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Mojo Nation provides a content-distribution service with integrated micropayments.

Right now, our beta network is just a proof of technology -- you can publish and download content and Mojo keeps track of who is contributing bandwidth and disk space to the network. In the future, however, Mojo could be used to remunerate the actual artists who create the content.

Mojo Nation is an open source project. Check it out!

Zooko

The trick will be to separate your identity from your profile and create a market in (possibly authenticaticated but) anonymous demographic information. Payments can get made to your pseudonymous persona that can collect or trade them with brokers to create quantities useful to convert to some useful form - or to barter back into the network.

--

There are many on-line communities that are beginning to understand the need for reputations: Slashdot has karma; Mojo Nation uses mojo, a private currency; even SourceForge has implemented user ratings. And much more is being done in the private, closed source sector, unfortunately often driven by a requirement to more accurately target specific market segments.

The holy grail here would be an open source, fully distributed, open yet secure reputation system can satisfy this need. If in addition, this system put the user in full control over their personal information and how - and with whom - it was to be shared, then privacy could be assured while reputations at one site could safely cross boundaries into other sites.

As information begins to drown us, reputation-driven services that can accurately direct our limited attention to what we want to see when we want to see it will drive the new economy. We have the technology - let's build it!

--

If the distributed work is carried out by Java apps, using the standard security precautions, you don't need to get so many grey hairs over that - as long as you're willing to exchange lots of processing power for it. I've always felt the correct language for distributed computing is assembler, at least for the core things. GIMPS and Distributed.net are model examples of this.

Burris

A small, working prototype is due by summer, although Kubiatowicz cautions the system is easily ten years away from widespread use.

Mojo Nation is a working implementation of almost all of the concepts described in the OceanStore paper. Mojo Nation breaks up data into pieces and then uses Rabin's Information Dispersal Algorithm to create eight redundant shares of those pieces, only half of the eight shares being necessary to recreate the original piece. Blocks are identified by their SHA1 hashes and documents are identified by the eight hashes of the pieces that make up the "hash tree." (a.k.a. the Dinode). Without the Dinode you cannot put the file back together since each piece is also encrypted. Even if your block server holds every single block in the file you still can't tell what it is.

Block servers only handle a small portion of the hash space and your broker keeps extensive local performance statistics on each other broker in order to make intelligent decisions on whom to ask first for a block (like keeping a map of who is logically closest in the network). There is much, much more.

Mojo Nation works today. While it doesn't have a large enough population of block servers to handle truly massive files yet, it handles a CD's worth of MP3's for instance. Here's a Mojo URL for an hour long set of really great freely distributable music by Medeski, Martin, and Wood. (it's Jazz). It's about 80 megs total but when you ask your broker to fetch the link you'll get an HTML page describing the performance with individual links to each song (i.e. clicking the link won't download 80 megs of data unless you fetch it recursively).

If OceanStore sounds interesting, you should check out Mojo Nation It actually works. The interface is rough but that's because it's a simple web interface (easy and works on every platform). The core stuff is what the developers have been working on.

Burris

A small, working prototype is due by summer, although Kubiatowicz cautions the system is easily ten years away from widespread use.

Mojo Nation is a working implementation of almost all of the concepts described in the OceanStore paper. Mojo Nation breaks up data into pieces and then uses Rabin's Information Dispersal Algorithm to create eight redundant shares of those pieces, only half of the eight shares being necessary to recreate the original piece. Blocks are identified by their SHA1 hashes and documents are identified by the eight hashes of the pieces that make up the "hash tree." (a.k.a. the Dinode). Without the Dinode you cannot put the file back together since each piece is also encrypted. Even if your block server holds every single block in the file you still can't tell what it is.

Block servers only handle a small portion of the hash space and your broker keeps extensive local performance statistics on each other broker in order to make intelligent decisions on whom to ask first for a block (like keeping a map of who is logically closest in the network). There is much, much more.

Mojo Nation works today. While it doesn't have a large enough population of block servers to handle truly massive files yet, it handles a CD's worth of MP3's for instance. Here's a Mojo URL for an hour long set of really great freely distributable music by Medeski, Martin, and Wood. (it's Jazz). It's about 80 megs total but when you ask your broker to fetch the link you'll get an HTML page describing the performance with individual links to each song (i.e. clicking the link won't download 80 megs of data unless you fetch it recursively).

If OceanStore sounds interesting, you should check out Mojo Nation It actually works. The interface is rough but that's because it's a simple web interface (easy and works on every platform). The core stuff is what the developers have been working on.

Burris

A small, working prototype is due by summer, although Kubiatowicz cautions the system is easily ten years away from widespread use.

