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Future Pocket P2P - Discreet Data Sharing?
"IMHO this vehicle for data sharing would be very discreet, anonymous, and unstoppable. Your ISP would not be involved, so they can't block your traffic. In a sufficiently crowded area of people, it would be difficult to pick out someone transmitting data and nearly impossible to locate person(s) storing a copy of said data. Pocket P2P transfers would be local and spontaneous in nature, so an organization trying to stamp it out would essentially need enforcement spying everywhere, equipped with RF detection and triangulation tools.
The devices for doing this already exist, albeit in slightly suboptimal forms (laptops, palmtops, and PDAs). However, it should not be impossible for enterprising engineers to eventually build more specialized devices toward this goal."
Technological predictions are fun and easy. Ethernet NICs cost $100 ten years ago and $10 now; 802.11b cards cost about $100 now and might cost $10 in 2012. So by then, will some entrepreneur be able to build an MP3 storage/playback device with wireless capability for $50 or $60? Think "Sony Walkman that trades music with whatever other devices are around."
The hard part is legal predictions. Right now the entertainment industry is trying hard to reduce the power of fair-use exceptions to copyright law, and thereby expand their own power. And they've made their key weapons things like the DMCA and the doctrine of "contributory copyright infringement" -- going after not music's fans, but the corporations that enable music sharing. The corporations that provide your access become the bottleneck that the copyright holders can control.
But suppose someone released a Walkman-sized, cheap MP3 player that had a wireless network card used to download (legitimately acquired) MP3s from your computer? It's not Napsteresque; it's like Apple's doohickey, except it connects wirelessly. That's all.
And then suppose it turned out that a simple command given from that computer could trivially put your player into a promiscuous, music-sharing mode?
The device need not connect to the internet (perhaps it can't) -- it talks to whatever other devices are around. "I like Jimmy Buffett, anyone got any Jimmy Buffett? I'll trade it for some Wayne Newton." A short-range hardware Gnutella. Set some parameters, go for a walk in a public park, come home with some new music. Pass it along.
(Your problem becomes spam -- come home from the park with ad jingles disguised as Jimmy Buffett... better to trade at parties with people who are friends of friends...)
This would surely stretch "fair use" to the breaking point -- but the question becomes, what part of the chain would the copyright holders be able to attack?
it's going to the point where we all need industry-approved descrambling implants for our eyes and ears to experience any media whatsoever.
This reminds me of the system (in Japan, think?) where people carry little wireless devices saying what they like in a partner, and they help spot folks which are good matches. Kinda silly, but interesting nonetheless.
On the distributed P2P system, where stuff is traded as people walk by, it seems like this is a pretty simple system to thwart. Police officers could simply carry a unit themselves, and when they see a system offering up copyrighted or pirated content, they just confiscate the gear. Pretty simple. I don't think you'll ever see it take off because of this (among other reasons).
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
O'Reilly did a conference on this, "Using Two-way Pagers as Peer-to-peer Devices"
, done by previously reported about "brian d foy". The link is here. I wasn't able to attend, but it sounds like just what this article is talking about. Mayhap brian has notes posted somewhere.
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
Do you think that many folks would be interested in my collection of big-furry-guy-smut and male chorus recordings?
P2P works 'cause folks can browse. Without browsing we might as well all burn CDs and send them chain-mail to eachother, then at least there'd be a chance of tastes being somewhat congruent.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Yea, that or the total ban on any non-government controlled electronic devices.
Just because copyright holders wont like the idea, anyone remembers another story like this? *cough* usa broadband *cough*
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
But sadly, I think it needs a bit more work. Otherwise, the first cop you walk past will nail you for illegally supplying copyrighted material to the PDA in his pocket.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Without being able to attack a service such as Napster, we will be seeing more of the same, encrypted CD's, etc. Also, they may try and go after the manufacturers of such devices much like the film industry went after Sony when VCR's were first coming out.
When you have a multi-billion dollar a year industry to protect, it is amazing how inventive you can be.
Yeah right - until you go for your first 'walk in the park' and come back to find your device full of spam, bestiality porn, and suffering it's 43rd DoS attack of the day.
Keep a door/port/service open and the standard assholes will try to fuck you up. This is no different.
This is the same argument that makes the me laugh at the bluetooth proponents...."Imagine walking down the street --- pass a pizza parlor and *bing* you get a pizza coupon on your bluetooh device." Ugh. So in this vision of the future every fucking retailer out there that spends $50 on a card will be allowed to spam me incessantly as long as i'm withing their broadcast footprint?
I'd rather put a bullet in my head now...... it'll be less painful.
j
Hate to break it to you, folks, but this is already being done. It's called the Gaydar.
No, this is not a troll, and this is not a joke. Check the link.
--SC
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
The Model T came before the Model A. First picking of that nit.
so good, in fact, others have been thinking along the same lines for a while now.
w ir edwomen991027.html
see this article
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/WiredWomen/
for some information about infocharms.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
Directionally finding a signal is trivial, and wireless pirating in public is going to be a blatant target for law enforcement.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Oh the filters I'd need to setup to make this "beneficial" auto-P2P work on handhelds!
The music I like tends to be of the classic_rock/alternative/modern_rock variety. However, not all of the groups in those categories have songs that I like.
So how much time would one have to spend in order to automatically download the songs they *want* to listen to rather than the songs that are simply within a 1/4 mile or their present location?
Would this filter system be something that the algorithm can slowly learn (thus no work for me), or would I have to create 200 different rules about the music I like?
Storage on PDAs is less than massive and they're not the easiest devices to upgrade.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
They would attack the manufacturers of the hardware. Make possession of a promiscuous mp3 player an offense the same way possession of a radar detector or certain types of radios is an offense in some places. Go after the supply chain.
:)
The govt is probably gearing up now for the War on Piracy.
-Steve
Just a little note. It is called a , not a handglider. Your hands just grip the bar, but you "hang" under the glider.
this sounds like smoke signals on steroids
;-)
ok, seriously, this could be the perfect tool for spies. just imagine. there are two spies say in a military base. no way to exchange information openly. they would just need to walk along each other for a short moment and their watches exchange the information they gathered.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
They weren't named in alphabetical order. Moreover, the Model T
had no antecedent of the type you imply. There were cars and car
production methods before the Model T and after the model T, but no
one remembers the "bubble" car you describe.
I think the bottleneck would become the device manufacturer. Unless a device like that could be put together from off-the-shelf commodity parts (like current PCs can--anybody can build one out of 100% legal parts), the manufacturer could be sued out of existance.
Something that small and (slightly) specialized would require custom manufacturing.
However, image a new generic motherboard spec (picoATA?) the size of a credit card. Thumbnail sized expansion cards plug into it via PCI-2010 or gigabit Bluetooth. Something that small + ubiquitous + cheap + low power + no single manufacturer would lead to wandering P2P.
Would like to find a picoATA board now that I think of it...
Good idea... Already implemented as Bluetooth. Some of BT Profiles implement File Sharing, Information Sync, OBEX, PPP over Ethernet.
The device is a small radio, costs nothing to make, buy stack from a range of different sources, works with PDA, Desktops/Notebooks (PCMCIA or USB), cellphones, headsets, Stereo/Receivers, what else?
We have this already!
Is attackable even a word? anyway. With the method the post describes ("I like Jimmy Buffett...") the RIAA may actuall - sort of - like the approach. If the device was limited to queries like "I like this type of music, do you have any other music that I may like based on my preferences?" as opposed to "Give me metallica - enter sandman" then they could perhaps get onboard. Because you never know what you're going to get, unless you're willing to spend eons in central park hoping to eventually happen upon the particular song you want this device is more like a marketing tool than a "pirating" tool. Sure copyrighted music is being traded, you're unlikely to get a whole album, but you ARE likely to find a new band you like and go buy a CD (or whatever is the norm then). I'd sure use one.
Of course this is all predicated on the RIAA not being too much of a bloodsucking leech in the future.
Ad in classifieds: Pandora's Box (no box) $5
this sounds like a great way to spread virii!!
just think, one user in new york city gets a single virus (or writes one), and next thing you know, it'll be on the news that half of new york's business folk lost all their data on their handhelds and pc's (once they sync'ed it) b/c of a new virus!
hah!
