Nullsoft, everybody's favorite independent geekshop-cum-AOL business unit was given a smack down of sorts recently. The issue is Nullsoft's newest application, Waste. Waste was released on Wednesday, May 25th, and pulled by AOL lawyers on the 29th. In the interim, I grabbed a copy of the Win32 binary and the Win32/BSD/Darwin source. Waste is truly interesting. It's a 1.0b release, sure to be lacking in certain f Nullsoft, everybody’s favorite independent geekshop-cum-AOL business unit was given a smack down of sorts recently. The issue is Nullsoft’s newest application, Waste. Waste was released on Wednesday, May 25th, and pulled by AOL lawyers on the 29th. In the interim, I grabbed a copy of the Win32 binary and the Win32/BSD/Darwin source. Waste is truly interesting. It’s a 1.0b release, sure to be lacking in certain features, and containing certain bugs, but the overall design and implementation are quite usable. The primary developer is Justin Frankel, who deserves that thanks of everyone who ever downloaded WinAMP. The long and short of the app is it’s crypto core. The installation prompts for random mouse movements to generate enough entropy to create 512-2048 bit keys, and a facility to import another person’s public keys. You then point Waste at their system running Waste, and you have an encrypted PTP connection. There’s a facility to share files via a publicly shared area, a facility to browse shares of others, and a fledgling IM client. Insert a server component (running on FreeBSD or Mac OS X^H^H^H^H^HDarwin), and you have the core of a fully-encrypted PTP network.I really like the application, and fortunately have the code. If you’re looking for a copy, it’s on blues, go and get it before I get a cease and desist letter. In my mind, AOL is perfectly within their rights to force Nullsoft to pull the code from their page. After all, Nullsoft has been owned by AOL for four years now. AOL pays the bills. This must chafe with Frankel, though, since the mind that created this application has to be bothered by these events. Of course, he may have seen this coming before the release… three days in the open and a mention on Slashdot will guarantee that the application will be available from a thousand sites across the Internet. It’s also interesting to note that this is hardly the first time this has happened to Nullsoft. Gnutella was pulled by AOL in a similar fashion, and still enjoys a large presence on the net.When a dove is released, all the lawyers can do is destroy the cage it once occupied; the dove is free.