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http://www.gnutella.com/news/5267
August 14, 2002
California Senator Kevin Murray is continuing his push to repeal the 'Seven-Year Rule', which allows record companies to lock artists into unfair limitless contracts for their artistic works.

Currently, the music industry is the only industry legally allowed to hold their personal-services contracts beyond the maximum length of seven years (as per California state law). The law limiting the length of personal-services contracts in California was created to ensure that people could not be turned into "indentured servants" by having a limitless unfair contract term put upon them which they are unable to escape from.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) issued a public statement last week outlining the five concessions they are willing to make to satisfy the concerns of artists' groups (such as the Recording Artist Coalition or RAC) which are currently negotiating the matter with the RIAA. In response to this "outline of concessions", Senator Murray has publicly stated his concern with what the RIAA calls "compromises" are in fact tailored to represent demands of the labels and not that of the artists.

"For the RIAA to present their demands as compromises or concessions was an insult to the recording artists, attorneys, and managers that have been working for months to resolve this issue." - Senator Kevin Murray

• Gnutella
• OpenFT
• IRC

KaZaA Lite is the best to get MP3s, porn and popular software quickly.
eMule (eDonkey network) is the best to get movies, games and software reliably, as well as full albums, ebooks and porn.
What Gnutella is good for, I don't know.
Direct Connect ++ is best to get stuff if you have a very fast connection.
BitTorrent is best to get fresh movie, anime and other releases and some legit stuff like game demos.
FreeNet is not really usefull as of today.
IRC is good to get fresh movie and software releases quickly.
Usenet is good to get fresh stuff quickly if your ISP has a good newsserver or you are willing to subscribe to a paid one, but it's bad for hunting down specific stuff.

How hard would it be to install a gnutella client on your Windows, Mac, and *nix boxen?

You know, for an ostensibly geeky audience, this one should have been near the top of the list of responses.

How hard would it be to install a gnutella client on your Windows, Mac, and *nix boxen?

You know, for an ostensibly geeky audience, this one should have been near the top of the list of responses.

Ok. Click here to be sued.

Gnutella
Bit Torrent
Freenet
Reiserfs
Linux Kernel
Open SSH
Encrypted Filesystems
GnuPG

At least in my opinion p2p and crypto are the edges in coding right now. Both can be hugely successful if you succeed in writing them properly. They can also be a huge failure if done improperly. Personally, I'm amazed that there aren't more p2p worms/remote exploits out there. Every now and then there are a few breaks in crypto from a weird angle, but in general they have been very successful as well.

Yes.

Here's yer link :)

Is Developer X going to spend 5 million making a game that can be pirated with ease because someone can goto lik-sang.com and get a modchip?

Yeah, that would be just like Developer X spending 5 million to develop a PC game that can be pirated with ease because someone can download a crack online. Or a music publishing company spending 5 million to contract a music star to record CDs that can the pirated with ease because some can easily download it online. Or a movie company spending 50 million to make a movie that can be pirated with ease because someone can easily purchase illegal DVD copies throughout the world.

Oh, wait. All of these things happen. Repeatedly. And most of them are far easier and cheaper than purchasing a mod chip online and soldering it into your case.

Dispite the ease of copyright infringement, these industries survive. It's not necessary to completely destroy copyright infringement, it's probably not even possible. (We work even harder at eliminating murder and illegal drugs, and yet both continue to happen.) Only fools think it's possible to perfectly protect content shipped to millions of people. Instead, work to minimize copyright infringment, prosecute the worst offenders of copyright infringment (people selling copied DVDs), and learn to live with the rest. When you have the effort of finding, purchasing, and installing a mod chip as a prerequisite, you're going to keep illegal copies to a bare minimum. The people willing to spend the effort to make the copies generally wouldn't have purchased a copy in the first place. Actual sales lost: minimal.

(Please don't take this as a defense of making illegal copies. I'm against copyright infringment. I'm for purchasing video games. I'm arguing that the problem isn't so bad that publishers should run around screaming that the sky is falling.)

What is the value of hacking a system to use it for purposes of which it isn't intended or designed for...?

What is the value in installing various performance enhancing modifications on my car that it wasn't intended or designed for? The value of overclocking my processor to a speed it wasn't intended or designed for? Answer: it's none of the fscking manufacturer's concern. How I chose to treat the physical things I purchase is my business, not the manufacturers. I obviously find value in the modification, so clearly there is value for me. That's all that matters.