"the Model T to Napster's Model A"
The Model T came first. The Model A was afterwords.
Err, isn't this what bluetooth was about ...
Cybikos can share Internet connections between each other within a ceratin range; as long as someone has a Cybiko hooked up to his main computer and its internet connection, other Cybikos can pick up on the signal and use it for wireless internet. Pretty neat, actually-I wonder how hard it would be to hack them up for a complete p2p system as described above?
***
This has WAY too much potential to be abused...
#1) Piracy and Warez
#2) People getting stuff that offends them. ie, goatse-ish
#3) A way for terrorists to exchange information without it being tracable.
What I'm really thinking about is #3. I know it may sound ridiculous, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.
PayPal $$ if you sign up for free offers (eBay, cred cards, e
Oh, and yes, the antiquated copyright laws are not going to mean squat in ten years...
www.lonseidman.com
As most of us have seen, the politicians like to attempt to regulate behavior through legislation. As technology has progressed, this "solution" has become less and less viable as it becomes less likely that one is going to be caught in the act. This legislative approach to solving society's problems does little to resolve the fundamental issues, and in some areas, like computer security, actually works against the goal of fixing whatever's wrong.
Give it a few more years. Very shortly our advances in technology will make it quite clear that we need to deal with society's problems directly instead of just hoping a piece of paper makes them go away.
Just give the people what they want!
-D
Imagine going to a club with your little receiver device or whatever and while you have fun and dance and such it would download. then when you wake up in the morning anything the DJ did last night you could have avaible because they setup stations there for your device to download from. Goto a music festival and at the end of the day have a complete mix of everything. Also the people could not only include mp3's but web sites and pictures for those who are seeking more info on whatever they encountered. also they could incorperate this into libraries so when you pass by someone thier recommended book titles and summeries would be downloaded.
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
http://www.p-o-x.com
This kids game is played similiar to how the article describes pocket p2p. the game is a hand held that is played by a user to teach its warrior how to fight. As the trainer walks around town,(mall,school,neighborhood), the game can sense other consoles and battle them. The trainer later sees that his warrior has won or lost a number of battles, and in the process gained abililities or weapons.
There is no spoon.
Normally these devices stay half dormant, listening to see if another Pocket P2P device is in range. When one or more Pocket P2P's get within range of each other, they automatically trade their data store with each other.
Why would I even want my pocket device to do this???
This is basically suggesting that as soon as it comes within range of another machine, it downloads its data (music/video/whatever). Do I even necessarily want this? Sure I can see spreading out the data to make finding any file eventually trivial, but unless portable batteries improve rapidly, I can't see letting my handheld run at all times just to mirror the newest radio crap.
A better idea suggested in the article is to set some parameters and get music you want... but...
We can already do this at home! I bet 80% of Slashdot readers have a machine at home running 24/7 that they can use to leech all the files they want. Why would they need/want to do this in a wireless context?
Not to mention dropped files because of wandering in/out of range of someone.... the spam concern mentioned above (although we don't see much of that in current P2P yet).
All the hassle of current systems, with brand new problems (battery, dropped transfers, spam, unwanted files). No thanks!
Mark
Are we living in the 10 year bubble before copy protection breaks down (or something to that effect).
If you can log onto the free P2P network anytime you want, so can the FBI. That, and a little signal triangulation is all they need for a conviction.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
See our 7DS for an implementation of a closely related concept.
ya.. we're on that. i'll let you know when its ready.
It might not be so trivial with ultrawideband, where you've got lots of extremely short bursts all over the spectrum.
etc... in about 10 years, if there is not a stop to file sharing, and computer prices stay down and hard drive space stays cheap, there will be no reason for music companys and tv companies to produce new content, except with the exception that many people still want to see it first. If you are like me though, and don't mind waiting till the next day, getting the latest Alias episode, or Star Trek Enterprise, and then running it on your TV-Out capable computer is not a problem, the old model of advertisements will be utterlly pointless. there is not going to be a new model, because you cant think of one, and niether can they, the only way i can see to get around it is to have people pay to view your content.
I am a high broadband user, and even I fall to the tempation of downloading episodes that i have missed of programs i like, just think about people that have no scruples, and then make arguments that say all information should be free. soon no one will be making any money and nothing will be produced, simply because when it is its easier and less bothersome to get the copy, and play it later from some anonymous user on kaaza. We arent talking about video tapes, or cassettes, with reasonable download speed its even faster to copy things because you dont have to listen or watch or wait while you download and tie up resources. When i download things i just click on a file and then look at porn for an hour, and if i want to give it to a freind, i just have him get it from my computer.
Yes im a hypocrite and yes i see my own point, do i follow my own advice? no because its easier not to. next thing you will see me taking someones software *shudder*
Thats what these things will become. Unless you're constantly scanning for whats available, or make a list of what you're looking for, your only other option is to just collect everything. Sometimes this makes sense, but in most cases you don't want to collect but a very small fraction of what's available, and storage will become a rather extreme issue very quickly.
Still, if only working with small numbers of files at a time, this could work. If, for instance, everyone is currently trading the latest movie, it would be rather simplistic to simply walk around and transfer it to everyone during the course of a day, then by the end of the day, everyone will have it, and this spreading well, well, spread. Isolated to a single office where the first copy gets sent, in a very short period of time, the entire city could have collected the same file as the number of people in possession of it grows exponentially.
The downside of this is when you start collecting stuff you don't want. I suppose if I'm only collecting mp3's, I won't be picking up some guy's porn collection, but if my collection is more diversified and I'm set in a "collect everything you find" mode, this could get interesting.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
- your 10 year comes home with a walkman full of smut and trash that just happened to appear over the course of a walk through the park
- you go cruisin for some Beatles and Sinatra tunes, and everything you come back with is a William Shatner cover tune, or worse, an ad or virus renamed to be what you are looking for.
You may see more success in the neighbourhood ftp server access via WiLans out there before this is anything more than an idea.
Of course, the military has already been looking into this. Albeit not for "mp3s".
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein
Directionally finding a signal is trivial, and wireless pirating in public is going to be a blatant target for law enforcement.
Wire-full pirating is a blatant target for law enforcement now. Doesn't work when law enforcement has the crime accessible from their desk, certainly isn't going to work when they actually have to cruise the city looking for (very) local broadcasts...
I love this idea. Really, I love it. But there are some real problems:
First, making and selling these devices will be very hard. Not technologically, but legally and socially. I bet most of the tech work could be done in 6 months and the device could be on the market.
But this isn't Linux - development and sales of these devices will have to be centralized rather than distributed. This means a large corporation. The devices have to be very popular for Metcalfe's Law to make them useful, so they'll have to be marketed. In other words, there'll be one large company for the Feds or RIAA to target and/or intimidate.
Second, this is the farthest thing from unstoppable. How hard would it be for the Feds to setup a listening station in Central Park and flat-out arrest everyone carrying on of these? Just because they're in your pocket doesn't mean they're hidden - they'd have to announce themselves to as much of the world as possible to be of any use. Shit, the RIAA could setup a hidden station in Central Park to perform a DOS (or format) on each one as it wanders by.
Technological solutions are notoriously hard to apply to social problems, and copyright is a social problem. No magical P2P device will sound the death-knell for copyright. It's going to take a sea-change in the way people relate to and value information.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
MP3s worth listening to take about 1Mb/minute of storage. Palm's current line has 16Mb 'expansion' cards. Wow 16 minutes of music! My Sony Clie has a 128Mb removable memory stick but that's still only about 35 songs. They are songs I like and appreciate. Think I want to spend time capturing and filtering some random passerby's 'favorite' tunes? Not to mention this is a perfect virus vector. No thanks. I can already beam anything I want to or from a known source. See also tragedy of the commons.
Furthermore, this kind of thinking is still rather primitive: "The content industry controls everything, but ha!, we, the great hackers & crackers, will break everything they come up with, and then we will distribute it for free! But if they ask nicely, we will still send the artists a check, or something." What is currently happening in the software industry -- the slow substitution of proprietary software with copylefted software developed collaboratively by volunteers and supported by sympathetic individuals and corporations -- must repeat in all other areas of information production. If that is the case, we can use all the existing infrastructure to distribute the content in question, be it Bluetooth or be it UMTS, without any limitations. Or has anyone ever sent you a nasty letter for downloading a Linux kernel?
