"The real play is when you've got small networks of co-workers or friends who can share whatever they want securely," Rogers said in an interview. "It could be a group of government officials sharing secure documents or it could be Justin sharing video files with AOL Dulles."
IMHO (yours may differ) much of what we use the internet for, namely person-to-person or person-to-small-group communication, could be accomplished using such software, as an alternative but not a replacement for doing these tasks over someone else's website. Those websites have grown to such ridiculous size, backed by entire datacenters, that people refer to them as "services" and "platforms". But for the task of communicating over the internet, as the programmer saying goes, "There's more than one way to do it." With the gigantic websites run by other people, there's an incentive for advertising. Large audiences and easy access to them, not to mention the ability to eavesdrop and track behaviour. With small networks managed only by the participants using software they choose, that incentive does not exist because advertising is relatively infeasible. For example, the top commenter in this thread states he has been running a WASTE network for years. How does one inject advertising and track consumer behaviour on his network. The answer is they don't. And IMHO that's one reason why this category of software is so useful.
The replies here strangely ignore the issue of the third party intermediary, the commercial motives, the single point of failure.
Who is the third party when using software like WASTE. There is none. There is no "monetisation". A commenter thread has been running WASTE running since 2003.^1 There is no Bay Area-based "WASTE, LLC" or "WASTE, Inc."^2 that must, among other things, pay thousands of tech bros, remain "free", be allowed to operate in all countries and stay in business, let alone for 20 years.
WASTE predates "cloud computing".
1. Went from being top comment to being critiqued by tech bros.
This is still an issue in 2023. Dropbox and Google Drive aren't new, and ironically Megaupload is now a Dropbox/Drive competitor Mega + Rapidshare is long dead. But emailing files or physically sharing on a USB drive is still the best way to share files ad-hoc. Dropbox etc does work, but you have to make a new account and mess around with settings and permissions.
WebRTC has been supported in browsers for at least 10 years.
To that end you can use a website like https://www.toffeeshare.com/ to send files directly to another person via your browser via a P2P connection, without an account.
Because its remaining an issue enables "value extraction". Magic wormhole would work if people knew about it but somehow software that promotes itself by honest word-of-mouth has difficulty competing with software that is bundled with Windows or is made by the world's largest advertising corporation.
I would argue the installation of magic wormhole is hard. Python is a pain and usually scares me away from installing it. I dont want python pooping all over my system.
There is no release artifact that I can easily open and run on the github page.
Wetransfer is exactly made for this purpose. Or if you have Apple and the file is not larger than 5GB, it’s sent through Mail Drop which does the same thing but seamless.
I was almost going to mention Drive and OneDrive and iCloud, but I realized that these are not secure sharing methods, unless your target audience also has accounts on the same cloud service. You can share to "anyone with the link", and practice security through obscurity.
This isn't security through obscurity at all, the links contain a random secret and aren't public. You might as well say a password is security through obscurity because it can be guessed...
Anyone who has the link can access the file. There is no authentication. It's only as "secret" as the email you put it in, or the Zoom chat room it was dropped into, or the web page it is published in.
The shared links do not contain a secret at all. The base64-encoded part of the link is the file object's UUID! Look at it as you copy a shared link, vs. seeing it in the URL bar. It doesn't change as you edit the file, move it to another folder, or share it out. It won't go away until you've deleted the file! If you notice that someone has a link and they shouldn't have it, then you'll just have to copy-paste the content into a new document, and throw the compromised one in the Trash. Goodbye, revision history and all metadata.
Common use cases involve sharing to groups of people, you know, more than one person who might keep a "secret"? What if you've shared a link to 30 people, how do you ensure that 31 can't open it?
"Three men can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
As opposed to passwords, which people know are secret[citation needed], links are shared. I mean, Google Drive literally calls it "Sharing", so who will stop sharing after the intended recipients have got it?
I think this is my biggest issue with the enterprise file sharing solutions; it's way too hard to manage access to files and to do simple sharing. like at face value it seems easy if you just want to drop a file to a friend or coworker, but it gets much more difficult when you want to actually enforce any controls on it.
Sharepoint and Google drive really feel like they have gone out of their way to make the permissions scheme as convoluted as possible, and it's never clear for me whether I've shared it in a way that permissions can propagate from those I shared it with or not. sometimes I can further share a received Sharepoint document without issue, other times I cannot, and I don't know what the difference is. some of my shared docs that are only shared with specific users can be shared freely apparently, other times when it gets shared further I get automated emails with access requests, even though the public access list is disabled/empty on both cases.
