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New P2P tool Using... IRC? [UPDATED]
SupremeOverlord writes "A new P2P file-sharing tool called "BitHive" is entering public beta soon. This one uses IRC servers to connect nodes to avoid the scalability problems Gnutella suffers while not having a centralized server like Napster. Check out the press release at BitHive.org, and sign up for the upcoming public beta here. At the very least, it's going to be an improvement over automated fserves." Update: 12/11 4:09 PM by michael: See also this article describing file-sharing over AIM - Aimster.
I don't claim to know anything about foriegn laws, but why can't one of these centralized services like Napster run in a foriegn country that has no real laws that would be broken?
Can anyone who knows more about this comment?
It seems like there will never be a decentralized file sharing service that works as well as Napster or Scour...
FoonDog
I'm not a CS major.
but from what i've read. O(n^2) would spell out too "Big Oh, N to the power of two" Big Oh -or- O() means the worst possible case for an agorythm to run. N is some variable. Big Oh notation is used to expresses the effenctentcy of an agorythm.
another case of O(n^2) would be a bouble sort. in it's worst possible case, if you had N items it would take N^2 time to sort those items.
What I don't understand is how is compares it to IRCnet, I can understand expressing it to expressions, and loops. but to a whole protocol is much more vague? What's N? in this case, the number of clients? what's ther result of n^2 apply too?
-Jon
this is my sig.
It means that the time required for the process grows at a rate that is similar to the curve generated by squaring the primary value that increases computation time (represented as n). "Big-O" notation is one of a couple different ways to express how a particular process' time requirements increase as the size of the job increases. If I remember right, Big-O represents the worst-case scenario (the time growth curve will be no worse than this). Combined with Big-Omega and Big-Theta, you get worst-case, best-case, and average curves.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Okay, I'm always skeptical when a couple of goonies manage to wrangle some VC money with a idea that has lots of buzzwords and promises to be really really hot.
I'm not saying that this is the case here, mind you. I haven't looked into the particulars of this company at all (other than the fact that its home-page looks home-made).
Here is my question:
The thing that has been plaguing these glorified FTP clients is the real-time searching utility. It has an inherent O(n^2) feel to it. 50 users want to use the network, and search for files on 49 computers. 50000 users want to use the network, and search for files on 49999 computers. Seems O(n^2) to me.
The Napster (Scour etc) solution is the central server, which people dislike, since these "P2P" fly-by-night companies are turning to the dark side at a rate not seen since the original Star Wars flicks came out.
The Gnutella (Freenet etc) solution is "maybe n won't get so big". Or, in desperation, "let's not search everyone's else's computer". Doesn't seem like people would go for that. I'd like to find that one guy who likes the same obscure stuff that I do. Isn't that supposed to be one of the advantages of this type of file exchange?
So that's the (billion-dollar) problem. Here's the proposed solution:
Let's use the IRC network instead.
Does something seem fishy here? How would this fix the inherent O(N^2) problems? It seems to me that these people are solving the O(N^2) problem by finding an unused network so N can start at 0 again. Does anyone else out there sense this?
Donny
Almost every single IRC server in existance has "Terms of use" that explicitly ban bots
bullshit, and if they do. trust me that don't do a thing about it. damm near anyone can eggbot a channel as long as they want. look at google's listing of IRC bots.
Now I've never seen a shell account that allowed IRC bot's. but as for the IRC serers? every channel is kept open from a bot. hell they way IRC is hacked together, it's the only way to really keep a room/channel open. You have a bot sit there acting like a user. then you can log in and pipe commands to it like "/kick 33l3le_lame_ass" of whatever.
-Jon
this is my sig.
- CitizenC . AssMonkey@EliteOrbit-58437.ivideon.com (com)
- realname í rm -rf
- idle í 1m 7s (signon: -1h 6m 6s ago)
/mode CitizenC -x
- CitizenC . AssMonkey@64-59-157-35.ivideon.com (com)
- realname í rm -rf
- idle í 2m 6s (signon: -1h 5m 4s ago)
------------
CitizenC
In a brief email exchange about 1 week after Napster existed (at least in a public sense), I learned that the original Napster servers were set up using essentially a modified ircd. A modified services handled search requests and the database. The napster protocol itself is a lot like irc as far as the authentication and message passing goes, and the hash's (#) in the channel names are a holdover that stayed in because it was convenient and familiar. It is interesting to note that he also told me that the ircd based system showed such poor performance in testing that they rewrote everything from scratch even before they opened the service to the public.
