I had been following, on and off (mostly off lately), the permutations of Jonathan Frankel, the mastermind behind WinAMP and Gnutella. I knew he’d sold WinAmp to AOL and, by most accounts, had sorely regretted the decisions (as expected, WinAmp began to, well, suck as soon as AOL acquired Nullsoft). Anyway, it was at AOL that Frankel developed Gnutella, but AOL, in deference to the RIAA, and in an effort to distance itself from filesharing, told Frankel to kill the project, and a related project called WASTE.

So Frankel quit. And the rumor was that he took WASTE with him — a better p2p system that would be totally invisible to anyone but those using it. (WASTE was sort of like a p2p-specific version of the Free Network Project, which was introduced around 2000, but only recently got off the ground.)

Frankel called it WASTE after Thomas Pynchon’s WASTE (from The Crying of Lot 49), which is a renegade underground postal system operating in plain sight of the status quo, but remaining undetected. A version of the full story is here, but suffice to say I lost track of the WASTE project.

Until now. WASTE was registered at sourceforge in 2003 and enjoyed a few years of development, then quietly died before it really got going. However, just over a year ago the WASTE forum at sourceforge received this post: “Is WASTE alive again? I’m not really sure. After 3 years on the internet, it’s actually more relevant than it was way back in version 1.0b. With government wiretapping, ISP logging, and general sneaky spying, it’s a great time to keep your private matters…well…private … With that, I’d say it’s time to kick this dusty old project back into gear.”

Sadly, to be honest, not much appears to have happened since the announcement (it’s still at v1.5-beta 4), but I think he’s right. So let’s help get this dusty old project back into gear. Start by getting WASTE and setting up your own darknet.