Last summer, we wrote about WASTE, the nullsoft tool for secure communication and collaboration among small numbers of clients (10-50 nodes), which was posted under the GPL and almost as quickly pulled by AOL. I was looking at WASTE as an example of the file sharing goes social pattern, but the sourceforge project has lain dormant for some time. Now, though, the chip-maker VIA seems to have stirred the pot by posting a tool which was a WASTE copy, not even a port, under the name PadLock, bringing this response yesterday from the WASTE developers. The PadLock code has since been removed from VIA's site, but it's (temporarily?) revived activity and interest around WASTE, whose potential as an open-source platform for building social networks is large but also largely unrealized. Will be worth watching... *UPDATE:* Bill Seitz's question in the comments is worth putting here, for greater visibility. He asks "Do you have any sense of how well this protocol works for sharing smaller packages of data, e.g. tuples/triples?" That is an incredibly good question, both because it is the design pattern of Groove, the best-engineered tool in this space, but also because propagation of small bits means that there are a world of RDF and transclusion-style tools (e.g. purple numbers) which could be integrated into that environment. So, a plea to readers --- can anyone with deeper familiarity into WASTE protocols than I have answer Bill's question?