I am skeptical as to how well this is going to work in practice. Anyone who remembers EFNet #quake on the day of the release of quake 1 should know how problematic having several thousand people in an irc channel can be.
~GoRK
How come whenever P2P is mentioned everyone starts to spout half-truths (or just complete mis-truths) as if they knew exactly what they were talking about?
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Almost every single IRC server in existance has "Terms of use" that explicitly ban bots. This is very much a bot. It won't scale well either because if a user on IRC is transfering too much data at once, the server kicks them off for flooding. In other words if three modem users request a search on "slashcode.zip" and it replies to all of them with 5 found locations, they go down. You also have to solve the problems where the servers are bogged down and users can't connect, k-lining the main bot, the RIAA using some l33t mIRC script to take out the bot, and more. Why someone just doesn't copy the napster service, generalize it, and run it in a third world country not regulated by US copy right laws is beyond me. Why not use Cuba, they're preety pissed at us now?
Regardless, it sounds like a good idea. But IRC servers are fragile things. Look at the dal-net network, and watch it's servers go up and down, up and down. Netsplit here, server crash there, services toasted for another 13 hours, and four thousand random messages from 12 year olds pushing porn down your throat. The problems of speed and stability faced by Gnutella may not be completely solved as it may seem, unless someone feels like shelling out some serious cash and setting up some slashdotable servers on irc.
Destrago Z. Scudiero -Noize Incorporated -Void42
<Foghorn-Leghorn>That there's a JOKE son, son that's a there's a FUNNY(I'll tell you what, that boy's got less sense than a Republican President)</Foghorn-Leghorn>
Why did I chose Bush? Because he's going to be the next President. That's been obvious since the Supreme Court stopped the recount. No, I don't like the slimy, human rights violating, little bastard, but that has little to do with anything. No, Gore wouldn't have been any more or less appropriate for the lampoon, the above economic policy is an attempt to cut income taxes (Republican) via an indirect tax which affects everyone regardless of whether they paid income tax before [inflation] (Republican. See "Sales tax"), those who point at the Internetty notion of the idea and suggest that makes it Gorish forget how completely stupid it is from any ideological perspective.
Having the "next" president as the subject of the joke is good for two reasons, first his supporters have already had enough good news, and secondly, the losing candidate is hardly going to propose how he intends to run the country now is he?
It's a joke people. Lighten up!
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
...Got the t-shirt. Then killed it off, because there were better alternatives.....
It's called Distributed FileServer over IRC, and is basicly like gnutella but using irc as a carrier.
There are much worse algrorythm scalings than O(n^2). A trivial one would be O(n^n). At 100 items a O(n^2) would have increased by 10^4 times, while a O(n^n) would have increased by 10^200.
Dear sir, Im having problems trying to transfer a file over your mIRC network. Its only 14 Meg and I am using a 56k line. It gets to about 400K and keeps dropping out, stalling, or just crashing. Why does this happen?
On, and yeah, since youre reading this already, can you also do something about Galt? He keeps kicking and banning me from #hottub but I did nothing wrong. He wont even acknowledge my numerous private messages to him after the fact. What is wrong with him?
Thank you,
Signed - lamer newbie #1038801
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
Bush To Abolish Income Tax
New "Taxster" system to be used to raise revenue instead
By Ack Countant
WASHINGDON, DC (Presswire) - Citing a taxation system riddled with loopholes and get-outs, President-Apparent Bush today announced changes to the United State's ailing taxation system. "There are all sorts of problems with it", a spokesman explained, "Poor people get to pay nothing at all. And, of course, not enough people have any income to begin with. We tried using executions to reduce the number of poor people, but then lawyers kept coming out of the woodwork protesting that some were innocent and stuff, and that was expensive, so we needed to find a better way."
The new system will be replaced by a system called Taxster, based largely on the Napster file-sharing technology developed on the Internet. "Essentially, everyone's bank accounts will be linked to the Taxster system, and whenever anyone needs money, they just grab some that's being 'shared' by someone else.", explained Vice President Dick Cheney, "By default, all bank accounts are shared. Whenever the government needs any money, it just looks for some on Taxster, and all the problems are solved."
The genius of the system is that the sharing system doesn't reduce the amount of money anyone has. "Basically, when we share money, we're not saying 'Here, have my money'", explained Cheney, "Instead we're encouraging people to make copies of money, for their own personal use. we still get to keep our money, but someone gets their own copy of the money in their own bank account. Everyone wins!"
