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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."
I did not mean to imply that DA is guaranteed by law to get paid, but he does have the right to place restrictions on who is allowed to copy his work and in the case of most professional authors one requirement is that the copier pays the author some money.
The GPL is an example where copyright holds but does not require payment.
Lack of payment does not negate copyright, as it says in Title 17 section 107 paragraph 1 (the exclusive right to make or allow copies - no mention of selling or giving away the copy: a copy is a copy) and in para 3 (phonorecords) it specifically states "by sale or other transfer of ownership" of copies.
The flaw in your argument is that you are suggesting that copyright law has nothing to do with copying and is instead about selling. I know that there are some differences in the US copyright law compared to the UK but I doubt that they are as fundimental as that.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Well the site had to move a few times because it could't handle the traffic. The creator also ended up getting ripped off by a banner ad company that didn't belive the traffic was real.
Wben something becomes succesfull online these days, it almost always collapses under it's own weight unless lots of $$$ come in to prop it up.
Mojo nation (and other distributed system) are hopefully going to ensure that people can afford to publish rich (bandwidth eating) content and are going to get compensated for the effort.
I really hope this takes off.
When it absolutely, positively, has to be there...
When it absolutely positively has to be there.
Actually, it's not even a content-trading system --- it's a resource-trading system. It deals in market infrastructure resources: money and market stalls where things can be traded. It does not deal in the content that individual traders happen to put on those stalls --- that's up to the individuals concerned, which as always will comprise both saints and devils. Such is the world we live in.
That makes the AC poster's comment doubly irrelevant. If he prefers the Napster model rather than give and take then he's precisely the kind of freeloader that the system is designed to marginalize. And if he's only interested in content restrictions then he'd do better talking to the people that provide that content, not to the banks and subcontractors that supply the medium of exchange and the poles and planks. I hope he's good at missionary work; reforming the world will be an uphill struggle.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
What piracy? You don't know what's in those files on your drive, and nor does anyone else, so they can't say that they're pirated. They're not identifiable by you. You'd need the decryption keys for a whole pile of dinodes to be able to identify them, and you don't have 'em.
You certainly can't be accused of pirating an unknown thing.
In any event, why are you concentrating on pirated goods? Mojo Nation (and more advanced systems which will be even more heavily distributed) have the potential of becoming a far better repository for all information on the planet than anything currently in existence. Only a tiny fraction of all this material is contentious.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I can't recall the number of times I see someone getting something interesting from me, but when I try to check their list, they are sharing nothing (this continues to be true even after Napster recent fixes).
It's easy if you are using a Napster clone such as Gnapster I just set my upload directory to some non-existant directory, and boom, no more sharing.
I steal files all the time. I'd certainly never buy the stuff. I didn't before, so what sales, exactly are being lost? The stuff I actually WOULD buy, I do anyway. (Not that it ever does the artist much good the way the business world is currently organized.)
And what's with the example you picked? Salon magazine? Canada's leading magazine for the professional beauty industry? News Flash, asshole; Salon doesn't make a thin dime from their actual paper sales. It's all advertising, baby! In fact, in the magazine biz, if they experience a 20% sell-through on the news stands, it's considered a bonanza. The rest, thousands upon thousands of copies made from prime Canadian rain forest, get hauled to the dumpster. (To the recycle bin? Hmph. All that hot press, clayed, glossy paper doesn't do too well in the recycle vats, kipper-my-man.)
So fuck Salon. They're ad whores. Plus, who the hell cares about beauty secrets, anyway? The whole beauty biz is pretty much totally evil. I like my girls sans make-up, thank you kindly.
Typical of people like you to choose a stupid, evil example to uphold a stupid, evil world view.
-Fantastic Lad, The Most Caustic Lad of Them All!
So 1 mojo is worth X CPU cycles (as the market will bear).
Eventually this might be related to dollars:
Y dollars = 1 mojo = X CPU cycles.
But avaliable CPU cycles are getting cheaper very rapidly (Moore's Law). So the value of 1 mojo should be decreasing very rapidly right?
A digial currecny that is constantly deflating in value (compared to dollars) seems like it's headed for problems.
-Harry
Tipping isn't the answer. It cannot support an industry. Advertising/sponsorship is the wave to surf on...
--
DigitalContent PAC
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
You don't have to run their proxy; it just lets you access http://mojonation.net/dinode/ style URLs. If you want to, you could set up your apache/junkbuster/whatever proxy to do the mapping instead. Access the conf/broker/intropage.html file with your browser if you don't want to use the proxy. You just lose the ability to access other peoples' hyperlinked references to mojo content.
...who own printing presses. In Mojo Nation there is no "big iron and bandwidth to host this stuff", that is all provided by the Mojo Nation infrastructure. In other words everyone contributed a part of this big iron and bandwidth and gets "paid" for the percentage they are throwing in to answering a request.
How about this for a possibility: what if the cost of pulication was next to nothing (but not zero or else it is too easy to flood the network) and the cost of distribution was paid for by the user who actually download the data. In other words almost no cost to publish to the net. In return for the faustian bargain I will allow users to be fair (by leaving a tip) which is about the only thing we have come up with yet for artist compensation, but if others have better ideas please let us know
jim
Although it would generally benefit everyone, what exactly is the incentive for publishing data? It costs you 'Mojo', and you get nothing back for it because people download it from other users. Am I missing something here?
The reason that you have to "pay" for items you download, is the same reason that some anonymous FTP sites have ratios. They are trying to enforce quality. By publishing items, or relaying requests, you enhancing the network and furthering the development. Or idea would be great, except you get the problem that gnutella has, that is it won't scale.
I don't see a privacy policy on the site either.
wrighty.
Filter out the 56k/128 users. 9/10 downloads work fine for me on a Cable modem...
--
DigitalContent PAC
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
Think out of the box, Jafac.
Mindshare is important for a business selling an image, lifestyle, and name. As for the file-sharing dilution problem, all it takes is for 'interface' gateways that translate one network to another. So that a search on Gnutella gets routed to random machines that, automagically, happen to speak Gnutella and Freenet and Napster, etc, protocols. If, for example, you had a translator for Mojonation to search Gnutella, Freenet, or Napster, it would just look like the entire Gnutella, Freenet, or Napster network is just another user with a large number of files to offer.
Same from the other end.
As for the 'totdc' thing, it just means Mojonation won't allow Gnutella, Napster, etc, to plunder the Mojo network without some function of uploads as well.
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
I was under the impression from the docs that it actually COSTS Mojo to upload. Ways to GET Mojo basically revolved around donating hardware resources (storage, cpu, bandwidth). You can't actually get Mojo for sending your own data, you have to send data that the system has stored on your drive.
That being said, where the vision will fall flat is nobody's going to pay to publish the porn and warez and MP3's that make up 90% of the Napster/Gnutella traffic when you can still get it through Napster/Gnutella for free.
Ok wtf, how do these types of comments get "+4 informative"? First of all, it's a damn FAQ, anyone can point to it. Second, you don't frigging need to post the whole thing, JUST LINK TO IT. You mod's are just begging to get it up the ass in metamoderation.
It's pretty easy to figure out, especially if you bother to read the first sentence of his post. The writer specifically says "Yo, things are really slow on this site, close to being totally slashdotted, so I'm posting this here."
By linking to the FAQ, he would've only contributed to the site's being slashdotted that much faster, for that much longer. By posting the relevant info there, it saves all sorts of "what-the-hell-is-this-thing?" clicks.
I agree that in most cases it's redundant and annoying for people to do nothing other than quote from the source, but in this instance (considering the weight that file-sharing technologies have around here) I think it was justified. Hopefully the meta-mods will be able to see that too.
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
=(.\')=
I have one main problem with Mojo Nation, or any other bandwidth-sharing system: my university imposes a flat maximum of 500MB per day. After that, my port is shut down and can't be re-enabled until I talk with our security folks (which is a real pleasure). If Mojo Nation had a feature to limit total bandwidth used per day, or even better, throttle bandwidth (perhaps even dynamic throttling as a certain maximum is reached), it would be far more preferable to people in my situation!
let 'em do something useful for a change, instead of chasing balls of yarn around.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
As for your reference to Title 17 section 107 paragraphs 1 and 3, you really mean section 106 don't you ? There is no such phrase in section 107. Another nitpick: in legelese don't say "negate copyright", because that means something else. Say "infringe copyright." I think "negating a copyright" means that the copyright holder looses everything he was given -- for example if he infringed on someone else's copyright by putting their stuff in his work. It is obvious that if I make a photocopy of DA's work his copyright to it does not vanish.
And finally, why are you wrong ? Because of the modifier clause where it says "Subject to sections 107 through 121." Those are the sections that outline "fair use".
The whole of Section 106:
Subject to sections 107 through 121, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
Finally, if you go to look at the Sections 107 through 121 that this is subject to, the first thing you see is:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include - .
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature . .
There's more to it, I won't quote the whole thing here; it is kind of vague, but you have a lot more work to do to make an argument that uncompensated copying doesn't fall under fair use.
If you want to see an actual court rulling, in which someone made thousands of copies of Word and other commercial software and was ruled to not be in infringement of copyrights because they didn't receive money for it, look at US vs. LaMachia. Search for the phrase "what LaMacchia is alleged to have done is not criminal conduct."
Do you happen to know where I could get a copy of British copyright law online ?
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.
--
Jim, can one choose not to store any sharemaps on one's own machine, but instead to buy that storage and/or reassembly service from another site in exchange for Mojo?
I ask because some people will want to be able to state categorically that it is impossible for them to know anything at all about even a single block on the basis of information held on their own machinery. Possession of a sharemap may undermine that. Without that guarantee, your client base will not grow as quickly as it might otherwise.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
It's all good having these multiple technologies, but being able to be caught is always risky. Lets face it, at some stage some script kiddies will be sharing their c00L war3z d00d, and it's all goind to go to crap - and especially so if there's even a hint of a financial transaction.
The chaps at iMesh (http://www.imesh.com/) are trying to do something a bit more distributed. I don't think it's quite there yet, but it's a start. I guess it means that iMesh themselves aren't going to have to purchase a bulk order of KY in the near future, but their luzers might.
Winblows clients only, unfortunately, so I'd also recommend a trip to http://antivirus.cai.com/ for the latest InnoculatePE.
DA has the right to prevent you copying his work. That is granted to him by Congress.
Books do come with a licence: its printed on the page with the copyright notice (this book is sold under the condition...). The bookseller is bound by this and the conditions of ownership normally include a price to the bookseller. S/he may then give away the book, but s/he can't copy it and sell or give the copies away.
As regards 107, the exceptions listed are for portions of a work, the bigger the portion the less "fair" it is. The bit about "commercial nature" is actually saying that the judge should be more generous on the interpretation of fair use if it is not for commercial use, which is in line with para 4 which says that the more you affect the value of the work the more likely you are to fall foul of the law. But saying that non-commercial use gets you off the hook completly is too much to hope for in court. Which is where the discussion started.
Read that section again and think about what it would mean under your system - can it really be saying that quoting small parts of a work is less "fair use" than larger parts or the entire work? It doesn't make sense.
It says that these are factors to be considered, not that these factors are ones which can be used only by the defense.
In short, it is fair use to quote portions, to use a text for education or to make other uses which do not, in the judge's opinion, affect the value of, or market for, the work. Giving the work away for free is definately going to affect both of those. but, again, the judge can be lenient if the effect is small, if s/he chooses.
LaMacchia was charged with the wrong crime and, under the Wire Fraud Statute, found not-guilty. The decision specifically states that it is not a copyright decision, only a fraud one. Indeed, it is hard to see how giving things away can be any sort of fraud.
