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I think the freenet link above is wrong. It's
http://freenetproject.org/

Before I installed, I needed a credibility check. I found it on one of the O'Reilly Network sites:
ian.html
maybe uprizer is what the author above meant.

The German parliament which has just adopted DMCA-style provisions to outlaw the circumvention of technical protection measures that control and curtail the fair use of intellectual property (and only needs the other House's assent for part of the new legislation) makes Germany the third country, following Denmark and Greece, to implement the highly controversial "monstrosity" known as the European Union Copyright Directive 2001/29/EC.

This move, allegedly a "propaganda victory" dubbed "lex Bertelsmann" (after the giant media conglomerate expected to line their corporate pockets under the new laws) in furious disapproval by tech-savvy parts of the news media, makes Germany one of the early adopters setting an unfortunate precedent for further European countries like the UK and France whose citizens, and notably developers like Linux kernel guru Alan Cox, will probably not be spared from similar legislation for much longer either.

Although open-source researchers, cyber-rights activists and even the ruling Social Democrats' very own IT experts as well as hardware manufacturers underlined the severe dangers and inconsistencies of this new and doubtful philosophy extending copyright law to reduce many of the general public's rights to insignificance, in a debate focusing only on academic exemptions from the publishers' power grab, the opposition even tried to tighten the government's bill, ignoring widespread experiences of Chilling Effects such as censorship and assaults on the Freedom to Tinker during the past four years under the EUCD's U.S. counterpart of draconian "bad law and bad policy", the flawed Digital Millennium Copyright Act, another overreaching implementation of the

Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation

Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.

Lesson 4: Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.

Lesson 5: File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.

Lesson 6: "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service.

Lesson 7: There's more than one way to do it.

the public will never accept DRM.

I certainly HOPE your right, but it is far from certain. There is an enormous TCPA rollout on the way that intends to make DRM a casual detail of everyday life. This is scary not just because of the staggering multi-industry backing it has, but because they have an extremely plausible path to getting it into virtually all computers and devices over the course of a few years.

Without DRM, music is free.

Music has been available for free ever since radio and tape recorders. The recording industry predicted cassettes would kill the industry. Movies and programming have been free since broadcast television and VCR's. The MPAA predicted VCR's would kill the industry. In both cases the industry made MORE money once they adapted to the new tech.

Just because the recording industry has deliberately CHOSEN not to compete in an online market for music certainly does not mean one cannot exist. The fact that the recording industry has REFUSED to sell music online has been the major driving force behind the explosion of the various P2P networks.

In the last few months the recording industry has made a pathetic token gesture at selling music online. They are selling DRM crippled products. They are offering limited selections (they withhold most popular music to avoid "competing" with their offline market). Their prices are unreasonable (purchasing downloads should be signifigantly cheaper than purchasing a packaged object from a retail store). And perhaps worst of all they have an uphill battle because they have handed P2P a FIVE YEAR first-mover advantage. All four handicaps are completely self-imposted.

Even with these four fairly severe handicaps I believe they have still managed to capture tens of thousands of customers. If they drop the first three handicaps they can still manage to overcome the fourth and capture a large and profitable market. The internet offers them access to an enormous market/distribution-channel with nearly 100% profit margins. If they choose to they can create/provide a service that would far outclass P2P is several ways. The longer they wait the harder it gets,

If you want links with even more support try this National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences paper and here, particulary sections 5 + 6.

Saying that the internet will kill the music industry is absurd. You're a victim of RIAA propaganda.

-

There are issues of user approval that need to be solved to get this working and Peppercoin (man what a lousy name) is not even close to any of them.
I'm not gonna waste your time with my words since Clay already wrote about it in The Case Against Micropayments

The main problem is that users hate micropayments:

"Why does it matter that users hate micropayments? Because users are the ones with the money, and micropayments do not take user preferences into account.
In particular, users want predictable and simple pricing. Micropayments, meanwhile, waste the users' mental effort in order to conserve cheap resources, by creating many tiny, unpredictable transactions. Micropayments thus create in the mind of the user both anxiety and confusion, characteristics that users have not heretofore been known to actively seek out."

