Slashdot Mirror
Domain: wego.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to wego.com.
Stories · 9
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Modelling P2P Networks
Nathan Kennedy writes: "Mihajlo A. Jovanovic did his Master's project at the University of Cincinnati on modelling P2P networks with Gnutella as a case study. You view his project along with source code, stunningly pretty pictures, an applet and a paper on scalability." -
Forget Napster & Gnutella: Enter Mojo Nation
burris writes "Salon's Damien Cave writes "Forget Napster and Gnutella. Jim McCoy's Mojo Nation is the coolest file trading service on the net." This OpenSource distributed filesystem uses digital cash technology to create a barter economy for idle disk space, bandwidth, and CPU. Now you can get paid for sharing your computer." -
Slashback: Toner, Zimmerman, Languages
A few words from HP on the Linux-based but Linux-unfriendly print server (read gently, and be thankful for small blessings); happy news from the "the NSA secretly controls PGP and its creator" front; more detail on the sordid, awful things that the MPAA used to say about VCRs, and an online Linux magazine for those who like read in 5 languages at once. (phew!)Sheesh! All the guy ever promised was pretty good security! :) zenith744 writes: " Now available here is PGP v6.5.8, which appearently "...corrects a security-related bug with Additional Decryption Keys (ADKs) that may allow sophisticated attackers to add unauthorized ADK key IDs to the unhashed areas of PGP public keys...". This bug was previously brought to light about a week ago and reported on slashdot. A little more security, a little less stress. A happily balanced equation."
And an unnamed reader points to a story on Network Fusion about Zimmerman's response to the hubbub. Paraphrased: "It was a bug. We're embarrassed about it. Now it's fixed." In an imperfect world, you gotta admit that PGP is one of the bright spots.
It's always "wait a minute," isn't it? Tjisana M. Lewis, Product Manager, Emerging Products World-wide Business Management at Hewlett Packard (and who hopefully doesn't have many middle names to remember) wrote in response to the article on Slashdot recently about HP's new print server which runs Linux internally but does not support LDP client printing: "I've read some of the responses and (understandably) there is much speculation on WHY we did not support LPD client printing in the product's first release." She sent the following response, which strongly hints at better Linux support in the future for this product.
"The JetDirect 4000 Print Appliance can send print jobs to any LPD enabled destination whether such destination is a Linux box, JetDirect print server, or any other vendor's print server. Currently the JetDirect 4000 does not receive LPD print jobs, however in a few months, this [and other features] will be available in a free firmware upgrade.
As a vendor with a Linux based product, HP is extremely committed to supporting the Open Source community. We support developers in the Samba team including Jeremy Allison and Andrew Tridgell by contracting with both VA Linux and Linuxcare to develop features for the print appliance. These features are part of the Samba project and will be available to everyone under the GPL. An example is NT Printing functionality that will enable the use of native NT tools and features such as "point and print." Point and print enables automatic downloading of a print driver to a Windows client when the client adds a printer.
Furthermore, HP, in working with SAMBA, adds testing resources during the development process of the release thereby increasing the final quality of the release."
Care for some salt with your wound, Mr. Valenti? Master of Kode Fu writes: "The New York Times has an article quoting MPAA President Jack Valenti saying this: "[it] is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone." He wasn't talking about DeCSS, Napster, Scour, FreeNet or Gnutella -- he said it in 1982 and he was talking about VCRs. He didn't see that VCRs would eventually become as important an income stream for films as box-office sales. Will the MPAA (and similarly, the RIAA) learn from historical precedent, or is file sharing over the 'Net a completely different case with different circumstances?"
Isn't it funny how the fight to prevent consumer taping went away when the companies involved realized that what VCRs really represented was a whole new way to make money? Hmmm. Extend, project, extrapolate ... I smell money here, too. Don't they?
Contribute to the death of excuses! The excuses not to at least try Free software keep dwindling, and it's nicer than strangling dodo birds. Remember when "But there aren't any books!" was a valid complaint about Linux? How about "I can hire MSCEs and know they have at least some knowledge of the systems they purport to administrate -- but there aren't Linux equivalents!"? That one's gone too, for better or for worse. And now, if your boss (or spouse) grouses that there aren't any free, multilingual Linux journals online, not only do you know their excuse barrel is near empty, but you can point them to ... well, let Atif Ghaffar explain:
"LinuxFocus (LF) is a multilingual magazine about the operating system Linux.
LF is managed and produced by Linux volunteers, fans and developers. There is no subscription necessary to read LF, it is freely available on the web with mirrors all over the world.
Lf is published almost every two months. The master website for Linuxfocus is at http://www.linuxfocus.org
Articles this month include pieces on Rebol, a presentation application for X Window, distro reviews, a book review and more. Get it while it's Free!
