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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".
(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.
Well email WAS peer to peer, way back in the day when you would telnet into a server (or just use a serial cable with a dumb terminal), you had POP and SMTP right there. Later in the day, it would dial up with whatever peer was scheduled, and belch out its mail, get fresh mail, and sort it. Repeat for the next host. It's only recently that we have the luxury of most servers having high-speed always on connections.
funny munging
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
- 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.)
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".
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Many hands make light work...
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.