut down or to face lawsuits. Despite what some people may think, our lawyer said we were highly likely to win if the RIAA were to sue us, so that wasn't the issue. The issue is that the expense of a trail against a cartel such as the RIAA would be immense, and that we simply could not afford such amounts. This is a case of consumer rights being trampled in favor of huge trusts with the bankrolls.

  • History of p2p at Umass and potential future... (Score:5, Informative)

    by adrenalinekick ( 884201 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @03:13AM (#14032849)
    I am currently a senior CS major at Umass Amherst (The place where i2hub was born thanks to graduate Wayne Chang) and as such I have witnessed the evolution of file sharing here at Umass in the past few years.

    As a freshman there was a program called winscan and if my memory serves me correctly, it basically was an index of all windows netbios publicly available shares on campus. Obviously not the best method for so many reasons, but it worked well enough.

    Then winscan stopped working and flatlan appeared on the grid, which basically seemed to work the same way, just with a flashier interface and a website to go with it. (I have a feeling flatlan was just winscan v2, but don't hold me to it I was only a freshman.) Something tells me that either winscan or flatlan or both was written by a student from RPI who was shut down by **AA at some point, but I don't feel like cross checking that comment for accuracy.

    Sophomore year saw the rise of DC++. I no longer remember the name of the server, but there was basically a limited version of i2hub available to only those on the umass campus network. By the end of sophomore year this server had at least started its merge with another campus network server, and slowly the networks allowed into the server began to increase. First to other colleges in the area, and eventually into something resembling what used to be i2hub.

    Junior year i2hub really sprang to life, rapidly gaining its own momentum and making the news on more than one occasion. The traditional DC Connect and DC++ programs were discarded in favor the the i2hub ad-ridden interface, new colleges and people joined daily, and subscriptions became available.

    Then disaster struck. The RIAA started going after students on i2hub.

    Midway through fall-semester of senior year: RIP i2hub.

    My point? These networks at Umass have grown from small to big since I've been here. There have also effectively been 4 different filesharing/p2p networks since I've been here. All have dissappeared for various reasons, but a new one always popped up in its place. For a few years the trend was to grow larger and larger and become more and more public, but I expect in the next few years whatever new network pops up to replace i2hub will remain more private and centralized, possibly restricting use to only the Umass network once again.

    I'd be willing to bet that some student is already hard at work on converting bittorrent or an old gnutella client or maybe dc++ (again) to restrict the network to users with internet2 addresses only. Hopefully this student will not make the same mistake as Wayne Chang made - going public with i2hub. As soon as I saw i2hub mentioned in the news and on slashdot, I knew it would be eventually doomed by some *AA.

    I'm envisioning a future of invitation-only networks, limited to a certain 'degree of kevin bacon' mixed in somehow. Think facebook + p2p. The only people that can see you and your files are your friends, your friends' friends, your friends' friends' friends... etc to a specified depth level. This would have some limiting effects on availability but would *reduce* (not solve) the problem of trust. Add some basic crypto in there somewhere if you are really paranoid and the *AA lawyer trolls can kiss my @$$

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