Untraceable File Sharing Inspired by Ants

Jan. 20 -- An invasion of ants has become the unlikely inspiration for what may be an untraceable way to trade files online.

Since last September, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed over 380 copyright infringement lawsuits against suspected online music pirates in the United States. And the effect has been chilling.

A recent Pew survey of online users found just 14 percent still downloading music files from so-called peer-to-peer, or P2P, networks such as KaZaA, compared to 29 percent a year ago. Many cited fears of being nabbed as online "pirates."

Still, the legal clampdown hasn't stopped others, according to a recent survey by market researcher The NPD Group. As many as 12 million individuals claimed to have downloaded music illegally in November — a 9 percent increase in the number of pirates reported in a September survey.

Now Jason Rohrer, a 26-year-old programmer in Potsdam, N.Y., thinks he has a way to really boost file-sharing back into popularity.

When Rohrer was living in Santa Cruz, Calif., and studying for a master's degree in computer science, he noticed a trail of ants had invaded his indoor Ficus tree from the front door. No matter how he tried to destroy the trail — sweeping daily, or blocking the path with chalk or hot pepper — the ants always figured a way around the obstacle to the tree.

"I read about how they use pheromones — chemical scents — to create the trails and how it's used by the colony," says Rohrer. And it inspired him to see if the same "swarm intelligence" could be applied to how programs work over the Internet.

The result: MUTE, freely-available software for a P2P system that Rohrer maintains is almost as hard to trace and stop as, well, ants at a picnic.

In current P2P networks such as KaZaA and Grokster, software identifies each computer on the network using Internet Protocol (IP) addresses — a string of numbers similar to a telephone number.