Even though i modded my dreamcast and could play pirated games, i didn't consider this a value add. For one, i couldn't read the japanese games and often times it wasn't worth the effort and for pirated games they were ripped, chunked, slow and missing features.

So it's of no value to you. That's fine. But a modchip in my PlayStation 2 is of value to me. I want access to the editions of Dance Dance Revolution released in Asia, the U.S. releases are inferior. Sure, I can't read the text, but I don't need to (I do just fine at the Korean DDR arcade machine next door). I'm not getting illegally copied games since I want to support the publisher, I'm interested in importing legally produced copies. So I don't need to worry about low quality illegal copies. I'd rather not have a second PS2 occupying space. This adds value for me. A similar set of reasons might create value for someone with an X-Box.

it was the "value add" of the modchips and ripped DC games that ended the life of that console. (and the ps2.. but sega cited the loss of software sales because of rampant piracy and loss of developers because of rampant piracy to be a big factor)

Well, gosh, if Sega said if was piracy, that must be the problem. The fact that they were competing with two very powerful, established competitors (Nintendo and Sony) certainly doesn't have anything to do with it. My many friends who all chose to wait for the PS2 instead of getting a Dreamcast clearly don't represent the typical population. There is certainly no chance that Sega misrepresented the reason they left the market to pin the blame on someone other than themselves. (I'm having problems finding articles were they actually blamed piracy... could you point me to a few?)

I'm a Dreamcast owner. I love the machine and I mourn its passing.uy the argument that illegal copying killed the Dreamcast. The millions of people who said, "well, it looks nice, but I'm waiting for the PS2" killed the Dreamcast. I encouraged all of my friends to buy Dreamcasts. None did. Yet

I'd take a wild guess that he's running some sort of P2P client (e.g. KaZaA, Direct Connect, Gnutella etc.) They can soak up a lot of upstream bandwidth (so I've heard :-)

So does Gnutella but they didn't mentioned he shot himself.

Very Very sad.

I have a red stapler and a red hole punch. Whooopdeee indeed.

I'm shaking my head in amazement that this made it to the front page. Obviously it's far mroe important than say, oh, I dunno, how about Gnutella developer shooting himself. Nah, that's not important at all...

It'[s a 55 meg download you can find mirrors
here non-windows
or
here if you running windows

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but I'm gonna bet that I'm not the only one who is unhappy about the legality of it, but excited that KaZaa might crash and burn.

Long live Gnutella!

-Jeff

3G needs to find a different killer app.

They already have...it's called Gnutella

I have a really great .sig, but I'm not going to share it with you.

• Kazaa Lite is without spyware

So is any Gnutella client compiled from source. Plus, the network is non proprietary, so you won't have to change clients/networks/licenses every couple of months.

Superpeering has helped give the Gnutella network a new lease of life, and there's a lot of content out there. The only problem is that asynchronous connections are taking their toll: last night I had 300+ files queued @ 0.0k/s. But that's endemic on any P2P network. Share your damn files! ;-)

yEnc is yet another encoding method for binary files. Unlike Base64 or UUENCODE, it uses nearly all octet values, reducing the overhead from 33% to about 2%. Problems with yEnc No MIME or Back to the UUENCODE mess

A huge mistake is not to use MIME for yEnc. Let me explain why: In the pre-MIME era there was UUENCODE, which had several problems:

• There are no clear delimiters. UU-encoded files can start anywhere in a text message. As a result, some newsreaders incorrectly see attachments where there aren't any. This has been partly addressed by yEnc which uses =ybegin...=yend instead of begin...end. But there's still a chance that the markers appear in normal text.
• No labelling of file types (Content-Type in MIME).
• Charset recoding problems. Note that this is a much larger issue with yEnc than with UUENCODE. UUENCODE is only corrupted on gatways that can't handle some ASCII characters (esp. EBCDIC systems, which should now be extinct). For yEnc, every 8bit charset translation is fatal.
• No standard labelling of split messages. (This is addressed by yEnc, but only within the body.)

MIME provides a proven solution to these problems:

• It clearly labels all data out-of-bound, using Content-* headers. It clearly seperates text from binary data.
• Base64 uses an alphabet that most likely survives all charset translations.
• message/partial provides a standard way to split large messages. It even allows MTAs to split messages on the transport level (granted, that should NEVER happen on Usenet).

