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JackSpratts · 25-03-04, 07:55 PM

The Zer0Share Project

Here at Napsterites of the Underground the members are no strangers to file sharing. With a name like Napsterites I may be running the risk of stating the obvious but the familiarity with peer-to-peer networking goes beyond that of the committed enthusiast. Indeed were it not for our members there might not be any peer-to-peer at all. Their lists of accomplishments in the industry is substantial, from work on the original Napster and KaZaa right up through new systems still in the lab. That the boards here reflect mostly social activities is much like a lake on a bright summer day. The water sparkles with invitation but is hard to see through, so it's not until one plunges in that one gets the full measure of the environment. Things in other words are happening beneath the surface. Don't get me wrong. I'm not implying that The Underground is some hot bed of file sharing intrigue, quite the opposite. Once one gets to know the members they can be very forthcoming about their work, it's just that like many things in life, there are levels of existence that at first glance may be somewhat obscured by more prosaic activities.

I've been thinking about this lately in relationship to file sharing and specifically in relationship to a program called Waste. While not to my knowledge developed by anyone at Napsterites it has been invited and accepted by NU members with enthusiasm, running virtually non stop since the first week it was released in June of 2003. I can't count the number of networks we have connecting members here, not so much because of the sheer volume of them, and there are plenty, but because Waste is a program designed from the start to be stealthy, and unless you're invited into a specific network called a "mesh," you're not going to know of its existence, even if you're already operating on another one. This is a big departure from file sharing programs and as you can imagine, it's one of the most important features Waste offers the user, particularly in these days of uncontrolled legal weaponry aimed at file sharers by an increasingly pathological media industry. Imagine pockets of resistance populated by content rich, free-sharing users hidden from view and scattered across the globe and you'll have some idea what Waste is about. Though small, with each mesh maxing out at some 50 members, the aggregate is surprisingly vast. But there's the rub, it is by design a disconnected aggregate and to a large extent socially balkanized. Nobody knows what anybody else is doing on these meshes, which from a security standpoint is reasonable, even laudable, but from a societal standpoint it is in my view a step backwards, and a shortcoming I'd like to address.

As of this writing I am a member of an even dozen meshes, most of them small and only occasionally active, but there are four that I connect to each day, and of those four one is of a fairly substantial size. I'm about to add another. Or more specifically, with your assistance, we're about to create another. One with a very different mission.

As someone who has become familiar with this program over many months of usage a couple of things become apparent. The first is that most meshes are simply too small to catch fire. Initial excitement at being able to connect at all leads to determined content mining which leads inevitably to content exhaustion, and one reaches that point in time fairly quickly, when one has transferred all the material worth acquiring from the various mesh members. I am on some fairly substantial ones, content wise, yet I can close my eyes and see all the folders each member has and the names of the files contained therein. It's not to say that new material isn't added, it is, but in the course of human events it's slow process, this adding of stuff, and one can easily become distracted from the quest. Which brings me to the second point. After a while you stop looking. It's true. Unlike gigantic file sharing systems with hundreds of thousands of users and multi terabytes of material, a humble Waste mesh may have a few hundred gigs at most, or perhaps a terabyte or two. After plumbing the depths on a daily basis for a few weeks one can become attuned to the natural rhythms of the acquisitional cycle of the membership and realize from an efficiency angle anyway, you can't really check in each day with a folder by folder census and expect any kind of major payoff. In other words without the excitement of the always new, one can get well, bored. This of course is not news to experienced Waste users and they all seem to do the same thing about it no matter what mesh you happen to find yourself in. As a matter of fact it can happen the very first time someone uses the program. Waste happens to have excellent, encrypted decentralized chat. It's all but uncrackable and it's under no one's control. This isn't lost on Waste users and they immediately put it to fantastic use notifying fellow file sharers of any new content they may have recently added. Conversely users also post requests for content as well. There's a lot of back and forth when the itch gets bad. This brings up another observation. Like an iceberg, most content in the hands of Waste users is not actually on Waste, but parked elsewhere in other files, discs, folders harddrives or machines otherwise inaccessible by the network search function, but not entirely by members. A simple query will bring about the transfer when one member responds by putting online something that had been parked off, in essence filling an order. This is how it should be in any network where storage and bandwidth are rationed, and indeed name me a network that isn't. The difference with Waste is that the chat functions are so efficient and so good they become dependably a part of the file sharing scheme acting like an uberdrive for the entire network. The interface is human of course, one has to query the owner directly, but it is no exaggeration to say you can get it faster using this system than with fasttrack or, and I hate to say this, Soulseek, my favorite regular file sharing program. I'm not kidding. In my experience if it's available anywhere in any mesh member's possession, online or off, you can get it faster with Waste than with any other program.

