Anonymous filesharing: the Anomos-project interrogated

In case the waves of dissuasions from the industry keep being as high as before, which one could expect, the issue of anonymous filesharing will get more and more attention over the next time. The users of the sharing networks don't want to receive displeasing letters from their ISPs, nor do they want to exchange expensive letters with assigned lawyers. We have consulted the project manager Rich Jones shortly after his lightning talk at the 25C3.

Lars Sobiraj: You and John Schanck are currently developing the service Anomos. For the start: Would you like to introduce us yourself? What's your education and scholastics and what's your special interest in that topic?

Rich Jones: Hello! I'm Rich, one of the lead developers of Anomos, along with John. We're both university students in Massachusetts.

Lars Sobiraj: Actally filesharing is the way people desire to share their datas, because it's easy to use, mostly provides quick transfers and offers a rich variety of different files - even things which aren't sold anymore can be reached that way. What does the word mean and will this all be possible by using Anomos?

Rich Jones: We are not developing Anomos as a tool of piracy (although this will likely by one of the primary uses). Anomos is anonymous and censorship-resistant, so we'd like to see it being used for citizen journalism and information distribution in places like China and the middle east, where certain types of knowledge and media are forbidden.

Lars Sobiraj: Would you like to introduce us, who are not studied technicans, the technical background of your service?

Rich Jones: Anomos is a modification of the BitTorrent protocol. The difference is that the traffic is strongly encrypted and routed through a mix-network of other peers so that nobody knows who they are uploading/downloading from or what the information that they are relaying is.

Lars Sobiraj: How easy will it be for us end users to use your proposal? Not to forget that filesharing in Europe as well as in the USA is getting more and more dangerous: Will it still be possible to locate my real IP anyway?

Rich Jones: We'd like it to be as easy to use as possible. Unlike Tor or I2P, Anomos stands alone and doesn't require any background services to be configured. Ideally, the end user won't actually notice a difference. We'd like to see Anomos extentions merged into the other major BitTorrent clients like Vuze, Deluge and Transmission.

Lars Sobiraj: Which are your rivals in the market and what's the difference between you and the others? Have you ever been thinking to work together with one of the big players in the market, such as MiniNova, The Pirate Bay etc. in order to develop one common standard?

Rich Jones: We don't really see them as rivals, we think the more anonymity options available the better. We are just developing the protocol and software, we won't be running a totally public like the Pirate Bay for legal reasons, although we would certainly encourage and assist others in more progressive countries who wanted to run a public tracker. We will be launching our own tracker soon, but it will be sharing forbidden materials and censored citizen media, not warez. We haven't talked to the PB guys yet, but I'd certainly love to meet them.

Lars Sobiraj: The only weak point seems to be the central tracker, which could become a target for the industry. As soon as Anomos is running, the industry, RIAA and its assistants won't be very happy about it. How are you going to protect this soft spot? Will you move the tracker off shore, far away from the possibility of access for them?

Rich Jones: Unless the tracker is run as a Tor hidden service, yes, the Tracker's identity is still known, and this is the reason we won't be running a public tracker from the United States. Fortunately, there are still countries with governments that haven't been corrupted yet for people to run public trackers in.

Lars Sobiraj: When can we expect Anomos to go online? Will there be any restrictions for its users? Do we have to order in advance? What would you recommend us until your proposal is online? The usage of a usenet-provider? Webwarez? What would protect us and our identity in the best way?

Rich Jones: Anomos is in a working state right now, you can find it at git.anomos.info. Right now, we're polishing it up and looking for some dedicated hosting for our public tracker, so it could be another month or so before things are ready for primetime.

Until then, if you're looking for anonymous filesharing, I'd suggest looking into i2psnark.

Lars Sobiraj: Many politicans and agents of the legal profession would say that P2P is mostly going to be used in order to conduct copyright infridgements. What's your opinion? Is it more a matter of freedom and our choice which sort of data we are going to download? What do you think: Why doesn't the music industry sell as many albums anymore as they did 20 years ago? What are the reasons for their crisis, if there is one? What would they have to do in order to get more healthy again?

