As ants marched with impunity through the Santa Cruz, Calif., home of the programmer, frustration turned to inspiration and Mute was born. The program, which seeks to hide the source of downloads by passing files between computers along twisting pathways, is gaining attention as an interesting solution to file swapping’s hottest problem: privacy. “If you’re going to be anonymous, you can not use direct connections,” Rohrer said.
Rohrer isn’t alone in developing peer-to-peer privacy tools. In the past six months, the quest for anonymity on file-swapping networks has become the equivalent of a technological holy grail, thanks to a wave of lawsuits filed against individual file swappers by the Recording Industry Association of America.
So far, the RIAA, tracing digital fingerprints back to individual names, has sued almost 1,500 people it claims stole music over file-swapping networks. Peer-to-peer network developers have been working on improving privacy ever since Napster was first targeted by a skittish record industry, but the results have been decidedly imperfect.
That’s because most peer-to-peer systems require some degree of openness to work at all. In order to download a song from another computer online, a file swapper’s computer must make some kind of connection to it. That leaves a digital record that can be traced back to a person’s Internet service provider, and from there to the account holder.
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