I can't find UK copyright law on line, with a quick search on Google, but I'll have another look tonight.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
This has some serious consequences which IMHO partially defy the purpose of mojonet as a fair, decentralized, anonymous and censorship proof way of file-sharing:
- fairness: The value of the mojo currecy is not only determined be the market but also by the total ammount of mojo available, which is controlled by a single company. Should mojonation.net e.g. decide to double the amount of mojo tokens for some marketing campaign, this alone would halve the value of your mojo account.
- centralisation: All efforts to decentralize technical ressources, while improving scalability, don't make the system itself any more robust than more centralized approaches (like e.g. napster) as the bookkeeping server still remains a single point of failure for the whole system. And for the case that mojonation.net goes out of bussiness, besides from not being able to use the service anymore, users would also suffer material losses as their accounts are nullified over night.
- anonymity: Any user will regularily have to contact the central bookkeeping server. Monitoring the activity of this server allows to identify the IPs of all users and the amount of their activity.
- censorship: A central server also means that there is someone to sue, for whatever reason, legimate or not. Considering the fact that mojonation.net is based in the US, it is only a matter of time until they are forced to implement restrictions or shut down their service. This is especially unfair to non-US users who are put at the mercy of a foreign legislation which has a notorious track record when it comes to intellectual property. (Remember that, unlike a "stateless" system like e.g. napster, with MojoNation, users are forced to pay (money or recources) in advance befor they have a chance to get anything back, so it is legitimate to expect some reliability.)
An obvoius solution for the above problem would be to not only decentralize the resources but also the mojo itself i.e. to allow multiple currencies: anybody who thinks that he is trustworthy enough to other users can issue his own mojo-brand and set up a standardized bookkeeping server.Users can then decide which "currencies" they accept and besides the other 4 services they can run on their brokers, can also offer to change currencies for other users at rates they define for themselves. This way, you can use market mechanisms to sort out untrustworty currencies and give the users the choice to decide for themselves where to put their virtual cash.
I still don't get it. What happens when mojonation.net no longer exists? How does one connect to other users without using the mojonation.net site? For example, mojonation is sued and ordered to take mojonation.net offline. As far as I can tell, the system depends on the existence of the mojonation.net domain name.
You are still wrong. I will send a more detailed reply via email this weekend.
But here is the summary: DA doesn't have the right to prevent me from doing anything. He has the right to recover from me in explicit ways for explicit acts. If congress wanted to say simply "unauthorized reproduction is prohibited", they could have said so in those four words. But they didn't. They spent the majority of the effort on the bill building an admittedly vague exception. I believe that under some circumstances photocopying a book might run afoul of the law, even if you didn't get money for that; but the tendency of the legislature is to spell out what you can't do explicitly and leave everything else vague; so the fact it doesn't explicitly prevent me from making copies is in my favor.
I'm not interested in excerpt or partial reproduction at all. Let's leave that out to keep it simple.
What I will send you this weekend, provided I can find them, will be a court case citation in which someone photocopied a book and was let off for it. I won't use the LaMachia case, but the rulling does explicitly state that that his actions didn't run afoul of the copyright statutes; the Judge was observing that the prosecution was seaking to make their case with the Wire Fraud exactly because they couldn't make their case under copyright.
Wikki - Your just plain wrong. The reason this idea is far superior to Napster and especially Gnutella is the fact that Mojo Nation has built-in incentive to share. The tragedy that is the Gnutella Commons, is that less than 1% of the people using it account for over 50% of the files shared. That means that most of the people are leaching off the system. With Mojo Nation, the more you share the more you get in return. Such a system will encourage a tremedous growth of the commons and is sure to see a massive proliferation of high quality material in no time.
www.enthea.org
OK, so Napster isn't great, in terms of it allowing prirating of music, but it isn't too bad if people keep buying the CD's they like. It's a pitty they decided to make money off the scheme, otherwise they would have a better case in court. But Mojo is blatently allowing people to "sell" stuff that they have no rights to eg. warez, mp3. If this ever becomes popular, the warez scene will just get even bigger.
Hi guys.
I just thought I'd interject with a few facts about Mojonation.
1. You do not need content to get Mojo. You can let people use your computer's resources.
2. You can exchange mojo for cash and vice versa (ie. if you don't like to trade files, sell your resources instead - this may be a great way for companies to use idle computers)
3. Mojonation is built to scale. It won't choke like Gnutella.
Please folks, read the damn article before you post. You just come off like idiots otherwise.
rLowe
----- rL
Given enough time Mojo will stabilize on a price the market is willing to bear - making it a true totally decentralized non-state issued currency. The potential of this is incredibly liberating, and I am totally exicited about it. This is great news folks!
www.enthea.org
Interesting. However, what's to prevent me from publishing to myself? There's a minimal cost to store the maps, and to publish the content description, but (using a custom agent) I simply keep the three gig on hand as a real file (And construct the blocks requested on the fly, to boot)
Now we have a situation much like the fake gnutella links... a fast way to procure mojo.
In fact, storing and offering from your own system (paying yourself to upload) is probably going to be required for things like freenapscourtella (.com) gateways.
I don't know the underlying technology of mojo well enough yet to see if that's possible. (On freenet, it's possible, but the data migrates off your system rapidly based on the closeness of it's content hash)
A system like this would make sure that an inappropriate document (Like, say, the Constitution and the first ten ammendments) dosn't accidentally get lost. One (or more) interested parties can always make sure they have it, likely at a higher price. "mirrors" can download "popular" data and offer it at a cheaper price.
I didn't see a hardcore technical document on mojo's underlying topology, so I'm gonna go back to reading dox and source now.
--Dan
do you really think anything as downright subversive as this has a snowball's chance in hell?
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
To build an effective network of people with obscure songs and fast connections, a service must first be popular. Too many people like Napster's close-to-leeching format to switch to a service like MojoNation. MojoNation is great for the geeks like us, but it doesn't seem like a system that will ever go mainstream. Which means that I can't get live radiohead mp3s from 100 different t1 users. :(
According to AcronymFinder, MoJo is short for a mag called Mother Jones.
Life is a disease, sexually transmitted and fatal.
Where have I seen this before?
Oh wait, it was on Slashdot! Man, this site is always way behind compared to Slashdot!
Sign me up!
The question is tho, can you make more money than it costs to purchase the hdd space?
Or do you just do it for sheer fun of it?
Whenever I ask a businessman what his service cost and I get a lot of hee-hawing about how "it depends", red lights immediately start flashing.
...
Ok, so you read the article. Why are you making points about a businessman when Jim McCoy is a programmer? A lot of this stuff is still up in the air because they are creating a new market and essentially just a big grey area. Sometimes things are just a little less cut and dry than what we'd like, but we still try them out
People will flood the system with 3 gig files titled 'nakedgirl.mpg' in order to cash in.
That might be true in the short term, but the people that upload crap are going to be labelled as users that upload crap (and when they open a new account they start with no mojo again). If your theory was correct, a web site (and business model) like eBay just plain wouldn't work at all. People would be too busy ripping other people off than having productive auctions - and this just isn't the case.
Sometimes people just have to be trusted. Of course, a good system (like eBay's) helps, but ultimately it comes down to good people who want to use the system as intended.
rLowe
----- rL
"Windows is going the way of Phlogiston"
So you admit that Phlogiston holds up almost 90% of th3e Celestial Sphere?
Not all BBS's went away... they just aren't on the net (for the most part) and so they have low visibility.
In order for this sort of thing to ever become popular enough to be functional (hit the critical point) it will have to be easier to use. This program inolves way too many steps for the everyday napster user to bother going through (changing proxies, running DOS programs, etc).
For this to be viable it needs to be available in a single windows executable package. Otherwise it'll be doomed, like so many other neat toys, to the hacker-nerd doldrums.
--
RumorsDaily
I guess I can argue against Mojonation in another way (really, I'm just trolling ;-),
With Hotline, if you "share" your MP3 collection, yet collect banner revenue, it's illegal, because the sharing is not non-commercial, and therefore is not protected by "fair use".
With Napster, sharing your MP3's with the world IS legal, because it's non-commercial - protected by "fair use".
With Mojonation, you're in-effect, selling your MP3's that you share for Mojo. Which gives you the privilege to buy more MP3's. Which means Mojo is a form of currency (like Slashdot karma, ho ho ho!), I suppose enough ambiguity there to keep a whole BMW-dealership-full of lawyers in Armani socks for the next 5 years. Perhaps it's more of a commodity. Goodie, then the gummint can TAX it. (which is why I troll, because I'm afraid that if Gore's elected, I'll be paying the IRS for my high-karma next April).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticising Mojonation, I'm not trying to say it's a bad thing, it's just that, for a global (world-wide, earth-encompassing) search, fragmenting humanity's free-MP3 library under these various services will make certain rare bits harder to find, and, of course, there's that commercial ambiguity with Mojo.
True, the "genetic variety" issue makes it more survivable, as a whole. . . I guess it's an inevitable stage of evolution. (with the final stage being no further legal inhibitions, and all systems being interoperable such that a single point can be searched for that Bathroom recording of Wierd Al's "Another one rides the bus".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Since when was it an illegal filetrading scheme?
Even if some people (mis)use it that way, it's a content-trading scheme and a Generally Cool Idea.
That's why I care -- not because of how people will or won't use it, but because the way it works is based on a novel idea. It's called 'geek factor' and is an important concept 'round here. 'Twould be a good thing if you'd familiarize yourself with it.
First of all, I understand that Mojonation intends to back Mojo with real cash.
Second, what 'voluntary' thing? I just grepped through the article and didn't see that word on any of the three pages. It most certainly _isn't_ voluntary -- when you download something, you pay everyone else involved in the transaction like-it-or-not. Maybe you've got the ability to choose to give people some additional Mojo, but you don't get anything free.
I think such a "what is the best music sharing tool?" discussion, meight end up in a holy war, because you have at least the Developers of Napster and Gnutella spporting their own tools.
Napster has also an Advantage, they have many registered users using their Tool and Network.
At last but not least there meight be problems with the Law. I think, that we don't know whether it is illegal to offer tools like Napster (even if they are "Free Software").
Is it appears that the system will go a long ways towards preventing broken transfers and the D/L of incomplete files - one of the primary problems plagueing Napster and Gnutella. Since it costs Mojo to publish, it's unlikely someone would bother to publish something incomplete, and since the file has to be fully uploaded before it's registered (AFAICT), no downloading unfinished uploads.
That feature alone may be Mojo's salvation.
If congress wanted to say simply "unauthorized reproduction is prohibited", they could have said so in those four words. But they didn't.
No, they used the words:
which is more than 4 but it means the same thing. The following section (107) then lists exceptions which I covered in the previous answer and revolve around a) educational use, and b) use which is not likely to reduce the market for the work.
I believe that under some circumstances photocopying a book might run afoul of the law, even if you didn't get money for that;
Every UK library has to have (by law) a notice posted above the photocopiers stating that copying >5% of a work (maps have a special section) is illegal. Have a look in your local library; perhaps US ones have a similar notice. In any case copying a whole work (which you do not own a copy of) for non-educational/research use seems very clearly against the combined statements of 106 and 107. If you copy a book from the library, say, you have reduced the market for that book by 1. This is not allowed.
the fact it doesn't explicitly prevent me from making copies is in my favor.
But 106 does specifically say you need the author's permission. Copying it without permission is the very first thing section 106 says you can't do. Therefore its up to you to show that you fall under one of the exceptions.
Well, could be, but I suspect that in fact the reason was that they were unsure if copyright covered software (it didn't in the US until quite recently).
I will send a more detailed reply via email this weekend.
Okay, I look forward to it.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I started using mojo nation and it seems quite easy to make an abusive client.
-Compenguin
That post was commented at slashdot readers, not the editors. :)
----- rL
I always wanted my mojo risin! heheh what the heck is MOJO! this sounds really wacked, the common currency, mojo. funny really I can't stop saying it.