Go ahead and read the article. It explains the problem in better detail and it clearly shows why the problem is conceptual and not technical. Then you can happily get on with your life, without Peppercoin and without micropayments. Cheers.

As I see it, the biggest problem in micropayment is the large amout of time each user has to spend by deciding if a certain page is worth clicking, and the technical means that require plugins or other stuff. I highly suggest everybody to read Clay Shirky's The Case Against Micropayments for more infos about the problems micropayments have today.

I've been waiting for this to happen for some time. We are now on the cusp of our latest suicidal "war" on our own society. I have no problem with protecting copyrights, but this law puts the Draco in draconian. Do we really want to head in this direction again? Do we really want to start locking people up for years for an arguably victimless crime? How about solving all the murders first? How about the punishment fitting the crime: perhaps a fine and restitution?

Filling the network with corrupt files might have some short-term effect but eventually those files get filtered out when users find them useless and delete them.

I say that micropayments are a horrible idea and have no chance of working, and there are significant problems that are only cursorily addressed. Clay Shirky said in the case against micropayments that "Why does it matter that users hate micropayments? Because users are the ones with the money, and micropayments do not take user preferences into account. In particular, users want predictable and simple pricing. Micropayments, meanwhile, waste the users' mental effort in order to conserve cheap resources, by creating many tiny, unpredictable transactions. Micropayments thus create in the mind of the user both anxiety and confusion, characteristics that users have not heretofore been known to actively seek out." I find this to be a distant 4th or 5th place reason. I came up with a good list of problems with micropayments that I wrote to the good people that wrote the original article. ... This type of model is FAR more economically, socially, politically, ethically, and technologically complicated. (than the article led the reader to believe) 1) PRIVACY issues. Paying means tracking, tracking will NEVER be acceptable. (this is the thermal exhaust port on this Death Star of a model) 2) Resonance to free sites on PRINCIPLE, causing large sites to drive off loyal users. 3) The subsidization of web properties by brick-and-mortar or other media outlets (CNN.com, Bank of America, Music Concerts, etc) 4) Ther lack of QUALITY content, and paying for information that you dont want, or was not worth your paying. 5) Technological security and fraud. Find me an encryption scheme that is flawless and that the industry and government can agree on. 6) International nature of Internet. Would be illegal in some countries under uniform transaction laws, (content disclosure, per-transaction approval, and privacy) currency exchange, and cultural roadblocks (VERY SIGNIFICANT) 7) Third world inequality. A penny may not be much when you make 50k per year, but what about a Hatian making 600 USD that has access to a computer? This could promote SEVERE social inequity across impoverished nations. 8) User shift back to free/no media. This type of model could very easily drive users off the internet. ISP fees are exorbitant as they are, ($20/month is a lot of money to the poor, to many minority groups, and to students. These are the groups that stand to benefit the most from the Internet.) computers are overpriced (compared to what they COULD cost i.e. MS Xbox is a fully functional high end Pentium 3 computer that can be sold under 300 USD with a minimal loss that will be recouped in licenesing fees) 9) Would destroy existing advertising base on web (more successful than you let on) 10) Would require massive upgrades to existing server and client software, and render all previous packages obsolete. Server software upgrade costs alone would be MASSIVE. I think the following quote from another user summarized it best "Incredibly dumb article. Not worth the 5 cents it would have cost me to read it. Casual browsing would plummet. Maybe the phone number and map providers would do well, but I think [small website] might not. I figure it's casual readers who come here to read about [specialized information] not people who are going to pay. I also question the logic that we need penny-per-page to keep the phone number and map providers afloat... they seem to be doing fine." thats it

As Clay Shirky writes, users hate micropayments: The Case Against Micropayments. Think about how much work they are for readers, content owners, content creators, businesses, administrators, developers, and others. Micropayments suck because they are not usable for anyone and they don't offer much economic benefit unless you have truly high traffic. Of course, if you have high traffic, you probably aren't a small player.

