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The West Coast is sent scrambling after a sighting in the wild of Triangle Boy! Once though defunct and out of commission, Triangle Boy is described as a stealth p2p application, that has thus far, proved VERY adept at navigating it amp way around nearly any network security.
This application was created by the brain trust at Safe web (www.safeweb.com) as part of the Voice of America project a couple of years back. The main thrust of this application was to defeat the censorship inherent in governmental internet regulation in countries like China and Saudi Arabia. Functioning somewhat like Gnutella, the freeware application uses the internet to connect to a Triangleboy-enabled network of computers which in turn will function as a server, thereby allowing the user to circumvent nearly any and all internet filtering products. Instead of requesting a resource from a blocked site, the TB app will look to another user to hit the site, and pass the data through from ITS IP address, usually some domestic, residential address that no one thought to block. Requests can be sent and received from any of the tens of thousands of addresses on the network. A true blow to the enemies of free speech everywhere.
To further the cause, the source code for Triangle Boy was released by the company (kudos, Safeweb) and it spread to dev circles everywhere. Since then, Safeweb has discontinued and dismantled it's Triangleboy product line, and it seemed that with more and more censors lining up and modifying their security to specifically screen out Triangleboy's requests, that it was dead.
Of course, nothing really dies on the internet, now does it?
Reports from middle school networks on the West coast claim that their student have been using the Triangleboy application to circumvent the school web filters for all sorts of unauthorized viewing on school machines. Worse yet, being such basic IP traffic from domestic machine to domestic machine, the administrators are unable to track these routes, nor estimate correctly how invasive the security breach has become. More and more network administrators are beginning to realize that this legalized spoofing (due to the authorization you give upon joining and launching the application) is a surefire, near untraceable way to get around their filters. Work continues and more sites are starting to offer up the application for download. And the network appears to be growing.
The file-sharing potential is awesome. Think of how a p2p FILE SHARING application (which TB is not at this point, it's merely a browser anonymizer) would confound the Association as it tries to identify, track down, and prosecute sharers. If suddenly the application itself spoofs addresses so you can't prove WHERE the file is located. According to US law, reasonable doubt is all that is needed, isn't it? Of course, in this permutation, the application won't work. You will instead be blaming some OTHER poor bastard for your illicit activities. But what about a service that routes things through a random number of connected addresses so that you truly CAN'T prove where it is coming from? Truly this would be limited to higher bandwidth users, but the potential IS there.
Other than the obvious abuses inherent in such a system (namely the behavior of people who are now believing they would be invisible and safe online) I think this system represents the guardianship of free speech it's creators originally meant.
Just not the way they thought it would ;)
G. Sven
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thumbtack
I fixed it.
ChillinBuzz
