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

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.

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.