What this means is that for all practical purposes after a certain amount of time has passed, one doesn't need to share anything anymore in the normal sense, with folders bursting with tons of content instantly at the ready and hogging untold gigs on pricey harddrives. You don't have to because nobody needs it. If it's up they've either 1, already gotten it or 2, they don't want it. Either way, it's taking up space unnecessarily. It becomes like the famous dog in the Sherlock Holmes story, important for it's absence. We know the goods are offline, we don't need to see what's on. We do need to know when something new arrives and as long as we can get access we don't need to know if the folder it comes in is offline or on. All things being equal of course you might say well so what, you have to put the stuff somewhere so why not just leave it online, members can at least get it faster that way and besides, what difference does it make if it's online or not? Hardrives keep getting bigger and cheaper too, it's not like Waste charges a storage fee by the month. Well, if keeping it online didn't make any difference you'd be right, but as we're finding out, it makes a huge difference, in the eyes of the law. Due to some albeit temporary legal pathology that hasn't worked itself out of the collective cultural consciousness it turns out some poor bastards have been finding themselves in quite a financial spot just leaving digital stuff lying around for any and everyone to stumble over. I know it sounds funny, blaming the victim and all but the copyright laws have been interpreted to suggest that in matters of information, if somebody comes into your house and copies your copyrighted stuff without the permission of the copyright claimant, you’re violating a statute, not the copiers. This is a somewhat simple explanation for a maddeningly complicated issue that even experts have trouble following but basically if you had a store and every time somebody shoplifted your stuff the cops sent you to jail it would be a pretty good analogy how the law - so far - treats downloading. Unfair? You bet. But that's the way it is at the moment. Suffice it to say, for our purposes, there is a huge difference between keeping files instantly available online and keeping them generally available off. It's not that the law appreciates the difference mind you; it's just that if one is going to participate in file sharing the tactical advantage enjoyed in keeping an offline archive is profound. Which brings us back to Waste.

My proposal is a simple one. I would like to start a file sharing network with no files. A sort of nullwork if you will for Waste users. More specifically, I would like to start a Waste mesh that does not contain any remotely accessible copyrighted content that is not under the ownership of the membership. No songs, no movies, no warez. It can actually contain gigs and gigs of downloadable material as long as it's member created or is distributable with permission. If not, it won't belong. Leave that material on the other networks, and there are plenty of them out there believe me. I might be responsible for helping kick off a few of them. But this one will be different. Depending on member’s ambitions it can have rooms, chat, 24 hour socializing, quiet corners and rowdy saloons, but it won't have any copyrighted content. None. It'll have so little content that if the RIAA happens to stop by they'll leave at the first opportunity because their presence will be a complete waste of time.