Conversation between a medium ISP Vice President (w/ a marketing degree) and Systems Engineer:
VP: Great! Here's a way we can earn some residual money on all this extra hard drive space we have that's not in use
SE: I don't think it's all that secure Sir.....
VP: We have our firewall, right?
SE: Yes, but it won't.......
VP: Nonsense! With the extra money we earn with this, we can afford to keep you.
SE: but.. but... but..
VP: Just get it done. My wife and I are going to pick up our new BMW and get lunch at Chez' Restaurant. I'll be back at 3:30. I want to see it finished when I get back.
File sharing has occupied the high moral, if not legal, ground only because no money has been involved; neither the sharer or sharee made or lost anything as a result of the sharing. The moment people start making $$$ of of others' work like this, that high moral position is lost. This inherent unfairness of Mojo Nation will only serve as ammunition for those struggling to modify the legal system to crush all aspects of Fair Use under Copyright law (as, in, "look at this! The DMCA really was needed after all! We need more laws like that...").
This thing seems to use some sort of http proxy (thats as far as I read the docs). That sucks - I already have a junkbuster/apache filter/cache set up, and I'm not giving that up just to earn some sort of weird currency and get hacked by kidd3z.
Oh well. A little reading (and that's not much since the docs are sparse ATM) reveals that you don't have to give up anything in this case. C'este la vie!
/*
What the hell is the difference between an "amature pirate" and a "professional pirate" ?
While your observation that the compensation aspect of this makes a big difference, you shouldn't imply that uncompensated file copying is in anyway illegal. The big copyright holding interests out there would certainly like to spread that idea, but let them spread their lies on their dollar, don't help them out for free.
Jim McCoy, Mojo Nation and the Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow are obviously just tools of the Illuminati.
Fnord.
Mojo Nation will not monitor your browsing. It simply mirrors the mojonation.net web site on your local box.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Even so, surely it could still go either way legally.
Is a quarter of a block of illegal data still illegal data?
Is lack of knowledge of the contents a defence, despite the fact that you knowingly allowed your computer to be used for storage?
Since the location of at least four of the eight blocks has to be found to retrieve a file, doesn't this just mean four to eight people can be sued for illegally hosting one file, instead of the usual one person sued?
Certainly makes the legal issues more complicated, but doesn't seem to remove them entirely.
Question for you, Greg, something the interviewer in the Salon article didn't dwell on too much. What redundancy is there if some of the blocks for a file on Mojo nation are inaccessible, like if they've settled into the shifting-sands of dial-up dynamic IPs? It sounds like the Gnutella scaling bottleneck is just being replaced with a "lost fragments" problem in this system. Say it ain't so!
Isn't IBM doing this?
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Mojo seems like a cool idea, and using Mojo seems like an excellent way to force people to share. But I was wondering why I should use Mojo Nation when I can use programs like Scour or Napster which are free. I could be a leech and not share anything there. What would Mojo Nation offer to a leech to get him to stop leeching?
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
You are correct that there are problems with the fast and shallow analysis that you seem to present, so here are the fast answers to why these problems will not be the major problem that you claim:
1) You get credit for content you publish so there is an incentive to publish lots of random crap.
This is untrue. You do not get Mojo to posting content, you get Mojo for reselling blocks of data to others. In fact, in Mojo Nation there is a minor cost imposed for publication to prevent people from doing the sorts of stupid attacks which you mention. Mojo Nation is built assuming a society of dishonest, distrustful agents. Your agent doesn't get paid (by my agent) until you deliver the goods.
We are also working on a simple collaberative filtering system to allow users to filter out the bad metadata in the system. If someone publishes 3 gb of random noise it will get a few hits and the users will be able to pass back to the content tracker a complaint that the description did not match the content, as a few of these pile up the content description gets fewer hits on search requests and eventually the blocks fade away because no one will buy them.
2) What is the "price" of Mojo.
The reason I tried to avoid that question is that the answer is a little too complex to distill into a sound bite. A unit of Mojo represents a slice of the current capabilities of the system as a whole. If you perform work for me now I give you credits, in the future when the network is larger those credits will represent a slice of a much larger pie and so have increased in value when you spend them. If the network collapses (as you predict) then the only value of those credits are that the company running Mojo Nation will redeem them for storage/message passing service on our own systems.
The problem with quoting a "price" is that everyone will dig it up later and call you a liar for not being able to successfully predict the future product of several different unknown variables in this equation (how large is the network vs. total tokens in circulation, what is the raw replacement cost of the resources, what sort of discount are users willing to make on these resources to attract customers, what is the current demand for each resource in our basket [is bandwidth scare this hour, perhaps disk space?])
Mojo is a mechanism for keeping score in peer to peer systems. The real-dollar value depends on the demand for the services and the supply in the pool. Please don't claim that I am an idiot just because I have a basic understanding of which claims one can and cannot make regarding a future market condition.
jim
Got my mojo risin' all right..... SCHWING!!!!!!!
looks like the site is about to be ./ed (it was dead slow for me and I am on a T1) So here's the FAQ's
.exe
1. What is Mojo Nation?
Mojo Nation is a worldwide system that enables us to publish and share any kind of data, like
text, sounds, moving and still pictures, and other binary files.
1.1 What makes Mojo Nation different from other file-sharing systems?
Other file-sharing systems are plagued by "the tragedy of the commons," in which rational folks
using a shared resource eat the resources to death. Most often, the "Tragedy of the Commons"
refers to farmers and pasture, but technology journalists are writing about users who download
and download but never contribute to the system. In Mojo Nation, every transaction costs some
Mojo, and as one's Mojo credit limit is reached, one must contribute *something* -- whether
resources or cash -- to the community.
1.2 Is Mojo Nation rated G, PG-13, R, or XXX?
We have no idea. Each file published to Mojo Nation is broken into several small pieces, and
then each of those pieces is broken into eight more pieces and encrypted so securely that finding
the key to the code is as difficult as finding an atom in the sun. The result is that one cannot learn
whether a file is on Mojo Nation or not except by trying to download that specific file.
2. Why isn't the Mojo Nation software working for me?
The three most common reasons we have encountered are:
* The user hasn't started his Broker before launching the gateway page on his web browser.
Under Windows, double-click "Start Mojo Broker" on the desktop. Under Linux, run Broker in
the command shell.
* The Windows software didn't install because Internet Explorer for Windows stripped the
extension from the installation program.
Right-click on the label under the mojonation-beta-0_90-win98 icon and rename the file
mojonation-beta-0_90-win98.exe.
* The user hasn't set the web proxy.
Internet Explorer 4.0: Go to the View menu, pull down "Internet Options...", then click on the
"Connection" tab. Select the "Access the Internet using a proxy server" checkbox, and enter
"localhost" into the "Address:" field and "8000" into the "Port" field. (Users running a later version
of Explorer also have to click "LAN Settings".)
Netscape Communicator 4.7: Go to the Edit menu, and pull down "Preferences". In the Category
window, select "Advanced". The "Advanced" tree will open, then select "Proxies". The Proxies
configuration window opens, then select the "Manual proxy configuration" radio button, and click
the "View" button.
2.1 What does the web proxy do?
If the web proxy is enabled, your browser -- instead of connecting to the host specified in a
http://mojonation.net URL -- connects to the proxy. It is then the proxy's task to make the
connection and return the requested resource. This will be invisible to Mojo Nation users.
2.11 Does using the web proxy reveal my browsing activity to mojonation.net?
No. The proxy runs on your local machine, and it does not log any of your activities nor does it
ever contact mojonation.net for any reason.
When you view a normal web page like "http://www.plastic_daisies_for_sale.com/", the proxy is
transparent -- it doesn't do anything but pass the web page through to your browser, exactly like
normal web surfing. When you view a Mojo Nation page, like "http://mojonation.net/broker/" or
"http://mojonation.net/id/XXXX"[XXXX Zooko: insert cool mojonation id here--Zooko
2000-09-28], the proxy intercepts your request and satisfies it without ever contacting
mojonation.net.
2.2 What if I don't want to use the web proxy?
In Linux, with your Broker running, open the intropage in ~/.mojonation/broker/intropage.html. In
Windows, with your Broker running, open the intropage in C:\Program Files\Mojo
Nation\config\broker\intropage.html.
2.3 Why do I get a symbol not found error from Windows when I try and run the
software?
One error we have seen (most often on Windows NT) is due to older versions of
MSVCRT.DLL being on the system elsewhere and in use by another application (check in
C:\Windows\System\). Our install program does not currently handle this properly. You need to
manually replace the old MSVCRT.DLL file with the new one from the mojonation directory.
3. What is Mojo?
Mojo is Mojo Nation's "digital currency". In the Mojo Nation distributed computing environment,
in which all the computers are joined by a common software, users may choose to contribute
disk space, bandwidth, and processing cycles to the network in exchange for Mojo. Users are
enabled to set their own prices for these online resources.
3.1 How many Mojo are in one dollar?
There is no fixed Mojo-to-dollar ratio. Mojo is exchanged for unused disk space, bandwidth,
and processing cycles, and Mojo is transferred from user to user with tokens -- when we move
past beta, users will be able to buy and sell the tokens for what the market will bear.
3.2 What do the "Mojo coming in" and "Mojo going out" numbers on my Stash page
mean?
The Mojo Nation barter system revolves around credit one user's Broker extends to another.
The Mojo doesn't move until one Broker owes another 10,000 Mojo -- because every
conversation between Brokers on Mojo Nation involves some cost in Mojo, it would be too
burdensome to make a digital token payment each time. So, the "Mojo coming in" total is the
sum of all the Mojo promised to you in an IOU but not yet delivered. The "Mojo going out" total
is the amount of Mojo promised by you.
3.21 I thought beta users were granted one million Mojo to start! Why do I have fewer
than one million Mojo? Auuuugh!
When you first use your account, it takes a little while for your Mojo to gather. Eventually, your
Stash page will report that cool million, give or take that couple of Mojo you earn or spend while
you're on the network. Also, if you halt your Broker while that million is still being credited to
your account, that won't stop the accumulation.
3.3 On my Stash page, I have more Mojo going out than coming in. Why?
The two main reasons are:
It costs Mojo to publish something to the system. When you publish a file, your Broker has to
pay block servers to store the pieces. Further, too much supply, not enough demand. The system
hasn't yet attracted enough users whose Brokers will pay for downloads.
If you're using a relay server, you're paying for it steadily. Mojo Nation users behind a firewall
need to employ a relay server outside the firewall that will hold messages for them until their
Broker goes out to pick them up. However, each time the Broker asks the relay server if there
are any messages there for it, the Broker has to pay the relay server a bit of Mojo.
3.4 How do I earn Mojo?
By running services for other users. Clicking "configure" at the main menu enables you to run
block servers, content trackers, publication trackers, and relay servers, and to set prices for each
of those services.
3.5 If I accumulate enough Mojo, can I buy beer/friends/France?
Eventually. The best-known distributed computing project -- SETI@Home -- accumulated
about 300,000 years of computing time in its first year of operation. If they shared that time with
Mojo Nation for a year, and ran every service while charging default prices, they'd certainly earn
enough to buy beer.
3.6 Can I earn Mojo in Mojo Nation while writing The Great American Novel in my
word processor?
Yes. You don't have to be using the Mojo Nation gateway in order to earn Mojo, as long as
your Broker is running in the command shell (Linux) or MS-DOS window (Windows). Some of
us leave our Brokers on all day, running in the background while we perform other tasks.
4. What is a relay server?
A relay server works like a mailbox for users who are behind a firewall. When the firewalls block
incoming messages from reaching the Brokers -- the agents which run the whole show -- the
relay servers sit outside the firewall and hold messages for the Brokers. The Brokers can go
outside the firewall and retrieve the messages, then bring them back in for processing.
