Peekabooty

Give Big Brother the slip
Lee Dembart International Herald Tribune	Monday, August 5, 2002

A voice for the consumer

PARIS A just-released program available free on the Internet holds the prospect of overcoming government restrictions on the Web, thereby allowing anybody in the world to read any Web page, even if it has been blocked. What's more, the program will make it impossible for the authorities to trace who is reading what online.

The program is called Peekabooty. It was released in mid-July, and a test version of it is available from www.peekabooty.org. Peekabooty's goal is to create a constantly changing, worldwide peer-to-peer network that will enable people to do an end run around attempts to block Web sites. The implications of such a system are revolutionary.

Here is how it works: Countries that limit their citizens' access to Web sites do so by blocking the Internet addresses of those sites. But someone using Peekabooty will be able to connect to the network - the Internet address of the connection will always change - and ask another computer in an unblocked country to download the desired Web site and pass it along.

In a sense, this is like the decentralized network that exists with Kazaa or Morpheus, the popular music-swapping programs that have followed in the footsteps of Napster. But instead of trading files, Peekabooty users will simply transfer Web pages on the fly. Nothing is stored. What's more, the network will let people surf the Web completely anonymously. Everything will be encrypted to thwart snoopers, but the encryption has not yet been installed, so security cannot be guaranteed.

The fully functioning Peekabooty network will also be like SETI@home, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project, which has enlisted 3.5 million computer users to donate their machines' free time to search through mountains of noise from outer space in hope of finding a message sent by intelligent beings across the galaxies.

As with SETI, for Peekabooty to work, it will need tens of thousands of people willing to install the software on their computers and make them available when they are not otherwise in use to be part of the network that passes along the forbidden sites, according to Paul Baranowski, creator of Peekabooty.

"We've gotten 35,000 downloads since two weeks ago," Baranowski, 27, said last week by telephone from Toronto, where he has been working on the project for a year as a labor of love. "I was totally surprised," he said. "I was thinking like a couple of hundred."

"People in censored countries really want this sort of thing, and people in noncensored countries think that they're being watched," he added. His colleague and self-described lieutenant, Joey deVilla, 34, said: "There are people very concerned about the curtailing of civil rights. Personal liberty has suddenly come to the forefront again, and the use of personal-liberty-enhancing technologies has suddenly become of interest to people." If you are interested in trying out Peekabooty, you must be running Windows Me, XP or 2000. For now, at least, Windows NT and 98 will not do. Go to peekabooty.org (note the .org - peekabooty.com is a porn site) and download Peek-A-Booty-Setup.exe. When you execute that file, it will install Peekabooty.

You also need to download the list of other computers on the network, which you can find by clicking on the “node database” at peekabooty.org. Download that list, rename the file host.lst and put it in the Program FilesPeekabooty folder.

Then launch Peekabooty from the shortcut on your Desktop. The program will begin going down the list looking for active connections. When it makes one, it will show a bear icon circling your computer on the Peekabooty screen.

If you encounter difficulties, send an e-mail to Baranowski from the Peekabooty Web site. He said he had been answering 40 to 50 e-mails a day, and he posts the answers to recurring questions on the site.

It may have occurred to you that a network that enables people to surf the Web completely anonymously could be used by the bad guys to thwart law enforcement as well as by the good guys to thwart censorship.

"Of course that's a legitimate concern," Baranowski said. But, he said, "There's plenty of tools that are designed to be malicious in many more ways than Peekabooty is. You'd have to modify Peekabooty so that it becomes malicious, in which case you're going through a lot of effort when you could just download one of the many scripts that are already out there." He said there was a link on the Web site for people to make donations, and about $800 has been received so far. Nonetheless, Baranowski said, "It's very fulfilling work."