If there's no content, why bother? Well first of all it just so happens you can do a lot with a mesh even if you're not sharing the latest songs. Users new to Waste can become familiar with the program in an open environment free from any controversy, which in itself is a kind of liberation. They can introduce others to the program in a neutral way, and walk themselves through the steps that enable them to create their own meshes for friends and family. They can use the chat functions like any other system, free in the knowledge that no one's looking over their shoulder reading every word. More experienced users can use it for more complex things. Developers may find it useful for new projects and to test newer versions of Waste, which is now open source. It can become a clearinghouse for all sorts of information, from politics to local events. Since some Europeans have erroneously concluded links are the same as content, link sites are falling by the wayside, so it can and probably will become a place to exchange them. It should although I'm not sure that it will, become a place for artists to announce and distribute their own works. It's been five years since Napster proved conclusively that artists can control their destiny and do their own mass distributing, yet to this day artists still cling tenaciously to outdated media company models and in doing so help perpetuate a system that at once enslaves them and corrupts any and all it touches. This mesh will not end the practice, but it may show some artists there is another way, and they in turn may become emissaries to the larger creative community, and that may prove to be an important step in their own emancipation. In laymen's terms Waste is not a "resource hog", people can and do leave it on all day long, even several meshes simultaneously without experiencing a drain on their computers. It may be that this new mesh becomes a sort of permanent community ticker, like the news zipper at Times Square in New York City, idling quietly in a corner of the screen and occasionally announcing events of interest, unmanipulated by corporate profit machines. A true people's network. I can't even begin to think of all the things this mesh might be capable of in the weeks and months ahead, and it's not from lack of trying. I just realize the futility of competing with a million minds.

I know that the time has come to start something new. Something a lot bigger than file sharing, and maybe something a little bigger than ourselves.

To that end I’ve gotten the ball rolling as it were. I’ve started the mesh and given it a name. I've also placed in my share folder some 600 works from the public domain.

Waste may be a funny name for a program that is anything but, that brings together people from all over the world in a corporate free, protected cybersphere. Justin Frankel its creator is said to have chosen the name after the underground mail system in Thomas Pynchon's book The Crying of Lot 57. In a society of extreme repression this was how members were forced to communicate if they wanted their words to remain unmolested. That was fiction of course. Still, without rearticulating the planet's immediate geopolitical history and headlines it probably wouldn't be the worst idea in the world if more of us became familiar with such a system, and one that's actually real. Well, here's our chance.

Pass it on,

Jack Spratts.

The Zer0share Project

The details~

Please note: There are two client platforms. They both have their advantages but are incompatible and will not connect to each other. We run unique meshes for each. When you’ve settled on a client and created a profile, you may announce it at the end of this thread.

The Clients: v1.4 and earlier

The Network Name: zer0share (Copy and paste exactly as written. Note the numeral zero. Open Waste, go to File | Preferences | Network | Network Name and paste.)

The Port: 11150

My Public Key:

WASTE_PUBLIC_KEY 20 1536 jackspratts
C113E695BFA94EA1BCEB8003BC9E3F2DAFAB86C9725FF4C148814A3CBC0C
088D77A94CF7FF60CDCD64361A3CA09C65B75B87E156CD368CBE6F45A424
2D00509B29FC1FF60F1956E636E81026F1835758AB5A8A7BDD0509D44F3D
CE02F5FBFB008B827B00A81B6D0ECD03B0C25B627C3600ED66A39AA096C7
F1C0599699C4E29EE8B29692C602916AFECDBB1538D078BF03B5864EBC23
9E9C1C78C611470AF635533E8648C4B65979318E96BAC6449F9BDD0E84F6
5E47161EE5F7797753E0F4270003010001
WASTE_PUBLIC_KEY_END

The Clients: v1.5 and newer

The Network Name: zer©share (Copy and paste exactly as written. Note the copyright symbol. Open Waste, go to File | Preferences | Password and paste.)

The Port: 11350

My Public Key:

WASTE_PUBLIC_KEY 20 1536 jacksback
E666044C641CEEC4CD0B12BC0E1BE8ED040BD7CBEEFB19DCFB9AE4D02F83
4FC55E2DCDA77D13DA0E4F12B0DBC58EB7B4E3AC450849FB55BECAABD5D8
11E298209FC98026CD8F16E0748D72BC4E2011B2B09C0A5E84C7C0F5B3CB
DA860311AF6D2E6096B62051DB0E2738D4BBF77C654DA70ECDCB4146B8D2
024D296168DE0F66F4C1DE1C8099F338B1A4EA269A766FA0F42F839A25F4
2897432A50529BA0EB6C5F159328030604EA242880EDD65A79B55757AAD5
C0E0A731D9C753345A34A1F70003010001
WASTE_PUBLIC_KEY_END

In order for this project to have any hope of success we will need a few regular users with static IP addresses. These act as seeds or hooks allowing others to connect. Anyone and everyone with a static IP who wishes may volunteer his or her IP in this thread.