I really wish that the user:group:world wide model was the basis for these permission schemes and it was easier to just set people/groups and the specific actions they can take on a shared file/document. I get why the companies call it sharing, but it shouldn't be thought of as sharing, it should be Grant Access. I think it gives a better mindset for what you're actually doing, and the design should be around the idea you're giving access, not sharing, which is not the same thing to me.
At the risk of not fully slaking your thirst for orthogonality, I discovered just now that Google Drive does indeed have user:group:world access control. You can share to specific users with Google accounts. You can also share with a group: https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/13004062?ref_topic...
I was rather shocked to learn that the mechanism for creating groups, in the sense of access control, is the Google Groups product, also known as collaborative forums, or one of Usenet's modern homes. And this feature works for individual users as well as Workspaces for Business. I just created a Google Group consisting of my three personal accounts, and I shared a Doc with them!
The three levels of sharing persmissions on Drive are: "View", "Commenter", and "Editor". The second level also permits "editing suggestions" which will prompt the Doc owner to accept or reject. These also have semantics for folders.
And then, there is a little options-gear where you can twiddle additional permissions for certain levels of access. In my personal account, they're permissive by default. Meh.
I have a few qualms with this webcomic:
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
Does this still work? I mean, can we actually get it looked over and make sure it's not going to turn everything into a screaming botnet, and fire it up?
While I applaud the idea of decentralising Internetty stuff, there are all these massively overengineered monstrosities like Mastodon out there that have shit user experience and break down at scale at an exponential rate.
WASTE looks like it might be fun to run alongside "slow internet" services like NNTP and non-ad-heavy websites.
We used WASTE in college. At the time I looked through the code and I'm 99% sure there was an Edgar Allan Poe easter egg related to "quote the raven" in there.
It was 10 years ago but I'm very sure it was "quote the raven", "whip the llama" is too funmy for me to not remember if that has been it. I searched the source and didn't see it but can't find a source control system copy to search over all the history.
i've been running a mesh since waste's release. yes, proper set up is a bit challenging but after that it's set and forget - as in it's never been down in all this time. flexible chat rooms, individuals or multitudes simultaneously. decentralized and encrypted of course with chaff no less and file transfers of any size can be especially fast. it's actually perfect for small groups. anything under fifty or so users and it's stable. certainly more stable than the community, which ebbs and flows.
Forums had/have a special "signature" area under your post for that for as long as I remember (2003 maybe?). People occasionally would write in a signature like that and I thought it was weird even then. I always assumed it was a holdover from email mailing lists or newsgroups, but I think people did it just because they liked the aesthetic.
that's a very good question ramgine. you might as well start with the wiki. i'm a bit biased because i wrote a lot of it but i just took a look after who knows how long and it still holds up. it even had a link to one of my open meshes, a project i started called Zer0share, but that's been moribund for ages or at least i'm not on it. you never know with a mesh it could still be chugging along...the thing is, meshes are private by design and by nature. waste has always been catnip for introverts, with its silent status box sitting quietly in the corner of a screen sometimes showing no activity for weeks. it's not even unusual for members to spend months, or more, pondering the admission of a new addition (once admitted one can't be expelled. the mesh itself needs to be rebuilt). but if you like, take a look at the Zer0share parent thread from Napsterites linked here. you may find it helpful.
Justin Frankel is a pretty interesting guy. Kind of ahead of his time. He had a warehouse space down the block from my business in SF and I got to hang out with him a couple times. I think these days, he's trail running and still making music.
> - You are an individual, and REAPER is only for your personal use, or
> - You are an individual or business using REAPER commercially, and yearly gross revenue does not exceed USD $20,000, or
> - You are an educational or non-profit organization.
Oh, it actually seems pretty reasonable. At least as someone not involved in the DAW space. $60 for professional grade tools on a non-subscription looks like it's comfortable for someone to get into this.
out of curiosity what do you use it for in the non-professional realm? just interested since honestly reaper looks very intimidating as an outsider looking in
I’ve used it for recording my guitar practice. I can throw in a jam track or backing track then record myself playing with it. One of the best things you can do as a musician is listen to yourself, you’ll spot all kinds of ways to improve.
* Recording my practice to listen back
* Recording music just for fun
* Using it to play back songs I want to learn at different tempos and speeds (I play guitar at a church so this comes in very handy).