So we need to develop revenue and marketing models that can compete with the existing oligarchy. And in order to take the laws into our own hands, we need to reform (or rather, reinvent) democracy itself. The tools that are needed to accomplish these goals are essentially similar and closely related:
These are all key technologies, all implemented in software, that are much more important than any file-sharing solution alone. For all of them, user interfaces are of utmost importance: One click too many, one second too much latency and people will not use them. Nevertheless, little progress has been made to wide deployment of these technologies. These technologies will not only make it possible to make money with any kind of content, they will also allow more direct participation of people in the lawmaking process -- if only on the level of newly formed political parties at first.
It's all nice and good to complain about the stranglehold that the content industry has on content distribution and on lawmakers. And I'm the first to support the kid who is locked up for copying an MP3 or DivX movie. But if there's not a serious counter-culture, the industry will win. There will be licenses required for cryptography. There will be DRM in every major operating system (even in Linux, in the form of binary only drivers), because otherwise hardware will simply not run. There will be laws like the SSSCA to enforce this. This will be done on an international level using organizations such as WIPO and WTO, which are fundamentally undemocratic. There will be protests and cracks, but think "war on drugs" here: You will find few people on this site who think locking drug consumers up en masse is a good idea -- yet that's exactly what's been happening for the last decades. Don't complain about your government but then naively assume that they are actually still kind of good misled guys who just need to be sent a few nice letters. Not with the money involved in this game, now and in the future.
Create counter-culture, not cracks. That's what the revolution is all about, baby.
The article actually said: "his is a keen glance at the future with enormous consequences -- unless copyright law is drastically extended, a clever hardware hack a decade from now could be the Model A to Napster's Model T. "
If I want music I'll either
a) buy it,
b) borrow it from a friend,
c) search for it.
What are the chances that the stranger I sit next to on the bus has the missing track from "The Beatles Jam With Elvis CD12" that I so desperatley want?
What's to stop someone renaming their old Britney Spears mp3s as "Next Boy Band Craze" and leeching for free?
Essentially, you might just walk into HMV buy the CDs you want and then return them under a spurious excuse.
I'd love to pay a fair price for music and, yes, the conventional method prevents me from doing this. But building a device to leech from everyone around me isn't the answer. Getting the people at the record companies to change their attitude would be a more useful project.
If a square is really a rhombus, why aren't all triangles purple?
...spoiled by warez kiddies?
Crackers break shrink-wrapped software? Industry moves to sucky subscription-based model and/or "product activation".
People rip CDs and post them online? Copy-protected CDs that won't play on my box.
Warez kiddies use P2P wireless to circumvent copyright? Maybe they will go after P2P wireless.
Hey y'all, if we end up having to pay some kind of onerous tax on these devices and/or having lengthy debates about whether or not they should be legal and/or having more FCC regulations and/or having violence in the streets involving stupid ugly paper-mache puppets, will you do me a favor? Find the nearest warez kiddie and piss on him.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Interesting that someone should mention this :)
I'm currently working on a client/server and p2p system for communicating between PDAs/laptops, etc, over Bluetooth or any other installed wireless hardware.
As far as the 'passiveness' that is mentioned, Bluetooth is ideally suited to this. You can tell a Bluetooth device to 'scout' for other bluetooth devices, and when one is found a connection is made. From there it's pretty easy to enable file-sharing (sending files is built into the Bluetooth SDK) with a small Napsteresque application...
Storage space is still at a premium in portable machines, though, and a full-blown Napster style thing won't happen until the new standards (SD, Microdrives, etc.) grow in size.
Let's say people walk about 5 feet per second on average. 802.11b is effective up to 300 feet. Assuming you and another person carrying these devices are walking directly towards each other at the same speed, that gives you about 2 minutes to transfer data. 802.11b, assuming PEAK performance, which is never really achieved, is 11Mbps. That's fast enough to transfer 165MBs of data. That's about 40 songs or so, depending on bitrate. Not bad.
It would be nice if these had a vibrating alert to let you know when data was being transferred to/from another device. You could hang around or follow whoever you think is carrying the other one, and stalk them until you've download all 20gigs off their Rio PocketRocket(tm)
One final hurdle until we all become Borg(tm)!
This will happen, it's just a matter of time. All the research in the networking industry is in wireless. The logic end for that research is fast, functional, multihop wireless networks that trade data via P2P type operations. Not just Palm pilots, but everything. The reason that this is not possible right now is that it is NOWHERE AS EASY AS IT SOUNDS.
There is a major problem with wireless networks in a multihop Ad-hoc setting and it is called Hidden Terminals. Essentially, due to the medium and the hardware, you can't (cheaply) implement Collision Detection or more specifically Carrier Sensing like CSMA/CD protocols such as Ethernet. A terminal between two other terminals can hear both of them, but the terminals on the edges don't know what each other is doing and they may both try to send data to the center node at the same time, resulting in interference and a collision. Here are some research papers if you're really interested but be warned, they are heavy on the math.
CCRG Research at UCSC Publications
And more specifically,
C. L. Fullmer and J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves, "Solutions to Hidden Terminal Problems in Wireless Networks", Proc. ACM SIGCOMM 97, Cannes, France, September 14-18, 1997. - There is also a pdf version on the CCRG page.
Enjoy!
Right now the entertainment industry is trying hard to reduce the power of fair-use exceptions to copyright law, and thereby expand their own power
Good luck to 'em. They've given me millions of hours of entertainment at easily affordable prices. What have the geeks and losers who leech off them given me? An increase in those prices and a clogged-up internet. I say, clampdown on piracy and institute punitive jail terms for anyone with any illegal content found on their machines, plus a ban on owning or operating computer equipment for those dickwads who think it's right to steal. Start to enforce that and we'll see "file-trading" services like Kazaa shut down doublequick (because only criminals use it IRL), cheaper and better entertainment for the law-abiding and forced buttsex for the idiots.
All they need is possible cause and they can corral and search everyone in the area.
Go into a building or on a public transit system. Detect someone sharing stuff. Force everyone to lineup for a search.
Not a big deal. Or they'll just make it illegal to carry a *concealed* electronic transmitting device. If you get caught with one, they arrest you for carrying a p2p box. If they catch you with one concealed, you're fucked anyway. They can make laws to get around anything they want. Hell, look at the "unlawful right of assembly" imposed on any group of more than two people wearing masks or mask-like devices on their faces in public.
I'm looking forward to the day when entertainment media is no longer shackled by ridiculous anti-copyright-infringement measures and the consumer can do whatever he wants to with such content as long as it stays within the law. When laws are broken, it's time for various branches of law enforcement to arrest and prosecute. Sooner we get there, the less I have to worry about losing my ability to legitimately share MY data with others.
Maybe this will finally motivate geeks everywhere to go outside more often.
http://www.Cybiko.com/
***
I can see it now.. walking through the mall with my portable ogg player, collecting googlebytes while browsing the cd section at Harmony House.
It would work well if the software had a request list. Suppose I was interested in a certain genre of music, certain types of por^H^H^Hclipart, etc, the client could request to receive this data from anybody sharing in the vicinity.
It could work very well, if, enough people are using them. I imagine a school/college setting would be very conducive to a busy p2p wireless network such as this. As long as the mobile devices aren't moving at 60mph in opposing directions it would probably work very well.
Contain my voice. Place my user into your foe list.
Even UNIX servers aren't immune to worms.... Chances are good that Your Favorite Software Company (MS) would write an OS for these, and virii would be spreading even worse than they do now...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
since these are portable devices, it stands to reason that they are quite likely to be going somewhere. lots of partially completed transfers aren't so useful. this issue might need addressing.
also, I don't know about you, but it would scare the hell out of me to drive on a highway full of porn archiving tailgaters trying to maintain connections and find better loot. yikes.
Extrans format bar 2>&1
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
Large Faraday cage and controlled admission, like speakeasies.
It sounds cool, to have your portable device just 'hook up' to nearby protable devices and share information. Maybe I am just being paranoid, but wouldn't this also be a way to tabulate where you are? Whith the increase of sanctions against our liberties as civilians who can say it won't be REQUIRED to have one of these devices on your person at all times?
