Earth Station 5 (ES5) is a peer to peer network and file sharing program that has put special emphasis on providing security to uploaders and downloaders. This P2P application supports UDP multi source downloading and "spoofing' to obscure and forge the origin of the files traded, and proxies to further protect the identities of the uploaders. There is also an option to run Earth Station as a private network, disconnected from the global Internet, and an option to organize the shared files using a built-in webserver. A peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network is a network that relies on the computing power and bandwidth of the participants in the network rather than concentrating it in a relatively few servers. ... File sharing is the activity of making files available to other users for download over the Internet, but also over smaller networks. ...

Earth Station 5 connects to KaZaA and Gnutella 2 filesharing networks. It supports their supernode structure, where individual users (Planets) connect to supernodes (Stars) that index files available on the network. Kazaa Media Desktop (once capitalized as KaZaA, but now usually left as Kazaa) is a peer-to-peer file sharing application using the FastTrack protocol. ... The Gnutella2 peer-to-peer protocol is a reworking of the Gnutella protocol, written mainly by Michael Stokes. ...

The creators of this program have also been adamant in ther opposition to recording companies and current attitude to copyright, unconditionally supporting personal filesharing. The anonymous authors claim to be based in a refugee camp in Jenin. A refugee camp is a camp built up by governments or NGOs (such as the ICRC) to receive refugees. ... Jenin, or Ǧanīn (Arabic: جنين) is a city in the West Bank, which - in accord with the Oslo Accords - is divided between Israeli and Palestinian control. ...

In September 2003 the program became the target of a controversy, as malicious code was uncovered in ES5. By sending a specially formed packet, the attacker could delete any file with a known path on the target computer. It has been alleged that it was created by anti-piracy companies to lure people into using their program, exposing their copyrighted files and then deleting them. The authors denied the allegations, argued that the function was retained from older builds, where it was used to control ES5 servers, and said they have fixed the problem. 2003 : January - February - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December A timeline of events in the news for September, 2003. ...

External links

• EarthStation 5 P2P Home Page
• Earthreactor Home Page
• ES5 contains malicious code - a detailed report on the issue from ZeroPaid
• A discussion on Broadband Reports

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61110-2004Feb21?language=printer http://p2pnet.net/story/827