Back then, when UUENCODE was state of the art you could just cut and paste a UU-encoded file into your text message. With modern, MIME-aware newsreaders, this is no longer the case:

• Newsreaders might be tempted to apply Quoted-Printable (or Base64) encoding on the text. Yes, I've seen Quoted-Printable encoded UUENCODE attachments.
• Even if they can be convinced to use 8Bit (or Binary), they might suddenly do some charset recoding:
  • ISO-8859-15 and UTF-8 become more and more popular, especially due to the Euro Currency Sign. This means the charset has to be recoded from the systems native encoding (e.g. Windows-1252).
  • Even with plain old ISO-8859-1, DOS and OS/2 newsreaders have to recode from the DOS charset and Mac newsreaders have to recode from the Mac charset.
  Further, there's no way to include yEnc within UTF-8-encoded text, which is slowly becoming the worldwide standard: If you include the data as-is you'll have invalid UTF-8 sequences. (This also applies to other Multibyte Charsets, which are quite common in Far East countries.)
  (Note that this is no problem with UUENCODE or Base64, which only use an unproblematic ASCII subset.)

There are also some smaller problems which should be addressed:

• Using CRC32 as a checksum. There are much better hash algorithms like SHA-1 or MD5 available.
• Bad Extensibility and less features than MIME Content-*: Could be solved by integrating yEnc into MIME or vice-versa (e.g., Content-* headers could be allowed directly after =ybegin and before an empty line after which the binary starts.)

One of the solution, of course, is to embed yEnc into MIME. The first idea is to do that as a Content-Transfer-Encoding.
There have been some arguments against MIME, however, which should be addressed here.

The creation of new Content-Transfer-Encoding values is STRONGLY discouraged. (Quote from RFC 2045)

This is true and there's a very good reason for it: A lot of software needs to be updated to support it.
On the other hand, the situation is no better when MIME is not used: Users would still need new software. If the news client does not support the format, users can just export the message (nearly every newsreader can export a message in source format) and process it with external tools.
You have to ask whether a new, news-only encoding is a good thing. If yes, then it does not make a difference wheter it's embeded in MIME or not.

message/partial MUST not have binary content.

This is because it couldn't be recoded as neccessary on gateways. But with yEnc, recoding would only happen where the message would have been recoded anyway.
It only raises the question whether a news-only encoding is a good thing again. (With yEnc, recoding would only happen where the message would have been corrupted anyway.)

There's no per-part integrity checking for message/partial.

There is no reason why Content-MD5 could not be used on message/partial: RFC 1864 only disallows Content-MD5 on multipart/* and message/rfc822, not message/partial. (The reason for this is that these type can contain data that could be recoded at gateways. This would not happen with message/partial or, if it happens due to yEnc, the message would have been corrupted anyway.)

There's no easy way to find all parts from a single part (i.e. find the message ids of all parts) with message/partial

Neither is there with yEnc. All proposed solutions would both work with a non-MIME-yEnc and message/partial.

You can't use your standard newsreader by pasting the encoded data.

You haven't been scared enough by the yEnc-over-Quoted-Printable and Charset Fun chapter, have you?

Conclusion: yEnc as a MIME CTE is much better than yEnc without MIME. yEnc as a MIME Content-Type

The other solution, of course, would be to introduce yEnc as a MIME Content-Type. It then would have to use the binary 8bit CTE.

This would be a similar approach as used for application/mac-binhex40, which is also defined as a Content-Type. Also note that many compression and archive formats are a Content-Type.

As yEnc contains additional information (such as file name, markers, etc.) which a CTE usually does not, this seems to be the better solution.

Conclusion: yEnc should be a MIME Content-Type. Alternatives

Of course, one should ask what alternatives are there to yEnc (or any other super-Base64 encoding). Not using Usenet

Usenet is, even without the Base64 overhead, a horribly inefficient method to transfer large files. Because of the flood-fill mechanism, the articles are sent to all news-servers carrying the specified newsgroup, even if there's no user that wants the article there.

Peer-to-peer networks, such as Gnutella or Freenet are much more efficient and can transfer binary data as-is.

Conclusion: Binaries should not be sent over Usenet. This is not expected to happen any time soon, however. Use all MIME features

MIME already has most of the features necessary to send binary data over Usenet:

• An encoding: Base64.
• A standard to split messages: message/partial.
• An integrety check: Content-MD5 (MD5 is much better than CRC32.)
• Out-of-band labelling of data types.
• No mixing between text with charsets and binary data.

