“WASTE is a software product and protocol that enables secure distributed communication for small (on the order of 10-50 nodes) trusted groups of users.” That was the message posted on AOL subsidiary NullSoft website yesterday. Got a lot of favorable play.
But apparently pissed off someone higher up in the corporate foodchain, who had it pulled. “The quiet launch of Waste was the work of Nullsoft’s principal developer, Justin Frankel, a soft-spoken 20-something known for his tech savvy and his streak of rebelliousness.” Frankel pulled a similar stunt a couple of years ago which gave the world Gnutella and all it’s cousins, so the outcome this time ought to be interesting, at least.
WASTE download page as of Friday, 4:30 PST: “An unauthorized copy of Nullsoft’s copyrighted software was briefly posted on this website…The posting of the Software on this website was not authorized by Nullsoft….If you downloaded or otherwise obtained a copy of the Software, you acquired no lawful rights to the Software and must destroy any and all copies of the Software, including by deleting it from your computer.”
For now at least, WASTE can be downloaded from a Harvard webserver, though this archive seems to be the C language source files (with some docs and ancillary material) and not a compiled executable.
BillSaysThis 