In effect, you have a situation where small web sites and businesses can't charge (e.g., blogs), medium sized businesses can sometimes charge for unique content (e.g., Consumer Reports and Fark can charge for premium subscriptions), and large organizations can charge if they aggregate content or offer unique content (e.g., Wall Street Journal). In the end, the vast majority won't be able to charge (most content is crap and not unique) but a few large organizations will be able to charge. Those at the top of the heap will make money, the rest will run around like rats looking for sloppy droppings. End of story.

It talks about more than just technical reasons why to (or not to) use micropayments...

Clay Shirky has written this excellent article against micropayments. His case is that users prefer Aggregation, Subscription or Subsidy as alternatives to continuously making decisions about content.

Assuming that small sites will not have enough worthy content to go the subscription route and that subsidy (i.e. advertising) is increasingly running dry, the only realistic option is Aggregation. I think that non-exclusive, subscription-based networks of affiliated sites are a much more realistic answer. If, e.g. my OSDN subscription would get me access to premium /., Freshmeat, SF, etc. content I would be much more likely to buy it. What if though an indy site could buy itself (with a % of user usage) into the OSDN network? Presto! profit for OSDN, convenience for its subscribers and potential revenue for small-fry websites.

(It is sometimes better to befriend 'em, even if you can beat 'em.)

To the leader of the Internet Villian of the Year, H i l l a r y!

For all of these creative artists, most laboring in obscurity, being well-enough known to be pirated would be a crowning achievement. Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say "may" because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues.

A few weeks ago, I wrote Microsoft Mac FUD, Phooey, complaining about Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit head Kevin Browne's comments on the eve of Macworld.

This is such a despicable tactic. Microsoft embraced Apple and gave them funding at the height of the antitrust investigation, as a way of sustaining the idea that there was still competition in the market. Now that Apple's back on their feet, and OS X is giving them a run for the money, they pull out of the market. This decision may end up as badly for Microsoft's Office division as Lotus' decision to skip Windows.

Hackers and "alpha geeks" push the envelope, start to use the new technology, and get more out of their systems long before ordinary users even know what's possible.

A good example that's still a bit far out, but that I'm confident is significant. I held a summit of peer-to-peer networking developers, and when we were sitting around having a beer afterwards, a young FreeNet developer said to Kevin Lenzo (who was there because of his early work on IRC infobots): "You sound familiar."

Kevin mentioned that he was the developer of festvox, an open source speech synthesis package, and that he was the source of one of the voices distributed with the package. "Oh, that's why. I listen to you all the time. I pipe IRC to festival so I can listen to it in the background when I'm coding."

Now I'll guarantee that lots of people will routinely be converting text to speech in a few years, and I know it because the hackers are already doing it. It's been possible for a long time, but now it's ripening toward the mainstream.

" ... I know several who have started using Darwin on Intel hardware as there[sic] Unix underpinnings of choice ... "

Todd Hoff writes:

I'm a Windows-only user and I plan to switch to the Mac on my next purchase because of XP's DRM approach. Using XP would be like voluntarily entering a jail cell and closing the door.

From an interface perspective, I don't find the Mac superior.

Amen to your DRM concerns. Apple has been relatively more enlightened on the subject of DRM, recognizing that most users are fundamentally honest, and unwilling to support the extreme position of fear-mongering media executives.

When industry gets handed lemons on this scale, it has no choice but to turn them into marketing. A common reckoning is that one-third of software is used illegally, but not every theft represents a lost sale. If economic theory has any claim on the real world, Microsoft's pricing should naturally gravitate toward producing an optimum amount of theft. That is, thieves who wouldn't use the product if they had to pay for it, but who might become future customers or who become part of a network of users that makes the software more valuable to legitimate buyers.
...
A sore subject at its antitrust trial, for instance, was Microsoft's practice of awarding large discounts to computer makers who bought a Windows license for every machine they shipped, whether or not Windows was actually loaded. This was supposed to be proof of monopolistic intent, but the only real competitor for Windows is a Windows bootleg. Microsoft's pricing strategy was designed to induce customers not to steal.
...
The entertainment industry is still getting used to the idea that anybody who wants to take the trouble can get its products for free. But as Microsoft has been showing for years, that's no excuse for not making bundles of money.

Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
The article simply provides no evidence to prove this, or how it effects the actual situation. When making an argument against someone, it's important to define your target and not confuse their interests and views with others'. Everyone actively opposing peer to peer technologies has already overcome obscurity as an obsticle. Sure, my buddy loves it when people download his song -- he's more excited by the fact that people are hearing it than selling it. And, as such, his music isn't being pirated, it's being distributed the only way he can get it out. The mp3s and movies on my hard drive are, quite simply, pirated. I lost my desire to own legitimate copies when 170 of my cds were stolen, so I've had the unique "opportunity" to be on both sides of the fence -- sympathizing with artists I'd like to support, and not caring. Nearly all artists fit in to one of two categories in my mind: rich enough that they don't need my dollar, and happy enough that I'm listening to their music that they don't care about my dollar.

Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation
"...may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say "may" because even that point is not proven)..." I'd call this statement horribly conservative, at best. While a pirated copy of a cd or book doesn't translate directly to a lost sale (I've got around 500 cds worth of mp3s, but I can guarentee I wouldnt have had that many cds), people simply aren't going to buy things they can get for free without leaving the house. I used to go to record stores hunting for rare vinyl with my friends, but it's just no longer worth it. CDs, in my opinion, really are on their way out and a standard for massive storage on whatever media ends up working out, where we'd buy the rights and probably no media, is probably inevitable. The simple fact is that CD sales are down, and I think you're lying to yourself if you don't believe mp3s have a large part in it.

Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
Some. How many? I think O'Reilly is on to something when he implies it's more than you'd think. But a quick glance at me shows it's not everyone (at least, not his definition of "right").

Lesson 4: Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
First, there is absolutely no evidence provided to back this up. Second, even if it were true, it would be highly subjective. Comparing shoplifting to piracy is like comparing apples and oranges. A pirated copy doesn't rob from anyone's inventory, but possibly steals a potential sale. Likewise, a shoplifted copy doesn't affect the copyright holder, but the retailer selling it.

Lesson 5: File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers. Again, who are you trying to convince? It seems the purpose of this article would only be to pursuade people that piracy isn't all that bad, and there aren't a lot of people other than these "existing publishers" and their puppet politicians who are against it, at least on a peer to peer level. The guys with the clout and money.

While O'Reilly's artile did hit on some key points, it suffered from the same thing as every other peer to peer proponnent: inability to provide proof. The large publishers aren't going to budge because they stand to (continue to) lose the most money.

Napster is called P2P because the content/resources are stored and distributed by the peers. It isn't a pure P2P network, but I can't think of too many things that are. Gnutella even uses super-nodes and 'leaf'-nodes' which behave in a client-server fashion. There is a good article on about the definition of P2P here

The consequence is that the content itself isn't worth thinking about.

Clay Shirky argues this point better than I've expressed it here....

In fact, I think Napster deserves some credit.
Agreed, it didn't start the music-sharing thing: before CD-Rs and MP3s we all had double decks.
It didn't start the MP3 revolution either: way back before Napster, lots of people were already encoding MP3s (L3enc first then Fraunhoffer and Xing...) and sharing with friends, normally using burned CDs but also with some useful useful FTPs, where one had to enter 'hidden' directories until the music could be found.
And it didn't even start P2P, because it is not a real P2P service...
But still, Napster deserves lots of credit, because it is the single thing that started the revolution, for its simplicity of use, bringing many users that were not computer geeks to the world of music sharing. It is, in a word, the service that made MP3 sharing popular, and now that it is popular, it will remain that way forever, no matter how hard they try. Cheers for Napster.

btw, if you want to read about what is p2p and what is not, check this.