4.1 Why should I choose to run a relay server?
Users who elect to operate a relay server (by clicking "on" for "Relay Server" on the Configure
page) earn gobs of Mojo because the Brokers who work behind the relay server (that is, those
folks behind the firewalls) are continually asking it if there are any messages there for it and are
therefore paying a steady toll in Mojo.
4.2 I'm behind a firewall, but the Mojo Nation software didn't detect it, so my Broker
isn't getting any replies to the messages it sends out. How can I make sure I use a relay
server?
There is an option on the configure page called "Behind A Firewall" that you should change to
"On", save the config, and restart your Broker software.
Alternatively: edit your Broker configuration file (in Unix systems, it's
~/.mojonation/broker/broker.conf, or in Windows, the default path is C:\Program
Files\mojonation\config\broker\broker.conf) and change the "SERVE_USING_A_RELAY"
setting under "YES_NO" to "yes".
4.21 Editing my Broker configuration file seems to be hazardous, since it determines
how my Broker interacts with the system.
Yes, so keep a backup copy, and keep in mind that the tabbing is vital.
4.3 I'm behind a firewall, but don't want to pay a relay server. How can I punch holes in
my firewall?
Consult your firewall documentation.
4.4 Which TCP/UDP ports should I open for Mojo Nation?
Once you've started your Broker, look in its output or log file for a line containing
"TCPCommsHandler: successfully bound to port NNNN" to find out the port number you are
using.
If you wish to use a specific port number, edit your config file and change these settings:
TRANSACTION_MANAGER_LISTEN_PORT:
This is the port you are actually listening on locally.
TRANSACTION_MANAGER_PICKY_PORT: false
If true, this means "barf if I can't get the listen port listed above." Otherwise it'll keep trying other
port numbers until it finds one that works.
People setting things up behind firewalls with tunnels through them may also need to change
these:
TRANSACTION_MANAGER_ANNOUNCED_PORT:
You are announcing to the rest of the world that this is the port on which you are running. If you
have a tunnel through a masquerading/nat firewall, you want to set this to the appropriate port on
the masquerating/nat firewall.
IP_ADDRESS_OVERRIDE:
This is the IP address that your Broker announces to others. If you have a tunnel through a
masquerading/nat firewall, you want to set this to the IP address of the masquerating/nat firewall.
5. Where's the Macintosh version of Mojo Nation?
Ask again after OS X is released. It will be easier to port Mojo Nation to Macintosh under
Macintosh OS X because it is derived from BSD Unix, and the engineers around here are all
Unix nerds.
6. May I publish content to Mojo Nation that no one else can see?
Yes. In the Publish window, click "Browse" to publish a single file, or type a directory path into
the "Select File or Path" field to publish a group of files. Then pull down "None" from the "Select
Content Type" menu, after which this message will appear:
Warning: Content published under the type "None" is afforded absolute privacy because it will be
invisible to searches and content trackers. That also means that the file cannot be found through
normal means should the file's Dinode be forgotten.
If content is published without a content description, the trackers on Mojo Nation are not notified
of its presence and neither can they find it later. However, if you lose the Dinode URL to the file,
you won't be able to find it again, either.
6.1 What's a Dinode?
When your Broker submits a file to Mojo Nation, it first breaks up the file into several small
pieces, then the pieces into smaller blocks which are encrypted for privacy and duplicated for
reliability. The Broker draws a "sharemap" to the location of the blocks, and for further security,
tears up and encrypts the map, too. The list of the blocks which makes up the sharemap is the
"Dinode". Nothing on Mojo Nation can be retrieved without the Dinode. References to Dinodes
in the Mojo Nation web interface are almost always presented in MojoID form, a
human-readable URL.
AdFuel
(a bit of history)
..." Time
Way back in the day, Tim May (cypherpunks)
created a distributed communications prototype
called 'BlackNet', communicating through anonymous
remailers and doing file service, etc. It was
lacking in a viable anonymous payment mechanism,
but was a totally adequate proof of concept for
a totally secure filestore and info-market.
http://www.cl.cam.ac. uk/ users/rja14/eternity/eternity.html
Ross Anderson, a professor at Cambridge University
(and member of the SERPENT AES-candidate team),
worked on specifications for a system which
provided a "global filestore" capable of storing
popular or unpopular content in a distributed,
censorship-resistant fashion, based on electronic
payment, network communication, etc.
Adam Back then implemented "Eternity USENET",
using USENET as a backing store, with a special
web proxy to enter/retreive files.
Napster, Gnutella, Freenet seem to have come from
a completely different direction (particularly
Napster), rather than from the Eternity/BlackNet/etc. tree. Napster is
certainly the least general, but has had the
most commercial/userbase success, which may
be linked. It's certainly a lot easier to understand "Napster is sharing mp3s" than
"mojonation provides distributed file sharing
backed by electronic cash and a system of reputations and agents and brokers and
will tell.
Publius is probably most directly inspired by
Anderson's Eternity Service, but I didn't check
citations.
Mojo Nation is from the same intellectual heritage
as BlackNet/Eternity/etc., but I believe the
foundations were laid at about the same time as
the others, with implementation waiting quite
a while for resources to be available. It looks
like the first viable opportunity to get
electronic cash widely deployed on the Internet...
I think that aspect of Mojo Nation (the mojo part)
is by far more important than the file-sharing
aspect, but it's a bootstrapping problem.
...mojo piracy. Men all over the world will wake up with a strange, dull pain "down there", and will soon discover, "Someone's stolen my mojo!" Austin Powers all over again.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
H. Rosen: So users buy and sell content using Mojo Nation, right?
Developer: No, ummmm, well, they don't buy content, they buy, ummm, the right to download content!
Judge: Piracy! AHRA does not apply! Shut it down! SO ORDERED.
Tell me how this won't happen.
sulli
RTFJ.
Think you got a story.. GREAT! Just do us all one little favor before you submit it: search on slashdot for the story first. There it is on the bottom of every page a search function! Sure the /. search on mojonation gives us this page.
trained squirrels should see it's a repeat, but they seem to have enough going on. (Come to think of it though maybe they should do a search in a second window on any story that gets past their initial inspection before approving it....)
Just for your info a
Or even a search on "mojo"
I and my wife spend a huge amount of time on Napster (read: every waking moment). I have to disagree with your assessment. It does not "just work". Half of the stuff I try to get fails, and half of the people who try to get stuff from me fail. I have an SDSL connection, and Napster's fragility doesn't seem to have much to do with my own net connection. It just breaks.
I've investigated a number of different free trading services, and the "tragedy of the commons" is at work in all of them. I can't recall the number of times I see someone getting something interesting from me, but when I try to check their list, they are sharing nothing (this continues to be true even after Napster recent fixes). Or those losers getting stuff at 98k, but are listed as "14.4". I've seen it in Scour Exchange, CuteMX, Hotline, etc.
I like the idea of something that will make it harder for leeches to just leech. Everyone has processing power, most people have bandwidth, and we need some form of agent system to find the more obscure stuff we're seeking. Gnutella is nothing but p0rn spam anymore...and wasn't scalable in the first place.
Give me Mojo! Yeah baby!
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Yes, he still has exclusive ownership of the rights, sure. That's the only thing he owned in the first place, and he owns it no less now.
And what happens if five of those parts happen to be on computers that are currently switched off? *oops* :)
)O(
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
What I meant was that we will pass on the cost to those customers who drive our costs up. In other words, you'd only see an increase in price if you used more, not if your neighbor does.
Why do I have this picture in my head of two guys in some seedy IRC channel debating the price of a quarter key of data?
I agree...either people downloading from 56K (I have a T1) fail constantly, or I'll try to download and I get either timed out waiting for the transfer to start, "This user is not properly configured", or it just aborts half-way through.
And this is going after users on cable, dsl, and T's.
I guess it's no loss though - many of the files that do make it are someone elses aborted transfers and only half a file.
And I agree about the people with DS3's listed as 14.4k...that's why I go for ping times!
OK sometimes a headline is just that!
-- look, cheese ahoy!
Ah, but a large majority of folks who know what they're doing list themselves as 14.4 or 28.8 users so as to discourage people from leeching off their 155Mb connection ;)
Go by the ping times. That's usually the best reference.
load "linux",8,1
Yes You are missing this.
I need a burst of bandwith at 9:00. You're DSL is idle at that time but you need a similar burst at
16:00 ( because you live in hawai ). So we trade, and in order to trade, we need a currency.
this is as much a pyramide scheme as hard money itself.
-- look, cheese ahoy!
Hmm, just a comment on the Linux debian potato release, which I downloaded and tried to get working.
.py files where there are none. Python modules that "import" themselves into their own namespace, and other modules that import the module and try to call it as a function.
Most of the stuff is written in python, and god is it badly set up. There's obvious bugs that make the system completely non-working. Shell scripts that look for executable
example:
SystemTest.py:
TransactionManager.TransactionManager(...)
TranscationManager.py:
import TransactionManager
does someone see a problem here?
Goddamn, this code sucks. I'm trying to get this thing to work, and I've already fixed about 20 spelling errors which cause calls to functions that dont exist all over the code.
-Laxitive
(Yes, I know it's misspelled. Whatever)
Dilution isn't a problem. If several of the services become popular, someone will come up with an mp3Archie that will have collective indexing capabilities.
The possibility of a massive new-age Archie search engine could make big bucks for those who implement it first. Would displaying banner ads or even charging some sort of micropayment be legal if you just pointed someone to a service where a user had a particular data file you where interested in?
load "linux",8,1
I know it's flamebait, I know I'm weak for caving, I know nobody is going to change their mind about anything just because of my little post, BUT...
:)
Destructive uses for a tool don't make the tool a step backwards.
If (when?) someone developes the ultimate book scanner that can copy and compress Salon magazine fast and cheap enough to make it unstoppable, I will still chear the accomplishment. That same technology can be used to copy and compress the bible, old government documents, or the rosetta stone. Besides, content authors will be forced to find a way to make money without killing trees.
Don't fear technology, understand that with all changes there are many consequences. Take the big picture into account. Yes, the industrial revolution led to phenomenal pollution, but it also led to amazingly cheap consumer products. We as a species have not yet caught up with our own technology, but that doesn't make the technology bad. Whereas 150 years ago children died in sweatshops running looms, today everything is robotic and 90% of what you pay for at K-Mart is marketing.
You can't put the demons back in Pandora's box. Look deeper into the box and see there is also hope inside. Our salvation is in changing our own processes and mindsets to take advantage of the new technology. All of the advances we have made to save us time in the kitchen, to make food cheaper, to keep us healthier and safer have resulted in surpluses which we are squandering in the form of large useless institutions (governments, churches, lobbying orginizations, the popular media). It's not time for a revolution yet, but when it comes, it will only be possible because of technology, and it will happen so that humans can focus on the things we enjoy most: art, philosophy, and procreation.
such a person would be great to have around...
Everything that is published gets broken into pieces/chunks which then get broken into blocks. You only need 4 out of the 8 blocks of any given piece/chunk to reassemble the entire thing. (yes this does mean publishing stores things as 2x as much data, but disk space is plentiful!).
Also, there is additional redundancy in that multiple block servers should end up storing a copy of the same block, especially if it is popular. (This also means that the slashdot effect within mojonation should more widely distribute that particular bit of content rather than causing a central server to fall over!)
If ultimately too many blocks disappear, that content is effectively gone (techincally only that piece/chunk of the published archive is, but most people want the whole thing)
There are unfortunately a lot of old entries in the current content trackers running out there that have fallen to this fate during out bootstrapping period because the blocks have disappearred from the system due to low demand and earlier on software bugs causing them to be lost. This will hopefully not happen much to any newly published content.
We are also working on making content trackers more robust, including possible content tracker entry reputations or at least having content trackers use some of their earned mojo to verify that items in their database are still accessable. Those features are second on our list after speed issues, but keep your eyes open or join the sourceforge mailing lists to keep up on whats current.
