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Originally Posted by Slice of Life
What exactly is the difference between them and the olde decentralized tools like overnet? What exactly is encrypted? The shared packages? Trying to log and analyze the transmitted raw data on the net is a pretty bad strategy. If you want the IPs of sharers simply take part in the sharing process. And this is something the copyright holder can do by himself, not just the government. I can't see how revealing the IP to the sharing partner can be prevented except if PD uses something like onion routing and even that wouldn't make sense if the network is exclusively created for PD. Furthermore, what does it mean, encryption has been hacked? Standard encryption algortihms cannot simply be "hacked". Finally, why is PD not open source? Security via obscurity?
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I'll try to address your questions by explaining how the network works (to my understanding; I'm not an expert at the subject and the full specifications on Share and Perfect Dark have never been published, most likely for security through obscurity reasons).
Winny/Share/Perfect Dark are all really a kind of giant encrypted shared network drive, sort of. Your client is always downloading things to its cache folder, regardless if you want it or not. I believe the things it downloads are not complete files, just parts of files, Bittorrent style. All transmitted data and all data in the cache is always encrypted, hence you need to "convert" fully downloaded files from your cache into your download folder (they need to be decrypted). When you "upload" files, you aren't uploading them to any specific user; you're uploading them into the network, regardless if other users want them or not - you're forcing other clients to download the file into their cache folders. Old files that noone has downloaded in a long time are automatically purged from the cache, so the network keeps itself clean, so to speak.
Furthermore, other peers (or "nodes" in the classical Share/Winny terminology) are never referred to by their IP address; addresses, too, are encrypted (or hashed).
The point of all this obscurity is that while you can simply run a netstat on your computer to see what nodes you're connected to, it's impossible to tell who is down- or uploading what, unless you manage to break the encryption to see what is being transmitted to who. You never download one full file from one node to another either; the structure of the network means you're always filtering it through a lot of other nodes' cache folders. Therefore it is very hard to prove any single node (except the one originally uploading the file into the network, but finding him/her is next to impossible) guilty of sharing anything.
I hope that answers most of your questions.