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Peer-to-Peer for Academia
Andy Oram has a good speech online about peer-to-peer and universities. He discusses a variety of possible research topics under the p2p umbrella and urges university administrators to promote this instead of squashing it.
...peer-to-peer file sharing in a purely academic sense is not discouraged or directly banned. However, internet file sharing programs (beginning with Napster) were banned due to the hit that they put on my school's available bandwidth. With over 12,000 100Mbps dorm room connections, it proved a little bit too easy for the student body to overrun the entire network by queueing up 100+ songs on Napster.
I would imagine that it is the same for most universities...they don't discourage file sharing in a more academic capacity, but they know that it's going to be used for Napster-esque file sharing, and thus they are forced to implement an overall ban.
Peer-to-peer, like many other technologies, has it's advantages and disadvantages. For some purposes (not just file-swapping), it's absolutely ideal (OK, OK so I'm a fan of SETI@Home :) ).
:) As I was taking my mandatory networking classes (which I wish I had paid more attention during), we discussed p2p quite a bit. By my senior year (Waaaaay back in...'98 :) ) there had already been several groups of students who created p2p final projects.
I just find it rather surprising that academia has taken this long to embrace p2p. It's not as if p2p has been an unknown or undiscussed topic in the realm of computer science. When I was in college, it seemed that the university was eager to stress the importance of object-oriented programming and relational databases...well, as soon as the market stressed their importance.
Is the market the core of the issue? Do colleges only adapt to teaching new technologies quickly when the market demands it? If that's the case, it would seem like more CS degress would be the equivalent of training at a vocational/technical school.
My sigs always suck.
"I'm not surprised that colleges would complain about Napster bandwidth requirements because I hear the same wringing of hands over education in general. I hear there are too many applicants to top colleges. Excuse me, but wouldn't it be good to educate more students? Instead of saying there are too many applicants, why don't you work on increasing the availability of high-quality course offerings? I know you don't have tenure-track positions for all the people awarded doctorates, but it's not your job to offer everyone a position; it's your job to educate them."
Excellent point.
The real sticking point, however, is what happens when general file-sharing software becomes popular, and people are sending each other pictures of the kids, notes, and all other sorts of digital goodies in addition to music.
Napster was banned for two reasons: bandwidth and copyright infringement. What's likely to happen in the case of general purposes P2P apps is that universities and ISPs will start to block out the software(such as gnutella) rather than individual users when they get complaints of copyright infringement, making the public suffer for the actions of the few. Worse, all of those legitimate users of P2P software will be labeled as "pirates."
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Perhaps the reason we only use 10% of our brains capacity is due to the bandwidth constraints it currently has...
Rod Taylor
College administrators have fallen into the same rut as telephone companies that are slow to roll out high-bandwidth lines, or the recording industry that is shutting down Napster. These institutions all find it more profitable to manage scarcity than to offer abundance.
(emphasis mine)
That's the problem right there. As resources become abundant, price should drop, availablility goes up, the product reaches a wider audience. It took how many years (lack of competition) for Microsoft to ship a decent product? How many DSL providers dissapeared? The RIAA and MPAA want to strangle any revolutions in the distribution of their product. What kind of market model is that!?!
When companies can hold back on the resources they control to keep profits rising, there's a problem.
Actually, our brains/nervous system do have 'bandwidth' issues - which is why the doctor does that little 'smack you on the knee with a tiny hammer' test. It's like pinging your brain for a response, and how long does it take for your brain to respond appropriately.
P2P networks are the next Big Step in computing if you ask me. Free neighborhood wireless networks will probably be the next step in networking too. We've had global community with wire-based networking, now it's time to bring community back TO the community.
I know this is OT but since it comes up so often I thought we would all benefit by knowing that the idea "We only use 10% of our brain!" is a myth.
The two points snipped from the article:
1.) Brain imaging research techniques such as PET scans (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) clearly show that the vast majority of the brain does not lie fallow. Indeed, although certain minor functions may use only a small part of the brain at one time, any sufficiently complex set of activities or thought patterns will indeed use many parts of the brain. Just as people don't use all of their muscle groups at one time, they also don't use all of their brain at once. For any given activity, such as eating, watching television, making love, or reading Skeptical Inquirer, you may use a few specific parts of your brain. Over the course of a whole day, however, just about all of the brain is used at one time or another.
2.) The myth presupposes an extreme localization of functions in the brain. If the "used" or "necessary" parts of the brain were scattered all around the organ, that would imply that much of the brain is in fact necessary. But the myth implies that the "used" part of the brain is a discrete area, and the "unused" part is like an appendix or tonsil, taking up space but essentially unnecessary. But if all those parts of the brain are unused, removal or damage to the "unused" part of the brain should be minor or unnoticed. Yet people who have suffered head trauma, a stroke, or other brain injury are frequently severely impaired. Have you ever heard a doctor say, ". . . But luckily when that bullet entered his skull, it only damaged the 90 percent of his brain he didn't use"? Of course not.
As the article says "For a much more thorough and detailed analysis of the subject, see Barry Beyerstein's chapter in the new book Mind Myths: Exploring Everyday Mysteries of the Mind [1999]"
What is music when you despise all sound?
It is often that I read knowledgeless prattle on Slashdot ... usually only from fellow commentors. This is not a troll, it is serious criticism of an article that is blatently wrong. Let's examine Mr. Oram's discussions of P2P ...
Did Universities try to stop P2P? Napster, certainly. Probably many other file sharing systems too. Why on earth would they do that? Bandwidth, security, liability. I'll elaborate later.
