The enigma of Earth Station 5
Can a file-trading network that promises total anonymity and is based in the Palestinian Territories escape the wrath of the entertainment industry?
By Mathew Honan
Dec. 3, 2003 | For the past few months, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been slapping American MP3-swappers with lawsuits in an effort to deter an activity that the entertainment industry claims is costing it millions of dollars. But now, somebody is slapping back. Earth Station 5, or ES5, is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing network based in the Jenin refugee camp in the Palestinian Territories. The backers of ES5 say that the program can provide complete anonymity for its users via third-party proxy servers (computers that provide a kind of neutral buffer between a file downloader's home computer and the network); has, on average, 16 million members connected to its network; will never contain stealth adware or spyware programs; and -- because it is headquartered in the Palestinian Territories -- is immune from the legal grasp of the RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
Moreover, ES5 has taken an aggressively hostile stance against the movie, music and software industries. There's none of the wink-wink, nudge-nudge, we're-not-responsible- for-what-our-users-do stance that goes on with other P2P platforms such as Kazaa, or, once upon a time, Napster. ES5 claims to be "at war" with the major media organizations. The company actively engages in file sharing, streams unlicensed first-run movies, and claims to have 200 terabytes of "free" music and software it plans to release across its network. And how does it respond to demands to cease and desist?
"Basically," says ES5 media liaison Steve Taylor, "we tell them to go fuck off."
"Earth Station 5 is trying to get press by throwing stones at us," says Matthew Oppenheim, senior vice president of legal and business affairs for the RIAA. Maybe so. But if history is any example, Palestinians can be very determined stone-throwers.
Before Kazaa, before Audiogalaxy, before Gnutella, iMesh, LimeWire, MP3.com, or Napster, MP3 swapping was already rampant on the Internet. If you knew where to look, the files were there. On IRC and FTP sites and in newsgroups, MP3 trading raged. But it was all very quiet, very hush-hush. And then along came MP3.com and Napster. Suddenly, you didn't have to know where to look anymore. It was all there for the taking.
But the centralized systems turned out to be easy targets for the RIAA. So the rapidly moving P2P world switched to decentralized servers, the Fast Track file-sharing system used by Kazaa and Grokster, and the Gnutella network used by eDonkey and LimeWire. Although the RIAA has had more difficulty stomping out these networks, it has still been able to uniquely identify users on those systems. These are the so-called "grannies and girl scouts" cases, in which the RIAA has sued end-users to try to stem the tide of file swapping.
As it always does, technology evolved in response. The latest generation of P2P applications, such as WASTE and ES5, are designed to thwart efforts to determine who is hosting or downloading files.
"Filehoover and I were talking about the Kazaa court case and how the Fast Track network lacks the ability to secure itself," says "SharePro," an ES5 programmer, via online messaging. (Like the users themselves, many of ES5's employees rely on anonymity. Although a few of the company's operatives, such as Taylor and company founder Ras Kabir, maintain a public presence, most of the employees tend to go by screen names.)
"Fast Track was built nicely three years ago. But today it is obsolete because it cannot complement modern secure protocols like HTTPS/SSL. Nor can Kazaa support proxies. It supports SOCKS proxies, which are mainly set up by hackers to steal passwords. So Filehoover, I and Ras discussed building a network and program that could support multiple proxies and secure P2Pr's.
"In addition, we were concerned with how Kazaa contains spyware and the fact that they could be putting their entire user database at risk. Spyware sends at different intervals the Internet Protocol (IP) address, MAC address, registry settings, and the entire upload/download log of the P2Pr. In other words, Kazaa has infected over 300 million P2Pr's and sold them out."
But without advertising, or spyware, ES5 would seemingly have no way to make money. Considering the massive infrastructure required to support such an application and network -- according to the European and Middle Eastern domain registry RIPE, ES5 owns blocks of thousands of IP addresses -- as well as likely ongoing legal costs, ES5 would require some sort of major investment and, presumably, a major payoff eventually.
Taylor claims that the company is spending $2 million a month. Behind the scenes, he says, are six investors who fund the project and keep it going, four of whom are billionaires. He claims that the company sees ES5 not as a P2P network, but rather as a full-service portal, complete with voice-over IP for making long-distance calls on the cheap, online dating, and eventually, online gambling.
Next page: Is ES5 legit? Or is it a trap set up by the RIAA?