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AOL pulls Nullsoft file-sharing software WASTE (2003)

172 points| ecliptik | 2 years ago |web.archive.org

118 comments

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[+] 1vuio0pswjnm7|2 years ago|reply
"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.

[+] 1vuio0pswjnm7|2 years ago|reply
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.

2. Google, LLC or Dropbox, Inc. for example.

[+] Gordonjcp|2 years ago|reply
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.

Fuck it, bring back Gopher!

[+] ajcoll5|2 years ago|reply
The GPL licensed WASTE source code if anyone wants to take a peek.

https://archive.org/details/waste-source

[+] SethTro|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] jackspratts|2 years ago|reply
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.

- js.

[+] FirmwareBurner|2 years ago|reply
Out if curiosity, why did you sign yourself at the end when your username is visible so we know who is writing? Is it some cultural thing?
[+] ramgine|2 years ago|reply
You have a site where i can learn more? I'd like to implement my own.
[+] latchkey|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] esafak|2 years ago|reply
Did he voice the WinAmp intro ("it really whips the llama's ass")?
[+] kripy|2 years ago|reply
“By default, WASTE listens to incoming connections on port 1337. This was probably chosen because of 1337's leet connotations.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE

[+] laurentlbm|2 years ago|reply
I use 24h clocks and every time it's 13:37, I think "leet". I hate it. It's been decades and it still won't leave my brain.
[+] freitzkriesler2|2 years ago|reply
Does anyone else like going to archive.org and just browsing old websites from the early 2000s?

I kind of miss it the ascetic and web 1.0 feel.

[+] RajT88|2 years ago|reply
It reminds me that a utopia was possible.

Not that we live in a capital-D dystopia, but maybe you get what I am saying.

[+] mat_epice|2 years ago|reply
Using ascetic instead of aesthetic could be a very clever pun.
[+] freitzkriesler2|2 years ago|reply
"Nullsoft has had its conflicts with AOL in the past, such as in 2000 when Frankel developed a music file-swapping technology called Gnutella. "

Huh and this was limewire was born!

[+] IntelMiner|2 years ago|reply
>this was limewire was born!

The screams of a thousand mp3.exe's being obliterated into the void

[+] orra|2 years ago|reply
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.

[+] Pannoniae|2 years ago|reply
I found it a bit surprising, but Soulseek is still chugging along well too. :)
[+] exabrial|2 years ago|reply
There was a time my computer barely had enough CPU to play an mp3. Then WinAmp and it’s decoding engine came came along.
[+] hoppla|2 years ago|reply
I am not sure how it was possible, but I was able to play mp3s on my 386sx 16mhz (with turbo button) using the mpg123 player. OS was Slackware Linux.
[+] amlib|2 years ago|reply
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...
[+] thristian|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] mikae1|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] koofdoof|2 years ago|reply
Is the name WASTE a reference to Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49?
[+] BLKNSLVR|2 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure reading about the inspiration for the WASTE name was my gateway to Pynchon.

For which I'm ever grateful.

[+] mattl|2 years ago|reply
To this day I remember “Justin can’t code” in one of the Nullsoft release notes.

It’s not true of course, he can. Understatement.

[+] rblatz|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] meltyness|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] yownie|2 years ago|reply
why exactly did F2F networks like WASTE die?

I'd love to begin using them again.

[+] toyg|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] washadjeffmad|2 years ago|reply
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.

Remember, sharing mp3s helps the terrorists win.

[+] h0p3|2 years ago|reply
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).