There is some debate in the community as to how many people can reasonably populate a mesh before it stalls. The prevailing theory puts that number between 50 and 100. Not a lot to be sure but more than it might seem at first. To put that figure in some perspective it should be noted the average node on the giant Fasttrack system was not all that much bigger (Kazaa, Groktster etc). Each had about 350 users. If in the future the original zer0share mesh becomes overloaded, new meshes will be added to absorb the growth. The next mesh will be called zer0share1, then the naming scheme will continue with zer0share1a, zer0share1b etc, until at zer0share1z, it will resolve to zer0share2, and continue with the alphabet as needed. I have no idea if that is even remotely likely, but just in case, technical solutions that enable these meshes to combine can be explored.

This is an all-access, fully open mesh. No one will be turned away, not even by me. There will be no administration in the usual sense, no one looking over your shoulder making sure you don't miss the spittoon, but with that freedom comes some responsibility. Indeed self governance is a major point of the program so there won't be any appealing to higher authorities when boorish behavior becomes a distraction. We are on our own here in this little community. If it gets too hot, delete the key of the member who's irritating you or shut the mesh off altogether.

Try not to get too caught up in any dramas. There are real people behind the nics, but their actions may not be. Try to have some fun, try to do something new and try to use this project as a way of exploring things that may be just outside your reach.

Above all, enjoy it.

- js.

Use this moderated thread to post your ideas, your information, and your public keys. I'll be checking in on a regular basis, loading keys and reading your comments.

Email – thezer0shareproject (at) lycos (dot) com

Please join us here at NU.