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The Tragedy of the Digital Commons
Frog writes "The New York Times (reg. req'd) writes about a study by the Xerox PARC Internet Ecologies Area which shows that only a small percentage of Gnutella users actually share files -- the rest just take 'em. The researchers note it's 'hard to generate spontaneous cooperation in large anonymous groups.' As a consequence, the system has degraded performance, and is more vulnerable to censorship or legal action. Maybe the solution is to implement a market system for resource allocation, but how to prevent cheating?" Reminds me of the BBS days of file ratios - 'course then we'd just take an image, resize and upload it, so that idea didn't exactly work as intended. -
Gnutella Vs. SPAM
darekana writes: "I know you've heard the quote: 'Every new medium will be used for sex.' Well, every new medium also appears to be used for advertising. Gnutella vs. Flatplanet.net who will win? From the 'ShareZilla' developers' mouths: 'When the fine folks at Gnutella find a way to filter ShareZilla, we will figure out how to get around their new filters. A subscription to ShareZilla entitles you to that new version of our software at no additional charge.' Beyond the $74.95 (US) initial charge that is." -
Implications For Software Like Napster And Gnutella?
vsync64 asks: "My employer hosts the main Gnutella site, and with the recent ruling against Napster, our servers are being pretty much crushed by the flood of Napster refugees. I'm wondering how much longer people believe this software will be usable. Obviously, given past events such as the whole DeCSS thing, the software will never disappear. Since there is a long tradition of "piracy" and sharing, going back to world-writable FTP sites, IRC channels, and BBSes, the practice won't disappear. I'm just curious as to what options the government and major corporations have in trying to stop it. They could probably get the software removed from the main sites, and possibly enact legislation to criminalize 'systems [and software] for the primary purpose of violating copyright', but what would the media and the unwashed masses think of this? Could copyright violation become stigmatized, much as smoking has, or could such an action be the final straw that turns public opinion against the large corporations once and for all?" -
Implications For Software Like Napster And Gnutella?
vsync64 asks: "My employer hosts the main Gnutella site, and with the recent ruling against Napster, our servers are being pretty much crushed by the flood of Napster refugees. I'm wondering how much longer people believe this software will be usable. Obviously, given past events such as the whole DeCSS thing, the software will never disappear. Since there is a long tradition of "piracy" and sharing, going back to world-writable FTP sites, IRC channels, and BBSes, the practice won't disappear. I'm just curious as to what options the government and major corporations have in trying to stop it. They could probably get the software removed from the main sites, and possibly enact legislation to criminalize 'systems [and software] for the primary purpose of violating copyright', but what would the media and the unwashed masses think of this? Could copyright violation become stigmatized, much as smoking has, or could such an action be the final straw that turns public opinion against the large corporations once and for all?" -
The Ultimate Weapon Against Censorship?
Erik Moeller writes "David Madore, mathematician at ENS, describes a method that might be the ultimate weapon in the battle against Internet censorship. In his paper A method of free speech on the Internet: random pads he introduces a system of so-called pads, chunks of random data that are used to encrypt controversial information.(Read More)Every byte in the source file is XOR'd with exactly one byte in the random file. The result file, by itself, is totally indistinguishable from white noise, provided that the pad used is truly random. Madore now suggests that users store pads on different servers and use several of them in combination to encrypt data.
A FTP or WWW site that stores one of the pads could argue that they are only storing random noise, and another might do the same. It would be mathematically impossible to prove them guilty of storing illegal information (unless there is a way to prove that one pad was created after the other). Only by the combination of the two (or more) files I am able to retrieve the original controversial information. The critical parts are the links to the pads I need to obtain the information, but those might be traded on a distributed system like Gnutella or FreeNet. Plus links take very little space and can be relocated easily to freespace ISPs.
The concept is a little more complicated than my summary here, so please read the paper (and mirror it, it's GPL'd!). There are already scripts and programs to create pads and restore the original files (including a GUI program for Win32). I might add that the idea of pad encryption is fairly old, already used in WWII -- its advantage is that it is mathematically safe if the pads are truly random and only used once, thus its name "One Time Pad"."
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SightSound To Distribute Films Via Gnutella
asonthebadone writes: "The online video firm SightSound.com plans to distribute feature movie content with Gnutella. The film content will be 'protected' by Microsoft's Digital Rights Management System. The article from CNET goes on to quote various security 'experts' as stating that Gnutella is "fundamentally insecure" and that its usage would sow the "seed of one's destruction". If you're looney enough to run a file of unknown origin with a .vbs extension, that would be referred to as Darwinism." (More)Carnage4Life writes with more details: "Sightsound has put up for grabs on the Gnutella network a dozen encrypted movie files from Miramax Films, for which SightSound has secured online distribution rights. Once people obtain the file, they are required to rent or purchase a license to view the movie. [...] If this works this could spell the beginning of the embrace of online digital distribution of movies, music and other forms of IP by the entertainment industry. Maybe then all the Napster madness will be over."
So long as it's a greater inconvenience (or a large enough moral dilemma) to crack such files for a critical mass of people, it seems like everybody could win here.