Or, similar to the devices as illustrated in Impostor or even Logan's Run? Would we be so willing to have our devices "link up" while we were required to regulate ourselves in this type of police state?
It sounds really cool to be able to share, but with the direction the general populous and governments are headed, this may be a development we all learn to regret.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
Why couldn't Joe "The Donut *Machine*" Police Officer just carry one of these around? He might even add a little beeper to go off when his device detects you aren't using ?
You could encrypt things, or password protect them, but then you lose the "everyone shares, everyone gains" core of the thing.
This is actually one of the problems that Sun had in mind when they developed JINI. Bill Joy gave a talk at a user's group a couple of years ago that described the same kind of scenario that you present here.
It's an exciting idea, but it's going to take a lot of effort and money to make something like this that's ubiquitous enough to be more than a geek toy.
I have seen a number of comments regarding how it would be easy for Law Enforcement to nab you - yes this is precisely true.
The point is that the powers that be will then be forced to go after "regular" people, which up 'til now they have not wanted to do for fear of alienating their customers to a point even greater than they do now. This plan would leave fewer intermediaries for the RIAA & co. to bully before they have to come down on their own potential sales market directly.
Additionally, when Jane Musiqlover actually becomes criminalized, that's when this "class war" will come to a head. The first time a senator's teenaged offspring get's hauled in for file-sharing in the park, we'd see some serious talk about what makes someone a criminal. At that point, I'd hope "we, the people" would finally be ready to stand up for our rights.
To use a popular paraphrasing of Gandhi:
First they ignore you,
Then they laugh at you,
Then they fight you,
Then you win.
When the RIAA actually fights their consumers directly is when they've actually lost.
I hope.
nonsig. unsig. desig.
Either way, they'll never truely stop us from sharing. If they lock down code, we'll move to the ever-denser disposable media format of the moment.
------
Today's Top Deals
No. It's the bubble before you need a license and FBI background check before you can own any personal computer (registered with the government) that you can install your own software on. See The Right To Read for more info about the coming regime.
It's criminal that so many people have posted to this story without mention Bruce Sterling's highly relevent (and extremely enjoyable) story, "Deep Eddy".
Jackasses. Just cus it's offtopic doesn't mean it's bad. Hell, getting people off this stupid topic is a -service-, so thanks, man.
This danger is well known to those who read Slashdot...I constantly see the benifits of P2P to independent artists being championed here, but rarely do I hear of the stakes (i.e., why it is so important for independent arrtists to have a voice).
It is important to inform others of the loss of personal freedom brought on by poor laws, but do not forget to inform others of the loss of societal freedom that comes with the loss of independent and uncorrupted voices.
MetallicBurgundy
First is that routing in an ad-hoc network of that scale can be very difficult. People are working on it (see books by Charles Perkins or C-K Toh) but it's sorta not there yet.
The second problem, which exacerbates the first, is that battery power will likely continue to be an issue. The reason this matters is that it can make routing even more of a challenge, especially when nodes keep dropping out to conserve battery power. There are also issues with trying to run expensive algorithms - e.g. crypto - on slow power-constrained devices.
If you allow at least some of the devices in your system to be stationary (and therefore mains-powered) things become a lot more interesting. They key is not so much the wired/wireless nature of the network, but rather the number of nodes - more nodes generally means more opportunities to obscure who's sending and who's receiving what - and how the high-level protocols they're using above TCP/IP.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
*MY* crystal ball says in ten years, a couple of terrabyte sandisks, Gigabit wireless, powered by a fuel cell...
everyone would sync up, like one big newsfeed.
Just collect everything! check against the mp3 db discard everything that doesnt check.
Before too long, at my luddite friends house:
Me: "I just finished my collection of everthing released in the 80's... Wanna copy?"
Put another way, if we ignore the copyright issue for now, what situation wouldn't be better handled with some centralization?
For example, consider the various music trading protocols out there. All of the peer-to-peer systems suffer to some degree or another scalability issues. We could expect much better if we had a centralized search engine and dedicated servers, a la Google and the WWW. Naptster performed pretty well, although I think that one could argue successfully that it would have performed better if the songs themselves had been centralized.
The situation put forth by the submitter don't quite fit the same mold: we do not have world reachability. Instead we only talk to those that are near to us, which limits the possibilities considerably. Unlike the current situation in which we would like to find any matching resource if it is available, we can only hope to find them if they are available and close to us. This could be done now on the internet, and makes scalability much less of an issue. Nobody seems to want to do it, however.
I don't really see this as a reasonable situation: in 10 years we could expect to have devices that are always connected to the internet, and we would want that world-reachability. In this situation, dedicated servers are still possible and more desireable in many, if not most, cases.
Unless, of course, our motivation is simply to avoid intellectual property laws.
So, what are the advantages other than that?
The RIAA still doesn't know what it is going to do about Freenet when it comes out, and already someone is thinking about something that will be even harder to stop.
Fuck off, troll. Your mental processes must be on par with those of the average piece of cow dung. It pains me to think that, by the mere act of typing, I am crushing millions upon millions of amoebae and bacteria living on my keyboard with more intellectual capacity and evolutionary potential than you.
That was a copy of the letter I am sending to Troll TV... jackass!
-Metrollica
The Toshiba 1.8-inch 10GB drives are 5mm thick, and available in 10mm 20GB. The 5GB drive in the iPod is the earlier generation of them, I think.
http://www.toshiba.com/taecdpd/products/features/M K2003GAH-Over.shtml
Don't limit your ideas to devices for P2P filesharing via wireless. Instead, think of some technology that every student in the US will want or need. (Sorta like graphing calculators in high school). But imagine this device is a 'tablet PC' that replaces all textbooks, notes, etc. and allows various interaction during class with the same automated ad-hoc P2P networking that would be handy for filesharing. But this device must be general purpose, just like an ordinary desktop PC. And of course most everyone else will have such a device in various form factors, simply because there are so many useful applications that will develop. Once enough people are using these devices, it will become possible to not only share files P2P, but establish community networks that automatically route out to other larger networks and Internet backbones. Combine this with wide-band technologies and both the communications and content industries could be in for some real change. As long as the SSSCA doesn't go through.. *shudder*
Heres something a guy that I work with gave a talk on:
Davis, J. A., Fagg, A. H., Levine, B. N. (2001), Wearable Computers as Packet Transport Mechanisms in Highly-Partitioned Ad-Hoc Networks, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Wearable Computing, Zurich, Switzerland, October 2001
http://www-anw.cs.umass.edu/~fagg/papers/2001/iswc 01_pednet.ps
VOS/Interreality project: www.interreality.org
So, if everybody is walking around with these things, which spontaneously share data, and everybody is walking around with whatever the latest band is in the style of Britney, or N*Sync, won't I just get a whole bunch of that stored on my portable thingie? If I am carrying around music, it's gonna be Love Incorporated, Barry White, Issac Hayes, Morris Day and the Time, etc. Oh, and Kid Creole and the Coconuts. Gotta have the Kid! I think what might be more interesting is a hardware gnutella of sorts, where I can be walking around, and have some sort of searching options. Maybe people could also have "Home Pages" on their wireless thingies, so I could push a button, and see the published content of everybody standing near me. I, for example, could have a small web site dedicated to soul music, and calypsco, while some of the people around me could just have a list of media for download, or a shring to Britney, or Soledad O'brien, etc... ::drool::
We are not interested in any of your insignificant activities. Please drop this super-elite crypto-hacking neuromancer paranoia immediately, it is only making you look stupid.
Thank you.
The FBI
Come back when you have something real troll.
Quoth the raven: "Piss off troll!"
-Metrollica
Sheesh.
This was already done, and is already on the market. It's targeted at school kids. http://www.CybikoXtreme.com/. They have "Wireless Local Virtual Networks". As long as they're within x feet of each other (I believe 300 feet), they can talk. They can relay for each other too, so if you had a school full of school kids with them, they'd all be able to share files, as long as someone made the 300' connection...
It looked very entertaining, but wasn't quite what I need in a business environment. It's only like $99 at Target..
