There is another peer-to-peer network around here, named Peek-a-Booty. This one has not been written to swap music or video files. Its purpose is to help people living in countries where the Web is censored.
Imagine a giant globe-girdling game of telephone played with Web-page requests, and you have the basic idea of how Peek-a-Booty works. Say a user in Beijing wants to read a story about Falun Gong crackdowns in Shanghai. Assuming she has the Peek-a-Booty software client installed, she launches the program, which automatically searches for fellow Peek-a-Booty nodes outside of China.
When the software finds an active node, it logs her onto the Peek-a-Booty network and establishes a direct connection with a Peek-a-Booty user in a country where Internet news isn't censored. That user then serves as a conduit for the Chinese Peek-a-Booty user by brokering Web-page requests between her and Peek-a-Booty users in other countries.
Since most firewalls are designed to block particular IP addresses attached to specific networks, Peek-a-Booty allows people in Beijing to surf the Web freely, thanks to fellow Peek-a-Booty members outside China. And the Great Firewall of China, on the lookout the BBC's IP address but not that of Peek-a-Booty user John Smith running a cable modem in New York City, will let Web pages coming in via John Smith pass through unmolested.
Voila! Censorship foiled, and the woman in Beijing gets her article -- albeit more slowly due to the many participants involved. Most important, no one gets busted. That's because, thanks to the ever-changing nature of the network and its cellular structure, no one knows the IP tags of more than a handful of fellow Peek-a-Booty users. That makes it hard to put the network out of business by impersonating a Peek-a-Booty user and harvesting IP addresses.
According to Alex Salkever, there are only 100 Peek-a-Booty nodes so far.
I cannot confirm it. Today, the Peek-a-Booty Website is showing me lists of MySQL error messages and no valuable information. But keep trying if you want to participate...
Anyway, as with all P2P networks, this one can be used -- and abused -- by criminals or even governmental agencies.
Paul Baranowski, one of the two software writers, comments on this.
Baranowski himself admits that Peek-a-Booty could provide ammunition as well as free communication. "You can use a hammer to hammer in a nail, or you can use it to break someone's knee," he says.
Source: Alex Salkever, BusinessWeek Online, July 23, 2002
5:30:00 PM
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