Of course, you would have to use all features provided by MIME to provide everything that yEnc provides (today):

• Use Content-MD5 on each embedded file.
• Use Content-MD5 on each message/partial
• Use Content-Disposition to transport file names and attributes.
• Use the number and total parameters on every part.
• Use the Message-ID convention described below.

Some features proposed for yEnc, such as assembling a file (message) from different sets of partial messages, could also be integrated into MIME - in a backward compatible way!

There is only one real argument agains MIME: efficiency. The Base64 encoding produces about 33% overhead.

Conclusion: MIME provides a proven solution to send binary data over Usenet. The only problem is efficiency. Link-level Compression

The 33% overhead can be more than nullified by using an compression method over bandwith-sensitive links.

There's a proposal for a MIME-aware compression scheme Assembly of partial messages

See my document about a Message-ID convention for partial messages. Conclusion

MIME already provides a solution to most problems that yEnc is supposed to solve. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel for yEnc, which causes some problems. Only the more efficient encoding remains. This problem can be addressed by introducing yEnc as a MIME compression scheme or by introducing a link-level compression/filtering.

Revisions
2002-03-19yEnc as MIME type would only require 8bit, not binary.

Some minor fixes. 2002-03-04Initial version.
Claus Frber <claus@faerber.muc.de>

According to their previous press release back in December, they were planning to merge the FastTrack and Gnutella network somehow in their 2.0 release.

In order to compete with existing P2P file-sharing, a subscription site needs to offer some advantage over them. The fact that a sub site is legit will not be sufficient until there are significant negative consequences to "ilicit" (read free-as-in-beer) file sharing.

So... how to compete? A sub site would therefore have to offer superior selection and accessibility. That means offering ANY file users want REAL FAST, RIGHT NOW. So far, given the high cost of bandwidth and securing the rights to songs, no sub site is anywhere near realizing this.

Note that this means it is in their interest for sub sites to crack down on "illicit" P2P file sharing. Don't be surprised whan the folks behind these sites to back law enforcement efforts to go after "pirate" P2P software like GNUtella, etc. Could a Napster-FBI alliance be far off? Stay alert...

-CT

Ummm, you don't need President Bush to budget cash for cable/DSL to be available. You just need companies with business models that aren't stupid. The fact that only 5% of users have broadband has more to do with its currently poor reliability and higher cost than dial-up service - and the fact that many users haven't seen the killer app (Napster notwithstanding).

There's a difference between neat stuff and significant stuff. ... [D]o Harry and Martha in Dubuque need peer-to-peer?

I think so. Napster adoption has been extremely fast, and not specific to techies. Legal Napster or other apps (not Gnutella, probably, if only because the name sounds obscure and the obvious web address is useless) will drive people to use P2P and adopt broadband soon enough, I think.

And don't forget porn. I've read that there are pic trading P2P tools out there (haven't used any myself of course!) but if there's anything that will sell to Harry and Martha in Dubuque, it's quicker access to hardcore. Don't believe me? Remember VHS, which took off in no small part because it was adopted by the adult industry - and all of those pay sites that were profitable long before Red Hat.

I disagree. I am using a firewall program called AtGuard (which has been discontinued and bought by Network Associates) which does a *great* job of blocking all banner ads, including java applets, etc. The heuristics this thing uses must be pretty good, b/c as far as I can tell, it is not eliminating anything but ads. When turning the software on and off and viewing my favorite pages; no non-related ad content is killed, but when turned on, *everything* (regardless of location on page) that is advertising is whacked.

/dev/null =)

In response to the post "Sure, lets all use Junkbuster and make sure nobody makes any money whatsoever... that way we can shut down this stupid Slashdot.org website and put Malda and his boyz out of business.. "

//rant begins here

Do you work for the RIAA/MPAA/BSA or something? Do you and your ilk actually think about the rhetoric that you spout? Guess what? In business, no one "deserves" and damn thing. If you sink a gazillion dollars into personnel, R&D, and somebody comes along with a better distribution model, oh *fscking* well. That's capitalism. Millions of business fail every year, don't go crying when technology and your target market finds a easier/cheaper way to obtain your services/product. And before you start with your moralizing and backward ethics, read this and this. If people could obtain free COPIES of hotdogs or gold bars or whatever, believe me, they would. Stealing, pheh.

//end of rant.

"Slashdot - Better living through moderation."