Mojo Nation is a working implementation of almost all of the concepts described in the OceanStore paper. Mojo Nation breaks up data into pieces and then uses Rabin's Information Dispersal Algorithm to create eight redundant shares of those pieces, only half of the eight shares being necessary to recreate the original piece. Blocks are identified by their SHA1 hashes and documents are identified by the eight hashes of the pieces that make up the "hash tree." (a.k.a. the Dinode). Without the Dinode you cannot put the file back together since each piece is also encrypted. Even if your block server holds every single block in the file you still can't tell what it is.

Block servers only handle a small portion of the hash space and your broker keeps extensive local performance statistics on each other broker in order to make intelligent decisions on whom to ask first for a block (like keeping a map of who is logically closest in the network). There is much, much more.

Mojo Nation works today. While it doesn't have a large enough population of block servers to handle truly massive files yet, it handles a CD's worth of MP3's for instance. Here's a Mojo URL for an hour long set of really great freely distributable music by Medeski, Martin, and Wood. (it's Jazz). It's about 80 megs total but when you ask your broker to fetch the link you'll get an HTML page describing the performance with individual links to each song (i.e. clicking the link won't download 80 megs of data unless you fetch it recursively).

If OceanStore sounds interesting, you should check out Mojo Nation It actually works. The interface is rough but that's because it's a simple web interface (easy and works on every platform). The core stuff is what the developers have been working on.

Burris

Mojo Nation does have a broker system, but those are also distributed. A rather neat idea actually. You have a file sharing system, a broker system and an indexer, and they are all distributed.

My personal experiences with MN are rather poor unfortunately, I did run a node for a few weeks, but I felt that it didn't result in anything. And uploading a file didn't work for me. It always got stuck somewhere. And the GUI (web based) isn't the best. A lack of feedback to the user.

Those are all nitpicks however, and I do hope that something like Mojo Nation, Newtella, Freenet what not can be spawned from the smoldering remains of Napster.

But then again, maybe if you did, your cross platform support would have been better and you'd have a much better UI using Swing than what you have now.

But then again, maybe if you did, your cross platform support would have been better and you'd have a much better UI using Swing than what you have now.

What an excellent article!

I especially liked the point at the end, that languages do have strengths and weaknesses and are not all created equal.

I firmly believe that we hackers at Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow could not have implemented Mojo Nation as quickly as we did if we had been using Java instead of Python.

Nonetheless, Mark-Jason Dominus is exactly right that tribalism is not a sane or effective way to grow, as a professional or as an industry. Developers and users of other programming languages are not our enemies, they are our friends.

Regards,

Zooko

Via these links (assuming you have mojonation installed w/ the mojo proxy):

linux kernel source 2.2.18 (tar.bz2) [mojo id 68AieSMlQkDNSi3vaFUpwB9sbIk]

Via these links (assuming you have mojonation installed w/ the mojo proxy):

linux kernel source 2.2.18 (tar.bz2) [mojo id 68AieSMlQkDNSi3vaFUpwB9sbIk]

jim

One downside to swarm delivery systems is that data is "published", simple sharing of a common filebase (a la Napster and Gnutella) is not possible. Someone has to upload the pieces to the system in the first place for them to be available because the system does not do the "let me take a look through your hard disk for things to give to others" kind of file sharing found in other P2P systems. jim

One downside to swarm delivery systems is that data is "published", simple sharing of a common filebase (a la Napster and Gnutella) is not possible. Someone has to upload the pieces to the system in the first place for them to be available because the system does not do the "let me take a look through your hard disk for things to give to others" kind of file sharing found in other P2P systems. jim

Actually, MojoNation does something very similar to what you propose.. its still a beta product, and it's still growing, but it looks good so far:

* Automatic mirroring nodes
Mojonation block-servers remember what blocks seem to be popular (most requested), and if they dont have them, they may go grab a copy to mirror locally.

Nodes would automatically mirror data from local (fast) mirrors, so that it's more accessible.

See above. Data that is popular is automatically mirrored. When data is published to the network, dual-redundancy is used to avoid losing the data if some blocks turn up missing. Think RAID. Well, no, not exactly, but it is somewhat redundant.

... 56k clients could connect and ask the "net" of super nodes for the queries on content..

It's called a content tracker, and anyone can run one on Mojonation. There are two central "master publication trackers" (MPT's) that keep lists of all publication servers, and the clients retrieve this list initially from them. There are possible plans to distribute the MPT's as well.

Content Security

All of the content posted to the network would have meta-moderation on it; anyone can classify data, and mark it as such.

There is currently no 'rating system' in mojonation, but it is something being looked at, barring the technical hurdles in doing so.

Privacy

If possible, I'd like to see users IP addresses hidden; only have a unique login name/password setup for security; but this may make hackers/spammers hard to track and ban, but hopefully the meta-moderation would filter out most of it.