Mojo, is the archi-enemy in some x-men magazine, nobody hear about the mojo-verse, Mojo itself is a big fat and yellow monster that controls a entiry universe...kinda scary to see now a "mojo nation" that sucks ALL you resources...but is funny anyway ;)
Very true. In fact, there is a lot more that could be discussed on the whole "economic" side of sharing bandwidth like this, but I don't want to get into it here and now.
When setting up the software it asks you to change proxy settings.
Most people are going to get nervous at this point and not go any farther. Why risk breaking my connectivity when I can just run Napster or Gnutella?
I played with it for a few minutes but I could only get as far as the "ooops" screen. At which point I hit the end of my attention span.
It's not worth the hassle.
This thing seems to use some sort of http proxy (thats as far as I read the docs). That sucks - I already have a junkbuster/apache filter/cache set up, and I'm not giving that up just to earn some sort of weird currency and get hacked by kidd3z.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I figured the windows version would be a little more polished than the *nix version, so I started there. Now, I have about 4 computers on my home network that share the DSL using masq.
OK, first I intalled the software. Everything great so far. So I read the README. This is where it started to go bad. The instructions aren't very clear, they say to start the broker. I did. Nothing happened. Apperently it's supposed to start your browser and make you click an agreement. After wrestling with this for an hour, we proceed on to the next mountain.
OK, so I finally got it running. Well, lets look around, shall we? I check my "stash" to see what I start with and I see I got Mojo dumping out like no tommorrow! Well, after some reading I find out about firewalls the hard way, and that include NAT. So I find out the port and I open it up to my machine on my LAN. Then I change their settings. It seems to work, kinda, but even when I do nothing I have more mojo going out than coming in. And I opted to host *ALL* the services they let you, so I expected to be raking in mojo! Well, that leads us on to the next and final problem I found.
No content. Legal anyways. I did a search for "funny" and after contacting 34 other proxies it found nothing. Nada. Zippo. <insert clever word for nothing here>. BTW, if you look at the search list, it's almost 99% illegal material for most people. They allow ROM searches, MP3 searches, and even **SOFTWARE**. Now, really, who's gonna do that? 3li73 juWaReZ kiddies I bet you.
So my opinion? Not really there yet. I never did figure out why I was using more mojo than I was making, even when doing NOTHING at all, not even searching. Never found anything I wanted to download either. So, I tried to uninstall.... That didn't work to smooth either. In the end I deleted some files by hand. Not a very good experience, but YMMV.
Free Online Woodworking Resources Directory
Dumb-ass moderators.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Sun have done a system very simular to this, and as far as I know it is far cooler ;)
For those who are interested it is called Jini. And you can get to their site here.
When content is published in Mojo Nation it goes through three steps before it becomes a small block of data which might be published on your host.
1) The file will be encrypted with the hash of the file. (feature in release 0.920 which will be out this week)
2) The encrypted file is broken into fixed-length segments.
3) These segments are pushed through an error-correction code, expanding the N bits into 8 N/4 length segments. (any 4 of the 8 shares are sufficient to reconstruct the orginal block)
These resulting block fragments are then published and are passed through the system. Each block fragment is only identified by its SHA1 hash, to reconstruct a piece of data you need a sharemap which tells you that if you collect a certain set of blocks and reverse the publication process using the instructions contained in the map you get the original file.
If you are holding blocks you have no idea what they are, it is effectively random noise on your system. If you have a map which contains a reference to block that you are holding locally you can figure out that small part of the puzzle, but looking at what is stored locally and knowing what you have is more than just searching for a needle in a haystack...
jim
CPU cycles will likely be worth double their normal Mojo dollars. The web server could use some at the moment. Or maybe some bandwidth donations.
Icebox
What is my liability if someone else stores stolen credit card numbers, kiddie porn or (gasp!) DeCSS source code on my drive?
Just speculating here, but if the blocks are encrypted before they're stored on your disk, then you can't be expected to know what's in them. You don't have the key (the system does), and even if you did, you can't encrypt your blocks without the IV from the previous blocks (assuming CBC mode or similar encryption) -- which are stored on someone else's computer.
--Jim
This brings a sacrastic laugh from me much like the laugh I have when I run across sites where you can order warez and movies to be burned on CDs. And, geez, all they need is your credit card number.
Even if I was interested (disclaimer: I'm not) would I trust a person with my credit card number?
Ah, now my response to Mojo Nation: would I trust a person with my cpu/hard drive/bandwidth? And what if my cpu/hard drive/bandwidth are used inappropriately?
Sounds like I would have a response much like the response I would have to: "oh, officer, he used the gun I leant him to kill someone?"; "he ran over people with the car I let him use?"; "geez, this person I don't know took care of my house and/or pet, why did he do this to me? what a cruel world."
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.
Does anyone honestly think that the Internet has stopped growing for the time being? People need choice because one system can't (and shouldn't) be required to handle the load of the file sharing community (which will be most of the people on the 'net soon). Besides that, people have different needs that are serviced by the different options.
If you need to be more careful about what you are sharing, you use Freenet and not Gnutella. If you want movies, you use Scour and not Napster. Scour incidentally has many obscure mp3s that Napster typically does not have. So there are many options are out there - and this is a good thing.
----- rL
You are having considerably greater success, percentage-wise, than I. :)
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Suddenly, I'm reading about MojoNation everywhere I turn my head. It was in Fortune last week, in Salon this week, in Time Magazine I think too (but I might be wrong) and in Slashdot a couple of times at least... Why do I get the feeling there is a huge PR effort behind this? /. is posting practically every article appearing in the Salon tech section?
BTW, Has anyone else noticed that
For those who got through and downloaded it tonight, their metatracker is down, /.'ed. No one can find anyone else in the Nation at the moment. The beta test only had one metatracker. It should be up later tonight. You can visit the official developers channel #mojonation on irc.debian.org if you have more questions.
Burris
I always considered this project really exciting, the idea of spanning bis of information over thousands of hosts, but I think their of using Java is not the best one in my opinion (altghough I have nothing against it, native code may have been more appropriate).
Now, with this newcomer, I wonder how both networks will be able to survive, wouldn't it be good for all potential users to join their efforts and form a common development team ?
I'd be glad to hear your opinion on this subject, as I would be glad to switch from Napster to a more generic system.
"Naughty, naughty, naughty, you filthy old soomka !"
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
once we attach some reputations to the content tracker entries (on our todo list), things that don't download perfectly should start to fall out of the system naturally as software agents (or people) discover that they're no longer 100% available.
yes, code could in theory be written to refresh content that has already been published by reconstructing missing shares (assuming at the minimum are still available to reconstruct it from).
I wonder if they have put any thought into this?
My problem with Mojo Nation concept is that some people indeed download much and don't contribute adequately, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they do so because they are selfish or bad. On the other end of the scale are people who have huge file collections and share them with others without expecting anything in return - and that doesn't mean that they are better humans than the others.
In my opinion it is so because not all net users have equal resources - fast machines, huge disk arrays, fast and permanent network connections. Although the average speed of CPUs and capacity of hard drives has increased recently still most people have relatively small disks and access the net with dial-up connections (and in EU local connections are charged per time).
Mojo Nation's design favours those who have huge infrastructure - those who can afford huge disks and fast network connections - or can use one for free (network administrators in big companies or on universities are the easiest example). In other words Mojo Nation's design favours those who are already better of - in contrast with more democratic and equal design of Gnutella and Napster.
I'm not against free market economy, but it is not applicable to every problem on the planet. I think that file sharing on the Internet is one of those problems that don't fit into market concept - it would be called file selling then.
Charging would be illegal if what it was pointing to was a copyrighted work. Because then it would be shared for commercial purposes, not noncommercial purposes. But I guess that opens up an industrial-sized barrel of worms.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What do you mean, you need read access too ?
In many countries there is a legal difference, a bit like the difference between a user who shares with friends and a pusher that sells on the street.
you shouldn't imply that uncompensated file copying is in anyway illegal.
Why? It can be. If I give you a file with the contents of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy in it I've broken the copyright whether you pay me or not. My involvement makes no difference to the fact that you have a copy of Douglas Adams' work and he hasn't been paid for it. It's not hard to follow, surely.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I understand everybody can run search machine. But if whole index is not stored on the one server than where clients should send requests to? And if the whole index is stored in each search machine then how fast this index updated?
You're still missing the point.
If you have a stereo that's been identified as stolen, ignorance is no excuse because the object of the crime has been identified. It's there before your very eyes, and it's provably a stolen stereo.
But what if you have only an amorphous blob in your possession, with nothing to indicate what it is? It may be one block of the free recipes FAQ, or part of one of a billion other innocuous items, but neither you nor anyone else can say whether it is or it isn't. Furthermore, whatever it is, it's only a fragment, one among countless others, not a complete object at all.
So there's no point talking about the stereo. What stereo? Not only can no such thing be identified. It's not actually there, and it's not there by design.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I don't think this makes sense. Are banks legally responsible for the contents of safe-deposit boxes? Are junk yards resonsible for stolen cars dumped in them? Are ISP's responsible for the data they transfer?
The answer is "no" to all three. I am sure banks are aware that odds are some of their boxes hold coke, weapons, stolen property. They are renting boxes, not going into business with the people that rent them. The law doesn't require them to run drug dogs through the vaults to make sure. This is the same thing.
The stuff on mojonation seems to be as impossible to decypher as anything out there.
Shit, data is ones and zero's. The contents of every kiddie porn, weapons plans, whatever could be pulled from anyones hard disk if you know the pattern. It's freaking ones and zeros.
The question is, do you knowingly store, copy, transfer anything illegal? No. I couldn't find out what I am transferring/storing/copying if I wanted to.
I thought we all went through this argument about freenet/napster/gnutella before.
- I like pudding.
Note to all:
/. load due to today's attention so you may experience problems finding other servers (or even running at all if you are behind a firewall and need to use a relay server) until we get this fixed. Hang in there and hop onto sourceforge for the mailing list and code.
Our meta tracker is under extra heavy
(side note: un-centralizing the meta tracking into p2p gossip is also high on our priority list)
How much Karma can I get for one Mojo?
Are there going to be Mojo whores out there?
As of right now, hotlists are only on the same server as you are on.
I just installed the beta on my system (p200 on win98) - laugh all you want but win98 is what most people are using now (and that's what made napster so famous).
Anyways, it works seemlessly! The average Joe(tm) user will not know what a proxy server is, nor what the gateway is all about... but the instructions are SO simple that it will soon become quite popular!
Mojonation needs to work on the setup. Win98 users are used to 2-button install and stuff running in the systray. Currently Mojonation requires the manual running of the Setup (doubleclick #1), ProxyServer (doubleclick #2), the running of the Broker (doubleclick #3). But what might throw most off is the setting of the proxy server on the web browsers. Although the instructions are extremely easy, this may throw a few off...
Also, running in a DOS window is not really that intuitive for most Win98 users. They prefer systray icons (or even in the invisible background).
What I really like is the web interface with a bit of Java. Anyone using computers today will easily be able to use the web-interface. (That's what I believe will make MojoNation more popular than napster!) No one has to learn how to use an entirely new program.
So my advice: Work at the setup and DOS windows... and for everything else - GOOD WORK!
Cd
---
This
Does this system (unintentionally) implement poverty?
If I'm in a third world country using a 486 with a small hard disk and a slow modem and/or ISP, do I end up with limited access to information?
I thought it looked like a good idea, so I had a go. I shared heaps of disk space over an ISDN link. I set up another one over a 28K modem line.
:v)
Both lost mojo hand over fist just for being there. I tried downloading twice over a 3-week period and lost over 1,000 mojo a day excluding that spent on the two downloads.
As a concept, it's great. As a practical implementation I fear it is badly implemented at best and heavily stacked at worst.
I've gone over to Freenet to see if it's any better.
