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Shirky On P2P
There's an interview with Clay Shirky over at O'Reilly's OpenP2P network regarding P2P. Some of the piece is wordy ruminations over what peer to peer (and dear lord do I hate that term) is, and where it's going - but the most interesting part, IMHO, is the talking about web services and the changing definition of "client" and "server".
I don't know what the big fuss is all about. Hasn't the Internet always been peer-to-peer? Why even come up with a new name for it?
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
Until we can get rid of the nasty stigma Napster gave P2P...
The uneducated only think of P2P as a way to rip stuff off of the man. We need another P2P killer app to make the general populace fall in love all over again... Otherwise, any P2P app will get stomped all over.
"I thought I had an Appetite for Destruction, when all I really wanted was a club sandwich."
How would the /. effect work on a P2P network?
(and dear lord do I hate that term)
/me thinks the 'free subscription' was just a ploy to dumb him down with acronyms.
Me too - but not as much as I hate CRM, B2B, and all the other crap that's always sprayed across the front of InfoWorld.
For a while I thought 'Peer-to-peer' was all about discussions between crusty old duffers in the House of Lords:
"One's having terrible trouble with one's gout"
or
"Have you heard about the disgraceful amount of cider Lady Thatcher was seen drinking last night in the members' lobby"
But alas, no.
I'm glad we cleared that one up.
The more advanced the technology, the more open it is to primitive attack
Its clear to me that the 'p2p' fad as begun to slip away, through a combination of people realizing it was nothing new and TLA's realizing that that part of the natural order must be crushed in order to maximize profits. (Thats right people, be afraid... they don't want to *ensure* profits, they want to *maximize* them, so throw any images of altruism out the window please).
.NET and 'internet services' are anywhere near nuke significance. Someone else must be coming up with something... somewhere...
In comparison, I'd like to draw your attention to another recent buzzword/fad combination, the repeating rifle. Previous to its adoption as a standard military tool, it was employed by some individuals to great effect. Later, as one side adopted it wholesale, it gave an unbelievable advantage to a single army (The United States of Napster). Nowadays, however, everyone has a repeating rifle, thanks largely to the datahaven provided by the USSR... cheap AK-47's are available anywhere in the world, usually for about US $25. At this point it was a moot point, since the buzzword race had moved to nuclear weapons by this time.
Where my analogy breaks is I don't think
Initially, we have bare-bones, thin clients which are no more than glorified typewriters that can output their characters over copper wire to mainframes. The structure was very simple: if it could fit on a desk, it was a client. If it took a room to hold it, it was a server.
Then came the personal computer. Soon people were setting up their own web servers, their own FTP servers, etc. This, IMHO, is when the definition began to be blurred, as clients started behaving as servers and servers faded away.
Recently, though, the shift has changed back to a dedicated server because of the increasingly high demand necessary on upkeep. Joe Q. User doesn't want to be bothered to keep up with updates (Code Red, anyone?) and so he decides to let other people deal with it through proxy servers.
Everything runs in cycles; eventually, it will shift back, but for now, servers are here to stay.
Why does Hemos dislike the term "peer-to-peer"? (P2P) I find it descriptive, especially since it seems that all involved in such a network are on the same level; in other words, peers.
I can see why the RIAA, MPAA et al. don't like it though.
- because we chopped up the IP address space based on byte boundaries rather than bit boundaries, an artificial scarcity was created that led (in part) to the widespread use of DHCP and NAT
- DHCP and NAT arguably broke DNS and prevented people from running traditional server processes on their boxen so we created P2P software
- due to the numerous security problems that surface (due primarily to misconfigurations) we invent firewalls that block traffic
- due to firewalls blocking everything but HTTP, we invent a whole new protocol stack on top of HTTP (i.e. SOAP)
and so on and so on... I'd include the push of XML to "fix" the problem of differing binary data formats, and the creation of XML Schemas to make up for the lost type information in all those mismatching DTDs and so on. But you all get the point.I do admit that the ultimate goal of the web services vision is admirable, but it seems to me to be just a bloated (UDDI+WSDL+SOAP+XMLSchema+HTTP(+P2P?)) version of what many software agent research groups have been after for years. Come on people, stop the insanity! There's gotta be a better way!