I'm not sure if Mojonation is going to go this route eventually, but if ya use TCP/ip, you can be traced eventually anyway. UDP is unreliable.. As for data privacy, Mojonation actually chops a file up into small blocks, then encrypts those blocks, and distributes them randomly. Then it send the description and block locations to the master server. In essence, nobody knows whats in each individual block on their server (if they run a storage server); everything is encrypted. I am breezing past all the details here, feel free to read more about it if you wish.

Volunteers
Anybody?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mojo nat ion/

Actually, MojoNation does something very similar to what you propose.. its still a beta product, and it's still growing, but it looks good so far:

* Automatic mirroring nodes
Mojonation block-servers remember what blocks seem to be popular (most requested), and if they dont have them, they may go grab a copy to mirror locally.

Nodes would automatically mirror data from local (fast) mirrors, so that it's more accessible.

See above. Data that is popular is automatically mirrored. When data is published to the network, dual-redundancy is used to avoid losing the data if some blocks turn up missing. Think RAID. Well, no, not exactly, but it is somewhat redundant.

... 56k clients could connect and ask the "net" of super nodes for the queries on content..

It's called a content tracker, and anyone can run one on Mojonation. There are two central "master publication trackers" (MPT's) that keep lists of all publication servers, and the clients retrieve this list initially from them. There are possible plans to distribute the MPT's as well.

Content Security

All of the content posted to the network would have meta-moderation on it; anyone can classify data, and mark it as such.

There is currently no 'rating system' in mojonation, but it is something being looked at, barring the technical hurdles in doing so.

Privacy

If possible, I'd like to see users IP addresses hidden; only have a unique login name/password setup for security; but this may make hackers/spammers hard to track and ban, but hopefully the meta-moderation would filter out most of it.

I'm not sure if Mojonation is going to go this route eventually, but if ya use TCP/ip, you can be traced eventually anyway. UDP is unreliable.. As for data privacy, Mojonation actually chops a file up into small blocks, then encrypts those blocks, and distributes them randomly. Then it send the description and block locations to the master server. In essence, nobody knows whats in each individual block on their server (if they run a storage server); everything is encrypted. I am breezing past all the details here, feel free to read more about it if you wish.

Volunteers
Anybody?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mojo nat ion/

Actually, MojoNation does something very similar to what you propose.. its still a beta product, and it's still growing, but it looks good so far:

* Automatic mirroring nodes
Mojonation block-servers remember what blocks seem to be popular (most requested), and if they dont have them, they may go grab a copy to mirror locally.

Nodes would automatically mirror data from local (fast) mirrors, so that it's more accessible.

See above. Data that is popular is automatically mirrored. When data is published to the network, dual-redundancy is used to avoid losing the data if some blocks turn up missing. Think RAID. Well, no, not exactly, but it is somewhat redundant.

... 56k clients could connect and ask the "net" of super nodes for the queries on content..

It's called a content tracker, and anyone can run one on Mojonation. There are two central "master publication trackers" (MPT's) that keep lists of all publication servers, and the clients retrieve this list initially from them. There are possible plans to distribute the MPT's as well.

Content Security

All of the content posted to the network would have meta-moderation on it; anyone can classify data, and mark it as such.

There is currently no 'rating system' in mojonation, but it is something being looked at, barring the technical hurdles in doing so.

Privacy

If possible, I'd like to see users IP addresses hidden; only have a unique login name/password setup for security; but this may make hackers/spammers hard to track and ban, but hopefully the meta-moderation would filter out most of it.

I'm not sure if Mojonation is going to go this route eventually, but if ya use TCP/ip, you can be traced eventually anyway. UDP is unreliable.. As for data privacy, Mojonation actually chops a file up into small blocks, then encrypts those blocks, and distributes them randomly. Then it send the description and block locations to the master server. In essence, nobody knows whats in each individual block on their server (if they run a storage server); everything is encrypted. I am breezing past all the details here, feel free to read more about it if you wish.

Volunteers
Anybody?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mojo nat ion/

This is not erecting new barriers to publishing, it is lowering them and letting anyone get in on the action. Nothing is for free, but if people work together we can make the cost so close to free that no one will really care. In the end, you need to have at least some cost for publication or else you are just shifting the problem from one of publishing to one of filtering out all of the crap that everyone else is publishing (which turns into its own set of messy problems.)

jim

The next step for these systems are to pass around the code to turn the database of objects (which P2P systems like Mojo Nation and Freenet are good at distributing) into something dynamic and structured on the local client. Imagine giving the user a chunk of the /. database for an article along with code to explain how everything should be formatted, etc. The presentation and organization is local (along with any dynamic effects) while the data is just a selection from the pool of possible objects. This would also mean that when you download the articles you can pre-load the higher ranked articles or use collaborative filters to trim out the bits you are not interested in and avoid having to download these in the first place.