Vik
Oh yeah, /. going to hire a GD lawyer to help answer some of these questions so we all don't sit here in a circle jerk everytime one of these things comes up?
When
- I like pudding.
Mojo Nation does not try to open security holes. The service is actually as content-blind as we can make it. That means that it does not know if it is downloading a image, a text file, or a trojan; we expect users to take appropriate steps in watching the content. We do intend on adding additional features which will make "bad data" less of a problem, the first of which is reputation filtering for content descriptions -- does this search result point to data that other people have given a thumbs-up to. The current reputation system is internal and used for performing activities like selecting who to buy from and whether it is worth it to pay additional credits to download that block from someone who has low-latency delivery, but we are working on scaling it up to let users make the basic reputation/filtering decisions. We provide the infrastructure, it is up to the users to provide and manage the content.
For preventing problems like eating up all of your CPU time or a rogue agent running rampant through your filesystem, we are trying very hard to do the right thing (for starters by not even trying to execute distirbuted code, CPU cycle costs are included in the costs of reselling or delivering a message.) We have used strong crypto where appropriate and we are aware that all control and trust boundaries are local so we are trying to create the basic infrastructure which takes advantage of this fact.
The market was chosen as our model for resource allocation and trust management because it seems to work. No one trusts other agents in the game, everyone is (usually) trying to selfishly maximize the utility of the system for their own needs, and successful cheating can carry great reward so risk management is built into the basic assumptions about how things work. Still this distributed system ticks right along without Alan Greenspan needing to keep track of where each dollar is spent or the local shoe factory needing to know exactly who is going to be buying the shoes it is creating.
In Mojo Nation you don't trust anyone, your agents are very paranoid about what is outside of their direct control, and choices about trust, performance, and privacy/anonymity can become economic choices on the part of the user.
jim
point well taken. :)
rL
----- rL
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
I agree. What is my liability if someone else stores stolen credit card numbers, kiddie porn or (gasp!) DeCSS source code on my drive?
--
J, Internetist
Other people using my computer resources? Uh-uh. I cringe when my girlfriend gets next to my box, why the hell would I let a complete stranger store their stuff on my drive?
Absolutely no, not now, not ever.
not to mention, if they are using your hard drive for storage space, what's to stop people from leaving all their kiddie porn on your machine? /.'s load killed their servers?
It may be that I don't have a complete grasp of what people can and can not do with this system.
Now I can't even get back to their site to find out more -
C'mon. This is company, a business, trying to make a fortune. Read their pages. This isn't Henry Hacker and William Webmaster sitting in a basement trying to come up with the BEST program. Look at the name. It just smacks of marketing ooze. Anybody notice the Austin Powers ref in the name?
What ever happened to computers making our lives easier. Every time I want to download a file there has to be a social interaction? Go start a web-commune or something. You can run ethernet, or wireless if you're also concerned about the environment, between your tents and burn anti-MS songs onto CDRs.
Bye, Bye, MS Anti-trust lies,
Installed Windows yesterday, and the computer just died.
And the tech support boys were drinking whiskey and wine, saying,
Can I have you credit card, for my time.
For a specification/statistics on this problem try Huberman Xerox Parc - Free-riding on Gnutella
I'm satisfied that this protects users copyright liabilities, and also the network manager.
Legalities aside, it seems the primary intent of the network is to consume and distribute forbiden material.
There appears to be a disincentive to publish material that you don't benefit from disseminating, though. It costs you to publish. It would seem pretty straightforward that the publisher should be part of the download compensation chain, so that there's an incentive to publish desirable content.
I don't see how this can be a better repository of information than the banner sponsored method when the publisher has no legal concerns in publishing it. (other than the abrrier to entry of having to have a minimum inventory of inforamtion, before renting traditional bandwidth)
]]You only need 4 out of the 8 blocks of any given piece/chunk to reassemble the entire thing
[[
Earlier this was described as *any* 4 of the 8 blocks will do. Rather than continue to struggle with the math for how this could be possible, is it actually that each block is stored twice, and in order to recover a 1/4 of the file, at least 1 of the 2 puters its hosted on has to be connected at the time?
Well the solution I'd like is an option to have a publisher fee attached to a file, such that the right to download it requires paying the publisher.
Mojo Nation always trys to act on local information (it is all that you can really trust) and if there is an economic incentive for a better strategy or new service then market pressure will favor anyone who creates it. For example, right now the network is rather flat and gnutella-like. Obviously this is a bad thing. The saving grace here is that as the network gets larger and there is an actual need to make smarter message distribution and cache choices these services will be possible.
Right now it does not make sense for the market to try to select the closest source unless it has a significant impact on performance. Making choices based on network topology, selecting what price lists you will present to a agent depending on its identity (e.g. being able to locally subsidize a worthwhile project or effort), these sorts of things are basic business logic decisions. We have created a skeleton set of these little rules, but as the market matures it will support whatever clever rules people can think up.
jim
I think that this could work fairly well if it reached critical mass, but I'm worried about the security of this. Renting out your bandwith or computing power is cool, but doing so leaves huge openings for script kiddies to get in your system and root it. Hopefully some sort of extremely good security will be implemented, otherwise most of the techies who would like to use this program won't due to its security issues.
Colin Winters
I would just like to say, that I know Jerry "Jeremy" Porter in real life, and that he is an insufferable, tired, "I'm-right-and-you're-wrong" asshole. He's like a USENET flame incarnated, Gepetto-like, to flesh. He's also on the ICANN board, which answered many of my questions about this strange body after I became aware of its existance.
Your proposal sounds rather interesting, but I have a few questions that haven't been raised/answered elsewhere...
1) If someone does a complete reinstall on their computer, won't that result in the loss of the content? (I assume that you have some redundancy of data, but the more duplication, the greater the cost in mojo... - Perhaps offer redundancy for a greater cost, but the default be non redundant...)
2) You offer 1 Million mojo for beta testers, what is to stop someone from creating numerous false beta testing accounts (say a skript kiddie installing the mojonation on rooted boxen...), and then transferring all of the mojo to his account.
3) It would appear that your company would be in a similar position to the Federal Reserve - capable of 'printing' additional mojo, causing price inflation. What types of safety mechanisms are in place to keep you (or a clever hacker) from openning up their own 'mojo printing press'?
4) Givin that Mojo transfers have 'float' - that is, payment is not made until a certain level of Mojo is 'owed'. Could not an individual make transfers that were only to just below the threshold, and then no longer use the services of that individual? Thus one could 'owe' 9999 to ten thousand entities, and yet only have a total of 10,000 mojo.. Or create multiple anonymous accounts that each only use 9,999 credits.
5) Can large content easily be broken down into smaller pieces? I realize that a user could break the content apart before uploading it, but it would be nice if I could download partial content of a movie in smaller parts so that my payments are over a longer period of time.
6) If I download content, can I then advertise that I have it available so that I can recoup some of the cost of me downloading the content?
7) Is a method in place to 'stream' the content, if multiple users are willing to wait to download the content at the same time to reduce the cost per user and reduce the resources used by the sender?
Thanks,
LetterRip
Tom M.
TomM@pentstar.com
>>Why the hell would I use a publishing system that makes people pay to read it?
I have trouble with this too. Maybe its cheaper/easier to publish pirated or illegal material this way as compared to web hosting. Often though, (only reason???) this is done so that your friends get it for free. The fact that 99% of the people grabbing it are not your friends is irrelevant.
but if consumers have to pay to access my content, then I'd like to be receiving part of what they're paying.
The economics don't seem to work except for the bandwith and diskspace people. I'm all in favour of bringing digital cash for micropayments ysterday, but i'm unclear how helpful this will be.
Content varies widely in its need for safeguarding. Obvious examples of content that needs much greater levels of redundant protection are expressions of political dissent, information about corruption in high places, key algorithms that corporations try to hide away to retain their monopolies, and content that RIAA/MPAA-type organizations want to control utterly in perpetuity.
Yet, such items would have the same degree of protection against loss in Mojo Nation as (say) a free recipes FAQ. Surely that can't be right?
Will there be any means of increasing the redundancy on the basis of content type in future versions? It would seem to be needed.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I certainly wouldn't want to be restricted to one service that combined all of these ideas; it would be slow, complicated, hard to search, and so on. Diversity is good! Open-source is evolution in the computer world, and inbreeding has costs.
Hmmm imagine a beowu$%^#5...NO CARRIER
"If you look 'round the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Quiz Show
IANAL, ofcourse...
Since there is (suppsoedly at least) the potential of cash payment, anyone breaking copyrights goes from being an amature pirate to a professional one.
You can be liable for up to 3 times the amount you collect in damages to anyone whose works you illegally make available.
I personally don't think this is a bad thing, but you might want to be careful of others' Copyrights when using this service.
- decrypt the files for the authorities, and
- convince them you don't have the key(s)
You go to jail. Directly to jail. Do not pass go, do not bend over to pickup the soap.Technophobic law makers everywhere will shut this system down, or make the population nervous enough to effectively shut it down themselves. Unless the revenue model will survive just with ISPs signing up their spare space and bandwidth you're looking at a short future with a messy end.
That said, when cable modems appear where I'm at, and if the service agreement lets me run a "server" I might be interested in something like this if I thought the micropayments would even cover the electricity of leaving my PC on all the time. I would even consider it for work, since we have about 50 PCs with an average of 2Gig spare on their drives, but again only if the micropayments would compensate for the bandwidth (A$0.17 per MB).
Linux System Requirements: You must have Python 1.5.2 installed on your system. Mojo Nation DOES NOT YET WORK with the latest Python versions, 1.6 or 2.0b1.
Hmm must be very beta.
--------
http://bell.sympatico.ca/DynamicContentServlet.dyn ?/english/hse/faq.html#q18
I strongly doubt they would notice... for a while. As soon as cash is involved I think the whole system may break down.
Another thought which occurred to me is that it would be easy to greatly reduce the value of the service by an over-population of servers. If (for example) AOL puts up a gazillion server farms, you or I with our 1Mbps connections and K7-1GHz CPUs won't be able to earn anything from this, and all the information we retrieve will send micropayments to AOL. Getting paid for system resources should ideally offset the cost of the information we request.
On the other hand, success may kill the service, but it would be cool watching it get there. I guess this whole thought could be slain by placing a stipulation in the protocol that no one body can posess more than a certain percentage of the network (or recieve a certain percentage of mojo...).
This is stupid. Just like every other idea like this. No one wants to bother with some sort of digital cash that you can exchange for MP3's, or cash out into $$(yeah right). Do these guys really thing that people are going to fall for this crap? I think napster hit the nail on the head. It's easy to use and nothing to bother with, just plug it in and turn it on. Sorry guys.
I've been wondering what to do with my muti-megabit connection now I'm at university, /Its such an upgrade from 56k It's unbeliveable. At the same time I have to pay £1050 tuition fees and £4000 a month bar tab, so I need a way to earn money.
Well, it doesn't. If I go a music store and buy a CD, I don't have to go across the street to get the case, across town to get the printed insert, over to Bob's house for the receipt only to find out a civil war broke out in Indonesia and I can't get the CD itself! I've paid for it, but I only have parts of the service/product I've paid for. Who cares I don't have to pay for the CD only the case and the insert? I still don't have what I was expecting to pay for!
Since MN is advocating the use of the service by corporations to back up their databases... well, let's just say there won't be many takers when they find out a node with one of the chunks is no longer online and able to serve it.
It seems like a cool idea, but even if bandwidth went up drastically there probably still wouldn't be enough users with their computers on 24/7 waiting so serve a chunk for fractions of a penny. Sure this may pay for electricity and access fees eventually, but what if it doesn't? What if you find yourself with really unpopular chunks? Or what if your HD crashes and you start losing your karma/mojo rating or whatever's used to measure reliability and allow you to presumably charge more?