Bush reputedly got the idea after watching an episode of the Geraldo Rivera Show on TV. "He saw a special on Napster", explained a government spokesman to a packed press conference, "And while at first he was a little perturbed when Trent Lott was interviewed and said it sounded like Communism to him, he got thinking, Communism is an economic ideal, and maybe this Napster thing could be applied to economics." The cash strapped Inland Revenue Service jumped at the idea, explaining that it meant they would no longer need to "Audit" Americans, a process which of late has become difficult as government stocks of truth serums have run dry and the government rack broke last week."
Ordinary American's reactions have been positive. "It sounds like a great idea", explain Rush Limbaugh, a journalist, "I don't mind sharing money if everyone else is, if I run short I can always grab some from someone else." Jeb Bush, a governor in Florida, explained "It's excellent. There's no risk involved, we just all share our bank accounts and we get as much money as we need."
Economists however are sceptical. "The money has to come from somewhere", explained Alan Greenspan, Chief US Economist, "Otherwise every bit of sharing is just going to devalue the currency." But experts have scoffed at the notion of devaluation. "These people are just living with an out of date old-economy financial model", explained new economy pundit Jon Katz, "With technologies like Napster, the notion that you'll be able to work for a living is rapidly becoming obsolete. Instead of being paid for what you do, like the dinosaurs of the old-economy keep claiming you should be able to do, you can distribute your work via technologies like Napster, and get your income from Taxster. It's much fairer."
George W Bush is 11.
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
There's no information about how it uses IRC in the PR guff or on the site. Does anyone have some *real* information?
If they're passing messages over IRC, either they'll have to run their own (and risk being shut down), or put the messages out over existing IRC networks (EF,Dal, whatever). In the second case, I can't imagine the guys running the IRC servers are going to be too impressed - the onus of fending off irate lawyers will then be on them, and most of the IRC servers seem to be run out of kindness as a hobby.
0.02,
Mike.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
I got the impression that the O(n^2) nature of IRC made scalability a problem (every change at every server needs to be propagated to every other server). Similarly, this was initially designed for sending 50 byte packets of gibber-gabber, not whole files.
I suspect I'll hear it start creaking at the edges fairly soon...
FP.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I can't understand why anyone would say this system does not use a centralized server, it most certainly does, and it's IRC. Remove access to IRC, and the system no longer works. However, I don't disagree that its not an innovative solution to the problem. We used IRC for a similar purpose from around 1990 to 1993. We wrote an encrypted protocal using IRC as a network connection point for our chat systems. It allowed us to link remote chat systems without having to pay phone bills. We basically hacked user accounts on university systems to gain access. Was around the the time pc-pursuit went down. If anyone was around back then the chat system/bbs was STS-12, and in case anyone was wondering, the channel was #freedom. Anyhow, the only real way to do this efficiently and reliably is with a central server based system. We did alot of research on Gnutella and non-server based networks, and we came to the conclusion that while it works great if the point of the system is anonymity and piracy/copyright fraud, it just doesn't work in any business models. "We" are the engineering crew at http://www.splooge.com, a new (beta) media-sharing application. Don't really want to use this as my own advertisement system, but check it out, we've spent a tremendous amount of time on it.
I don't see this new p2p software as a overuse issue for irc servers, people are already talking on them all the time:). I think the software must open up discussion groups named after the software or mp3 you are seeking (irc chat room Metalica - Battery :) with the info tag of the group containing the information of where to find your software/info. In the info part, there would be several addresses, such as 198.58.113.7 ... to the peer that has the software/info you requested. The client would than proceed to attempt connects at the addresses until it hit one that worked.
This is all speculation. It would be interesting to see how it actually works. (It could work by continually posting address's in the discussion room from people with the ware/softwares computer, overuse of the ircs I guess)
It is shady to use someone elses server to steal warez/music though - Even from people who encourage theivery among youth with their music (like Dr.Dre).
In the distance you hear an ominous moo.
This Red Herring article lays it out pretty nicely. P-2-P is not any new innovation, it is simple repackaging of existing ideas which look suspiciously like FTP or, in this case, IRC. The specific uses might seem interesting, but now that people are starting to see that there isn't really any great leap forward here, they can get back to just designing useful file transfer systems and leave the gee-whiz hype at the door.
And now, a few comments on this "revolutionary" file sharing idea. Napster (the program) was originally written because Napster (the person) was annoyed with having to manually go into IRC channels with offer bots running in them and then manually picking files to download and keeping track of it. Napster was, in fact, designed to be a more convenient version of an offer bot network. Does anyone see the irony of going back to IRC?
As for the comments that Napster is in danger of being extinct, take a look at Napigator's server listing page. There are at least 10 different networks, all of which are pretty large. Though they cannot yet be compared in size to the Napster network, they will explode the second that Napster is taken down.