Freenet has some good cacheing mechanisms in there but there is a balance which needs to be maintained between de-centralization (which provides the censorship resistant features of systems like Mojo Nation and Freenet) and dynamic information features that require a trusted codebase for execution. If Java had lived up to some of its hype perhaps we could be passing around dynamic objects that contained information and presentation all in one bundle and we would run these in our browsers without fear, but it just didn't turn out that way...

Mojo Nation deserves a plug.
It has an ingenious solution to the freeloader problem, namely an
internal currency system, which may make the system more scaleable
than Freenet. Advogato also
runs some good discussions of these issues.

The digital tokens used are the internet equivalent of the old upload/download ratios of BBS days applied to a distributed, decentralized P2P system. This isn't a "sharing" system, so it doesn't walk through your disk looking for things to give away; instead other users publish data to the system and it gets broken up into pieces, these pieces get RAID-like error correction and then they are sent out to other peers in the system. Downloads can use a swarm approach to pulling in data, taking a small piece from lots of peers (including those who might be on slow connections) rather than trying to shove the whole file down someone's (already overloaded) narrow upstream link.

Previous releases were a bit unstable, but the new 0.920 release that is available for download has a much better installer and significantly faster publishing and downloads. Check it out!

The digital tokens used are the internet equivalent of the old upload/download ratios of BBS days applied to a distributed, decentralized P2P system. This isn't a "sharing" system, so it doesn't walk through your disk looking for things to give away; instead other users publish data to the system and it gets broken up into pieces, these pieces get RAID-like error correction and then they are sent out to other peers in the system. Downloads can use a swarm approach to pulling in data, taking a small piece from lots of peers (including those who might be on slow connections) rather than trying to shove the whole file down someone's (already overloaded) narrow upstream link.

Previous releases were a bit unstable, but the new 0.920 release that is available for download has a much better installer and significantly faster publishing and downloads. Check it out!

In order to download, search, or even upload, you must compensate your peers with Mojo, which represents the the resources of theirs you are consuming. To earn Mojo you must contribute your own resources to the network by setting the software to resell your own computing resources. It also features redundancy so servers can disappear without data disappearing. It's really cool, check it out.

Burris

what are we left with???

Mojo Nation. Less leechable, more balanced. Cool name for a parent company (whois mojonation.net).

As far as I can tell, you are in the interesting position (potentially) of not even knowing what is on your system, let alone whether it is illegal or not. Of course, I haven't actually managed to get it working yet, either.

If the resource is popular then it gets mirrored automatically by greedy block servers who are hoping to sell copies in return for Mojo to people that download it. (Note that you earn Mojo by running a Mojo Nation client, so it is more like "trading" your bandwidth and your disk space and the blocks you've collected for the blocks that the other guy has collected.)

So as far as I can tell, mirroring useful web resources that a large community uses is a perfect use for Mojo Nation. I wouldn't recommend depending solely on Mojo Nation at this point (BETA! BETA! It's the letter that comes before Gamma which is the kind of radiation that made Spiderman and The Incredible Hulk!), but I would recommend experimenting: take a web site that you are mirroring, do a `wget -r -k' on it, then run the Mojo Nation utility "cmdpub" on the resulting directory.

Regards,

Zooko, Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow

You can post your web sites on Mojo Nation (warning: this is in beta! It is not stable, but it works.). Documents posted to Mojo Nation are not deletable. (This is due to some complicated peer to peer architecture and RAID-like splitting of the data into multiple redundant shares, of which you need only a subset to reconstruct the original document. See the web site for docs.)

Regards,

Zooko, Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow

There is something similar called Mojonation that sets up a peer to peer network over the internet by using and granting resources to people. If you provide a resource, such as hard drive space, you get "mojo" if you use up a resource, you spend mojo.

It seems organized well and it promotes people providing resources and not just taking them. Also everything is encrypted and your files dont dissapear with time!

I havent tried it yet, but if you have then I would like to hear from you.

-gcrocker

and to Freenet (fast but hard to use): freenet:KSK@mpeg/lasermameNTSC.mpg

In general, Mojo Nation and Freenet are great ways to mirror large content from slow sites. Both automatically mirror popular content so they're less slashdot-effectable.

-gcrocker

Take a look at mojonation. you earn/spend a currency called mojo backed on your bandwidth/cpu/storage capacity.

"p2p" (i hate buzzwords) has a bright future!

When will companies realize that having stuff available online is more advertising than anything? I would have never have heard of the actual book if I hadn't found the web version on google. I was tempted to buy a copy before, but not anymore.