(and no, I didn't read the whole article, i had to stop and release the built up rant pressure before the insanity blew my head open. go ahead and mod me down for being an offtopic troll now.)
Why is slashdot constantly reinforcing the same old shit from biased sources as if anyone takes geek politics seriously? It's also pretty boring for a propaganda site, and it would be a lot more believable if they fired Jellicle the Testicle.
Shirky seems to be suggesting that web services are to be outmoded by his new vision of peer to peer. Peer to peer has its place but for efficiency many things require a centralised location for dealing information.
If I want to send a letter the fastest way is for me to take it to the post office - not to hand it to someone randomly on the street in the hope that eventually it will be handed to someone who is going to the post office.
Carpe Daemon
Let me save you some money with a more concise analysis - Napster is dead, and so is P2P.
I had a friend that got a promotion because he got to be good friends with the guy that owned the boat next to his in the marina.
Would that be considered "Pier to Pier Networking"?
- Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
There was some discussion of "web services" on Perl Advocacy list recently. I come down on the side that says Apache is all you're ever going to need. Look, Slashdot is technically an application... does that make Slashcode an n-tier application server? Purlease. It's just marketing - web servers are SOOOOO 90s, now we call 'em "web services".
This is probably slightly offtopic, but I wanted to gauge peoples reactions, and this seems like a good place to do it...
Search engines are having a harder and harder time spidering the web as time goes on. There are more and more sites to spider and more and more indexed sites to update. This seems like a perfect application for a peer to peer application - kinda like gnutella except only the indexing information would be held by the nodes rather than the data itself... There are lots of idle machines out there with idle bandwidth - we could create a peer to peer solution where each node spiders a minute part of the web. When it's done, it could send the info to it's immediate peers so that a node being down doesn't hide the index. A search could be done using a similar technique to gnutella but the advantage would be that the system could index all the information that is currently out there rather than the items stored in the application. Does anyone know if anything like this has been done, or is even feasible?
Feel the sensation!
The newest phemonemon on World Wide Web, PFP are sensation that is make mouth tingle! We are not to let lamers (ha! haha) like teh CmdrTaco take away the firsts posts. To first post! Is our right! And no one takes away out right!
SO teh first post in every story is to be awardde Award of Pseudofirst Posting, even though the post has not number "1".
So band together, friends! For the is sweeping the Internet! PFP, the new sensation!
-- The_Messenger
Has anyone more detailed information ?
They could raise dead Nietzsche.
My understanding is that a 'server' is a machine that offers 'services'. So if you connect to a machine that is offering a service it is - by definition - a server.
If I'm right then we'll all have to agree that P2P is an empty internet buzzword that has no meaning.
Even with Napster it wasn't really P2P. You were getting MP3's from a machine 'serving' them. That makes it a server.
Maybe P2P should be renamed to NEN, or 'normal everyday networking'.
Claric
There's no problem that cannot be solved with a suitable amount of high explosives
I don't know what the big fuss is all about. Hasn't the Internet always been peer-to-peer? Why even come up with a new name for it?
Not really - try Client / Server instead. For instance, you don't send email to someone directly - instead you send it to you server, which then talks to another server, and the end client downloads the email from the server.
Browsers talk to servers - you are the client. FTP clients talk to servers. It goes on and on... most of the Internet has been (and probably will continue to be) Client - Server comminications, not Peer to Peer communications.
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
This is a really important debate right now, and there are no good answers. The debate comes down to how much do we need to do to the Web as we have it today to be able to create an environment where programs can be as interoperable as web browsers and servers are today?
.NET, even if a lot of it is hype, it will affect our world a great deal.
There are growing criticisms of the consensus vision of web services -- http / SOAP / WSDL / UDDI -- largely on the grounds that its complexity is un-web-like, and that there are uninvented and possibly uninventable layers required above UDDI for any two arbitrary applications to be able to find each other in the dark.
