from: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,37892,00.html Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,37892,00.html">Get Your Music Mojo Working</A> ----- Get Your Music Mojo Working by Declan McCullagh 5:45 p.m. Jul. 29, 2000 PDT LAS VEGAS -- A new file-sharing system could best rivals like Napster and Gnutella through more anonymous and efficient transfers. The service has an innovative feature that rewards users for uploading and distributing files: payment in a form of digital currency called "Mojo." "It's a cross between Napster and eBay," says Jim McCoy, the 30-year-old CEO of Autonomous Zone Industries, which created the open-source MojoNation software. McCoy's goal is nothing if not ambitious: to create the first file-sharing economy of agents, servers, and search engines in which senders and receivers can agree on prices for each transaction and use micropayments to get paid. The prospect of millions of users spending Mojo tokens on pirated movies and songs is sure to draw the wrath of the entertainment industry, which has sued to shut down Napster and erase a DVD-descrambling program from the Web. Another probable early use is pornography copied from other sites, and companies such as Penthouse's publisher also have shown they're willing to tak e legal action. Autonomous Zone says that since it -- unlike Napster -- does not keep a master index of files, its employees are simply unable to remove references to illegal files stored on MojoNation servers. "We are a bigger threat because we can survive most attacks," McCoy says. But the startup claims it wants to work with Hollywood through a voluntary-payment-for-downloads feature that the firm's programmers have dubbed "PayLars," a reference to Metallica drummer and Napster foe Lars Ulrich. "When the president of Sony comes to us, we'll say Gnutella's never going to do anything for you," says the Autonomous Zone programmer who goes by the name Zooko Journeyman. "Fight them or die -- or join us and prosper." In an attempt to spread MojoNation quickly through the hacker underground, Autonomous Zone plans to release the beta version at the DefCon convention this weekend in Las Vegas. Versions will be available on sourceforge.net for Windows and Linux machines. MojoNation's current stage of development is somewhere between a working prototype and a polished final product. It works, but a friendly interface is still being shaped, and as of Friday, company programmers were still unearthing some remaining bugs. At least when its development is complete, MojoNation should combine the ease of use and search capabilities of Napster and Gnutella with the kind of distributed server network that FreeNet uses. Files that are uploaded to a Freenet server remain online after a user disconnects, but Freenet does not support searching or micropayments. But will MojoNation be compelling enough to make other users switch? "It doesn't seem to buy anything over Gnutella," says Jon Lasser, author of Think Unix. "It's not clear to me who is served by this system." The libertarian-leaning cypherpunks -- only about seven so far -- who work at Autonomous Zone are pinning their hopes on creating an emergent network of electronic buyers, sellers, and service providers, all exchanging tokens that might represent as little as one-thousandth of a cent. Another addition: A limited form of reputation-tracking, so you can determine which service providers are the most reliable. The first time you log on, you generate a public and private key pair that the system uses to identify you. "It is an ant colony of sorts -- tons of agents, each with its own specialized goal," says McCoy, a former Yahoo engineer who founded Autonomous Zone last summer and is providing the seed capital. By pinning even an infinestimal value on all transactions, the company plans to discourage piggish folks who download more than they contribute in return. To earn Mojo tokens, users can sell their extra bandwidth or disk space and act as servers, or create their own service that others want to pay for. A successful system would also likely include money exchangers who buy and sell Mojo tokens in exchange for dollars. Before a MojoNation user uploads a file, the client software splits it into eight pieces using an algorithm akin to that used in RAID hard disk arrays: Only four pieces are necessary to reconstruct the entire file, and the sender can try to use the network to cloak his or her identity. Copyright � 2000 Wired Digital Inc., a Lycos Network site. 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