• The only viable solution to the virus problem is a secure machine (OS and apps). Anti-virus software is to computer security as an automatic sentry gun is to home security. It does more harm than good, no matter how well it's administrated.
• So now the virus writers can check their virii against the latest definitions without even hitting the main servers? They'll appreciate that. :)
• Why make a different app for sharing of each kind of file? Why not a single distributed master-less network with distributed trust and market-based load balancing that is content-agnostic? (MojoNation)

• Oh great, another way my friends who've just discovered the internet can bug me.
• Why just text messages? Why not extend existing protocols to be peer2peer broadcast rather than simply point-to-point? Oh wait, we have that already. It's called EMAIL.
• What's wrong with a MUD (or MOO)? Is it so hard to run one or find a friendly one? I don't seem to have any trouble...

My take is that the SDMI is an evil thing, a thing that should not happen, and a stupid thing from the companies' perspective. I hold all the companies who haven't yet said "screw this; we're going to go work on a revenue model that might work" responsible for that choice. You can't give someone music and deny them the ability to copy it. You can't. You never will be able to again. They'll stick a microphone up to the thing they listen to, they'll encode it as MP3s, and they'll put it on Freenet, or Gnutella, or Mojo Nation, or whatever the next and even better system is. There is no longer such a thing as "secure music." I allow for the possibility that, if you throw enough money, enough brains, and enough industrial and political muscle at the problem, you might be able to get secure, uncopyable digital music, in which case only people with good speakers will be able to get MP3s of Napster quality out of it. Regardless of what the right thing to do is, regardless of what would protect the artists' rights best, regardless of your or my personal stance on copyright, this outcome is a done deal. It's already happened; there simply is no way to stop people from trading MP3s on the internet, watermarked or not. That's a fact. The whole thing is stupid, and doomed to failure. The RIAA in particular is so hidebound and arrogant that they can't see that.

Now this watermarking idea that the SDMI is having rammed down its throats by the RIAA is particularly doomed to failure. Not only is it impossible for the above reasons, it will piss off the consumers royally. People who don't care about Napster because they can't figure out how to use it will get pissed, because they'll have to go through all this bullshit, buying new equipment at the very least, just to listen to the next Blink 182 album, and they love Blink 182. A lot of them will stop listening to the Top 40 checklist. Not only that, it'll get cracked, quickly, and completely (you know more about this than I do :-), and millions, maybe billions, of the RIAA's money will go straight down the toilet.

From my point of view, this is an unqualified success. This is grounds for dancing in the streets. I loved it when I finally started to believe that they were going to try to go through with it. It was a veritable vision of the future: everyone hates SDMI, everyone hates the RIAA, and the RIAA takes a bath. All the companies that had the balls the tell the SDMI to go fuck themselves and work on revenue models that work find themselves with lots of new customers.

The SDMI is obviously doomed to failure, barring the institution of a copyright-enforcement police state the likes of which makes 1984 look chickenshit. If Sony can't figure that out, fuck 'em. If Sony wants to try to take my fair use rights away because they think that'll make it work, good. Fuck 'em. It won't work, and they'll look stupid and lose money trying. That is the biggest reason I wanted this watermarking nonsense to go as far as it could.

No, we are not helping SDMI restrict fair use by making them (and everyone else) aware of weaknesses in the system. Keeping mum about ways to circumvent the system will hurt everyone, as a flawed SDMI in deployment hurts everyone a lot more than no SDMI at all.

And what about users? A circumventable system on your portable devices may not stop people with the right utilities from making copies, but it will forever get in the way and generally annoy the heck out of people. This is also okay for you? Acceptible losses, friendly fire, if it will help you teach SDMI a lesson?

The RIAA won't give up on this. If they do, they die. They'll try to beat Napster until they die, and I won't like what they come up with. It won't be on my side. It won't be on anybody's side. It'll be a plan to preserve a profit model that simply doesn't work anymore, at the expense of the music consumer. It might be lobbying congress to make MP3s illegal. It might be CDs uniquely keyed to the buyer's identity, so if your CD winds up on the net you wind up in jail. It will be a greedy, rapacious plot to fuck the American consumer out of his or her money and freedom, and every clue the RIAA gets means a little bit more clueful a greedy, rapacious plot. They're evil, they're clever in their way, they're very, very powerful, and they prefer massive force to insightful change. It's the way they've been doing business for decades, and being heavily under attack in an arena they don't understand isn't going to make them any nicer. Now I don't personally care; I've got enough John Lee Hooker tracks on my HD to last me quite a while, and every time I convince myself to check out the great new indie band, I hate it, and I rip another Dylan album. But I wholeheartedly believe that the RIAA and its bastard child the SDMI can do nothing but harm to the American people, and I want them to lose money, lose mindshare, lose political clout, and gradually die an ungraceful death while being made fun of on the internet. I think a horribly flawed SDMI sounds like a great start, and I sincerely hope that they're arrogant enough still to go on with this thing.

That's my rant.