Dave Winer of Userland, inventor of XML-RPC and co-designer of the SOAP spec, advocates an embrace of these two protocols by the Open Source movement as a lightweight way to advance the battle for interoperability. (Dave's ideas in many ways answer the Will Open Source Lose the Battle for the Web? article form earlier this month.)
Another group, in line with your "Apache is all we need" idea, has taken Roy Fielding's idea of the REST (REpresentational State Transfer) architecture as a way to extend existing web semantics furhter into the domain of applications. They have started a RESTWiki to expand on those ideas.
This is all a big mess right now, with no obvious clarity coming any time soon, but two things we can be certain of are that experiments with application-to-application traffic is going to increase dramatically in the next 12 months, whatever the framework, and that with MSFT driving this idea as part of
-clay
The seeming evolution of client-server realtionships (and definitions) stems from our increasing ability to place more and more advanced technology into the basic PC. In a very basic and abbreviated form, a server transmits information (typically content, not simply SYN/ACK) to a client, which receives it. Modern PCs have the ability to host information, and are typically capable of fulfilling both roles simultaneously. Hence the machine-based idea of the client-server model has changed to a typically event-based concept. Your PC can act as a client when it displays the lastest Slashdot postings, but also as a server when someone decides to download pornography from your gnutella app. It it this very ability that makes P2P possible, each machine exchanging data according to the specifications of the user.
Furthermore, "Peer-to-Peer" infers an equality relationship, which in turn denies the client-server heirarchical model. Hence, the necessity to revisit terms that no longer fit the previously typical standard.
What I see in this article, the constant references to web services learning from P2P and vice-versa, is already realized in SOAP. We've just got to harness it.
Let's hope that's the way the industry goes.
It's actually very exciting, if your ISP doesn't start charging you a P2P account, like they charge for a Presence on Web account
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
when referring to God (also with a capital).
Only when using the plural, eg. "gods" or "lords", can you use a lowercase.
.... but who gives a fuck?
I bet some people would pay alot for a gnutella (for example) anonymizer/redirect cache service.
example:
[customer machine]
(connects too)
[SUPER NODE:file location cache,server cache,new anonymous name]
(connects too)
[gnutella network cloud.]
Slogan: Garrunteed anonimity barring court order, instant connects, instant searches.
Hey anonimity might work for ISP's too, but no infrastructure would be neccesary for the big cache service, just bandwidth.
PS:cmdrtaco "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!" was trigered by an ASCII network diagram.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
FLAA. (Four Letter Asshole Associations)
sulli
RTFJ.
Just a random observation to a quiet story: If Microsoft ever gets into peer to peer, we should (since they operate on the basis of FUD) probably call it ph33r to ph33r.
Unfortunately, no one seems to be able to come up with many concrete applications of this idea (other than a few mentioned, like music sharing). The reason is that most of the functions we expect from a network are based on client-server technology. There seems to be this hazy notion of "conversations" between machines, in the same way that two friends could have a chat, and this is not the kind of fluffy computing model that I'm looking for when I visit my bank online to pay my bills.
I definitely agree that the HTTP protocol is ill-equipped to deal with the demands of today's network applications, but the solution is to standardize a better protocol, not throw out the entire model.
-- Brett
You know, five years ago "the Web" meant HTML documents moderated or mediated by HTTP. "The Web" now means the publicly accessible Internet, so I think we're not only going to keep the word "Web services," I think inasmuch as it becomes popular, it's going to change the meaning of the word "Web" away from narrower protocol-driven definition and toward the larger public Internet definition.
You know, there's a perfectly good word for "the publicly accessible Internet": the Net. The Web is a bunch of html pages hyperlinked together. The Net is that plus everything else. It's nice to be able to express oneself with precision, and if "the Web" becomes a blanket phrase for the entire net, we'll lose a little.
... if people remember to declare/define acronyms the first time they are written the universe will realign!
