Winny

~ the obit ~

Winny was one man's Windows program and it was never open source. Isamu Kaneko wrote it in C++ in 2002 while working as a research assistant at the University of Tokyo, and announced it on the Download Software board of 2channel. Because 2channel refers to anonymous posters by their post number, he became 47, or Mr 47, and that is still the name most Japanese coverage uses.

It got very large inside Japan and almost nowhere outside it. The security firm NetAgent counted between 440,000 and 530,000 users in April 2006, and an industry survey that year put the number who had ever installed it above three million. Japan had fast broadband arriving early and a legal culture in which nobody wanted their name attached to a download, so a client written in Japanese, announced on Japanese boards and designed around anonymity had the market to itself.

On 10 May 2004 the high-tech crime unit of the Kyoto Prefectural Police arrested Kaneko himself, on suspicion of conspiring in copyright infringement committed by people he had never met.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cache ~

The design borrowed from Freenet. You entered a few keywords describing what you were interested in and the client attached you to nodes that had chosen similar ones, so the network organized itself into interest clusters rather than around a single searchable index. Files traveled through a cache on every node along the route and sat there encrypted, so your machine relayed and stored material you had never seen and could not open. That was deliberate. Nobody on the network was knowingly hosting anything.

~ antinny ~

From August 2003 a family of worms called Antinny spread across it. The mechanism was simple and vicious. It copied itself into the machine's Winny upload folder under a filename designed to be downloaded, and it pushed the contents of the victim's own drive into the same folder. Whatever was on that computer became a file that strangers could pull down.

What was on those computers turned out to be the actual news story. All Nippon Airways lost passwords covering twenty nine airports in 2005, and a Japan Airlines co-pilot's machine leaked that December. Classified material walked off a Maritime Self Defense Force computer. Roughly 1,500 investigation records went out of Okayama Prefectural Police, including the names of people who had reported sex crimes. Japanese government offices spent years formally instructing staff not to install a file-sharing client on a computer that touched work, an instruction that had to be written down because so many of them already had.

~ the trial ~

Two Winny users were arrested in Kyoto on 28 November 2003, and the same unit came for the author five months later. Kaneko was held for three weeks and bailed on 1 June 2004. The charge was assisting copyright infringement, and the prosecution's case was that he had written and distributed the software knowing what people would do with it.

Kyoto District Court convicted him on 13 December 2006 and fined him 1.5 million yen, about thirteen thousand dollars, a small figure attached to an enormous principle about whether writing a tool makes you party to its use. The Osaka High Court overturned the conviction on 8 October 2009. The Supreme Court of Japan closed it on 20 December 2011, holding that the prosecution had not shown he intended the software to be used illegally. Seven and a half years had gone by since the arrest, and through most of them he had been unable to work on the program at all.

~ what stayed on the network ~

He never went back to it. By the time he was cleared, successor clients written by other anonymous authors had taken the traffic, and Kaneko was running Skeed, a content distribution company he had founded, alongside a special instructor post at the University of Tokyo's information technology center. On 6 July 2013 he had a heart attack and died at 42. Winny was a closed source Windows binary with exactly one person holding the source, which made that the final release, permanently.

The network took a long time to notice. NetAgent found roughly 45,000 nodes still connecting over Golden Week in 2018, five years after the funeral, which was enough to make it the busiest P2P network in Japan. None of this reached me. Winny was Japanese from the interface down to the boards where uploads were announced, and what I could reach from an Ankara internet cafe in those same years was whatever client was already installed on the machine, pointed at English-language music.

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