My take is that the SDMI is an evil thing, a thing that should not happen, and a stupid thing from the companies' perspective. I hold all the companies who haven't yet said "screw this; we're going to go work on a revenue model that might work" responsible for that choice. You can't give someone music and deny them the ability to copy it. You can't. You never will be able to again. They'll stick a microphone up to the thing they listen to, they'll encode it as MP3s, and they'll put it on Freenet, or Gnutella, or Mojo Nation, or whatever the next and even better system is. There is no longer such a thing as "secure music." I allow for the possibility that, if you throw enough money, enough brains, and enough industrial and political muscle at the problem, you might be able to get secure, uncopyable digital music, in which case only people with good speakers will be able to get MP3s of Napster quality out of it. Regardless of what the right thing to do is, regardless of what would protect the artists' rights best, regardless of your or my personal stance on copyright, this outcome is a done deal. It's already happened; there simply is no way to stop people from trading MP3s on the internet, watermarked or not. That's a fact. The whole thing is stupid, and doomed to failure. The RIAA in particular is so hidebound and arrogant that they can't see that.

Now this watermarking idea that the SDMI is having rammed down its throats by the RIAA is particularly doomed to failure. Not only is it impossible for the above reasons, it will piss off the consumers royally. People who don't care about Napster because they can't figure out how to use it will get pissed, because they'll have to go through all this bullshit, buying new equipment at the very least, just to listen to the next Blink 182 album, and they love Blink 182. A lot of them will stop listening to the Top 40 checklist. Not only that, it'll get cracked, quickly, and completely (you know more about this than I do :-), and millions, maybe billions, of the RIAA's money will go straight down the toilet.

From my point of view, this is an unqualified success. This is grounds for dancing in the streets. I loved it when I finally started to believe that they were going to try to go through with it. It was a veritable vision of the future: everyone hates SDMI, everyone hates the RIAA, and the RIAA takes a bath. All the companies that had the balls the tell the SDMI to go fuck themselves and work on revenue models that work find themselves with lots of new customers.

The SDMI is obviously doomed to failure, barring the institution of a copyright-enforcement police state the likes of which makes 1984 look chickenshit. If Sony can't figure that out, fuck 'em. If Sony wants to try to take my fair use rights away because they think that'll make it work, good. Fuck 'em. It won't work, and they'll look stupid and lose money trying. That is the biggest reason I wanted this watermarking nonsense to go as far as it could.

No, we are not helping SDMI restrict fair use by making them (and everyone else) aware of weaknesses in the system. Keeping mum about ways to circumvent the system will hurt everyone, as a flawed SDMI in deployment hurts everyone a lot more than no SDMI at all.

And what about users? A circumventable system on your portable devices may not stop people with the right utilities from making copies, but it will forever get in the way and generally annoy the heck out of people. This is also okay for you? Acceptible losses, friendly fire, if it will help you teach SDMI a lesson?

The RIAA won't give up on this. If they do, they die. They'll try to beat Napster until they die, and I won't like what they come up with. It won't be on my side. It won't be on anybody's side. It'll be a plan to preserve a profit model that simply doesn't work anymore, at the expense of the music consumer. It might be lobbying congress to make MP3s illegal. It might be CDs uniquely keyed to the buyer's identity, so if your CD winds up on the net you wind up in jail. It will be a greedy, rapacious plot to fuck the American consumer out of his or her money and freedom, and every clue the RIAA gets means a little bit more clueful a greedy, rapacious plot. They're evil, they're clever in their way, they're very, very powerful, and they prefer massive force to insightful change. It's the way they've been doing business for decades, and being heavily under attack in an arena they don't understand isn't going to make them any nicer. Now I don't personally care; I've got enough John Lee Hooker tracks on my HD to last me quite a while, and every time I convince myself to check out the great new indie band, I hate it, and I rip another Dylan album. But I wholeheartedly believe that the RIAA and its bastard child the SDMI can do nothing but harm to the American people, and I want them to lose money, lose mindshare, lose political clout, and gradually die an ungraceful death while being made fun of on the internet. I think a horribly flawed SDMI sounds like a great start, and I sincerely hope that they're arrogant enough still to go on with this thing.

That's my rant.

Good work, guys! You actually did it! Now it will be possible to make Mojo Nation run over Freedom.

:-)

Regards,

Zooko

From http://www.mojonation.net/about.shtml:

You didn't have to worry about the sudden unpopularity of your web pages, either?
Mojo Nation is de-centralized and secure, once data is published it cannot be deleted or controlled. Publishers have their identities hidden with pseudonyms and can publish without fear of reprisal. Content consumers can retrieve data with as much anonymity as they desire, privacy is a simple economic decision.