I.E. Peer-to-Peer (P2P)
Just for reference, it really sucks being left out on a limb when a parent post is COMPLETELY DELETED... with the parent at -1, nobody see's your retort, but as soon as its gone, you're offtopic. SLASHCODE BREAKS THREADING, YOU SHOULD DELETE ALL CHILD POSTS AS WELL IF YOU DON"T LIKE A THREAD.
The funny thing is -- that everybody's acting like "Peer to Peer" is some recent buzzword that was created in this new age of unwashed idiot internet users.
Strange how that works, eh?
It wasn't coined recently. It's been around forever. It's just that nobody ever bothered saying "Yes, this network is peer to peer..." or "...this one has a server."
Concerning the Internet, yeah. For networking in general, the term was out there. Even MS was making the distinctions in thier manuals for Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (insert flashback to much worse days... WfW 3.11 *SHUDDER*) The term has been kicked around for a long time, but, now with this new 'peer to peer' networking thinggy on the Internet, it introduced quite a few people to the term. And, as someone else pointed out, Peer to Peer means Napster or some other evil technology these days it seems. *SIGH*
I remember hooking up two Amigas with a parallel cable and running that nifty little tool called "Parnet". It was supposed to create a "Peer to Peer" network of ... uh ... two computers.
hehehe - man I remember this. I built that stupid bidirectional parallel cable and hooked up the two 1000's. (IIRC, there was a slight difference between the 1000's and the 2000's parallel port that screwed hooking up to the 2000 - which had a bigger HD) I thought that was like the coolest thing... then realized I had almost nothing useful to do with it! ;-)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
Yeah, right ... I have a Gnutella client which I search through a network of servers. Interestingly enough, though, I also (but not everyone does!) run a Gnutella server myself on my computer, allowing other people to search and download from my own.
So what you're saying, in essence, is that more and more home computer are becoming servers--which was how the Internet was before the "home computers" started logging on.
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
So far it seem to me that everyone except "Trollman 5000", the only mention of RIAA and MPAA in this whole topic, is missing the point.
There are major economic forces, forces so big that they are (hopefully temporarily) superceding the US Constitution, that are effectively trying to turn the Internet into a big broadcast medium. Essentially, to a media mogul used to TV and Radio, every electronic distribution means ought to look like TV and Radio. (Kinda like the old hammer/nail thing)
Centralized focus means ease of control. It means you can easily go after an ISP for content posted on their servers. The lawyers can wield a big OFF button.
Peer-to-peer is much more difficult to police, though it sounds as if they're trying against Gnutella.
But then realize just WHO runs the cable ISPs, and then take a look at their TOS, and it's immediately obvious WHY. Aside from not having adequate amounts of the correct competence to run a data network, they know that personal servers and peer-to-peer are more difficult to control. Therefore, "No servers for the use of others" is the most common rule on Cable. Note that DSL is generally more open, and that fits with the parent organization being a non-content-owner.
But as a cable subscriber with no hope of DSL, peer-to-peer is beyond my reach.
So...
We need a peer-to-peer proxy, for two reasons.
First, it lets me connect out of cable, and once connected to the proxy, it lets me act as a peer. If the cable companies got a little more enlightened, they might even let run the proxy themselves. (Yeah, right! Who wants to wait?)
Second, as Code Red has shown, with default Microsoft security and Joe Sixpak running his home PC, the Internet simply isn't a safe place. For the most part, perhaps ISPs should allow NO incoming connections, by default*. A peer-to-peer proxy would be the only thing keeping the concept generally viable, in that case.
(*) By the same token, they should allow the knowledgable user to open ports. (Again, fat chance!)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Wasn't there some article here the other day about some P2P network working better the more users were using it at once?
Are you looking for the Freenet Project? Each Freenet agent ("clerver" sounds clumsy to me, and "servent" should have passed away with the 13th Amendment) retrieves documents from the closest user on the net, so as more people grab the latest Linux kernel, the path between each user and Linux 2.4.x becomes shorter and sending each copy creates less long-haul traffic.
Will I retire or break 10K?
RedBack has a model for DSL that the telcos love.
-
"You click on an icon for the service or application you require, fill in some basic subscription and payment information and gain access to the service you need. When you have finished using the service, you "hang up".