I bought a license when I first got serious about music with the launch of 5 in 2015, and I'm still getting updates. I've moved on to Ableton Live for making music, but there's no match for Reaper when it comes to editing or finalizing audio. SWS and Reapak provide a tool for just about any operation.
For example: I use Ozone to do a quick and dirty master on songs. The tool suggests running it on the loudest part of the audio. SWS provides an action that moves the playhead to the loudest part of a clip so there's no guesswork.
It's practically free at that price, and given that it's more-or-less a "Dude In A Shed" project it's hard to begrudge the money.
If you think 60 bucks for a professional non-subscription heavy-duty media tool is good, DaVinci Resolve is going to blow your tiny wee mind - you can use the same tools they use to make stuff for Netflix, right there on your desktop, for *free*. If you want the extra features of the paid one (maybe you want to cut 8K video, or you really need neural network rescaling, or something) it's about 300 dollars. And that's it, that's you - you own a licence, it's yours, forever, including the upgrades.
At the money that Reaper costs, it's worth buying a copy just to help the folks out.
Huh TIL! Reaper is considered by a lot of professionals to be the best all around DAW for those who are unaware of the audio world. It only really gets the respect it deserves though in the world of game audio design. If DAW's were compared to operating systems, logic/ableton would be macOS, Pro Tools would be Windows, and Reaper would be Linux.
I've made this same comparison between OS and DAWs and totally agree. I'm a reaper user for like 13 years now. I use it on a mac, though it's cool to see how far audio production on Linux has become, with both REAPER and now Bitwig available for Linux.
I have mixed feelings, as someone who grew up in that utopia.
On one hand, looking at the mass internet culture, the prevailing utopian culture was only possible in the way that jumping into the air is flying: true for a moment, but ultimately gravity (or in the internet's case, the Powers That Be) inevitably exerted itself as mass culture came to embrace the internet.
Tangentially, I suspect the fate of cryptocurrency is similar: to be embraced by the old guard only to have much of what made it special (especially, easy transfer of value across borders) undone, because it turns out banks and governments take KYC/AML law seriously.
But back to the internet, that utopia still exists. It's just not the prevailing internet culture any more. It's pushed into the corners under labels like "small tech" and "tildeverse". I sometimes use the term "Digital Amish" because the emphasis this community shares with the Amish is to understand the side effects of the technology you use and choose what to use and avoid in order to avoid undesirable side effects (e.g. feeding your life to an algorithm). In practice most of them are not quite that hardcore, but I use it more aspirationally since I think it'd be cool to get completely to that point.
I was at Seagate when they took over Lacie, ended up spending some time in Zurich with the team at Wuala. Very talented group of programmers, but had issues trying to keep out uploads from sanctioned country...and eventually killed off by Lacie
A startup called Space Monkey did something similar and is also gone. This seemed like a winning combination for users and backup providers, but in practice, it’s probably not practical to rely on users for redundant backup and file access.
the magic of wuala wasn't 'backup' but you were able to make communities quite easily about certain subjects with pretty good media sharing. I created one for collections of optical illusions and witty advertising campaigns.
Yeah, Gnutella was very quickly pulled by AOL. There was no chance to see if Nullsoft would follow through and release the source (which they hinted at with the name Gnu-...).
In the short term there must have been folks unofficially hosting the installer, and probably substituting different bootstrap peers.
Quickly the protocol was reverse engineered and reimplemented, thanks to being text based, and maybe also due to users of IDA.
Yes.....and that's what I like about it tbh. Decentralised stuff always has an overhead, and is usually much more complicated. Here it's dead simple and way more usable than DC++
It's still chugging along in that some client software is still maintained, but the userbase has dwindled. I recently fired up Soulseek for the first time in over a decade, and I was unable to find some indie stuff that was commonly shared back in 2010 or so.
Sure that was a regular bitrate stereo mp3? I remember struggling a lot with my 486DX/100, waiting for better assembly optimization to happen on Linux (to keep up with a DOS mp3 player that handled it better).
I no longer have the details, but the music was just some mp3 files I copied from friends. Buffering may have played a role as I had at some point, I had maxed out the specs memory-wise.
There was also a time when my computer playing mp3 in winamp while trying to browse the web would glitch the music due to buffer underun. Then I guess faster computers came along...