But, from the Salon piece:

Napster, for example, has the problem of not being able to get rid of the files even if it wanted to. They couldn't play fair just because of the way their system was designed. With Mojo Nation, if a content owner comes to us and says, "Hey, someone has published my Britney Spears track and here's the blocks and the map," we'll say, "Well, you're correct, and according to the DMCA, we'll take it off of our servers." We'll remove those blocks and publish them as bad blocks. Everyone who subscribes to that list could say they won't traffic in that.

Is this a contradiction, or is it something to do with the difference between the storage network and the trackers?

Oh, and why's the whole site in an invisible frameset? I hate things like that.

-- Yoz

Mojo Nation will not monitor your browsing. It simply mirrors the mojonation.net web site on your local box.
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs!

Yes, critical mass will be important, but security is one of the primary reasons for its existance. Worried about someone using up your disk space? Don't worry because if they do, they have to pay for it (it costs the sender money to publish a file). Worried about someone using up all your CPU? Don't worry, because if they do, you're compensated (virtually). Worried about someone running something on your machine that you don't approve of? Can't happen as the system is currently designed, because noone (currently) provides an open-ended cpu service. You can only do searches, and you are compensated when someone uses your machine to search the network.

The major goals of mojonation are security, privacy, scalability and decentralization. Everything within the network is distributed, including trust. I may be mistaken, but I believe even the compensation medium (mojo) is going to be decentralized. There will be no federal mojo reserve or official Mojo Authority.

A lot of the goals are still unimplemented, but some of the features exist now. The best example of where this is headed is how files are published: When you publish a file it is broken up into eight blocks, any four of which can be combined to re-create the original file. Those blocks are sent out to different servers without indication of their contents.

It's not done yet, but it's also not a bad start.

Slashdot - Napster Clone With Pay Per Download [July 30, 2000]

But I guess it's good to dig up topics from time to time in case anybody missed them last time 'round.

They've gotten a lot of press in the last four months, mostly good.
--

Mojo Nation is a distributed file sharing system, but we (the Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow) plan to make it into a full distributed computation system next. It features integrated micropayments so you can get paid per CPU cycle that you donate.

Check out Etree. This is a loose group of people that legitimately trade live concert recordings compressed with Shorten (lossless compression). They use FTP. People setup FTP servers and then announce to a mailing list what they have available.

The problem is that all of the public servers are staggering under the load. They limit the number of concurrent connections betwen 2-5 users to prevent complete mayhem on their bandwidth. So many people are trying to get in that the servers have scripts that automatically route ban anyone that attempts to connect more often than once a minute (or even two minutes for the bigger servers). The files are so large (350 megs per CD, 1-3 CD's per show usually) that it takes forever to get in. Standard Operating Procedure for downloading from public Etree servers is to open 12 terminal windows, each with a script trying to login to 12 different sites (once per minute, of course). After a few days you might get into one or two of them.

Hotline is a relatively modern BBS like system (it has integrated file transfer, message bases, and chatting). It's a little more advanced than FTP: it lets anyone connect but downloads are placed in a queue. So instead of redialing over and over and over again you just connect and start your download, and wait for the people in the queue ahead of you to finish. On popular sites that have lots of goodies I have literally had to wait in the queue for well over 24 hours to begin the actual file transfer.

I think the solution to the problem is a market based solution. Create a barter system for disk space, bandwidth, and CPU. In order to download something from someone and depelete their disk/bandwidth/cpu resources you must provide a comparable amount of resources. Since disk/bandwidth/cpu is a commodity, you can use a digital bearer instrument to represent those resources and create a fungible currency backed by the disk/cpu/bandwidth. Mojo Nation does exactly that, but you probably already knew I was going to say that.

Burris

Mojo Nation is a p2p file sharing protocol that has a built-in digital cash system. It prevents the "Tragedy of the Commons" problem by effectively creating a barter system for bandwidth, disk space, and CPU. In order to search, upload, download, or otherwise consume any resources from the remote host you must compensate them with the internal currency, known as Mojo. The Mojo represents the resources you are consuming from the counterparty. This way nobody can consume more resources than they are contributing to the system. Each person who joins helps to make it stronger. Note that contributing resources doesn't mean uploading files. You must pay Mojo to upload since you are consuming other servers disk, bandwidth, and CPU by uploading blocks to them and asking the servers to hold them.

The best way to get Mojo, so you can get the files you are interested in, is to provide your own resources (bandwidth, disk, CPU) to the network by using the Mojo Nation Broker (our name for the client software) to run a Block Server, Content Tracker, or Relay server.