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Okay, I went and read it all again, and then I went and read the Salon article, and now I have absolutely no idea why I would actually want to upload content to this thing. Well, almost no idea: if they get the tipping mechanism working and people actually use it, that might be something. But all the rest of it...
Firstly, Napster's got no competition here. You have to pay to upload your MP3 stash, and no one's going to do that (talking about ripped-off music here, which is what constitutes 99.9999% of Napster stashes, rather than music I might have made myself). It's the people who host the content that get paid, not the people who upload it, and they're not the same.
Secondly, what are the actual usage scenarios that make this thing more worthwhile than, say, just going and finding a decent hosting provider? If the content is so popular that it'll bring down a free hosting solution, and it's content that I'd pay to upload (which makes it pretty unlikely to be pirated... well, I'm not sure about that, since some software pirates seem to pay for good chunks of their hosting, but let's press on, anyway - especially since I'll bet that pirated software is not Mojo Nation's prime target) then surely someone (most likely myself) would pay to host it for me?
Sure, some sites get Slashdotted, but that's mainly because they're on crappy servers. I've never seen any of the big free hosters buckle. And besides - suppose I want to promote my new project which is total Slashdot fodder, and I stick up some big GIF screenshots and then I start promoting it. Why the hell would I use a publishing system that makes people pay to read it?
The CPU cycles thing is slightly more likely, but Popular Power are already going for that one, with a considerably simpler system.
So, can someone (Jim? Still watching?) give me some real-world examples of what I would upload to Mojo Nation, and why I'd be better off spending Mojo on that than, say, using some free web space, or going to an online content publisher, or whatever?
-- Yoz
Aren't they contradicting themselves?
They say:
Mojo Nation is a peer-to-peer network, enabling any computer on its network to talk to any other without having to go through a centralized server.
Then they say:
At that time, the debtor pays up by transferring a digital coin from his account on the Mojo Nation token server to the creditor account.
Correct me if I'm just not getting something, but doesn't the need for a "token server" require that the system not be decentralized? I.E. If 'the man' or whoever can shut down [by whatever methods] the MojoNation "token server," won't the whole system collapse very soon? I would suspect that each client ("broker") would be unable to continue functioning, yes?
--Knots
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
As I see it, the best features of Mojo Nation are its automatic encryption and the fact that its at least partially anonymous. Unfortunately the FAQ is rather vague about the actual specifics of the system are: >When your Broker submits a file to Mojo Nation, >it first breaks up the file into several small > pieces, then the pieces into smaller blocks >which are encrypted for privacy and duplicated >for reliability. The Broker draws a "sharemap" >to the location of the blocks, and for further >security,tears up and encrypts the map, too. >The list of the blocks which makes up the >sharemap is the "Dinode". Nothing on Mojo Nation >can be retrieved without the Dinode. References >to Dinodes in the Mojo Nation web interface are >almost always presented in MojoID form, a >human-readable URL. This seems somewhat similar to the method of using the one-time pad on a file and breaking it up into multiple smaller packets on a distributed network that was posted to fm a while back. (One time pad=encrypting a file with a single key, in such a way that one attempting to decrypt the file will get some sort of output no matter what key they try to use. The atvantage is, that there is no way to tell what the orininal file contained unless you know the exact key that was used to encrypt it. Eg, the same file x.crypt would produce "The shipment will arrive tonight" or "I like the happy bunnies" or "jfd83kdkfjsks sss sj" with equal probability, without any way to prove what the intended message was.) Someone looking for a particular file must be able to assemble a particular set of (seemingly arbitrary) packets in a particular (again, seemingly arbitrary) order, and then be able to input the proper key to decrypt it into the original file. It sounds like these folks are adding some automation that no doubt cuts down on the security. But, as I said before, the page is very vague due to the amount of lingo used. It also appears that there is some amount of anonyminity available in this system, but it is unclear if you are anonymous just to other users (likely) or to the system logs in general (unlikely). Why can't we have a free version of this? As in, get rid of the 'MojoMoney' and just have a nice double-blind, heavily encrypted, distributed file system. Let it be open-source, free to use, community driven, and completely anonymous. No suits can be filed, because the content could be nothing or anything. The same file could be public domain text, or a homebrew kernel, or an mp3 or whatever. The real content is in the identity of which packets to use in what order and what the password is. This info could be distributed in irc, www, orally, in an encrypted or plain text form , etc. depending only on the will of the content creator. Since it would be distributed, no one would even neccessarily have a complete file on their server, which would be anonymous anyways. Any thoughts?
The primary resource making the market is bandwidth. Disk space comes in second. Modules for reselling CPU time for specific tasks will spring up later but are not the immediate focus of the system (seti@home, distributed.net for mojo anyone?)
:)
Also, for any newcomers to the software, we are expecting a major new release soon that should improve the download speed from mojo nation drastically. The current sucky speed issues are completely client side due to inefficiencies in the way its current downloading code is written. We are rewriting that.
Happy Mojoing!
Greg - mojo programmer
That's the nice thing about diversity. The variations help prevent the whole species from getting wiped out by particular threat. (disease or 'da man')
-Vel
Does the person who originally uploads a file to the network get paid?
No.
Then how do content creators get paid -- what's the incentive for them?
You can earn revenue by publishing through a feature we haven't added yet, which is basically tipping. When you publish you can say, Here's a digital signature on this map: I published this file; this is who to give the tip to.
---
Great! Another system in which the publisher (the people with the money and the big iron and bandwidth to host this stuff) rakes in the profits while content creators have to live on whatever scraps get thrown their way.
Would anyone else be worried about getting paid for providing illegally copied materials?
Of course people here follow ALL music related copyright laws but I've been told that there are those who don't.
It seems that actually receieving money for providing this content takes it to the next level and it wouldn't surprise me if someone like the RIAA tried going after end users on this one.
Just a thought...
So you're arguing against diversity and choices? Thinking that there should be one central way to exchange files? That leads to one thing...control and regulation.
You know, IANAL, but with gnutella you have some defence, as you dont profit(in currency) from your transaction. Its just sharing. Using this method, you make a "sale"..
-- You canna change the laws of physics, Captain; I've got to have thirty minutes!
Slashdot attracts karma whores Mojo Nation will undoubtedly attract mojo whores
Sometimes you by Force overwhelmed are.
Back to playing Monopoly with Monopoly money
did you miss these paragraphs?
<snip!>
How does Mojo Nation and Autonomous Zone Industries make money through this process?
As the bank, we earn a small percentage of Mojo-to-dollar transactions or dollar-to-Mojo transactions. We act as a market maker: There are some people who will end up with a surplus of Mojo -- they will contribute more than they download. There are lot of people who will end up with a deficit of Mojo. We will put the two parties together and basically let them buy and sell on our Mojo market, and we'll take a small percentage.
At the moment it's 2 percent. It's only for dollar-to-Mojo transactions. If you put $10 of Mojo into the system and keep using it and using it, you never pay the fee.
</snip!>
Looks like real money to me. Of course, I haven't seen money in a while - so you never know.
rLowe
----- rL
Ryan knows this stuff, but for those in the audience who have not been hanging out in crypto and cypherpunk circles for the last ten years:
> Mojo Nation is from the same intellectual heritage
> as BlackNet/Eternity/etc., but I believe the
> foundations were laid at about the same time as
> the others, with implementation waiting quite
> a while for resources to be available.
The original genesis was the "Internet is a Brown Paper Bag" system created by myself, Doug Barnes, and Jerry Porter back in Austin and presented at the HoHoCon '94 conference. Things sat around for a while because we were waiting for two things: digital cash and a raison d'etre. At the time we did this early work connectivity and storage costs were expensive and there was no digital content to speak of. The growth of broadband and flood of digital content(music, video, images, etc.) made this arena more interesting several years ago so that is why we starting talking to lawyers to see if it would be possible to actually implement some of the wacky ideas we used to have.
A digital cash system was the sticking point. All great cypherpunk projects seem to begin with the line "when we have digital cash, we will be able to do X..." Our insight was in realizing that for a distributed system like what we really needed was a method for fairly allocating resources. We combined a cool idea to base a form of currency on payment in kind with a reputation-backed microcredit system to cut down on token clearing overhead and thus was born Mojo Nation.
One insight that Ryan has made which I hope others pick up on is that Mojo Nation is about more than just swapping music or pushing data. We are trying to create a basic infrastructure for any kind of peer to peer transaction, we just happen to think that trust management and resource allocation are the two important problems that need to be dealt with in this space and have targetted our micropayment system in this direction.
jim
The more of these file-sharing systems we get, the less likely it is that they'll be shut down by "da man".
Unfortunately, when we splinter the "file-sharing community" like this, we get divergent standards, content, and we start to lose the appeal that a system like Napster had, where EVERYBODY was on it, and nothing else, therefore, if you were looking for something in particular, a search of Napster was always your best bet. Now if you were looking for something, chances are, if it's not on Napster, it's on Gnutella, or Freenet, or . . . etc.
Same thing happens with Online auctions. People were afraid to go to other auction houses, because Ebay had THE name. Therefore, they retain most of the business. Mindshare. It's all about mindshare.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
has arrived.
Technoli
I guess the point is, if bandwidth becomes more valuable (as a mojo commodity), it's going to therefore become more expensive. ISP's who use their spare bandwidth will benefit, but my concern is for consumers as they relate to ISP's. You point out that ISP's will pass their costs on to users- that's exactly my fear. I'd rather not have my DSL line (which I can barely afford) triple in price.
Then again, if there was serious demand for bandwidth, maybe it would force the physical network to grow again. But the rising costs! Ack!
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Finally- a filesharing system that stresses the cooperative element required. However, it only provides a framework for sharing files- you have to think about where these files come from.
Something like OpenCulture backed up by a file distribution system like this would be the answer everyone's looking for.
this is seeming a lot like the crypt idea from neal stephenson's cryptonomicon. the page said that someday we could use the mojos to buy beer, that'd be cool. This would be a fully digital economic system. it's way cool.
-"Hey, Baby. It's not a rash, it's textured love."
, it's just that, for a global (world-wide, earth-encompassing) search, fragmenting humanity's free-MP3 library under these various services will make certain rare bits harder to find
I dont agree. Napster/Gnutella et al are exploding in the numbers of users. Ill bet that the Napster usage is on demand simply by searching this 'mojonation' or 'napster' or 'wrapster' thing"
We havent 'peaked' yet - there are more than enough new Napster users to make up for the defectors to other systems... for now.
Free file-sharing systems are exactly like the cow pasture described in the original "tragedy of the commons" essay -- lots of cows chomp freely until the pasture is barren and of no use to anyone. Mojo Nation avoids this by ensuring that everyone give to the system in order to get from the system.
Yeah - nice idea. Collect "mojo" to allow you to download other people's stuff.... stinks of Karma, eh? :-)
/prak
So the RIAA sees this, thinks it's a good idea, although Real Bucks could make them Bucks, none of this Mojo stuff... they launch an offensive, succeed in getting a Cease and Desist, and release their own version??
And speaking as a musician... I'd rather be paid in Real Bucks than "mojo"... there are two flaws: according to the article, "it's voluntary... not unlike tipping in restaurants..." kinda like busking online? And secondly, how's "mojo" gonna pay the rent?
Back to playing Monopoly with Monopoly money. Or wait for a sanctioned version of "mojo". No wait, that'll have adverts. Bummer.
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
Will there be any means of increasing the redundancy on the basis of content type in future versions?
Yes. As you have noticed, the filesystem is market-based so that which is most popular is the most widely replicated data. An agent in progress(the "eternity agent") will let you give it a bit of Mojo and it will run around making sure that your blocks are still available and if it finds any of of the shares are missing it will reconstruct and republish the missing shares.
