EarthStation 5

» see earthstation5.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In 2003 i was in internet cafes in Ankara, and the file sharing on those machines was Kazaa plus whatever the counter had installed that month. EarthStation 5 never turned up on one of them. i missed it completely and only learned the shape of the story years later, which is probably the correct relationship to have had with it.

It was announced on 9 June 2003, although the name has traces going back to that March. The pitch had two halves. The first was ordinary for the period: a P2P client with a big media library, encrypted transfers, and claims about anonymity that most of its competitors were also making. The second half was not ordinary at all. EarthStation 5 said it operated out of Jenin refugee camp #23 in the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank, and its argument was that American copyright law was unenforceable there, so it could serve movies without consequence.

The company committed to that story properly. Its domain registrations carried the camp address, and its RIPE records described the netblock as covering employee VOIP and workstations in Jenin refugee camp #23. Its president appeared publicly as Ras Kabir and gave interviews defending the numbers. It was one of the more complete pieces of staging the file-sharing era produced, and almost none of it survived contact with anyone who checked.

~ the case file ~

~ the claims ~

The declaration of war is what people still repeat. After receiving cease-and-desist correspondence, EarthStation 5 responded with a press release stating that it was at war with the Motion Picture Association of America, and promising to add even more movies for free by way of reply. No other network of the era answered a legal threat by issuing a formal declaration of hostilities against a trade body.

The user number was sixteen million. Nobody outside the company was ever able to support it, and the people who went looking found the opposite. Slyck put the founder on the record about the arithmetic, and a straightforward test kept failing: for a network supposedly that large, searches for well-known artists returned very little. Richard Bejtlich, writing in August 2003, went further and suggested the whole operation read like a media-industry sting, on the grounds that the claimed adoption rates were implausible and the rhetoric about the evil empire was laid on far too thick for a real business.

~ the slide ~

In September 2003 Shaun Garriok, better known as Random Nut and the author of Kazaa Lite, published a finding about the client. A specially formed packet sent to a machine running EarthStation 5 could delete any file on it whose path the sender already knew. Slashdot carried it on 3 October and the story moved fast, because the obvious reading was ugly: an anti-piracy operation could distribute a client to file sharers, watch what they held, and then reach in and remove it.

The company acknowledged the function existed and denied the intent. Its explanation was that the code was a residue of an older remote-update mechanism used to manage its own servers, that it had never been used against users, and that it was removed in the next build. Whether or not that was true, the damage was structural. A network whose entire proposition was that it would protect you from the copyright industry had shipped a client that let a stranger delete your files, and had not noticed.

~ the actual end ~

The Jenin story did not hold either. Business registration papers named Stephen M. Cohen as sole director, and EarthStation 5 initially described him as no more than a consultant. Cohen was already a known quantity in a bad way. He is the man who took sex.com from Gary Kremen through a forged letter, lost a landmark judgment worth $65 million over it, and then spent years out of reach of the courts trying to collect on it.

EarthStation 5 disappeared in February 2005 with no announcement worth the name, at a point where the legal situation around Cohen was closing in from several directions at once. It is not remembered as a network people used, because in any meaningful sense it never was one. It is remembered as the moment the file-sharing wars got theatrical enough that a client could arrive wrapped in a formal war declaration and a headquarters address in an occupied territory, ship a working remote delete inside itself, and still find people willing to install it.

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