Are you sure Katz didnt post this? it has his 'style' alll over it
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
I know this have been talked a lot (here), but I really don't see Bluetooth as feasible. I know all the big companies are planning or building bluetooth-enabled devices (from notebooks to PDAs to cell phones) but you really can't just beat 802.11b, for a myriad of reasons, mostly open standards. 802.11b is here, now, ready, reliable, open and spreading everywhere. I just couldn't help myself. =)
Txurlo
Oh, I forgot to mention one thing. I love the taste of cum.
-Metrollica
such technology could be easily used as spyware.. Why risk meeting or handing off a cd rom? the 2 couriers could easily "swap" their state secrets wihout getting any closer than 100 feet. Granted I'm sure the CIa is looking for such swapping already but being able to do it without having a laptop open...
the evil uses scare me more than the joy of seeing entertainment crime families destroyed...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Cell phones will shortly have the ability to "know" their location, and be able to receive location-specific content.
Picture if you will thousands of cell phones in cars on the freeway... all providing their location and a time stamp to a central server. Wouldn't that be the basis for a cool service that would provide real time traffic information including the average rate of speed and the traffic volume?
Somebody do this so I can use it.
Why you just don't skip through the internet instead is beyond me... but yeah hers's a good use, I came up with in my HCI class for palm pilots.
Every person keeps their schedule on a palm pilot... Why not add the ability to synch up a meeting via IR? Instead of people arguing what time is good, the palm should auto synch people... Which would save precious time at conferances.
God spoke to me
Imagine if you had portable p2p devices that you could use with metro freenets (http://www.freenetworks.org). Instead of downloading music from anyone within your device's range, you would be connected to all participating parties on the wireless network.
The device could work like a radio that listened to "broadcast" mp3 streams on the network, in addition to the standard p2p mode of operation. If you hear a song that you like, just have the device store the song for you to later download to a machine of your choice. This would allow independent artists/groups of artists to "push" their music out to a listening audience. Make them cheap enough and I see no reason to listen to commercial radio.
I guess at that point, the good 'ole BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) will REALLY be fatal! :)
If you support the War on Drugs, might be supporting terrorism.
(And that's not to mention Colombia at all....)
grep -ri 'should work'
To heck with the p2p file transfers. Think of each PDA receiving and sending out a carrier signal then a non-ISP "wireless ethernet" type of network could be accessed. P2P could be worked out whether the host is 2 feet or 200 miles away provided there were enough PDA's between it and the client. I'm certainly not an electronic engineer but seems to me once a link was established, TCP could be used to create a free "sub-ethernet," no?
So this is how I see it evolving. First, small group of people begin to use the technology (and everything is fine -- just like e-mailing when it just began [excluding the bugs :P]). Then, however, as it becomes more mainstream, people will decide that "hey, this would be a good way to advertise." Eventually, as more an more people advertise, there's going to be people walking around for the sole purpose of sending you advertisements. So instead of Pocket PDA's transmitting their data stores people end up with piles and piles of advertisements at the end of the day.
Also, what's to keep large corporations from making large wireless towers for the sake of doing this? If the network is available to everyone, then they could easily do this.
As technology becomes more mainstream, humans have a tendancy to abuse/misuse it (like the emailing example).
Massive networking attempt for friends
http://www.cs.rit.edu/~anhinga/
Anhinga is a nice little framework in Java for adhoc network applications currently being researched in conjunction with Sun.
- gtaluvit (prnc. GOT-tuh-LUV-it)
Great. Now when I have my device in my pocket on my way to work as I ride the subway, I will get other people's crud music. What a great way to start my work day. Set my pocket music device to random play, and out spits Blondie's Heart of Glass.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
Yes, very nice post. Especially on that imitation cum loving post of me.
And what makes you think you have a voice? ACs post at a higher score than you... jackass!
Now that I have a voice, I suggest you go to jack off!
--Metrollica
The reason this can't happen is that the wireless service providers are in complete control of what goes over their airwaves. The wireless world does not use the end-to-end principle.
That may change at some point, but it hasn't happened yet.
If the technology came 60-80 years ago, we might see a big chance of the "media giant" collapse. The only media giants that really existed back then were the newspapers, and the "what's good for big business is good for everyone" doctrine hadn't become quite so popular as it is today. And it's the meme that needs to be fought (into a more balanced and tempered form, at the very least) if this sort of thing is going to happen.
Most slashdot readers realize this; what I don't think many know is that is has to be fought diplomatically and carefully. The status quo is powerful and has the mic; simply creating the technology and declaring the days of profit from media over will only create a harsh backlash. This is shaping up to be a battle precisely because it was framed as a revolution. Middle ground technology, serious activism, smart compromises, and thoroughly polite and ethical behavior might get us the result we're looking for.
Just my $.02.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Oh my God, you noticed that during the Superbowl too?
Yeah, more and more these days my head explodes if I look at any government produced TV commercial. To say some stoner is responsible for the vast security breakdown that occured for sep 11th to happen is mind-boggling. Maybe (and I may be wrong) the blame could perhaps fall on some of the congresspeople and senators who only passed legislation that benefited their "real" constituents (read: donors), rather than the country at large.
So fuck all this, if President Bush wants to say that some dope is responsible for the Taliban, I can make up something equally asinine, like President Bush is the LEADER of the Taliban! If you support President Bush, you hate democracy (though, since he never actually won the presidency, the above is true anyways).
"What we elect to call imagination is mere combination of things not heretofore combined." - Frank Norris
Abolition of copyright completely?
I have a question: what if this technology were used to transmit and install a proprietary Linux kernel?
I'm not sure I want to see a world where there is no financial incentive whatsoever to apply knowledge and time to anything currently covered by copyright or patent. It puts the software, recording, movie, and publishing businesses out of business, makes jobless all the people they employ, and will likely remove the value from at least 10% of our economy.
Perhaps we could devote some of the time spent railing at the "content industry" to finding a more equitable balance between the various interests involved. Something that people will support with purchases. Maybe prices could be made even be a little more reasonable in such a new balance.
But a course that leads to the universal irrelevance of all copyright laws, regardless of their term or scope, is not a wise one.
And before everyone screams "content industry suppporter!!" we support Fair Use Rights more than most.
We used to go to parks and malls and keep our pockets/wallets to ourselves, unless obliged. We all used to have a couple of pieces of plastic that could buy your dear everyday life, unless it had bad credit. Most of us had a pocket communicator that can reach the whole world, worst, the whole world could reach you and ring you a nasty tone. We survived to it all, isn't it? Just ten years after, we share our life in a way unthinkable in 2002. What the guys in that thread could think of a simple blend of Surf music, *all* the joyous fender music ever made streaming unrelentlessly, never repeating itself, never ceasing to be reverb seasick endless summer music. And you can try to count music streams with proper names and you can say they are as many as what once was called a "phone conversation", wich was another kind of named stream. I can imagine the pains to get to grips with such modern concepts. A network was just a technical proposition, can you read it? In 2002, they had echoes of Victorian rules in all matters of thinking, manners, copylaws, protocols, it still required iron plants and belt conveyors to get mental Things going. Can you imagine someone not sharing his life? There were concerns about being reachable, hideable even 'undesirable' flow of content. It was very hard to 'connect' as used to be in the 1800s using speech, or written words in the 1600s, or sex in the 1900s, for that matter. Flogosity, they never ever could think of it, the knack of getting in universal touch. All it took was a generation of games, some abuse of radio commnetworks already in place, the remains of the old internet. That is it, and we were all flocks in the same wintersturm. OK, wavelets and organics changed the limits, almost a decade of Free ProTools created some basic ground for blends to spread, but I reckon, they had no clue, like hippies and punks, did you know? I'm posting this to find anyone searching some roots to Flogosity in this mood. Best.
{100% paranoia is not enough when you are 99.9% right}
Any device that would be "broadcasting" music (or whatever) across some sort of medium would then fall under the jurisdiction of the FCC. The laws would be changed which regulate the ability of small devices to communicate with each other (i.e. wireless phones with their bases, remote controles, etc.) and would then include any communication between two devices not purchased simultaneously (for example). Failing that, the RIAA would make it illegal to allow any music playing device to collect said music without the expressed concent of the user, inserting "annoyance" into the equation, which negates the entire process. Not to mention all other types of "community" communication devices have failed (all those cute little beepers which go off if anyone else in the area has one), and this would only work if EVERYONE did it, which they wouldn't.