Andy Oram at O'Reilly has some interesting thoughts along these lines: Stop the Copying, Start a Media Revolution.

If you occasionally need a bit of industry-sanctioned entertainment but don't want to fund their legal teams, get it at your local library.

Buncha bullcrap. I'm tired of this crap that tries to wring money out of you for time spent doing something. Subscription software, pay-per-minute viewing/listening, and the like.

(...)

Micropayment systems have not failed because of poor implementation; they have failed because they are a bad idea. Furthermore, since their weakness is systemic, they will continue to fail in the future.

Proponents of micropayments often argue that the real world demonstrates user acceptance: Micropayments are used in a number of household utilities such as electricity, gas, and most germanely telecom services like long distance.

These arguments run aground on the historical record. There have been a number of attempts to implement micropayments, and they have not caught on in even in a modest fashion - a partial list of floundering or failed systems includes FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, MicroMint and Cybercent. If there was going to be broad user support, we would have seen some glimmer of it by now.

Furthermore, businesses like the gas company and the phone company that use micropayments offline share one characteristic: They are all monopolies or cartels. In situations where there is real competition, providers are usually forced to drop "pay as you go" schemes in response to user preference, because if they don't, anyone who can offer flat-rate pricing becomes the market leader. (See sidebar: "Simplicity in pricing.")

Why have micropayments failed? There's a short answer and a long one. The short answer captures micropayment's fatal weakness; the long one just provides additional detail.

The Short Answer for Why Micropayments Fail

Users hate them.

(...)

Buncha bullcrap. I'm tired of this crap that tries to wring money out of you for time spent doing something. Subscription software, pay-per-minute viewing/listening, and the like.

(...)

Micropayment systems have not failed because of poor implementation; they have failed because they are a bad idea. Furthermore, since their weakness is systemic, they will continue to fail in the future.

Proponents of micropayments often argue that the real world demonstrates user acceptance: Micropayments are used in a number of household utilities such as electricity, gas, and most germanely telecom services like long distance.

These arguments run aground on the historical record. There have been a number of attempts to implement micropayments, and they have not caught on in even in a modest fashion - a partial list of floundering or failed systems includes FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, MicroMint and Cybercent. If there was going to be broad user support, we would have seen some glimmer of it by now.

Furthermore, businesses like the gas company and the phone company that use micropayments offline share one characteristic: They are all monopolies or cartels. In situations where there is real competition, providers are usually forced to drop "pay as you go" schemes in response to user preference, because if they don't, anyone who can offer flat-rate pricing becomes the market leader. (See sidebar: "Simplicity in pricing.")

Why have micropayments failed? There's a short answer and a long one. The short answer captures micropayment's fatal weakness; the long one just provides additional detail.

The Short Answer for Why Micropayments Fail

Users hate them.

(...)

Here's O'reily's take on micropayments

essentially it boils down to 'producers like it' and 'consumers hate it'.

The Case Against Micropayments

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

a good overview of different p2p architectures is over here at openp2p.com.

One system the author fails to mention is Circle, which uses a decentralized hashtable system., more about it at his system is in a pdf slideshow he'll be giving at linux.conf.au

My favorite quote from his page: "FastTrack (aka Kazza/Morpheus) is kind of like trying to optimize a bublesort", which leads me to believe he has a regular quicksort at hand. (actually he does claim O(n log n) seachs, so its about right)

Also to note are Chord and GISP which seem to use simular schemes, where Chord is pure acadamia (someones masters thesis). GISP is an implementation of something from JXTA, suns p2p framework.

For windows users, you can still use Morpheus for all your mp3 and pr0n downloads. I wouldn't be suprised if Morpheus is next considering Kazaa and Morpheus are based on the same technology from fastrack. Both morpheus and kazaa are similar to napster in the sense that they have centralized authentication, but they differ in the fact that there is not a centralized index. There is a good writeup on morpheus and kazaa available here.

