Waste

In 2003, the latest peer to peer file sharing protocol was WASTE which had been developed by Justin Frankel who worked with Nullsoft. The name of the protocol was actually decided based on a novel that was written by Thomas Pynchon that was entitled The Crying of Lot 49, in which their was an acronym of the same which stood for “We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire” and was an underground postal service in the novel. In the same way, WASTE is an underground postal service designed to deliver data rather than mail, but it has the same effect of being underground and a means of delivering something.

Right after the development of WASTE, Nullsoft was bought out by American Online. During the initial release of WASTE, the parent company, AOL, realized the possibilities of legal implications and pulled the release from the website. Luckily, since WASTE was an open source project, those who downloaded still made it available long after AOL had attempted to stop the distribution. It did not take long for the source code of WASTE, to get reverse engineered and implemented into many other peer to peer file sharing clients that are still available today.

Since the time when American Online pulled the release of WASTE, many of the original development team has gathered to covertly maintain the protocol in which the only true source of this project is still available in its originality at Source Forge. Source Forge is the home to many of the open source peer to peer file sharing clients. Thanks to Source Forge, these open source projects can stay open source since there is no cost to the developer. For a long time, many have believed that the internet should be free and anything within its domain should be conformed with this belief. It is with this idealism that many of the internets best software is open source and can even be found there at that site.

WASTE offers many of the same features that virtually any peer to peer file sharing protocol and client share, but is an anonymous client with built in chat capabilities. Chatting has always helped during the downloading process. There is an entire community of people out there who enjoy using the peer to peer file sharing clients and some are always looking to talk about their hobby. Feel free to start a chat will a fellow file sharer and keep the internet free.

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