WASTE

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

~ the obit ~

It was officially on the internet for three days. Justin Frankel put WASTE on the Nullsoft website on Wednesday 28 May 2003, Slashdot found it the next day, and by Saturday the download page had been replaced with a legal notice from AOL saying the software had never been authorized and that anyone holding a copy was required to delete it.

The name came out of Thomas Pynchon. In The Crying of Lot 49 there is an underground postal system called W.A.S.T.E. that people use to send each other things the official mail cannot see, which is a fair enough description of what the software did. It built small private networks. You and the people you trusted exchanged public keys, agreed on a passphrase, and after that you had a chat room and a file browser running between you with nothing in the middle.

There was no index and nobody to serve a warrant on. RSA handled the key exchange, Blowfish encrypted the traffic, and it listened on port 1337 by default, which tells you the register the thing was written in. The suggested size of a network was ten to fifty nodes. That ceiling was the design rather than a limitation somebody meant to lift in a later version.

In May 2003 I was on a 56k line and broadband was still three years away from my house. WASTE needed two things I did not have. It needed upstream bandwidth, because every node routes traffic for the others, and it needed ten to fifty people who already trusted each other and were online at the same hour of the same evening. A dial-up connection that has to be given back so somebody can use the phone supports neither. The window to even get hold of the software was one weekend on an American website.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ ten to fifty people ~

The number is the part worth keeping. Every other file sharing system of that period was trying to get larger. Kazaa counted users in the millions and treated scale as the whole proposition, because a bigger network has more of everything in it. WASTE went the other way and said the useful size of a network is a group of people who know each other by name. That is much closer to how a private tracker or a locked group chat works now than to anything else running in 2003.

The trade is that it cannot spread. You are not able to join a WASTE network by searching for one. Somebody has to hand you a key. That is what made it safe and also what kept it tiny, and those are the same property described twice.

~ the notice on the page ~

What replaced the download read: "An unauthorized copy of Nullsoft's copyrighted software was briefly posted on this website on or about Wednesday May 28, 2003." It went on to instruct readers that if they had obtained a copy they "acquired no lawful rights to the Software and must destroy any and all copies of the Software, including by deleting it from your computer."

The timing explains the temperature of it. AOL Time Warner owned a record label, the industry was working through the courts against everything Napster had left behind, and the first lawsuits against individual file sharers were four months out. A subsidiary shipping an encrypted anonymous transfer tool into that particular summer was a liability nobody upstairs had any appetite for explaining.

~ the license argument ~

WASTE had been released under the GPL, and AOL's notice declared any license "void, revoked and terminated". The GPL contains no revocation clause, and the argument that ran through every thread that week was whether a company can un-free software it has already given away.

The answer turns on whether the release was authorized to begin with, which is precisely what AOL claimed it was not. An employee posting company code without permission does not extinguish the company's copyright by posting it. That is a defensible position on paper and an unenforceable one against several thousand strangers who already had the file on a hard drive. Nobody was ever sued over it.

~ what got out first ~

Within three days of the Slashdot post the software was sitting on roughly a thousand sites. The source had gone out alongside the binary, so development carried on in places AOL had no claim over. A SourceForge project took it to version 1.7 by 2008, and a fork called BlackBelt WASTE was still shipping updates in 2023, twenty years after the notice went up.

Frankel threatened to resign on 2 June 2003 and left AOL the following January. AOL closed Nullsoft down entirely in November 2004. The company outlived the programmer's patience by eighteen months, and the thing that outlived both of them is the software that was officially available for three days.

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