WASTE, private file sharing
I'm a user at a quasi-private message board. The users there may occasionally find a TV Show or a media file that they'd like to share. Of course, with all the hullabaloo about file sharing - some may be reserved about the manner in which these files are shared. You may remember mention of WASTE as an innovative solution, now thriving as an open-source project.
WASTE was originally a project of Nullsoft (makers of Winamp). Through acquisition, Nullsoft eventually wound up in the hands of Time Warner via AOL. Obviously, Time Warner didn't want anything to do with "file sharing" so the project was released into the wild. In fact you can still see the page that was posted when AOL yanked the software. In spite of that, you can still download the project from SourceForge.
A key element of WASTE is that traffic is encrypted. However, in my opinion, the biggest benefit of WASTE is the fact that you are able to regulate who can connect to your server and your content. RSA public keys are shared between users (generated by WASTE).
You can select how much bandwidth you'd like to allow WASTE to use, so your high speed connection isn't bogged down by to many uploads and downloads. In addition, performance seems to suffer for anything over fifty users. Don't be mislead, with a decent number of users contributing unique content - this can be quite powerful.
I'm not advocating piracy. It's just cool to get your hands on rare things. For example, I have a copy of "The Star Wars Holiday Special" - something that will never be released on DVD as everyone involved is so ashamed of it. Believe it or not, there's also some music tracks that simply aren't available on iTunes or available online or at retail. If someone you know has a copy they can encode, it's an acceptable way of sharing the material.
While there's Linux source code version of a WASTE server out there, I wasn't able to get it to work. I haven't found a whole lot of reports of getting it to successfully work either (too many shared library problems). However, thanks to the suggestion of someone at the board I've referenced, I realized I had overlooked Wine. WASTE works great on Wine - very stable.
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