Peeping into the Darnet:

Peeping into the Darnet:

In the era of 'Great Firewall of unwanted restrictions' and restrictions on freedom of expression the people have always found a wayout to breath some fresh air and express their views. It may be expressing a political, economic or social views on various subjects or may be a idea's. Well everything happens in a good spirit for the betterment of the humanity.

History:

Justin Frankel, the rockstar of internet at the age of 18 developed WinAmp which went on to become defacto software to listen music on computers. He was paid a whopping $100 million to buy the software from America Online-AOL. Justin created another brilliant software called 'Gnutella'- a software client that lets people trade music online and put it up for the world to use. Unlike traditional networks where everybody connected to a contral node' Gnutella allowed peer-to-peer (P2P) connection directly. This goes something like this, Assume you and I have Gnutella installed on our computer ; on connecting to internet you can see what music i have on my machine and vice-versa. If you wish you can download them directly into your system. Some smilar reverse engineered variationsa are also available namely, Kaaza, Bearshare, and Limewire etc.

Justin came up with another innovative software called WASTE (An acronym for We Await Silent Tristero's Empire); it was inspired by the underground postal system described in Thomas Pynchon's book titled 'The Crying of Lot 49'. The WASTE differed from Gnutella significantly. If WASTE is installed on systems it dosent mean one can view or download what exists on others machine, each time we're online. If we want to share data/music we ought to invite each other to form a network, Here virtually everyone knows each other to form a network of buddies. Some of these network have as little as 10 people. But the system is so robust and active that it generated a seperate active group called 'Darknet'.

How to find a Darknet:

The entry into one of these networks takes some amount of digging. try www.grouper.com, It is a piece of software that maintains a directory of various darknet groups. You can find all type of people here so be careful, who want to swap music to those looking for videos, whitepapers, e-books; you'll find them all here, Hey you know what?, you can start your own group by making available a set of documents you want to share; may be you can browse through various groups to find the one which suits your interests and request members to allow entry. Because the entry is strictly 'by Invitation Only'.

A network led by a graduate from IIT, Kanpur 'Shashank Dixit', started a group called 'Krawler Network (Visit www.krawlerx.com )

Another network called Freenet (Visit www.freenet.org ) is a good place to start with.

To find out more on Darknet about its insisde stuff and info on groups and developments on Darknet visit www.darknet.com is a good destination.

If freedom and knowledge is one thing which you regard in high esteem then you'll find a path from preying eyes welcome to Darknet.

PS: This article is put up with a intention to help people to know about Darknet, The original article was published in Times of India. This info is put up here to those people who do not proceed from Front page and Sports page of any news paper. Copy Right or Copy Left doesnt matter as long as Knowledge is shared and used for the benefit of mankind.