Peekabooty goes into hiding

The Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc), which gained notoriety for its Back Orifice tool, has put its latest project, an anti-censorship file sharing system, on the back burner in the interests of "end user safety".

The tool, known as Peekabooty, was initially announced back in April as a distributed file sharing program that uses encrypted connections to hide the traffic from prying eyes.

Allowing users to trade files in a similar way to the infamous Napster, Peekabooty claims to run in a 'stealth mode' that hides the data being shared as well as its source.

But this is where the developers have encountered problems. According to the cDc, the tool is not yet fit for release because it fails to hide data as efficiently as its programmers would like. Such a lack of protection could leave users, and the data they're sharing, vulnerable to discovery.

However, the very fact that Peekabooty will operate in a stealthy manner has attracted criticism from some web-watching circles, which are concerned that an encrypted file transfer system could be used by terrorists and paedophiles to hide their activities.

Peekabooty was originally set to be released at the king of hacker conferences, Defcon, in Las Vegas next week, but the stealth issue has forced its release back until cDc is "satisfied that the software is sufficiently discreet".