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        Wired News

        Get Your Music Mojo Working
        by Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com)
        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 take 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 http://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.

        http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,37892,00.html


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