MUTE Grows In Popularity, Iterations 50
jcr13 writes "MUTE is a search-and-download file sharing network that uses ant-inspired routing to make both downloaders and uploaders anonymous. Version 0.2 was released today (change log). Since its mid-December 0.1 release, MUTE has risen from complete obscurity to one of the top-ten most active SourceForge projects. Several people have described MUTE as a "third-generation file sharing network," with the first two generations being Napster and Gnutella (and generation zero being the web---remember when MP3s were traded through web pages?). Each generation circumvents the tactics that the RIAA used to squash the previous generation. Alas, each generation is less and less efficient (though MUTE's dynamic routing works surprisingly well).
MUTE was discussed in a previous Slashdot story. Oh, and if you are wondering, it's M.U.T.E., lady, an acronym, not "mute," and we had best not go into it any further."
Re:Network size? (Score:3, Interesting)
You could try to estimate it by number of nodes you've routed messages to or for. If you had enough nodes logging this information and consolidating it, you could, probabilistically, be arbitrarily close to the actual number of nodes.
Or at least it seems that way to me.
Ants are all very well but.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Security holes (Score:4, Interesting)
I liked how they stated, the virtual addresses and routing tables will be tweaked for best anti-spaming and spoof checking.
Seems like they are working hard on the transport, after thats perfected, then you can add all the features like hash checking, multipart downloads, and file searching.
I like this much better than freenet. Sorry, no internal search engine, and everyone has to give up disk space for cache.
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Secondlife [secondlife.com] for programmers, artists and designers.
Just tried it out (Score:5, Interesting)
Here are the problems. First off, it is slow and unstable. Not to be unexpected for a non mature project. Another problem is the lack of search results. Searching for led zeppelin, a common band, returned 2 results when I was connected to 20 nodes. That's kind of sad. Last problem is that there are so few features. This is a raw bare bones client. Someone needs to make another client that has more stuff, like DC++ did for direct connect. For now I'll stick to DC for everyday quick p2p and WinMX for those rare hard to find files.
SF.net glory... (Score:4, Interesting)
1 Hype your project, get it slashdotted!
2 Brag about your own project's activity, get it slashdotted again yourself!
3 ???
4 PROFIT!!!
Nice way to keep in the publicity though, could use his PR manager. Self-organizing systems are fun though...