There were several responces to this article pointing out that the current Gnutella network is much more scalable than the one discussed in the article. Try looking here and here for articles discussing the changes since early 2000.

Come on Slashdot, its 2002 not 2000. It looks pretty bad accepting this article right after the Napster one. Does Slashdot or VA own a stake in Napster or something?

Essentially the problem with Jxta is that it is built on the assumption that P2P needs a communication standard above the TCP/IP level, and I am unconvinced that it does. The range of applications that call themselves P2P are sufficiently diverse that they each have different (and often mutually-exclusive) requirements of the communication layer that sits above TCP/IP, yet this is exactly the layer that JXTA tries to mandate.

As an example, Freenet has very strict requirements about how encryption is implemented at a low level, most other P2P architectures have no such requirement (and, in fact, would fail if such a requirement was forced upon them). Freenet, Fastrack, Mojo Nation and other systems also have very different ideas about how peer discovery is achieved, yet again, JXTA tries to mandate this too (adopting a Gnutella-inspired approach).

Standards are useful in some circumstances, but for P2P, TCP/IP is probably the highest-level standard we need.

So, let's see what the IBM thingy does... hmm, well, it serves web pages (check), provides dynamic DNS check (check), and it distributes the load to other boxes, after you manually set it up to do so (check).

Sure, the slick interface is a value-add, by I don't really think of this as Peer-To-Peer. It'd be a lot more interesting if it automatically distributed the load, replicated the most accessed content, etc.

Much like Napster and Gnutella, search results in Morpheus contain the IP addresses of peers sharing the files that match the search criteria, and file downloads are purely peer-to-peer. As is the case with Gnutella, file transfers are via the HTTP protocol. Because of this, each peer is essentially a Web server. With knowledge of the appropriate URLs, Clip2 was able to successfully download files from Morpheus peers using Microsoft Internet Explorer.

A typical Morpheus file download request looks like this:

GET /4431/Martin+Luther+King+Jr.+-
+I+have+a+dream.mp 3 HTTP/1.1
Host: 10.20.31.42:1214
UserAgent: KazaaClient May 7 2001 16:00:44
X-Kazaa-Username: anon
X-Kazaa-Network: MusicCity
X-Kazaa-IP: 102.12.97.42:1214
X-Kazaa-SupernodeIP: 113.103.15.82:1214
Connection: close
X-Kazaa-XferId: 2956456

Upon receiving the above download request, a Morpheus peer sends a response like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 4381547
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Date: Thu, 07 Jun 2001 20:43:32 GMT
Server: KazaaClient May 7 2001 15:59:09
Connection: close
Last-Modified: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 22:31:02 GMT
X-Kazaa-Network: KaZaA
X-Kazaa-IP: 10.20.31.42:1214
X-Kazaa-SupernodeIP: 120.23.123.227:1214
X-KazaaTag: 5=274
X-KazaaTag: 21=128
X-KazaaTag: 4=I have a dream
X-KazaaTag: 6=Martin Luther King Jr.
X-KazaaTag: 14=Speeches
X-KazaaTag: 3=asqK3s/zY2oC4IaGYq3gJYWLcKo=
Content-Type: audio/mpeg

Note the use of metadata headers describing the requested file. Also, note the repeated occurrence of the "Kazaa" name in these headers.

Following the HTTP response, the number of bytes specified in the "Content-length" header is sent from the peer sharing the file to the one who sent the download request, and the connection is closed. [more...]

The holdup is _Micro Payments Will Never Work_! For more explaination, please read Clay Shirky's "The Case Against Micropayments"!

The Case Against Micropayments

Especially with search engines in the state they are, I might hit two dozens pages trying to find what I'm really searching for. I have no problem paying for the information I want, but I'd be annoyed at paying for content I don't want simply because they haven't indexed it properly.

As Clay Shirky pointed out, not to mention the fact that you are adding another thing to think about. Another decision to make every time you reach for an href link.

The web is alredy too costly from a user GUI standpoint in that every link you click wastes about 5 seconds (YMMV) of your life. That's the real reason people hate sites that split their stories up into pages. The last thing that will fly is adding another thing to consider every time you click a link.