That is actually the original reason I switched to Linux in the late 90's. I couldn't multitask while listening to music in winamp while I could still browse and use staroffice while playing music on mpg123 on that old, already considered obsolete, computer I was using at the time.
What's the modern version of WASTE? It seems to me that the progression from Twitter & Facebook to Discord probably ends in something similar to WASTE, especially if it includes voice chat and video streaming.
Perhaps Soulseek? Still up and functional. The only downside is some people do "share for a share" BS instead of just sharing their entire library with the swarm. It's a lot of the worst parts of What.cd back in the day.
I often think about WASTE I reflect on why filesharing never decentralized. Bittorrent needed trackers and we're still in the slsk era and still sharing on the mercy of the four letter organizations.
Modern BitTorrent can function entirely via DHT and peer exchange. Trackers are supplementary and an optimization. Most torrents you find specify several trackers, and it's fine if some are down. I have a hard time imagining improvements on the current architecture, even under a better copyright regime, which is why BitTorrent has largely stood the test of time.
But it still needs some sort of index to search for stuff, and torrents cannot change. It's a jungle of ever-changing forums and search engines. This makes it harder to pin down by authorities, but significantly reduces casual usability.
There are some tools to index the DHT, although it's limited. But that's more of a result of the regulatory environment and that it's hard to have decentralized search that works well.
There is a spec for updatable torrents, I believe it embeds a pubkey and the creator can announce an update by broadcasting a signed message. But it's not widely used.
"The name WASTE is a reference to Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49. In the novel, W.A.S.T.E. is (among other things) an underground postal service." - Wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE
You saying this shook loose a long forgotten memory. I also saw that. And I frequently have used that phrasing when I submit a bug fix PR now I know why.
Crypto is probably the closest echoes of this era. Unfortunately the youth isn't going to follow most of this, and their fondest memories are themselves mostly going to be considered missteps, like the problems with building recommendation systems in the past decade.
The file sharing era was anything but a get rich quick pyramid scheme hyped by greedy unethical shills who want to make a quick buck by pulling the rug out from under the next gullible sucker to come along who's as dishonest and fraudulent as they are.
It all boils down to the difference between the words "sharing" and "scamming".
Not to mention the fact that file sharing also has many practical applications, and doesn't pollute the atmosphere and cause cancer and lung disease by burning megatons of coal, unlike crypto.
Hmm, yes, let's all work together to fight climate change, but uh... not peer-to-peer, having a middleman is always more efficient, even with a global decentralized ubiquitous network of personally controlled, energy efficient devices, best to continue to delegate to a bank that's delegating to a bank.
Oh, and yes, you can be the middleman -- you seem trustworthy, I nominate you for de novo utopia money dude, enjoy your new, absolute power.
Beyond the legal issues mentioned on a sibling post, the main thing in my opinion is that anything requiring installers was killed by Apple transforming the mobile market. People came to expect that most services would be web-based, or uncontroversial enough to be in the Apple AppStore. That expectation destroyed entire categories of software: sure, you could still eke out a living on the desktop, kinda; but any chance at real popularity was wiped out. This is particularly true for non-professional software, because households became mobile-first.
Chilling effects of the "nothing to hide" era. People were being allowed to be sued based on IP, so a lot of people just stopped using the net for normal human things.
The revelations of domestic spying made it obvious how much collusion and voluntary cooperation was going on between the military, federal and local governments, law enforcement, and corporations, and how much people feared the state of unequal information dominance.
Retroshare is still being updated and used (there's at least a few hundred on right now). It's relatively feature complete, and you can route it over i2p or tor as well (which is uncommon for this kind of tooling, in my experience).
IMHO (yours may differ) much of what we use the internet for, namely person-to-person or person-to-small-group communication, could be accomplished using such software, as an alternative but not a replacement for doing these tasks over someone else's website. Those websites have grown to such ridiculous size, backed by entire datacenters, that people refer to them as "services" and "platforms". But for the task of communicating over the internet, as the programmer saying goes, "There's more than one way to do it." With the gigantic websites run by other people, there's an incentive for advertising. Large audiences and easy access to them, not to mention the ability to eavesdrop and track behaviour. With small networks managed only by the participants using software they choose, that incentive does not exist because advertising is relatively infeasible. For example, the top commenter in this thread states he has been running a WASTE network for years. How does one inject advertising and track consumer behaviour on his network. The answer is they don't. And IMHO that's one reason why this category of software is so useful.