There is also a _lot_ of idle space out there. Back of the envelope predictions seem to indicate that once we pass the ignition point where the whole range of this SHA1 address space is covered in depth there will be enough spare disk blocks out there that any data which is even mildly interesting will stick around. One market opportunity for users who are sitting on lots of disk space but small connections to the net is to collect a narrow range of the filesystem but to great depth, then just charge a higher price for access to the less popular blocks.
Oh yeah, you can also increase the number of shares for each block to whatever you want, so that downloading a particular block is a "get 32 out of 64" operation for example. The particular error correciton code we are using means that 50% is still the target for number of pieces, but by making more pieces you spread the data across more of the SHA1 address space and increase the probability that someone is online who has the share you need.
jim
----
Their article that makes a bunch of arguments against "Freeloaders and Parasites" sounds rediculous. The last time I checked there was no such thing as a "Freeloader" on free music. And there were no proper rules on pirated music. By sharing music you're saying that you're supportive of pirating the music whether you get return from it or not. And it looks to me like they just made another "ratio site" except with a real client.
Just about every modern computer in the world has masses of detritus on it, huge chunks of it unattributable to anything in particular. It accumulates all the time, with each new package installed or run on your system, typically dozens to thousands of random files per year, many of them utterly opaque. You don't know what they are, and with few highly techie exceptions, nor does anybody else. (One can guess of course, but that's not the same thing as being able to prove it.) If everyone had to be able to either show the content of every file or hand over a magic cookie to render it visible, virtually the entire population of computer users would be in jail.
Mojo Nation and other similar system now being created at an accelerating rate just add to this background of unattributable noise. If anything, you're safeguarded by design when storing their content, since in general you simply cannot know what you're storing, and you definitely don't have the key to decrypt it even if you had all the pieces, which you don't. This makes it extremely easy to state convincingly that you don't have the key, since unless you've discovered a way of ensuring that you hold all the bits and have somehow subverted the dinode encryption, you definitely won't have it. By Design is a very powerful phrase.
In any event, this is just the start of the distributed storage revolution. In future systems you might well be able to obtain the key if you desire it --- only to find that you hold one bit of information for each of one billion files spread across 1 million hosts. A fat lot of good that will do you, or the prosecution. Welcome to the new world.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
One day I was browsing through Slashdot comments, and saw a link to Mojonation. I thought it was 'pretty damn l33t' so I signed up. Their system sucks! The entire 'search capabilities' are basically run off everyone's machines, using some wierd, outdated self-written protocol that just plain sucks. I could never find anything. My machine was extremly bogged down ( and I have a very nice machine) even though it (Mojonation) was not doing anything. From watching their log, I think I discovered their biggest problem. Some college student decided to make a huge beowulf computer and name it MojoNation. Except it sucks. It is slow, ill-configured, and worthless. I could not find anything, in part because it took nearly 10 minutes to load their search page. If I wanted to change what I would provide, it took another 10 minutes (all on empty T1 lines too) Word to the wise: don't waste your time. Even if GNUtella and Napster are slow, filled to capacity, they are still better than this.
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
hmmm...
Ok, it seems to me that most people here envision this system as solving all the bandwidth ills by creating a barter system all the while having perfectly legal applications. The problem with this is that people are trading bandwidth that they don't really have. The only way a user can make more than the cost of the connection, is if he's using an _excessive_ share of the bandwidth where they're using more than then ISPs allows (or presumes) him to use. What's more, most ISPs are significantly oversubscribed. They depend on most users not being geeks, using only a fraction of their supposed bandwidth, and still paying for it. If everyone were to attempt to use all the bandwidth available to them, it'd be well below their expectations.
There really isn't such a thing as "wasted" bandwidth for most every end user. One might be able to sell "his" bandwidth, without negatively impacting the status quo for other users or his ISP, but only if he takes mojo in lieu of his normal personal bandwidth consumption. Anything beyond that necessarily implies that someone else is paying for it, either the rest of the users, the ISP, or the intellectual property owners.
Which brings me to another point. If the user is participating in a legal transfer, how could the payment possibly exceed the cost? If the only service the customer is really providing is bandwidth and nominal storage, you'd pretty much have to expect the cost of bandwidth to be higher. What value does the customer add to the transaction that the ISP cannot do, and do better (i.e., faster and more economical connections)? The only reasonable answer is _illegal goods_ (i.e., pirated stuff). If the ISP cannot partake in facilitating piracy for legal reasons, then one might expect the customer to be "adding value", to speak, which the ISP cannot.
I guess this is the "real McCoy" of file sharing.
*is uplifted by laughter
*takes a swiq of shampoo
*realizes it's shampoo
*dies
All "content-blind" means is that the security features don't watch the content, but rather proper execution of the program itself. It's really a Good Thing for a program for moving data to be content-blind; after all, the more you look at and process the data, the more opportunities there are for buffer overruns and the like.
The "security features" which would be non-content-blind would be things like a built-in virus scanner. I don't expect such features from my mailreader; I don't expect them here either.
They've put a lot of thought into this system. A million years or so ago I was sysop of a BBS. You had to prevent people from doing nothing but leeching or they'd tie up your phone lines and prevent other people from positively affecting your board. So Ratios had to be in place. You had to give people a default number of credits or they'd never stick around long enough to contribute. However, if you gave too many away, people
d just d/l your best stuff and disappear. You had to make things convienent for people who wanted to contribute, and inconcienent for those who wanted to leech. The concept of Mojo is a great step in that direction.
You give a little, you get to take a little. You give a lot, you get to take a lot. Rinse. Repeat.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Short answer: people who try to make money selling bandwidth will have to pay full price for it in the first place.
As System Administrator and part owner of Got.net, I can say we will not wig out. It's true that part of our niche is over-selling or aggregating our resources: bandwidth, phone lines, modems, disk space. We operate in a similiar way to how banks do. Banks loan out about five times as much money as they have on hand. This ratio is maintained by the government. I think it's called the "prime lending rate" or something.
ISPs sell about 10 times as many dialups as they have modems, and likewise with bandwidth. It's true that if all our nailed-up customers used all their bandwidth we'd be in trouble. However, that doesn't mean we're going to charge EVERYONE more.
We buy bandwidth from our provider under a contract which provides us a minimum committed data rate, and if the lowest 95% of our traffic is over that, we are charged for our overage. We can burst our connection in San Jose at 100Mbps, but as long as 95% of our traffic is under 6Mbps, we won't have any surprises on our bill.
If one of our co-location customers uses a consistantly high amount of bandwidth, we will pass our increased costs on to that customer. If they are doing it to gain Mojo, they will probably want to sell that mojo (maybe to us?). In other words, it's the micro-payments within MojoNation that make it viable. Whereas Napster just drags down a network, prompting private and public institutions to try to block it, an increase in MojoNation traffic is accompanied with an increase in Mojo, and therefore a means for compensating all parties effected.
Most likely, as an ISP, we will be one of the early adoptors and pushers of MojoNation. It will allow us to sell bandwidth and disk space we haven't committed to our official customers yet, which will decrease waste within our company. If our MojoNation agents use too much CPU or disk space, we'll just increase our agent pricing.
Great. There's no possibility that those using this service are legally protected, because it adds a profit motive to its "information sharing". Now the RIAA will be going after YOU, not Shawn Fanning's uncle. Even if courts rule that Napster is legal, this service doesn't have a prayer.
~wog
It looks like a big nasty 1:1 Ratio FTP, I thought those went out of style with the 90's. Long live the leech!
>> 3. Mojonation is built to scale. It won't choke
>> like Gnutella.
from http://www.mojonation.net/product_news.shtml:
> More than 10,000 new users overloaded our
> metatracker, the currently vital piece of the
> software that notes the network location of
> each user's Broker and the services each
> provides.
It would appear as if it's choking.
Hopefully they'll get this under control soon.
-rt
======
Now, I think it would be GOOD to buy FIVE or SIX STUDEBAKERS
and CRUISE for ARTIFICIAL FLAVORING!!
I don't see how they intend to avoid being shutdown by the RIAA. It claims to be a peer-to-peer system, but you need to go to their web page to find stuff or places to go.
>Finding Content on Mojo Nation
>
>First, launch your web browser and go to the
>URL http://www.mojonation.net/broker
What happens when that page is shutdown? (.net is in/administrated the states)
The voluntary part is our (still hidden from the UI and non-operational in Beta) PayLars function. This will let a user send a tip to the registered publisher and/or digital rights holder for a particular piece of data. That publisher/creator then converts this Mojo to dollars (or euros or cowrie shells depending on the local cost of a double espresso) or they can use it to make the cost of their next publication and content distribution cheap or even free.
You always have to pay for the download. That is the cost of getting service. Once you have the data things are a little fuzzier. If Sony wants to distributed a bunch of files locked up using InterTrust boxes then we work just great for moving the data efficiently. If the content escapes into "the wild" we still offer a backup solution. We also offer a solution to those who are not big name artists and who can't necessarily get Akamai to return their phone calls and who aren't willing to sell the car to pay for an InterTrust distribution license.
We know that this is not a final solution, but we are trying to keep future options open. If a good digital rights management solution is developed that people think is fair and just then we are ready. If nothing happens then we are still ready, albeit with a less optimal solution. If anyone else has a suggestion let us know and we will try to include it.
The only
The old days when you used to have to earn credits on the BBS by uploading a certain number of programs to be able to download. Yeah, it was sort of fair. But there must be some reason that things like that went away... Maybe people won't bother with the whole credit system. Why would they, when Napster, Gnutella, etc. are more or less free, except that you gotta be willing to give up some bandwidth and cpu time.
Windows is going the way of phlogiston...
my experiences were similar too. though i don't agree with his assertion that "SOFTWARE", or "MP3" sharing is illegal.
the one time i tried to download something, i got this error message:
Error: reassembly failed: Rebuild failed: not enough blocks of this archive were available at this time (4 needed, 0 found)
Dammit, I had this idea like two months ago while laying in bed with busted nuts. I should've patented it.
The Meaning of Life
great comedy company.
Uh.... When it is impossible to determine _what_ is on your system, how could you be proven to posess it? Or is the AC posting just a total idiot? I'll pick number two, Bob.
-aT
the mojo to dollar ratio is ratio is flexible and they expect it to decrease steadily over time as bandwidth and storage costs decrease. so what this means is that it's very dangerous to build up mojo equity because your stored mojo is going to constantly decrease in value. thus to get the most $$'s for your mojo you are forced to pull your mojo out of the system at regular intervals.
second because anyone can post anything, and you only get mojo for what people download directly from you, what is the incentive for people to post information into the network? since it's impossible to maintain control over the information once it's posted into the network why would anyone post it? at least offering something for free on a web site you get content hit logs, can offer advertising (maybe use it as a loss leader?) and have direct control over the data presentation. i have difficulty imagining why people will post information into the net unless it's illegal. i can see mojo nation being a great place to store child porn, mp3's etc ... but why would people use it as a legitimate method of data distribution?
don't get me wrong, i think mojo nation is very very technically cool, i just don't understand what's gonna stop it turning into another irc/usenet where very little of actual value happens.
to answer some of you questions (as best i can from memory).
1. yes, data is redundant by default, your data is broken up into 8 pieces and any 4 is sufficient ot restore it.
3. i don't believe there are any. but they have fairly carefully designed their system to be self regulating. the idea is that they don't want to have any direct control over it for legal reasons.
6. yes, anyone can "sell" anything on the mojo nation network. they don't care and they can't stop you.
7. anything that you can make work on top of http will work now. they plan to add other transport mechanisms later, i don't know if multicast is one of them.
--
moderate me up, i might be right.
How is this not a huge pyramid scheme?
1) Users who enter are given a certain amount of mojo.
2) There is an exchange for mojo in every transaction (i.e. no mojo is created)
Since there is no way to create mojo, except for the new users, old users must only focus on getting new users to give them their mojo. Old users will be able to build up mojo over time, but ultimately they can only increase their stash by taking something from new users. Am I missing something here?