Nullsoft WASTE

Justin Frankel just caused AOL more grief. His last stunt was releasing Gnutella, a P2P application that quickly became the core of every file sharing program out there, including the current favorite, KaZaA. He released his lastest project, WASTE, onto the Nullsoft site on May 28, and it quickly became big news. The software gets its name from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, an is an acronym for “We Await Silent Trystero’s Empire.” W.A.S.T.E. is an underground postal system in the novel. Frankel’s WASTE got mentioned on Slashdot and on Daypop and a lot of people managed to download it before it was taken offline. I saw WASTE on the Daypop charts and downloaded the installer before AOL revoked it. I played around with the program a little bit right after downloading it and found that Frankel has made yet another great program.

Say hello to a killer new IM program.

WASTE is essentially a P2P IM program that sports encryption. You can set up a private network of about 50 people and share files or chat securely. The program runs at 128-bit encryption by default, which is virtually impossible to crack. This is the same level of encryption that is often found in web browsers. Needless to say, the record and movie industries won’t be happy about this because they won’t be able to track what people are sharing.

AOL didn’t like WASTE very much because it is a potential threat to AOL Instant Messenger, really the only good thing AOL has going for itself.

WASTE is a snap to set up and it generates a PGP key for you based on random mouse movements. Just follow the directions in the installer and you’re ready to go. Getting onto a server is a little bit more difficult. The host has to manually accept your PGP key and you have to entry the host’s as well. This prevents people from entering a server without access. It’s ingenious, really. Be sure you remember the password you enter during setup because it is required every time you open the program. If you forget it, you’ll have to reinstall and make a new key, which will cause you to lose access to all the servers you were able to log on to previously.

WASTE has already been shut down by AOL but who knows, it may resurface in the near future. Keep a look out for a stable release in the future.

Browse other user’s files through a graphical navigation.

WASTE lets you control how much bandwidth is used.

A password is required to open the program.

Manage your private key settings.

Remember, AOL has taken WASTE offline. Do not ask me where you can download the software.