25-03-04, 07:55 PM	#1
JackSpratts Join Date: May 2001 Location: New England Posts: 10,016	The Zer0share Project The Zer0Share Project Here at Napsterites of the Underground the members are no strangers to file sharing. With a name like Napsterites I may be running the risk of stating the obvious but the familiarity with peer-to-peer networking goes beyond that of the committed enthusiast. Indeed were it not for our members there might not be any peer-to-peer at all. Their lists of accomplishments in the industry is substantial, from work on the original Napster and KaZaa right up through new systems still in the lab. That the boards here reflect mostly social activities is much like a lake on a bright summer day. The water sparkles with invitation but is hard to see through, so it's not until one plunges in that one gets the full measure of the environment. Things in other words are happening beneath the surface. Don't get me wrong. I'm not implying that The Underground is some hot bed of file sharing intrigue, quite the opposite. Once one gets to know the members they can be very forthcoming about their work, it's just that like many things in life, there are levels of existence that at first glance may be somewhat obscured by more prosaic activities. I've been thinking about this lately in relationship to file sharing and specifically in relationship to a program called Waste. While not to my knowledge developed by anyone at Napsterites it has been invited and accepted by NU members with enthusiasm, running virtually non stop since the first week it was released in June of 2003. I can't count the number of networks we have connecting members here, not so much because of the sheer volume of them, and there are plenty, but because Waste is a program designed from the start to be stealthy, and unless you're invited into a specific network called a "mesh," you're not going to know of its existence, even if you're already operating on another one. This is a big departure from file sharing programs and as you can imagine, it's one of the most important features Waste offers the user, particularly in these days of uncontrolled legal weaponry aimed at file sharers by an increasingly pathological media industry. Imagine pockets of resistance populated by content rich, free-sharing users hidden from view and scattered across the globe and you'll have some idea what Waste is about. Though small, with each mesh maxing out at some 50 members, the aggregate is surprisingly vast. But there's the rub, it is by design a disconnected aggregate and to a large extent socially balkanized. Nobody knows what anybody else is doing on these meshes, which from a security standpoint is reasonable, even laudable, but from a societal standpoint it is in my view a step backwards, and a shortcoming I'd like to address. As of this writing I am a member of an even dozen meshes, most of them small and only occasionally active, but there are four that I connect to each day, and of those four one is of a fairly substantial size. I'm about to add another. Or more specifically, with your assistance, we're about to create another. One with a very different mission. As someone who has become familiar with this program over many months of usage a couple of things become apparent. The first is that most meshes are simply too small to catch fire. Initial excitement at being able to connect at all leads to determined content mining which leads inevitably to content exhaustion, and one reaches that point in time fairly quickly, when one has transferred all the material worth acquiring from the various mesh members. I am on some fairly substantial ones, content wise, yet I can close my eyes and see all the folders each member has and the names of the files contained therein. It's not to say that new material isn't added, it is, but in the course of human events it's slow process, this adding of stuff, and one can easily become distracted from the quest. Which brings me to the second point. After a while you stop looking. It's true. Unlike gigantic file sharing systems with hundreds of thousands of users and multi terabytes of material, a humble Waste mesh may have a few hundred gigs at most, or perhaps a terabyte or two. After plumbing the depths on a daily basis for a few weeks one can become attuned to the natural rhythms of the acquisitional cycle of the membership and realize from an efficiency angle anyway, you can't really check in each day with a folder by folder census and expect any kind of major payoff. In other words without the excitement of the always new, one can get well, bored. This of course is not news to experienced Waste users and they all seem to do the same thing about it no matter what mesh you happen to find yourself in. As a matter of fact it can happen the very first time someone uses the program. Waste happens to have excellent, encrypted decentralized chat. It's all but uncrackable and it's under no one's control. This isn't lost on Waste users and they immediately put it to fantastic use notifying fellow file sharers of any new content they may have recently added. Conversely users also post requests for content as well. There's a lot of back and forth when the itch gets bad. This brings up another observation. Like an iceberg, most content in the hands of Waste users is not actually on Waste, but parked elsewhere in other files, discs, folders harddrives or machines otherwise inaccessible by the network search function, but not entirely by members. A simple query will bring about the transfer when one member responds by putting online something that had been parked off, in essence filling an order. This is how it should be in any network where storage and