EarthStation 5

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Earth Station 5 (ES5) is a Peer-to-peer network and file sharing program that has put special emphasis on providing anonymity to uploaders and downloaders. This P2P application supports UDP multi source downloading and "spoofing" to obscure the origin of the files traded, and proxies. There is also an option to run Earth Station as a private network, and an option to organize the shared files using a built-in webserver. Earth Station 5 also connects to the FastTrack and Gnutella2 filesharing networks, though connecting to them eliminates any anonymity provided by its primary network.

The creators of this program have also been adamant in their 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, though some investigative attempts to locate their headquarters in Jenin were fruitless.

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.

The Earth Station 5 program and the people behind it have been the subject of a lot of speculation and controversy. The project has died a silent death since about September 2005. Coincidently this is around the same time Stephen M. Cohen was arrested who has been alleged to be behind the whole operation. ES5 also claimed to have a lot of Palestinian people working for them on their servers and software. In fact there were probably no more than only a hand full of people programming and maintaining the software and servers, all located in the US or Mexico. The servers were supposed to be in Palestine to avoid copyright legislation but this has never been the case.

In the beginning of the project the servers were located at level3 in their Amsterdam data center. Mr. Cohen placed the servers there himself, kept the staff in the dark and did not pay any bills. Level(3) changed their security policy by chance during the time ES5 operated their servers, removing the front desk guard and relying on their automated access system, and when Level(3) threatened to shut down the link mr. Cohen removed the servers during night hours making use of his access pass and avoiding Level(3) staff, leaving the company with a large bill for traffic use and floorspace usage. The entire operation subsequently moved to another location in Europe, as of yet not identified. This time the routing coverup was more elaborate and a traceroute actually ended up at an Israeli ISP although it is believed that the servers were actually hosted in a Talia datacentre, no doubt using the same tactic as used at Level(3).

For the anonymity the program relied heavily on an anonymous proxy. A list of these proxy servers was regularly provided by one of the ES5 crew on their forum site. This design worked partially in the beginning but the concept would never have sustained the network if it would have caught on a broader scale since there would not be enough open proxies with sufficient capacity to sustain the massive data flow and those that would be accessible, with ample bandwidth, would have quickly been shut down or closed to the anonymous public.

The content provided was also subject of some controversy, since the network contained very few users in its early days and in fact perhaps not in its entire life, a lot of content was downloaded from other p2p networks, screened for quality and placed on one of the ES5 machines running a version of the client to make sure there were at least a decent amount of hits when people searched for content. The live movies which were provided later on to attract users were mostly downloaded from the internet before they were recoded and put online in realmedia format.

The screening of material, as well as the anonymous proxy concept were two good concepts but closer examination leads to the conclusion that a setup like this would not survive if the network would grow beyond a certain size, dooming the actual useful features of the client, although most users probably did not base their decision to use or not use this software on this information.