The only way it would work is by offsetting all of these "costs" with something. I think only "Damned good content" would work, and since this is the internet we're talking about here, for most sites it simply will not fly.

-pos

I posted the following comment to Slashdot and another site not so long ago, unaware of this new proposed legislation.

It's similar in approach to what is being suggested:

Here's my comment

I hate it when an ironic posting starts to come true: especially so soon!

Having conversed with her on a number of occasions, I can attest to JC being smart.

Wow! Praise from Caesar! An expert witness! (on the right)

Please, stop being so modest!

In The Trouble with JXTA Adam Langley, a Freenet developer, gives his not so rose-tinted view of JXTA.

There have been numerous JXTA articles over at O'Reilly's openp2p.com site. Ob Karma Whore :)

Jxta was created by Sun to be a "framework" for P2P networks. What exactly that means is rather vague. It appears to make basic development decisions that are better left up to indiviual projects (such as broadcast seaches). TCP/IP is really the only thing most P2P networks have in common, and even that could often be easily replaced with a diffrent underlieing protocol if it was necessary.

There are several other assumptions that Jxta makes that it shouldn't. See this article for more information.

At nearly the end of the interview, Lawrence Lessig makes the following statement:

copied directly from this article without permission, with all due credit, and with unknown intentions.

Yes. I think we should go back to the principles that defined us originally, which was about open societies with free people who should obey the law but you don't get them to obey the law by basically coding it so that they can't do anything different [italics added]. You get them to obey the law by making the law reasonable and getting people to be respectful of it, and that's the direction we ought to be going.

end quote

This statement interests me, because it seems that there is an even stronger statement to be made, namely that: Replacing the responsibility of the individual to obey the law with the inability of the individual to break the law not only encourages an ignorance of the law, but also encourages a lack of basic moral judgement.

Now for some justification.

Historically, moral philosophy has often considered the ability to reason practially about ethical and moral issues to be a sign of some maturity. Rousseau's Emile encourages this view especially with respect to children when it presents the advice that one not command a particular behavior from a child; rather, make it impossible for the child to misbehave. Similar thought has gone into modern society in every niche from electrical-outlet-covers to child-safety car-door locks. The underlying principle at work is that a child has not developed the practial reason required to go from an abstract commanded behavior pattern (Don't stick the scissors into the outlet) to the benefits (not getting electrocuted) without experimentation.

Very much simplified, in the case of persons without the ability to reason practically about ethical and moral issues (those who cannot understand *why* they should obey a guiding principle) technology is an oft-used preventative measure.

With respect to children, the profoundly impared, and other similar cases, no one argues that the use of technology to prevent a harmful outcome is innapropriate; however, I would argue that the continued use of technology to make impossible the breaking of a rule frees the faculty of reason from having any connection with that rule.

In other words, utilizing high technology to keep people from being able to commit a crime does not in any way educate the moral faculties of the people being so protected from their impulses. In fact, I would argue that through reliance on that protection, people become inherently less able to distinguish the moral reasoning behind the rule being enforced. Instead, it would be much like your telling me "It's illegal to fly by jumping up into the air and flapping your wings". Should you say that, I would give the moral reasoning behind it no thought simply because I can't accomplish the deed.

Certainly in such an imaginative case, giving the reasoning behind the law no thought would do no great harm; however, in a society where we are all in theory responsible for the health of our democracy (I seem to recall hearing that once with respect to the American legal/judical system) an inability to clearly reason about the morality and justification of the social contract under which we live spells the eventual end of that social contract.

Perhaps
it is better that way.

Further searching on Google show's that yep they're the same. Here's an article about the history of Music City and Morpheus. Also, a very informative OpenP2P article which details the server structure used by Kazaa and morpheus. Also interesting to note that both use FastTrack software to build their networks. According to the FastTrack website, their software is also used in another client, Grokster (annoying pop-up warning).
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I saw an article a couple of months ago (I don't remember where).