bandwidth are rationed, and indeed name me a network that isn't. The difference with Waste is that the chat functions are so efficient and so good they become dependably a part of the file sharing scheme acting like an uberdrive for the entire network. The interface is human of course, one has to query the owner directly, but it is no exaggeration to say you can get it faster using this system than with fasttrack or, and I hate to say this, Soulseek, my favorite regular file sharing program. I'm not kidding. In my experience if it's available anywhere in any mesh member's possession, online or off, you can get it faster with Waste than with any other program. What this means is that for all practical purposes after a certain amount of time has passed, one doesn't need to share anything anymore in the normal sense, with folders bursting with tons of content instantly at the ready and hogging untold gigs on pricey harddrives. You don't have to because nobody needs it. If it's up they've either 1, already gotten it or 2, they don't want it. Either way, it's taking up space unnecessarily. It becomes like the famous dog in the Sherlock Holmes story, important for it's absence. We know the goods are offline, we don't need to see what's on. We do need to know when something new arrives and as long as we can get access we don't need to know if the folder it comes in is offline or on. All things being equal of course you might say well so what, you have to put the stuff somewhere so why not just leave it online, members can at least get it faster that way and besides, what difference does it make if it's online or not? Hardrives keep getting bigger and cheaper too, it's not like Waste charges a storage fee by the month. Well, if keeping it online didn't make any difference you'd be right, but as we're finding out, it makes a huge difference, in the eyes of the law. Due to some albeit temporary legal pathology that hasn't worked itself out of the collective cultural consciousness it turns out some poor bastards have been finding themselves in quite a financial spot just leaving digital stuff lying around for any and everyone to stumble over. I know it sounds funny, blaming the victim and all but the copyright laws have been interpreted to suggest that in matters of information, if somebody comes into your house and copies your copyrighted stuff without the permission of the copyright claimant, you’re violating a statute, not the copiers. This is a somewhat simple explanation for a maddeningly complicated issue that even experts have trouble following but basically if you had a store and every time somebody shoplifted your stuff the cops sent you to jail it would be a pretty good analogy how the law - so far - treats downloading. Unfair? You bet. But that's the way it is at the moment. Suffice it to say, for our purposes, there is a huge difference between keeping files instantly available online and keeping them generally available off. It's not that the law appreciates the difference mind you; it's just that if one is going to participate in file sharing the tactical advantage enjoyed in keeping an offline archive is profound. Which brings us back to Waste. My proposal is a simple one. I would like to start a file sharing network with no files. A sort of nullwork if you will for Waste users. More specifically, I would like to start a Waste mesh that does not contain any remotely accessible copyrighted content that is not under the ownership of the membership. No songs, no movies, no warez. It can actually contain gigs and gigs of downloadable material as long as it's member created or is distributable with permission. If not, it won't belong. Leave that material on the other networks, and there are plenty of them out there believe me. I might be responsible for helping kick off a few of them. But this one will be different. Depending on member’s ambitions it can have rooms, chat, 24 hour socializing, quiet corners and rowdy saloons, but it won't have any copyrighted content. None. It'll have so little content that if the RIAA happens to stop by they'll leave at the first opportunity because their presence will be a complete waste of time. If there's no content, why bother? Well first of all it just so happens you can do a lot with a mesh even if you're not sharing the latest songs. Users new to Waste can become familiar with the program in an open environment free from any controversy, which in itself is a kind of liberation. They can introduce others to the program in a neutral way, and walk themselves through the steps that enable them to create their own meshes for friends and family. They can use the chat functions like any other system, free in the knowledge that no one's looking over their shoulder reading every word. More experienced users can use it for more complex things. Developers may find it useful for new projects and to test newer versions of Waste, which is now open source. It can become a clearinghouse for all sorts of information, from politics to local events. Since some Europeans have erroneously concluded links are the same as content, link sites are falling by the wayside, so it can and probably will become a place to exchange them. It should although I'm not sure that it will, become a place for artists to announce and distribute their own works. It's been five years since Napster proved conclusively that artists can control their destiny and do their own mass distributing, yet to this day artists still cling tenaciously to outdated media company models and in doing so help perpetuate a system that at once enslaves them and corrupts any and all it touches. This mesh will not end the practice, but it may show some artists there