Slashdot Mirror
Real Time Gnutella Visualization
brett42 writes "Some students at Berkeley wrote a python program that connects to the Gnutella network and maps out connections between nodes in real time. " I gotta say thats pretty smooth. Hopefully future gnutella clients will incorporate something like this just for the time wasting potential of watching the graph wiggle while seeing what porn others are searching for.
Well, here's our next generation of college-millionaires. They can sign a nice spiffy contract with the RIAA and mod this thing to spit out home addresses and phone numbers, complete with a detailed map for "physical evidence." Let's hope that's not as easy as it sounds and the RIAA never gets that capability.
~ now you know
These guys disected the Gnutella protocol and used the Furi interface (which provides network status screens and gives users info about nodes they're connected to) for their project. I was looking over the source code briefly and it looks very tight. It's nice to see college students interested and working on projects like these. If you go to the website and read over their final paper it is very interesting. You'll find a lot of stuff about the guts of Gnutella and what is unique about this project. They toyed with interfaces for a long time and rejected a great deal of them. It seems they spent a lot of time making this a very easy to use tool. They even worked hard on getting the color scheme down (hence this rejected scheme). Seeing a few people that are this poetic in refining their tools so that the user can use them best is rare.
The final visualization was createed with Python and Tkinter ("Tk interface"-- the de-facto Python interface to the Tk GUI toolkit). Tkinter is not the only GUI for Python. However, they chose it because it is commonly used and is easily portable between Unix and Windows (how thoughtful of them!)
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
Gnucleus(Win32) already supports something like that which uses a component by AT&T. You have to start it before connecting though. So I'm not sure, how RealTime it is compared to this script.
Is if this kind of technology was used for a new kind of music chart:
Top 100 pirated songs!
It would be doubly interesting to see if the same songs which were top of the 'real' charts, were also the top of the Gnutella charts. Maybe we could catch the record companies that buy their own records to boost their positions in the charts red-handed.
*r
--- My dad's political betting
I believe that Limewire does support some sort of boolean searches. I've noticed that using '+' with a search further limits the results you get e.g 'foo+fighters+everlong' returns almost only that song not anything else. Like you said though, I too cannot find any info. on this feature.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
Because since the network is being routed through apparently one super server to authenticate its clients as they connect, this gives the RIAA, MPAA, and MS reason to attack and destroy that one server. Gnutella, while a little clunky and information on it is once in a while unreliable - at least it IS completely distributed with no central server so it makes it harder for someone to sue or attack any one entity as they all share in the 'criminal acts' of getting little known artists and videos massively distributed and seen/heard. (Whatever your affiliation is with the MPAA/RIAA/MS, feel free to flame me for being sarcasticly cynical about big corporations tearing up file sharing innovations, a-la Napster).
Don't think the RIAA isn't stupid enough to go after some end users. It just hasn't been practical so far to get evidence. Now they can point to P2P traffic maps as probable cause.
Our efforts are paying off in fighting this disease called "l33t speak".
In out time, we'll wipe out this idiotic, hacker wanna-be, script kiddie morons who think they're special when they type things like a moron.
But we must remain vigilant!
potential of watching the graph wiggle while seeing what porn others are searching for
This is already a fairly interesting utility. Turn on the "view search" option on your favorite gnutella client (Limewire on OS X for me) and check out how specific people's porn searches can be.
"Asian nurse enema big boobs midget amputee smoking."
I guess there really is something for everyone on this new fangled internet thing.
--saint
My ISP just called. A Hollywood detective agency had contacted them and informed, that a dynamic IP address once given to my cable modem had had Gnutella running at some point in time and it had shared some episodes of Futurama. And now they are after me.
Note that I live in Finland, so I guess somebody has decided to mount a large scale attack against global peer-to-peer piracy.
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
Does the internet need *that* much Britney Spears?
Or, does the internet need *that* many FPS games?
Or, does the internet need *that* much corporate money?
The fact is, however, that the internet is what it is, and if you don't like it you'll just have to set up your own little multi-terabyte information resource that is devoid of all that pr0n, Britney Spears mp3's, and corporate money. It's not that easy, you say? Well, no one said we all agree on what's on the 'net, which is why it's so powerful for uniting people in niche sectors that do agree on certain things. Your cable connection doesn't suck because of how much information is available, it sucks because of the way it has been built by the cable company.
To the uninitiated..
Indeed newsgroups are great for downloading...
+Extreme speed - you're downloading directly from your ISP's news server
+LOTS of files available, from games to movies to music to p0rn.
-You can only download what happens to be posted at any given time... Harder to search for a specific item
-Missing parts sometimes. Large files are split up into 20MB parts, and sometimes some parts are incomplete and hence don't get through. Recently, though, people are starting to upload Parity Archives along with the main archives, which means that if you're missing a file, you can reconstruct it based on the other files and the parity archive! very cool... this makes the missing archives problem much less of an issue. But then, there's always IRC for fills.
Andre060
-
Another possible solution to this problem is the transformation of what is
effectively a public good into a private one. This can be accomplished by setting
up a market based architecture that allows peers to buy and sell computer
processing resources, very much in the spirit in which Spawn was created
He seems to be mellowing a bit; at least in that paper he considers other solutions.Actually, if you run into the "tragedy of the commons" problem, it's usually because the protocol mishandles scaling. See my ancient RFC 970, where I pointed this out back in 1985. Gnutilla is generally acknowledged to have scaling problems.
As for the economic analysis, market enthusiasts tend to ignore that markets both increase transaction costs and consume attention. Some goods are too cheap to charge for, because the costs of pricing, charging, billing, accounting, advertising, and marketing exceed the cost of the goods themselves. This is why the Internet beat out the pay-per-bit services.
Worse, there's the problem of limited attention. If something is charged for, the buyer has to pay attention to its cost and how much they're using. That attention is a limited resource, and people hate wasting it on little stuff. This is why consumer Internet services moved from per-hour to flat rate.