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Informally, a function is O(n^2) if it grows no faster than n^2. A function is Omega(n^2) if it grows at least as fast as n^2. The latter is at issue here.
Um, if I'm not mistaken this has been possible for years.
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enterfornone - logging in for a change
It just goes to show you that you can't block peer to peer filesharing without requiring end-to-end authentication for all Internet connections. Don't laugh; the MPAA/RIAA is probably working on this right now.
Change the CTCP (client to client protocol) VERSION response to mimic that of a standard IRC client, make the protocol look like a few people talking, and change the channels you use, and it will become reasonably hard (albeight not impossible) to systematically identify these programs.
If I remember right, Napster originally was based off of the IRC idea as well. Unfortuately, IRC offers little anonymitity as to the source. An IRC server put in debug mode captures all the messages sent through it, and your connection IP is available to anyone online. We'll see how this one works. Hopefully we won't end up with a bunch of additional people flooding the system to take control of channels; IRC is overburdened with DoS attacks against servers already.
I hope that these guys are not planning on layering this service over existing networks becuase they're going to have to make sure that sys admins can't identify the clients to K-line their users. Adding Napster and Gnutella amounts of traffic to already busy IRC networks is just asking for disaster - I know of a few ISPs that would like a good reason to remove their IRC servers.
Personally I think that file sharing en-messe needs dedicated protocols and servers - or at the very least extensions to existing protocols and dedicated servers.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
The article cites Gnutella's centralized load problem. How will this differ on IRC? Aren't you just adding massive load to whatever network you utilize, be it Dalnet, Efnet or what have you?
The article also cites Napster's legal problems. How is utilizing IRC going to change this? People once thought Napster was untouchable, too. You'll just move the battle to IRC and the people who run IRC servers. Passing the problem on to someone else doesn't help.
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seumas.com
Although maybe some people who have a commercial interest in this could setup some IRC servers that can handle serious load, and will scale with the amount of usage.
If theres money to be had, it could very well mean the introduction of new IRC servers. Maybe this will be the best thing that has happened to IRC in a long time. Although, maybe it will just mean more splits, and slower servers.
Ooohhh, poor baby. It's torture to look at unispaced text, isn't it?
Wait a second, this is ALL unispaced to me.
Maybe I should stop using lynx.
you fucking crybaby
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
"Unlike Napster, which is becoming subscription-based, Scour, which has succumbed to legal pressures, and Gnutella, which suffers from scalability issues, BitHive relies on no central servers or corporations to run."
Neither does Napster. With Napigator, users can connect to OpenNap directory servers and share their files without needing some big corporation's help (unless you count VA Linux's SourceForge, which hosts the OpenNap website). And this To demonstrate the legitimacy of OpenNap, simply make a Linux kernel tarball available on one of the servers, and run an OpenNap segment on your local network to ease the bandwidth problem. With that kind of cred[?], RIAA won't be able to touch it.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The archie information system is a network-based information tool offering proactive data retrieval and indexing for widely distributed collections of data. The archie Data Gathering Component automates the gathering, indexing and maintenance of information, allowing information providers to offer improved resource discovery and access to information.
The archie User Access Component allows your users to locate and access your information using a variety of interfaces and search methods.
Given the number of hosts being used as archive sites nowadays, there can be great difficulty in finding needed software in a distributed environment. You may know that the software that you need is out there, but it can sometimes be difficult to find. Perhaps the best known application of the archie system is to maintain this Internet Archives database. The database, already available from a number of service providers across the Internet, currently contains the names of over 2,400,000 files at over 1,000 anonymous FTP archive sites. Using this database, users can rapidly locate needed files without the need to log onto dozens or even hundreds of machines. archie servers offering this database currently receive over 50,000 queries per day.
http://archie.emnet.co.uk/readme.html.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
If anything, instead of starting with IRC, just develop a new protocol that would add the needed features in a desired P2P setting; don't use the IRC protocol as the model, save for how leaf/hubs work and how a message is propigated across a network.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Anybody that uses IRC will see that this is a very bad thing. IRC has always been a breeding ground for the underground MP3 and Warez scene. Everyone on IRC just laughs at Napster and the likes. If you want to get full albums you know where to go and that does not include the word Napster. IRC has always been the best place for the hardcore bootlegger and gamer that wants to get off cheap. Why would someone make something like this to gain usage of IRC? This will destroy the underground scene and eventually lead to IRC being monitored more and more. This is a very bad thing for anybody that currently uses IRC as there means for getting stuff.
>neotope