Mr. Oram asserts that P2P is a great way to overcome limited resources. Then expounds on how Internet2 and IPv6 are going to remove the resource barriers to P2P.
Is P2P new? No. IRC's DCC extensions have been around for at least 8 years; ytalk is even older. The idea of dsitributing information on a whole lot of servers without central control is, surprise surprise, the basis for the Web. P2P simply involves direct communication between clients, at most using a server to mediate discovery.
I'm going to ignore the anti-DMCA dissertation, because its been heard before. It also has nothing to do with P2P; just a few specialised services that use P2P as a means to swap copyright information. If it wasn't for people like Mr Oram confusing P2P with specific P2P applications, then P2P as a whole wouldn't have a bad name.
A little later we hit the "IPv6 will help" argument, to which I can only say: security. Sure, you get rid of NAT. But at the risk of placing your device in the line of fire. Even if it is "secure by default" (so end users don't have to worry too much), it is still accessible from everywhere. That means DOS vulnerable, attack vulnerable when a security hole is found, and each and every individual is responsible for their own security. That doesn't work in corporate of group/organization networking. A central point needs primary control over security for the entire network. NAT, firewalls, and prevention of arbitary data coming IN to the network unsolicited are significant defenses against attack.
Which brings up the strongest point for universities to deny P2P: they would have to allow access to P2P services (yes, P2P is actually a client and a server on each machine) behind their firewalls, causing a security risk. Typically universities have a limited number of computers providing services behind firewalls, and take care to guard them against attack, and quarantine them in case of breach. With P2P, this approach goes out of the window.
For the same reason Mr Oram has ignored the security communities hatred of SOAP, a protocol explicitly designed to penetrate those nasty firewalls that administrators put up. Tell me, why don't we just set up a public inbound IP-over-TCPIP tunnel available on all firewalls so that we can get past them?
Now Mr Oram turns to debunking the security argument. Totally missing the point of course. You can encrypt and sign until your CPU is blue in the face, and still have zero security because your computer has been compromised. Unless you can adequately secure ALL services on your computer, you are insecure. One of the best ways to secure a service is to shut it down. The more services, the more ports of entry. Not surprisingly, P2P is a service.
Sendmail and apache serve massive amount of network traffic every day. They have taken years to mature to a point where they are mostly secure, yet new hacks are found for them every so often. How long until P2P implementations reach this level of maturity, and security?
The McAfee example is laughable, to say the least. Multitier client-server technology isn't P2P, not matter what this supposed expert wants to believe. Oh yes -- what was that announcement two weeks ago about an attack on the McAfee auto-upgrade feature?
While most of the assertions regarding bandwidth are true (shock!), Mr Oram is WAY OUT on the University issue. You see, students may be downloading the same amount irrespective of whether they use P2P or FTP ... but there is the issue of UPLOADING. Having administered a network for just a small company at the time of Napsterism, I saw a massive increase in bandwidth use just from Napster fielding and responsing to queries, even before local users started downloading the music.
Finally we conclude by returning to nonsense: Seti@home is P2P?!? In what universe does distributed computing offloaded by a central server and in which none of the computing nodes communicate with each other get classified as P2P?
Please, Mr Oram. Understand at least the vaguest basics of a topic before spewing garbage about it.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
As I recall, there was an attempt made to tack on a provision that would allow these organizations to inspect your machine, but that the attempt was retracted. There are serious issues in enacting a provision like this - how do they know which are legal copies, for instance. There was a /. post about this a few weeks back. Any other readers may feel free to correct me on this, but I believe that was the 'state of the union' so to speak.
I'd be more worried about the tendency of some universities to build strong firewalls around their networks that filter out all incoming traffic, thus preventing the use of any private servers and peer-to-peer clients of students as well as researchers.
Our university did this, which has annoyed especially many computer science students. For me, it closed down my largeish website, together with many CGI programs for research (such as a data equalizer for neural net research) and personal purposes.
I wrote a long complaint (in Finnish sorry) about the problem, but since most people don't need (or don't know they need) the service, they don't care. The students still can put up their web page to a poorly administered and always outdated main server, which doesn't have any DB or other softwares, and has very severe restrictions on disk space (on the order of 10 megs while I'd need some 10 gigs).
I see this also as a serious threat to the development of new Internet services. If you look at most of the existing Internet technologies (http, nntp, smtp, bind...), they were all created in universities as "gray research", often by students. In a tightly firewalled Internet, they might never have made it out.
Sure, researchers and deparments of our university can theoretically have their own servers, if the department's head takes personal official responsibility and the department officially allocates money for the upkeep. This means absolute ban for almost all "gray research" projects (often part of larger projects.)
In our case, firewalling was explained with need for tighter security. However, an easy-to-use unofficial port registration would have solved most of the security problems. It's difficult to say what's the real reason; perhaps over-enthusiasm for "high-end security tech", or perhaps just low interest to administer the system - if the net isn't used it doesn't cause so much work, right?
Oh, and we pay for our connections, although they are partly subvented. Well, it might even be profitable for the university. (Note that studying doesn't cost anything here.)
Well, if you want to block IP watchdog companies, you'll have to start with Slashdot.
Free Hans!
CFS and PAST are P2P readonly file systems a la Napster/Gnutella/Freenet. Both had papers in this year's SOSP. Both are based on log(N) P2P overlay routing/lookup substrates.
OceanStore seeks to be a more general (writable) global storage system.
And several P2P conferences have formed and will continue to form.
Some of these projects have been going on for years. So you shouldn't buy the "Academic networking/CS researchers are a bunch of P2P haters" line without a few grains of your favorite seasoning.