Rich Jones: It's a desperate attempt to blame p2p on the absolute crap state of modern mainstream music. That's why nobody is buying albums, honestly.

We're trying to end the business of restricting access to information. If information is available to some, it should be available to all. Access to knowledge means smarter people which means a better society. Anomos stands to protect access to knowledge and freedom of speech.

As I said, we aren't in the business of piracy, but I won't say that I'm opposed to it. That being said, I'd like to see artists and content producers be able to making a living, it's just that I think it should be as a service industry, or supported by voluntary patronage. Instead of adapting to the times, the RIAA is blackmailing young people and corrupting our governments, and they can go to hell for all I care.

Of course, Anomos makes it impossible to prove that any copyright infringement has taken place. So hopefully they won't be able to sue anybody anymore.

Lars Sobiraj: How will filesharing look in 10 years? Will the industry be successful with their three-strikes law they'd like to indroduce everywhere? Or is there maybe a sort of fairsharing flatrate for everyone, something like a sort of duty and as long you pay it, you may leech as much legally you like to.

Rich Jones: 10 years! 10 years is a long, long time. I might be able to guess at five years though.

The RIAA is shifting tactics and now focusing primarily on bribery and corruption rather than directly suing people, and they're probably going to do a lot more damage that way. We'll see pushes towards content filtering and 3 strikes and all that lot. This will drive people to use more secure methods of p2p, which is where Anomos comes in.

As for the industry, look for more services like Hulu.com, which I'm a big fan of. Of course, filesharing will continue to rise as well.

I'm really interested in what's going to happen in China and India. I think it depends on the mentalities of the people there more than anything else, although we'll be working on the technology to help them out of if they want it.

Lars Sobiraj: Last, but not least: What's your summary of the 25C3? Did you like it there? It was quite crowded there, wasn't it? ;-)

Rich Jones: 25C3 was great! We've never been to Germany before and it was wonderful. A very intelligent, sensible society. Everybody was very nice and super leet. Shoutout to the German Privacy Foundation and the i2p guys.

Lars Sobiraj: Greets and thanks a lot!

Rich Jones: Any time! Rich.

(picture: The project manager introducing the visitors of the 25C3 into his service.)

You can find a german version of this interview here!

News Redaktion am Mittwoch, 21.01.2009 16:26 Uhr

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4 Reaktionen zu dieser Nachricht

DrDuke am 21.01.2009 15:38:55

Ihrgendwehr hat Irgendwie recht! ;) Besonders mit dem Absatz Stimme Ich 100% überein: Don't get me wrong, I'm all in for another anonymous filesharing solution, but it seems like Anomos just tries to "crappify" BitTorrent with ideas that are already on the net and also where quite some co ...
Ihrgendwehr am 21.01.2009 15:31:16

(I case some Anomos dev is reading these comments as well, I'm writing in english...) Hm, Mix Cascades for file traffic - how do they want to avoid the _huge_ overhead and redundancy that gets created with such an approach? ATM it sounds imho just like a kind of merge between TOR and BitTorrent wi ...
Ghandy am 21.01.2009 15:25:36

Dann schau mal hier! Derartig interessante Projekte möchte ich künftig nicht nur in deutscher Sprache vorstellen, das ist für alle Leser interessant. ...
musicjunkie am 21.01.2009 15:18:06

die wirklch allerallererste news, die ich hier auf english lese :p aber guet interview. mal schauen, was daraus wird. musicjunkie ...
gullinews am 21.01.2009 14:34:59

In case the waves of dissuasions from the industry keep being as high as before, which one could expect, the issue of anonymous filesharing will get more and more attention over the next time. The users of the sharing networks don't want to receive displeasing letters from their ISPs, nor do they ...

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