Death of the P2P net Predicted! Film at 11!

87C751 writes "Cnet has a preachy, whiny piece bemoaning the peer to peer "phenomenon" and its lack of commercialization potential. The humor comes when they claim that bandwidth limitations will ultimately doom P2P (as though bits that traverse through a server somehow take less bandwidth than bits sent from one box directly to another). " Alright, I'm a little softer then the submittor, although I agree with some points. The area that I do question is how much is actually shared - most of the people I see out there are taking, not contributing to the Gnutella and the like.

Comments

Aggregate bandwidth

[hey!]

as though bits that traverse through a server somehow take less bandwidth than bits sent from one box directly to another

The aggregate bandwidth needed for file transfers won't change; it's the bandwidth required for meta-information -- catalogs, searches and search responses, that goes up.

Has anybody done any theoretical research here? I'd guess that in a P2P network the bandwidth required to carry meta-information would go up O(N^2) -- that is you want to have a network of information distributing nodes that is some fraction of a complete graph. The Napster architecture, while introducing a single point of failure (at least from a legal standpoint), seems closer to optimal from a purely technical standpoint -- it centralizes meta information allowing O(N) growth of query bandwidth in nodes, and decentralizes data transfer.

Tech Articles or Obituaries?

[Luminous]

It seems to me it is becoming more and more common for tech writers to proclaim the death of one thing or another, even when it isn't true. Content, the web, desktop computers, and mp3's have all at one time or another said to have died, yet as far as I can tell, all are still doing quite well.

P2P has just scratched the surface. To say it is dead before it even gets out of the starting gate is a level of eagerness that surpasses morbidity.

There are constraining factors on p2p, but these will actually fade away as more people get broadband. Sharing will become more prevalent when it is made easy and has an obvious level of security (like Napster, where you choose which folder other's get access to). Also, as soon as it is decided what can and cannot be shared, that will open things up. I know I get a bit leary when I see people downloading my Juice Newton tunes, wondering if it is actually Juice's lawyers gearing up to sue me.

P2P may not be the next killer app, but it will become a mainstay of the internet like ftp. So let's stop paying attention to doomsayers who are just trying to be seen as prophets of the internet through Kassandra-like proclamations.

Total ignorant BS?

[jabber01]

First off, I DO understand the concept behind Napster, Gnutella and the like..

However, the whole idea that P2P is at all different than server-to-server is ridiculous. Just TRY to set up a P2P connection on the net without going through an ISP.. If you can, then you ARE and ISP. You are a 'server' - whether you have clients of not is irrelevant. Even major corporations today have to go through an ISP for their connection to the backbones. My little workstation has to make just as many hops to get to Mae West as Sony's data center.

There is no technical difference between gnutella and a couple of buddies running anonymous FTP servers on their home machines. There is no technical difference between that and IRC - except for volume of bits. Bits is bits is bits. The difference, the ONLY difference, is that there isn't a corporation extracting an additional toll on the data that's transmitted. There lies the 'problem' with P2P.

If Guntella and Napster were used to share vacation photos NOBODY would care. ISP's might jack up their rates based on how much pipe you use, but that's it. If the data transfered wasn't (arguably) someone's 'intellectual property', this would not even be an issue.

People have been running private FTP servers in a P2P fashion since before the WWW made server-to-server the defacto mode of operation. Before ISP's got on the band-wagon, is was all workstation to workstation, account to account, peer-to-peer.

Just because some kid slapped a web interface onto a hack of anonymous FTP doesn't suddenly make it a different technology. Just because he made it distributed doesn't make it anything more than simply 'convenient'. Searchable FTP has existed for a long time, also since before the www. Anyone remember the Archie tool? Indexing, and making it transparent is the next obvious step, not some revolutionary break-through.

P2P is nothing new, and it is nothing 'different' than what has always been done. Servers talk to each other as 'peers' too, don't they?

Just because a bunch of corporate-types label the same technology in two different ways, depending on wether they get a cut of the profits or not, does not make one way doomed and the other saved. Just because somone calls this 'piracy' and that 'a stable business model' does not make the two ways into different technologies.

P2P, S2S, B2B... It's all the same technology. It's the same protocols and algorithms. It's all the same bits. The difference is only in who is in CONTROL of THE DATA. He who controls the INFORMATION, controls the Universe.

As for P2P 'failing' due to low bandwidth at the 'local loop', well, that's just a hot, steaming pile of BS. Ye Olde Bulletin Board Systems (the ORIGINAL P2P networks) thrived on 2400 baud.. They thrived even more on 9600, then, when 14k came, the Internet had started to mature and began to offer more 'value', farther reach and more neat stuff. But the BBS's didn't 'fail'. Not due to poor performance or inequitable sharing of files within the communities they supported. In fact, the only times BBS's were put out of business (except for their owners personal choice) it was due to... (drum roll) PIRACY and kiddie porn.

The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196