I2hub
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- The correct title of this article is i2hub. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.
i2hub was a peer-to-peer file sharing service and program designed and intended primarily for use by university and college students. The program, based on the popular DC++ software, was created by Wayne Chang, a student at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The service was launched in March 2004 and ultimately expanded to over 400 universities and colleges both in the United States and abroad. [1] On November 14, 2005, i2hub shut down, citing legal concerns after being threatened by the RIAA.
The main advantage of i2hub was its utilization of the Abilene Network, a high-performance backbone network created by the Internet2 consortium, which allows for data transfer rates much faster than typical Internet connections. Because of this, download speeds through i2hub were usually much faster than through other peer-to-peer networks such as the conventional Direct Connect.
The network was criticized by the RIAA for its ability to share copyrighted materials through a faster medium. On April 13, 2005, the RIAA announced it was suing 405 i2hub users, students at 18 colleges and universities, for copyright infringement.
i2hub was shut down with the message "'RIP 11/14/2005. It was a good run. Forced to shut down by the industry." at exactly 5:20 p.m. on November 14, 2005.
A new version of i2hub (colloquially i2hubv2) was to be released which would not be based on the DC protocol. It was going to be built from scratch rather than based on existing technology. According to Chang, the new version was co-developed with the head developer of Morpheus and imesh and was to be capable of searching other P2P networks as well. Several beta versions were released. They have not been publicly available since the i2hub website shut down. However, people who already had the beta installed discovered that it was still operational after the official shut down. This is because the file sharing is largely handled using the Gnutella protocol, which is completely decentralised, and the chat section is based on IRC, for which the i2hub server (irc://irc.i2hub.com/i2hub) was kept operational until January 2006 when it was shut down suddenly. The topic of the main channel noted that the administrators had attempted to shut down file sharing capability, and warned users not to ask about it. There is another chatroom setup at irc://irc.freenode.net #i2hub for people to chat.
On January 17, 2006, it was announced by Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press that UMASS students that were sued for using i2hub now want founder Wayne Chang to pay for their lawsuits. Wayne Chang and his attorney Charles Baker, who is also representing StreamCast Networks (makers of the Morpheus P2P software), responded saying that i2hub has no liability in the matter and is protected by the EULA.