A Block Server holds the actual data. In Mojo Nation, instead of holding an entire file on a single server, every file is broken up into many redundant blocks which are spread over many block servers throughout the network. You only need half of the available blocks to reassemble the original file. Of course, the Broker does all of the hunting for and reassembling of blocks transparently. In this way Mojo Nation is like a big distributed RAID drive which makes it resistant to servers disappearing. It also spreads the load out over many hosts, so when you download you are not impacting any single host or network connection severely (expect perhaps your own). It also means that hosts with slow net connections can hold data since each block is pretty small. Your Broker can download some blocks from slower servers in parallel with more blocks from faster servers. The Broker keeps track of performance statistics for each host so it can make intelligent choices about where to purchase blocks from.

Content Trackers are like the search engines in Mojo Nation. Instead of routing all searches through the entire network (which is what is bringing Gnutella down). Mojo Nation has centralized content trackers, but anyone can run one. The content trackers store rich XML metadata describing the files so you can easily search on different fields. The metadata also holds the instructions for your Broker to find and reassemble the blocks that comprise the file. So if you run a Block Server but not a content tracker you cannot know what data you are holding.

Relay Servers are for people behind firewalls. Mojo Nation is an asynchronous protocol. Relay Servers are used so you can send a request to someone behind a firewall. The Relay server holds messages for the clients to pickup, in exchange for some Mojo of course. Relay Servers will also be used for Digital Mix untraceability, much like the old Cypherpunk remailers.

In any event, it is extremely cool and is definitely worth checking out

Burris

Multicast is not well situated for internet content distribution because reliable multicast transport is a very difficult problem and the infrastructure to support it just isn't there.

Instead, try something like Mojo Nation or Freenet to distribute your popular content widely so that you can get it when you want without all having to access the same server.

It uses centrialized content tracking servers, but anyone can run one by just clicking a switch in their client. The content trackers store XML metadata describing the file, so you can search on different fields in different file type categories (easily defineable).

The the files themselves are broken into small redundant pieces and spread over the network. You only need half of the available pieces to reconstruct the original file. This way the system is resistant to servers disappearing. It also means you distribute your load over many hosts and clients with slower connections can still provide block services.

The coolest thing is that Mojo Nation has a built in digital cash called "Mojo" and a microcredit system that effectively turns it into a barter system for disk space, bandwidth, and CPU. Whenever you upload, download, search, or otherwise consume another systems resources, you must compensate them with Mojo. The Mojo represents the disk space, CPU, and bandwidth you are using. You can get Mojo by contributing your resources to the network through the client software (it's automagic). This way nobody can consume more resources than they are contributing to the system. Each person that uses it helps to make it stronger. Of course, being a real digital cash system, nothing stops people from sending Mojo to eachother in e-mail and settling the transaction with something like PayPal.

It's really cool, check it out.

Burris

We've all heard the anecdotes. "International borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway." "The 'Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Well, these things are actually true. Suck doesn't see it.

Napster might be pummeled into submission by the US legal system. Will this have much impact on the trading of copyrighted material by individuals? Hell no! They are switching to peer-to-peer systems. The draconian laws of Prohibition have little effect on the consumption of cannabis in this country. Stiff anti-piracy measures will be even less effective; you will never see ninja cops busting down people's doors at 3am to sieze someone's MP3 server. We've all seen how much success the Federal Courts have had at supressing DeCSS. They are shouting but most people on the net are ignoring them. Ostracism is the ultimate punishment on the 'Net.

The fact is that cryptography enables people to communicate secretly, without even knowing whom they are communicating with (but they are assured they are communicating with the same trustworthy folks they have dealt with in the past). Networks are international. Entities offering services will use "Regualatory Arbitrage," to keep the data flowing to people everywhere. Crypto hides the content, and obscures who is speaking to whom.

The 'Net will create it's own currency. By keeping things on the Net, people will avoid the hassles of credit card paper trails banking regulations when buying services on the Net. This is already happening, check out Mojo Nation which is creating a currency backed in CPU, disk space, and bandwidth.

Burris

Files are broken up into small redundant blocks and spread all over so you spread your load all over the net instead of concentrating it on one host (so even people with slow connections can play). It also means some of the hosts can disappear without loosing data. It's way cool.

Burris

From the Mojo website:

You can sell your idle online resources to others for Mojo (the internal currency), and then can trade Mojo to download content yourself or exchange it for cash after the Beta test is complete. This makes it easy for anyone to start getting Mojo. No paperwork to fill out. No wait. Just start running the software and you can begin earning Mojo as other users buy services from you.

Community members contribute resources by running one or more services on their computer. Most services can be operated from behind firewalls and with modest Internet connection speeds and can be launched and start earning Mojo for you with a couple clicks of the mouse. Anyone, even those connected by modem, can offset their charges by providing services to the system. Examples of services that users can provide to earn Mojo include:

• Publishing and storing content for the Mojo Nation data service.
• Actively caching popular content.
• Hosting a tracker service to help other users find particular content or resources
• Providing a relay service, so that users who work behind a firewall or use a client-level anonymizer can operate services.