Off topic (but I thought you guy might want to know), but the FastTrack protocol has been nearly deciphered, clearing the way for third party KaZaA/Morpheus/Grokster clones on a variety of platforms.

The project under this is giFT, or the generic interface to fasttrack. Since the FastTrack protocol is so complicated (encrypted everywhere), graphical frontends use giFT as a daemon and talk xml with it, making client development _very_ easy (downloads are also just http-based).

webpage is http://gift.sourceforge.net/

Interesting,
But I can't get it to work in windows or Java.
Anyone who can tel me howto ?

RaaF

Someone mentioned that it will run in Cygwin , but it can't find a supernode.
Now I have no Linux / Unix experience, so I forget about it I think....

Does this mean that we could soon be seeing a Gnutella application that also searches the FastTrack network?

And what are the legalities of actually doing that? Isn't the FastTrack network a private one? Wouldn't tapping into that be similar to driving onto someones private driveway?

-Pete

Don't overestimate the need for having both protocols in the same software. Many people are like me: they run both types of clients (I run Xolox and Morpheus currently) and share the same files.

Note that this also means that it is easy to bootstrap the next generation of P2P networks and protocols: just provide any software that rocks and I will share my files there too.

BTW, I suggest that someone looks at Inferno/Plan9 (www.vitanuova.com) as a protocol (Styx/9P/2000P) designed for secure distributed processing and resource access. Inferno runs on top of both Linux and Windows, and has a very nice programming environment with the Limbo language.

It'd be neat to have both protocols.. No, the fasttrack network is not "private". It is completely legal to reverse engineer a product in order to make a compatable one, like the gift folks did.

It's interesting to see the growth of gift, in it's 30 days of existance: http://sourceforge.net/project/stats...group_id=34618

from 0 to 281,778hits/day

Seems Fasttrack is not entirely happy with gIFT, following comes from the gIFT homepage :

Synopsis

The latest version of Kazaa and Morpehus, version 1.3.3 has broken giFT. We can no longer connect to the network and communicate with other supernodes or nodes. We believe that the protocol was changed in such a way that you must now log into a central server to get a new "key" for generating the cipher state for encryption and decryption. This was a bad move by FastTrack, as it now makes it's network reliant on a centralized server, and possibly puts them in a situation similar to Napster.

History of giFT

The giFT project was originally set up to create a means to connect to the FastTrack network in an open source manner. While Kazaa originally stated that they were interested in working with the open source community we quickly discovered that it was not the case. They asked us to develop a closed source Linux client, however we decided to go the open source route and start on our own.

What entailed was a long, complicated process consisting reverse engineering of the official clients in oder to create a compatible product. Eventually, with the help of some anonymous donors known as "The Givers" we reached a stage where we could connect to the network, and later query, download, and share files.

Kazaa/Morpheus v1.3.3

Unfortunately, as of Kazaa/Morpehus versions 1.3.3 (deemed a "security update") FastTrack has been trying to shutdown our open source implementation by changing various parts of the protocol. Originally 1.3.3 only changed a few minor things in regards to our "cipher state" generation algorithm, which allowed us to figure out how the encryption was being done between the supernodes and the clients. Today, (Sept. 29, 2001) FastTrack unveiled another added "feature" in their "security update" - changing how the official clients communicate, and how they develop the cipher state for encryption/decryption (this is possibly done by an "auto-update", we will be uncertain until we perform a further analysis.) It is still unconfirmed as to the extent that these new modifications, however we are working hard to figure out what the problem is and how we can most easily fix it.

-The giFT Development Team



(RaaF)