And they mean it. They want users to open separate PPPoE connections for separate, and separately priced, services. Their video conferencing example uses $0.35/minute as a suggested price. Users will no longer connect to "the Internet", they will connect to specific, paid services, billed through the telco via the PPPoE connection mechanism.-
The SMS allows Service Providers to "resell" the same link by offering subscribers dynamic access to multiple services, thus generating more revenue per subscriber.
That's pitched to telcos. The whole RedBack push is "more revenue per subscriber line". Quality of service can be different for each PPPoE connection. Thus, the "quality of service" mechanism can be used to throttle the non-premium services down to low data rates. This encourags use of premium services, and slows down "unauthorized" distribution of content.The telcos have tried this business model before, with X.25 (an overpriced flop), Minitel (an overpriced flop in the US), ISDN (an overpriced flop in the US), and 900 numbers (an overpriced success, but only for porn.) Here we go again.
None of this would go anywhere except that in the US, DSL is becoming an unregulated monopoly. This gives monopoly telcos the power to force this on their customers.
You were getting [files] from a machine 'serving' them. That makes it a server.
Why can't a server also act as a client? We need to get away from the idea that a "server" must always have a permanent, high-throughput connection with three or more nines reliability at the edge of the network.
Even with Napster it wasn't really P2P. You were getting [files] from a machine 'serving' them. That makes it a server.
But that machine was also 'getting' files from other servers. Read the article. In a client-server system, the client and server have relatively fixed roles, whereas in a distributed or "peer-to-peer" system, the clients and servers exchange roles frequently or even concurrently, preferably even when the agents are on transient network connections. For example, I may be downloading the latest Linux kernel from user foo while serving the latest XFree86 release to user bar.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Many hands make light work...
means Napster, Gnutella, Freenet and not being controlled, freedom of speech etc...
true or false is irrelevant, it's the perception
I can see why the RIAA, MPAA et al. don't like it though
when all your income depends on being the middleman between artists and their paying fans, the words peer-to-peer would make you pee your pants
However, it contained the dumbest phrase I have read in weeks, clearly proof that the smartest people make silly mistakes from time to time:
Well, if it's inevitable, then by definition trying to avoid it is pointless (not just "probably pointless", pointless).
Sorry, I couldn't resist pointing this out.
--Q
Jeepers, we were going to have a shiny happy remoted interconnected interoperating world with CORBA. And before that it was RPC. Now we're supposed to get it with UDDI and SOAP and so forth. Why? What's changed that people are going to completely throw out the window the idea of orthogonal client and infrastructures.
... I just don't see it serving its purported purpose of generic information interchange.
Let's look at CPAN for a second. Here's how you run a CPAN site: cd to a public ftp directory and wget --recursive ftp://some-cpan-url. The smart client figures out the rest, and people can use dumb ftp clients too.
Here's how slashdot disseminates its feeds in XML and RDF and HTML: you grab it from a URL, and the webserver shovels it at you, blithely ignorant of the semantic meaning of the bits it's transferring around.
In the magical world of webservices, you now get to write special methods on the server end, configure the server to invoke them, and in general ensure that you don't interoperate with anything. Oh yes, you also get to classify the whole system with some big bureaucratic UDDI schema that is supposed to describe it all to any capable client, as if you didn't already write the client to work with this domain-specific protocol already.
All this might be great for intranet apps
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
If only I had a fiver for every time somebody has posted to some forum saying words to the effect of "If only the net had been designed *properly* from the start - we'd never have to implement all these kluges!"
It's precicely BECAUSE of the absence of a over-arching design that the net has been and will continue to be so successful. I agree that's a mite hard to grasp when people are used to devoting their lives to designing elegant systems (and/or are attracted to the M$ concept of centralised control), but I believe it to be true.
In design terms the net is a singularity - it needs to have a degree of chaos at its heart to function.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
All it is that makes a server a server is it running services.
OK. I guess I was bitching to ISPs who think "server" is "something you pay $$$$$$ per month to run" and not something that the average consumer can run.
Will I retire or break 10K?