Is this it?

Hailstorm: Open Web Services Controlled by Microsoft

It pointed out that the genius behind Microsoft's plans with Passport and Hailstorm involved controlling the schema of the data. Sure, anyone can reimplement the software behind these services. However, each industry will standardize on Microsoft-written schemas relating to their communications and authentication needs.


Wait a minute, before we assert that each industry will standardize on a schema copyrighted by Microsoft, can you explain the incentive for the participating companies to do this?

For example: Travel booking companies, why would they agree, by default, to establishing a standard schema, give the copyright for the schema to Microsoft, and then submit themselves to paying a royalty for using a service they helped define?

Where is the incentive for a company to agree to a shoddy deal like this when someone else is willing to do it cheaper and without copyrighting your schema?

Personally, I see technologies like Passport and Hailstorm as value added technologies which credit card authentication companies, portals (Yahoo, AOL), and services providers would offer to new/existing customers to use thier service.

Keep in mind that Yahoo, AOL, Amazon, and other companies have already established relationships and have already gained a majority of marketshare in these types of services. They can just as easily offer these services as SOAP webservices, provide authentication and personal information like they already have been doing. Heck, Amazon is the only one who can license these services plus OneClick(tm) shopping thanks to the US Patent Office.



The clever part is, Microsoft will copyright those schemas. They can't be cloned legally, so you're still stuck with MS control. MS knows that almost nobody is going to write and test a service twice with different schemas just to interoperate with some second-tier implementations. At the end of they day, they're still in the driver's seat.

You'll have to elaborate a bit on the limitations of schema copyrighting, because I know there are a lot of people who will get the impression a schema copyright is like a patent.

1. How does a schema copyright limit a competitor?

2. Can't this be circumvented using a clean room approach, much like the clones did with IBM BIOS in the early days?

I'd really like to hear you address my issues, and you may even be able to clear up some of my questions and assertions, but you have to admit can't blame me for being skeptical in believing Microsoft is going to get away with screwing over all of these corporations without offering a competitive service.

Micropayments are not very likely to take off in any significant way. This article explains why.

-- Shamus

O Brave New World, with such People in it!

As linked to previously by Slashdot, see this article which explains why Micropayments will never work (by Clay Shirky).

The Case Against Micropayments


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This article, linked to by Tycho, sums up my feelings about that.

What that article does not mention, however, is that flat-rate programs currently in use ALSO fail on the Internet.. So who knows? Maybe the analogies in that article don't hold after all, and people would be more willing to part with a few cents than with a few bucks on the Internet? Personally, I feel that there's a good chance that will not be the case, and someone will have to come up with some billiant new idea, since none of our current ideas, micropayments included, work. *sigh*

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Almost everyone seem to be on their own personal crusade against micropayments, yet noone is satisfied with the way you pay for low-cost internet-services today (banners, spam etc). I say we should give these guys a break. What's so awful about trying to come up with a different way of doing things? It's not like anyone will force those cards on you anyway.

Good luck!

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That's true, but in the time-scale of this project it shouldn't be a big problem. I just recently signed up for network service with cogent who is proving 100 megabits of internat based transit for $1000/mo. If you figure 256kbit mpeg4 streams (very watchable even now) that's 400 people watching video at the same time for only $12,000 a year. Dirt cheap. Cogent is part of a new breed of ISP that will be coming to market in the next few years that aggresively use DWDM to provide much more bandwidth per dollar than traditional service providers can. Bill Joy said in a recent interview that he thinks the biggest thing coming that people don't expect is an explosion of optical bandwidth. So I wouldn't be too worried about 1990's economics of video streaming.

"You're not going to repeal the speed of light in the near future. You're going to have a latency issue, but you won't have any real bandwidth constraints. This has enormous implications: It helps things to become a service, and it makes it possible to cobble together machines to do certain problems and to replicate things real easily. It affects the whole economics of peer to peer. It's a strong wind at the back of this kind of distributed architecture."