Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
a user can browse libraries of others, and participate in the sense of a music
community. On March 10, 2004, Napster announced a team effort with IBM
in the introduction of their
Super Peer
application for music downloads. It is
an open standards-based technology to assist universities, ISPs, and commercial
enterprises, as well as their own customers, to safely and rapidly download music
legally. On May 20, 2004, Napster announced its move into the British market.
Other markets are sure to follow. There are new systems that are similar to the
old Napster, but operate in a fashion that makes it diHcult for the courts to
shut them down. Let us see why by looking at one of them.
Gnutella
: In early 2000, a subsidiary of AOL,
10.35
called Nullsoft,
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made the first Gnutella program available on its servers as a distributed soft-
ware project designed to establish a genuine peer-to-peer file-sharing network,
without a central server.
Gnutella
(pronounced with a silent
g
), is a word amal-
gamation of GNU (see page 385), and Nutella, the latter being a registered
trademark for a hazlenut spread with a chocolate taste first developed in the
1940s by Pietro Ferrero (currently outselling all peanut butter brands combined
all over the world). Ostensibly the name combination, Gnutella, derived from
the fact that the two inventors of the initial program, Justin Frankel and Tom
Pepper, ate large quantities of the product while working on the project, and
they had intended the source code to be released under the GNU GPL. In any
case, AOL pulled the plug on Gnutella the day after its release, since they were
concerned over the legal issues already plaguing Napster over similar issues at
that time. This did not stop the program since it was reverse engineered
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and open source copies were cropping up all over the Internet.
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AOL
means
America Online
, which is a corporate ISP, based in Dulles, Virginia, and is
owned by Time Warner, the world's largest media organization, headquartered in New York
City. Time Warner was created from the merging, on January 10, 1990, of Time Incorporated
and Warner Communications. In 1996, Time Warner merged with the Turner Broadcasting
System. This ensured that Ted Turner would be the largest shareholder of the group of
companies. In 2000, Time Warner merged with AOL to form AOL Time Warner. However,
due to the weakness of the performance of the AOL component, the name was changed back
to Time Warner on September 17, 2003. AOL's
instant messaging
system works in a fashion
similar to that of the original Napster, but of course the purpose is not to pirate music. Instant
messaging is essentially a service that allows users to communicate with others in real time
through private online chat areas, and alerts them when others are actually online.
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Nullsoft
is a play on Microsoft, observing that “null” (meaning “nothing”), is smaller than
“micro” (in general terms, meaning “very small”), and is the name of the software company
purchased by AOL in 1999. Nullsoft is perhaps best known for its open source installer
program,
Nullsoft Scriptable Install System
(NSIS), which is similar to the original Windows
installer, while being easier to use and supporting more compression formats. In general,
open
source
, in reference to software, means source code that is in the public domain. It may also
refer to copyrighted material that is distributed under an open-source license such as the GNU
GPL (see Footnote 10.15 on page 388).
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The process of
reverse engineering
(RE) refers to the taking apart of something, which
could be a piece of hardware or software, and analyzing it with the goal of creating a new
construct that has the same functions as the original. Of course, reverse engineering collides
with copyright and patent laws, since patents, for instance, apply to
what
a product does, not
how
it is implemented to do so.
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