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.

Comments

How does this overcome the fundamental problem?

[donny]

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

Hmmmm irc.....

[GoRK]

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

More point-to-point sharing...

[squiggleslash]

Monday, December 11th 2000 1020 EST
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.
--

Always sketpical when I see "revolutionary"

[Mike Connell]

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.

Isn't IRC overloaded already?

[fatphil]

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.

IS this a good thing?

[matthew.thompson]

I used to use IRC fairly extensively and servers would regularly go missing creating a fractured and fragmented network - response times were laughable - 2 or 3 minutes between someone sending a message and the recipient getting it was not uncommon. Now I find ICQ a much better way of contacting the people I want to chat with - they all have ICQ numbers and I have much more flexibility - even if the software is pig ugly and eats memory faster than Outlook.

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.

Poor old IRC

[yebb]

Sweet jesus, as if some of the IRC networks arn't already overworked enough. Any of the last few battle scared EFNet servers will finally cut their losses, and say "To heck with you all" while they pack up their server, and twine up their twisted pair.

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.

Is Napster's "centralized" model really that bad?

[yerricde]

"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.

Anyone remember archie?

[peterdaly]

Remember Archie? I'm only half joking...

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

Gah, IRC protocol bad...

[Masem]

IRC is a rather antiquated and outdated protocol for what it needs to do. It's not the concept of multiple servers in leaf/hub connections that's the problem, but the protocol that is used to send messages between servers and the various types of messages that a user can initiate. There's a lack of encryption (in general, some servers have that hacked in), spoof protection, and various other details that while most people think should be added to IRC, no one wants to reprogram all the clients and servers from the ground up to add said features. Previous attempts to try to 'extend' IRC by various tricks, such as MS' infamous Comic Chat, tend to pollute the system more, and if these people set up a standard on their own IRC network, some other networks that are meant for chat only might see weird requests from people trying to leech from EFNet.

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.