Face it, you can't fight city hall. If you play their game, you will lose. Music is (and IMO, should be) a product which people can charge money for. Yes, the system is old and should change, but a free-for-all is not the answer.
-d
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
Hopefully this will turn media from the money-centric machine it is back to a medium for the artists; people that produce content because they want to produce it.
-1 Flamebait?? why?? Sure it's idealistic, but it's just an idea... If you think it's a crap idea, reply to it and tell me so (and maybe offer a better solution [dickhead])...
The Content-Addressable Web provides HTTP extensions that solve many of the problems associated with distributing content across ad hoc networks. This is because the addressing of the system is location-independant and content-centric. This makes it perfect for unreliable and transient wireless networks.
--
Justin Chapweske, Onion Networks
I guess. In exactly the same way that a sheet of glass "stretches" when it falls twenty feet onto concrete.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
as far as an end user is concerned, it's all free downloads from the web.
nothing on current p2p systems labels music as 'freely distributable' or 'copy protected'
therefore, how could an end user get busted? they never agreed to any copy restrictions, they just picked a song that sounded good and listened to it.
the current range of 802.11 is a limiting factor, how many people in my neighborhood have a thrashmetal collection for my listening pleasure?
UWB ultra wide band radio technology, however, promises much more bandwidth and range, but it'd still need an uplink to the web somewhere on the network to come close to what I can find on gnutella now.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
Stop putting restrictions to obsolete stuff,
innovate new technologies that will want the user to migrate to your new system, NEEDING THE HARDWARE to play it back because it will bring ADDED value/features.
This is like seeing a good movie at the theatre, would you have enjoyed a ripped screener on your x inch monitor at home or did you get a good experience watching it at the theatre with the big screen the big sound and all? yes you can reproduce that at home, but at a price, a price most people pirating the movies cannot afford. Think lord of the rings for example. Did they go bankrupt? No... far from that!
It's not my job to bring new ideas and tell these companies about the future, there are people paid 10x what I am doing right now to market new ideas and so on, if they can't deliver, they aren't worth the price they are paid, and the industry deserves to die like any buisness doing wrong decisions, if tomorrow my CEO would do something stupid, the gov wouldn't jump in at 100MPH to save us, I don't see why this should be any different for anyone else...
To get back to my point, if they would innovate on new ideas that would make the experience so much better than pirating it, they wouldn't lose. They can't blame their content being more and more crappy and more of the same to pirates, that's only a lame excuse. I still see movies making tons of money, big success, and I still go to the theatre when there's good stuff out.
HDTV is starting to appear mainstream (took a while) see? copy that to a DIVX file, its going to be huge and cumberstone to move around at a decent quality and no loss in resolution, copy it to a VHS or SVHS? you lose the initial quality, this is just an example.
Put new technologies with good content, I'm sure people will gladly pay for it. The fact that a lot of movies are being pirated and it's "hurting sales' is simply because they suck too much to go see in the theatre in the first place.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that EVERY protection scheme got broken, it pisses me off to see that the profit I am paying big corporation goes in barriers instead of innovating to bring me, the customer, a better experience for every $ invested.
They are at the service of the customers (customer by definition: someone that PAID to get a good), not the other way around, some people there seems to forget that very basic rule.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Not that anyone will see this, but the old Cybiko would almost be perfect for this. The wireless link isn't all that fast and only has a range of 150 ft or so, but can already hold 64megs of card ram and has a C devkit. The new cybiko might be even better, I've heard it has a 500 ft range.
The real kicker is that the old cybiko is only 30-60 dollars, depending on where you get it.(which is really nifty, cause if you buy two, you can leave one hooked up to your computer, giving you a short range network that let's you use a WAP browser)
What you all are after is the INTERNET - minus the internet provider. These devices are just a way to cut the providers out of the loop and be totally anonymous.
JetRacer
Rant mode on.
Right, and it's quite convenient for them to be able to point to the large number of technologies developed specifically to allow greedy technophiles to cheat the artists out of even the pittance they receive from the sale of their albums.
Crowing about "fair use" in an article devoted to figuring out an even more succesful scheme for copyright infringement is insulting to people who really care about fair use. It's openly dishonest -- "Well, fair use, nyah nyah nyah." Garbage like this tells the record mafia -- and the government -- that we're a bunch of irresponsible children who can't be trusted to use technology legally. It tells them that the only way to ensure that copyright (without which I'd be out of a job, and the GPL would be useless) can continue to be enforceable at all is with digital rights management mandatory in all hardware for which it is meaningful.
"DRM will never work blah blah Turing machine blah blah compilers would be protected technology blah freenet blah." Infeasibility doesn't stop the War on Drugs from ruining thousands of lives a year. It doesn't stop China's murderous war on Falun Gong, either. Laws are not subject to regression testing or quality control -- they're just passed, and enforced. Usually with a ruthlessness that is proportional to their futility.
Don't like the record mafia? Quit playing into their hands. Look here. Plenty of free-as-in-speech mp3s for your legal downloading pleasure. Most of them are shitty; the same problem exists, I hear, on Sourceforge... I found Sparky and the Wipers and Blues Motel to be fairly good, but that's just me. Hell, even mp3.com has some stuff that's not half bad. But advocating the sane-ification of copyright law by illegally copying music is about like supporting free software by pirating Windows.
Fair use. Fantastic. There are artists out there who fucking agree with your ideas about copyright, Jamie -- and you're not listening to them, because you're busy advertising for the ones that don't.
Not sure where I read this, but the US military is looking at using this type of technology for its next generation soldier equipment to provide networking between grunts, as well as planes, tanks, etc. (I can just see the jokes about Beowulf clusters.)
Would be real useful for distributing tactical information, commands, and battlefield conditions.
Just check out jxta.org to see exactly this sort of protcol. It lets you find peers, establish peer groups, share data in flexible ways, etc... It's also open source (Apache license), by the way.
Compaq's Western Research Lab has a project called Factoid which already implements what you describe. This project has been around the block a few times by now. Sorry to burst the bubble -- someone already thought of that -- but on the bright side, it was a really smart person, and the idea is still really really good. Check out Factoid here.
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
Think "Sony Walkman that trades music with whatever other devices are around."
Now that's just stealing. I'm all for fair use with music that I buy, but this is absurd.
The device need not connect to the internet (perhaps it can't) -- it talks to whatever other devices are around. "I like Jimmy Buffett, anyone got any Jimmy Buffett? I'll trade it for some Wayne Newton." A short-range hardware Gnutella. Set some parameters, go for a walk in a public park, come home with some new music. Pass it along.
Still stealing! You can't transfer ownership of the music you've bought without tranferring the CD itself.
Why are so many people obsessed with stealing music?
-Mark
Used to cost about $100 or so... Flopped right on its butt as far as I know. Saw like 2 commercials for it and never once saw anyone using it.
Basically it just would just connect to other Cybikos in the area and kids could play games or send little instant messages to each other.
This would be the ultimate way to swap kiddie pr0n. Just know what area to stroll through...
The terrorist doesn't have to set up an adhoc 802.11 network. They're already being set up all over the place. Personal Telco is already seeing to that in the Northwest metro areas. Freely available 802.11 nets will be popping up all over the place. All you need is some protocol to exchange IP addresses with devices nearby in the net. Kind of a reverse DHCP or something like that: "Here's my current IP and capabilties."
recently announced on Slashdot. It's a conference on P2P and crypto code, taking place Feb 15-17 at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco. Unlike the more commercial/marketing flavor of conference, presenters need to have actual working code.* There's now a Schedule as well as a Program.
In addition to the code presentations, there are also several panels on legality, security, and business models by a number of usual suspects.
So be there or be square!
* ok, or at least well-rigged demos :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
One toy they built was the Factoid, a Peer-to-Peer information exchanging keychain dongle. It's about the size of a stick of gum, runs for a long time on watch-batteries, uses a short-range radio link, and trades things it knows with other Factoids, typically with data objects up to about 200 bytes long - business cards and that sort of thing.
The Research Paper ;
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I don't see why people always point to the next technology on the horizon and say "That's it, that is going to change the world". The fact is, if we all wanted to share our files, we could run a public webserver and anyone that opened port 80 on our current IP address would be able to download our files. If you want a more static way, you could distribute the dyndns.org domain name, and have a search engine based on it... But guess what.., No one is doing it. No one will do it because no one wants to do it.
