Well that is unfortunate. I think a little eulogy would be in order.
Several years ago, I was working on a personal project for doing 'Distributed Digital Fulfillment', which is a fancy way of talking about a technology for buying files online (think ITunes, except I had this idea and was trying to make it work 5 years before ITunes). The project was too advanced for it's time, and subsequently got dropped, only to see pieces of it resurface in new business models in the past year. One of the pieces of magic in my model was the use of hashes to identify files. Another was the concept of 'distributed downloads' where multiple people connected to one person, and each sent different parts of the file until the reciever had the whole thing.
I was pretty involved in the scene at the time (much more so than I am now) and discussed these ideas and their implementations with people in IRC channels, whom most of which were really enthuastic about the potential benifits. Not long after that, work began on a new type of file sharing program which made heavy use of these properties and technologies, of which I was for a time in charge of the security related aspects. The program grew into what you all now know as EDonkey2000.
It wasn't an overnight success, but as the understanding of the benifits of the program's model grew, so did it's popularity and therefore it's usefullness as more people started to run it. Of course, not everyone was as altruistic about their intentions, and the problem of fake content started to become a very real problem. People would mislable large porn files as movies, and these would get spread around the network being passed of as the movies their title claimed them to be. To help combat this problem, people started setting up 'fake lists'… lists of hashes of files which we're known be be fakes or mislabled.
This set the stage for what would become the first generation of 'Hash Indexing' sites.
A girl called Gowenna started a web page where she would list the hashes of the files she had downloaded herself, and knew to be good. Thus anyone looking for a specific file that Gowenna had could go to her site, and download it via edonkey, and have a reasonable level of confidence that the file they were getting were in fact the files they expected them to be.
The site was an instant success, and helped to further bolster EDonkey's popularity. People started submitting their own hashes of known good files, and Gowenna did her best to keep up with the demand. After a while, she realized that the popularity of her site had grown beyond her ability to maintain it, so she asked for assistance from the community to make a new site which could be maintained in the manner it needed to be.
Thus Sharereactor was born. Driven by a database backend and under new management, they started my importing Gowenna's list, and built the site up from there. Gowenna continued to be an active submitter of known good links, and was given much credit for being the person who had made all of this possible.
In January of 2002, Gowenna was driving her car and slipped on some black ice. She was killed instantly in the crash.
For a long time Sharereactor had a large black box with a tribute to Gowenna as the main feature on their site... a stark contrast to their green and white color scheme. The community continues to morn her loss, but ShareReactor continued. A seperate tribute complete with her avatar's image is here: http://atributetogowenna.netfirms.com/ I invite you all to visit it and pay your respects for our dearly departed.
Now, as terribly ironic as it is, ShareReactor is a victim of it's own success. The content they host is not illegal, but it has legal implications if used improperly. These acts of 'accusing someone because they might commit a crime' is a serious breach of justice and we should not be standing for it, lest we wind up in a world like the one we roleplay in.
Fight the good fight, guys, and keep the dream alive.
Rest in peace, Gowenna.
Rest in peace, ShareReactor.
You are missed.
-Kevlar