is another way, and they in turn may become emissaries to the larger creative community, and that may prove to be an important step in their own emancipation. In laymen's terms Waste is not a "resource hog", people can and do leave it on all day long, even several meshes simultaneously without experiencing a drain on their computers. It may be that this new mesh becomes a sort of permanent community ticker, like the news zipper at Times Square in New York City, idling quietly in a corner of the screen and occasionally announcing events of interest, unmanipulated by corporate profit machines. A true people's network. I can't even begin to think of all the things this mesh might be capable of in the weeks and months ahead, and it's not from lack of trying. I just realize the futility of competing with a million minds. I know that the time has come to start something new. Something a lot bigger than file sharing, and maybe something a little bigger than ourselves. To that end I’ve gotten the ball rolling as it were. I’ve started the mesh and given it a name. I've also placed in my share folder some 600 works from the public domain. Waste may be a funny name for a program that is anything but, that brings together people from all over the world in a corporate free, protected cybersphere. Justin Frankel its creator is said to have chosen the name after the underground mail system in Thomas Pynchon's book The Crying of Lot 57. In a society of extreme repression this was how members were forced to communicate if they wanted their words to remain unmolested. That was fiction of course. Still, without rearticulating the planet's immediate geopolitical history and headlines it probably wouldn't be the worst idea in the world if more of us became familiar with such a system, and one that's actually real. Well, here's our chance. Pass it on, Jack Spratts. The Zer0share Project The details~ Please note: There are two client platforms. They both have their advantages but are incompatible and will not connect to each other. We run unique meshes for each. When you’ve settled on a client and created a profile, you may announce it at the end of this thread. The Clients: v1.4 and earlier The Network Name: zer0share (Copy and paste exactly as written. Note the numeral zero. Open Waste, go to File \| Preferences \| Network \| Network Name and paste.) The Port: 11150 My Public Key: WASTE_PUBLIC_KEY 20 1536 jackspratts C113E695BFA94EA1BCEB8003BC9E3F2DAFAB86C9725FF4C148814A3CBC0C 088D77A94CF7FF60CDCD64361A3CA09C65B75B87E156CD368CBE6F45A424 2D00509B29FC1FF60F1956E636E81026F1835758AB5A8A7BDD0509D44F3D CE02F5FBFB008B827B00A81B6D0ECD03B0C25B627C3600ED66A39AA096C7 F1C0599699C4E29EE8B29692C602916AFECDBB1538D078BF03B5864EBC23 9E9C1C78C611470AF635533E8648C4B65979318E96BAC6449F9BDD0E84F6 5E47161EE5F7797753E0F4270003010001 WASTE_PUBLIC_KEY_END The Clients: v1.5 and newer The Network Name: zer©share (Copy and paste exactly as written. Note the copyright symbol. Open Waste, go to File \| Preferences \| Password and paste.) The Port: 11350 My Public Key: WASTE_PUBLIC_KEY 20 1536 jacksback E666044C641CEEC4CD0B12BC0E1BE8ED040BD7CBEEFB19DCFB9AE4D02F83 4FC55E2DCDA77D13DA0E4F12B0DBC58EB7B4E3AC450849FB55BECAABD5D8 11E298209FC98026CD8F16E0748D72BC4E2011B2B09C0A5E84C7C0F5B3CB DA860311AF6D2E6096B62051DB0E2738D4BBF77C654DA70ECDCB4146B8D2 024D296168DE0F66F4C1DE1C8099F338B1A4EA269A766FA0F42F839A25F4 2897432A50529BA0EB6C5F159328030604EA242880EDD65A79B55757AAD5 C0E0A731D9C753345A34A1F70003010001 WASTE_PUBLIC_KEY_END In order for this project to have any hope of success we will need a few regular users with static IP addresses. These act as seeds or hooks allowing others to connect. Anyone and everyone with a static IP who wishes may volunteer his or her IP in this thread. There is some debate in the community as to how many people can reasonably populate a mesh before it stalls. The prevailing theory puts that number between 50 and 100. Not a lot to be sure but more than it might seem at first. To put that figure in some perspective it should be noted the average node on the giant Fasttrack system was not all that much bigger (Kazaa, Groktster etc). Each had about 350 users. If in the future the original zer0share mesh becomes overloaded, new meshes will be added to absorb the growth. The next mesh will be called zer0share1, then the naming scheme will continue with zer0share1a, zer0share1b etc, until at zer0share1z, it will resolve to zer0share2, and continue with the alphabet as needed. I have no idea if that is even remotely likely, but just in case, technical solutions that enable these meshes to combine can be explored. This is an all-access, fully open mesh. No one will be turned away, not even by me. There will be no administration in the usual sense, no one looking over your shoulder making sure you don't miss the spittoon, but with that freedom comes some responsibility. Indeed self governance is a major point of the program so there won't be any appealing to higher authorities when boorish behavior becomes a distraction. We are on our own here in this little community. If it gets too hot, delete the key of the member who's irritating you or shut the mesh off altogether. Try not to get too caught up in any dramas. There are real people behind the nics, but their actions may not be. Try to have some fun, try to do something new and try to use this project as a way of exploring things that may be just outside your reach. Above all, enjoy it. - js. Use this moderated thread to post your ideas, your information, and your public keys. I'll be checking in on a regular basis, loading keys and reading your comments. Email – thezer0shareproject (at) lycos (dot) com Please join us here at NU.