Everyone wants to download files without sharing their own. It was a bain to Gnutella when it hit popularity, and it was a problem with Napster before it shared all your files behind your back.
If you want to impliment the wave of the future, take a good look at today's technology first.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
This walkabout version wouldn't have the same advantages:
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Distribute and store large amounts of data? Why not just have an allways connected device and consume whatever you want directly from source (or through a 3rd party search/collection provider) and pay your $0.01 each time you listen or watch?
Well, if the SSSCA passes, this is what I see as the future of these types of schemes. The RIAA/MPAA/AAP want to use prohibition to not have swapping on this scale take place, and this is what we'll get as a result.
It will be illegal to make or sell these things in the US, but not in the 3rd world. So there will be a need to set up manufacturing overseas and smuggle them over the border. Then some outlaws will have to sell them here.
The infrastructure is set up for this already. Street gangs in san diego and LA have ties to rebels and paramilitaries deep in south america. Usually these are temporary strategic alliances. The technology for these things would be of interest for operational coordination for the paramilitaries. So the gangs get them the technology in return for manufacturing a surplus.
The surplus devices then become part of the drug/arms/people underground trade finding their way in with those products. It's a lot easier to get past dogs who can't sniff the difference between a walkman and a wireless portable music player.
Once across the border, the street gangs and other players in underground marketing will take on the distribution. Likely the same people who sell cloned cell phones.
There will also be a group of people who will modify hardware and software for a fee or with kits. This is like car ignition mod chips and cable descramblers.
This is the system we will have for general purpose consumer electronics post SSSCA. It's a world where only outlaws can publish, and you can get shot during a tape recorder deal gone bad.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Fuck the MPAA, fuck CD's.
Next time you go to a gig, wire up with all your fellow fans and *BUY THE RECORDING OF THE ACT RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF YOU*, carry it away in your pocket, thanks to shit like this.
iPod v2 will have WiFi, I'm so sure. And if it doesn't, I'll eat my shorts. Promise.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Here are a few choice quotes from slashdot's *caugh* *caugh* favorite senator from todays Enron coverage.
"There's a culture of government corruption,"
He seems pretty self aware for a politician.
"I've never seen a better example of cash-and-carry government than this Bush administration and Enron."
Fritz-
You're both as corrupt as fucking mafia dons. Get over it.
It wont turn it over to artists only, public television, thats exciting, ever watched public television lately? and where exactly are these artists going to get money to create these works of art? there wont be any shreks, no cast aways, no final fantasy the spirits within (ok some we could do without) no movies of any quality because there wont be any money in it, sure you will have good actors bad actors still. you forget the common man, but when this stuff becomes the tool of the common man where will the media get the money to produce these things? they will get payed by citizens to do it for them? bull, you havent read about this little trait in humans, everyone expects everyone else to contribute, if its voluntary, a man can die in the street around 10 people that could save them and none do nothing because they expect the other guy to help. imagine expecting some entrepenuer or other persons to produce content? imagine paying taxes to watch television! lol thats the most moronic thing i have ever heard. artists dont produce movies that people want to see, because good art makes you think, and shows like friends... well that doenst make you think... lol imagine being able to get friends, w/0 commercials because your replay tv that your friend has on his cable connection copied it and you got it from his hard drive because of your 802.11 protocol your sharing in your apartment... sure poor people wont be doing these things, but poor people dont buy the latest peice of crap someone in a commercial is trying to sell you.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
This could be done as early as NEXT YEAR. My view of it:
You have a cheap PDA, which has a port for flash memory. It has a 900mhz wireless connection, which can be used anywhere, legally. It implements IPv6. Each unit randomly picks an IP every few hours, and broadcasts its existence at this IP at random intervals, say, between 3-6 minutes.
This enables the devices to establish their presence as the user moves. It enables units to tell the world they're interested in things...for example, news, ads (i'm picturing like the classifieds from the newspaper, but it could apply to ads for ANYTHING you request, and it'll ignore the rest), stock quotes, business cards, pictures of your pets, audio interviews - and request them from personal units AND physically static units, in say phone booths, busses, trains, planes, stores, cafeterias, etc. A unit that hears such a request establishes an SSH tunnel to the requester and sends the data (you can specify to your unit "never send my personal info" of course, but you'd think news and stuff would be free for all from all).
The beauty of this setup is that the units are caching units...their spare memory is permanantly full, and it's a profiling cache, so the most-requested info stays the longest and the least requested is first in line for deletion when you the user want to use that space, and it works flawlessly behind the scenes. Indeed, it'll even keep a short list of files on your home PC, and if they're requested, it'll make sure to grab them next time you synch systems.
Such a system has a billion and one legit legal uses, yes? Many people would want one, to have a PDA that also works for you autonomously. It's almost too useful to resist, eh?
Of course, you ride the subway to and from work every day, at the same times, with people who generally do the same thing. And your readily-broadcast personal info says that you really like song XYZ by this group. And, funny, the next day by the time you get to work, it's on the flash card.
Pipe dream? Like the article says, all this stuff already exists except for the public broadcast ports. We already have Palm Pilots in the $150 price range that take Flash memory and hold enough charge to run for 8 hours nonstop (but usually are never out of the cradle more than 3 at a time). We already have $40 900-mhz cordless phones.
This device, or something very very like it, will happen - proposed this way, I'm surprised it doesn't already.
As long as you don't promote it, I don't see why not. But say that you publish it freely, broadcast it...well then better make sure no copyright stuff on it.
It all seems to boil down to the same, I guess the only thing that changes in the story is with this device there are digital police walking around sniffing in public places. Any predictions on how long until that comes to pass? Before or after UAVs* become derigeur?
Unmanned Aerial VehicleI'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Here's why. It might work if you are sitting in a coffeeshop with one or two other people and you can sit there for a few minutes while your devices trade off, but what about walking past someone in the street, where there was only time to grab part of a file? What about if you were in a room with hundreds of similar devices, how would you keep the bitrate up and use channels efficiently? With present tech, that partial file could never be recieved fully, as the "same" file with a different length or checksum couldn't be integrated within the filesystem. Channel congestion and crosstalk would reduce concentrations of devices of nine or above to substandard bitrates. Eavesdropping concerns are rampant. Lastly, you could never make it cheap enough for the system to be adopted.
Distributed services of this type require entirely new network service layers, not the least of which are:
Seamless encryption. I do not want people to lock in on file transfers between me and a trusted client. Period. In addition, one might implement a 'friend' list that would only lock in on people that were known clients, or friends of a known client.
Robust file transfer services that support successive and iterative media interleaving. As in, devices that query, "Hey, I have half of G. Love's Kick Drum, anyone got the other half? What about a different bitrate, or a slightly different checksum? I don't care, just give it to me and I'll integrate it with the half that I have on the fly."
Semi-intelligent cooperation methods between groups of devices to relay content to distant users, and power and channel scheduling to prevent congestion in high-density concentrations of these devices. As in, "Anyone know anyone that knows anyone that has any 216? Think you can get it for me?"
What about providing live recordings in realtime to people at a concert as part of their ticket price? You'd need broadcast data methods that have almost no upstream information, not even error correction, coming back to the reciever, as it would be wasteful of available channels. Instead, you'd need to be able to broadcast redundant media streams that could reconstruct themselves at the reciever, with minimal loss. You'd need an entirely new data transport service to realize this.
But that's just me thinking. Nope, I'm not thinking about starting a company that does this with off-the-shelf hardware. No, I haven't put together simulations that indicate that concentrations of these devices in 'recieve from broadcast node' mode can work at 943KBps, in groups of 1500 on a group of three channels 24MHz wide. No, I don't think I can get it in a form factor the size of a cell phone, with cost projections indicating that this device could cost under $70 in two years with the prices of 2.4GHz radio transcievers and storage media dropping as they are.
Nope, nothing at all. I have nothing. Nothing that could possibly worry the RIAA.
But I do need funding.
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
Consider you live in a world where this wireless p2p is a reality.
Now for amusement's sake, suppose you are walking around all day and you notice some weird guy following you around. For extra amusement, let's pretend he looks like Kramer off Seinfeld.
When you eventually get the courage to confront him about his suspicious behaviour...
You: WTF are you doing following me?!
Him: I'm downloading your Aerosmith albums!
You: Well, get them off someone else- I have a board meeting in 10 minutes!
Him: I'll just stand in the corner! I won't bother you!
(further hilarity later ensues when he won't leave your board meeting- claiming the directors have some "really shit hot pr0n on them")
graspee
Your second two bullets should be combined; GHWB was in charge of the CIA while it was on its drugs&terrorism binge.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
No, you changed the story, without giving any indication that you had done so. That's not an "update". The difference is that by doing it this way, you make all the comments below pointing out your error look like they were wrong. Bad Editor. No Cookie.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Of course, all it does is trade virii. But remember, virii can deliver any payload including Jimmy Buffett. Well, his music anyway.
Such a device would not be a big problem to the content industry: Once it would take off, the device could be forbidden simply for "stimulating piracy", basically the same reason that shut down Napster.
BUT if a device is very general (like a PDA) and this functionality is solved with software from another party that you have to add manually, nobody could stop such a thing.
attackable \At*tack"a*ble\, a. Capable of being attacked.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
Special people have long socks, ride short buses, & invent witty sigs.
Out of crap ideas like region encoding, selling mp3s and cuecat, finally comes an excellent one.
:)
You would need to release schematics/open source software, so that anyone could make one, even after they were banned. You could probably stick a wireless card in a notebook or PDA and use some software straight off
I'm sure it would create lots of new cultural events: like groups of kids hanging around some bum on a street corner trading files instead of drugs lol, and you could just imagine the stake-outs the police would do: you've just finished swapping fils when suddenly "POLICE! FREEZE!! DOWN ON THE GROUND" (they start beating you with their sticks) "Your under arrest for copy-right infringement, possesion of, and intent to supply" You see, the files you just swapped were on a police decoy. They tracked you device with triangulation, and right now, their checking it to see if it has the dummy police file on it. Your going down. Then there would be the crowds "Oh my god, someone has some hot pr0n" "where where???" "everyone go to the park, quick, theres someone with some _hot_ pr0n!!" 5 mins later you take off your headphones, look up from your newspaper, and 500 people are standing around you ROFL.
It would definatly get me out more.. and that can only be a good thing
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
What about using the P2P networks for transport means of intelligent agents. Everybody has its own agent hopping from client to client in search of data and when it has the data it will return to the owner........leaves a hell of a lot of thinking about security issues, but would be cool....
That was pretty damn funny.
After some fatal flaw is found in the protocol, some yahoo will write a virus that exploits this flaw and uploads code that turns your P2P device into a propagator of said virus, ad naseau... And who said viruses don't model biological functions...
"haha, my handheld has an infection rate near 99%"
On the positive side of this, I suppose you could write a self propgating virus that would fix the protocol as it infects...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Not so trivial (spread spectrum), and the speed issues are moot, think 802.11a. Spread spectrum could be hacked to the "frequency agile" form used in more secure wireless communications. As part of the token exchange to setup the P2P wireless exchange and encryption, the peers also exchange a randomized one time frequency map for the exchange. Just try to triangulate that!
There was that case about the DEA/FBI/whoever using heat detection equipment on a house they didn't have a warrant for. I believe the Supremes threw it out because they needed reasonable cause without the use of the device inorder to use the device... (i'm trying here so bear with me)
So logically if they can't use those devices to detect heat in houses they have no warrant for, they can't use devices to detect RF signals that eminate from people whom they have no warrant for. (I'm PA Dutch, so bare with my language)
Of course using logic for the real world can bite you in the ass.
Sean D.
-- A preposition is the wrong word to end a sentence with.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
First of all, I think this would work if everyone had one of these devices and if everyone was sharing. Next, I don't think that these devices should ever save anything. Data should be passing from one handheld to another. The only reason your device exists is so that it can relay data to another device. If you want to listen to a song, you search for it, the device streams it, destroys it from your ram as it streams it to another device. What's the point of all this storage if you jsut want to share it anyway?
If cybiko made one that looked a little more professional, and bumped the maximum range up (maybe use the FRS radio band? those have like 2-5 *mile* ranges), they would sell a boatload. Add handwriting recognition and ditch the keyboard, and it would beat the wireless palms hands-down. Add cell capability, so that individual units could bridge traffic (without being wired to a PC) to the internet for long-haul p2p if nobody's in range, and you've got a handheld that always has wireless access, with no fees other than your cell phone bill, and is as cheap as a palm pilot.
I'm dying for p2p wireless-- but everybody wants to make money on the service, so don't expect a lot of help from the major vendors. Go get 'em, Cybiko!
First, I think this could work, and the legal aspect could be skirted. First of all, these could be completely legal when used to swap family pictures or other files via 2GHz or other open frequencies. They would be no different than these mini walkie talkies. Would they knock you down for duct-taping one to your boom box and transmitting that way? So enforcement couldn't just knock you down for transmitting radio waves- they'd have to snoop on what you're transmitting and correlate it with triangulation information, which may be feasible and maybe even legal in an open environment, but certainly not easy. Triangulation could be "spoofed" by having each device randomly sending out fake transmissions. Going around snatching kid's walkmans would be a PR problem if nothing else. But, one question I have: What are the advantages of this over regular, TCP/IP-based P2P? Or maybe a wireless internet device with P2P client on it. Then you're not limited to a specific area, and can share with a global network. It'd be even harder to triangulate and correlate with content in real-time.
Not to mention that it certainly isn't going to work when 1/10th or more of the population has one of these devices.
This type of network could be built today; here is a quick checklist: -
Hardware
Sharp Zaurus (Linux based PDA that has built in MP3 player)
Socket Compact flash 802.11b card
256mb SD memory card
Software
SOAP based location centric name services - e.g. to locate peers based on location
Basic peer software - e.g. modification / port of Lime Wire to run on J2ME
Integration of Java encryption framework into peer client
Network
802.11 base station
Is there an engineer in the house? Seriously. You could be right, although I always believed spread spectrum prevented interference with a specific frequency. And it's spread within the spectrum, not spacially. If you're *looking* everywhere in that *band* of spread spectrum for RF energy, you should be able to find it. I could be wrong, though.
If I put a lead wall on one side of my laptop, and get a certain signal strength, and put it on the other side of my laptop, and get a lower one, I've found directional information. And I've seen such effects with wireless lan cards. Despite being spread in the spectrum usage, the RF energy still propagates outwards in straight lines, it doesn't just "spread around the area"
If you've found someone you know beforehand, exchanged private keys, and are doing encrypted stuff, yeah, they might find the signal, but won't have a clue what the contents is. But that's not public piracy, as discussed in the original article.
If this thing is generally accessable to the public, or even a subset of hacker subculture, there's nothing stopping a police officer from using the system himself, going to the mall, doing a key exchange with an individual on the system, whose PDA then presents a bunch of pirate software/music to download. Doesn't matter a bit if there was a key exchange, if ability to partake in that key exchange as a partner is a public ability.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Still, triangulating one signal across the available BW is one thing. Now try to isolate a signal source to track when there are tens or hundreds of sources ? It's the "forest and tree" problem. The biggest problem is still secure key exchange that's public but still allows denial of access to solicitors that have not contributed (significantly)....perhaps a floating segmented database with an arbitrary size limit, through aging?
My favorite Supersuckers song. Chorus:
Sweet and sour Jesus gonna tear out yer eyes
Hypocritical son-of-a-bitch gonna tear out yer eyes
Standin' by the side of the road waitin' to tear yer eyes out, man
And he don't give a good god damn!
Sure, finding one source amongst hundreds of sources is a major problem. Mid 1900's wartime kind of problems.
:-) Seriously, anything in the 2.4ghz range for wireless lan is going to be blantantly obvious to find in close range. Yes, specific frequencies within that range might be used for other purposes, but in much more distant proximities, so they'd be tiny background noise.
:-)
But finding one IEEE 802.2/11 lan singal in a mall, and then locating the source of the signal within that bandwidth??? Easy stuff
Again, where are the electrical engineers to confirm what I'm saying, or to tell me I'm full of shit? Is it strictly coders on slashdot these days?
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Strip club with a giant Faraday cage.
There, happy.