Future Pocket P2P - Discreet Data Sharing?

zilym writes "Think about a class of portable devices that include storage space, wireless networking (ala 802.11b), and user loadable Software. For these devices, why not implement a protocol for adhoc, wireless data sharing (Pocket P2P)? This is what I'm imagining... Lots of people carry around Pocket P2P devices hidden in their car, backpack, purse, pocket, handglider, whatever. 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." This 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. Are we living in the ten-year bubble before the collapse of entertainment media copy prevention?

"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?

Comments

Couple of thoughts

[PhotoGuy]

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

Re:Couple of thoughts

[PhotoGuy]

The police can't really do that. Well, at least here in America anyway. They can't just stop people on the street, searching each and every one of them to see if one might possibly have this offending device in a pocket or backpack.

Huh? If they have probable cause, they can search you. If they see drugs through your car window, they can search your car.

And I'm pretty sure publicly emitting radio waves with pirated music and software is pretty clear-cut probably cause for a search. The fact you can't see the radio waves without a device, doesn't matter. They use other electronic devices to measure and determine illegal activity on a regular basis (radar).

And no, they wouldn't need fancy equipment to "triangulate" as another poster suggested, or have to search a dozen people. Triangulation is used for more wide-area stuff (cell phone towers). If you're close enough for IEEE 802.2 communication, I'd think a simple directional signal finder would suffice. I'm not an engineer (nor a cop, nor a lawyer :-), and maybe an engineer with more RF experience than I can comment, but I think spotting an IEEE 802.2 card in an area with the radius of a few hundred meters would be a simple weekend project. (Directional antennae, filter circuitry for the 2.4ghz range, and a signal strength meter.)

Now, I'm not saying the cops would actually bother to do this. However, if it became as popular as the walkman, I bet industry would make sure they do start enforcing it, and it wouldn't be that hard to do.

Now if the network were closed and encrypted, they wouldn't know the content. But that kind of defeats the purpose of this public-oriented system. If the public can sign up, so can enforcement.

The whole thing just strikes me as akin to an electronic equivalent of selling pirated video tapes or CD's on the street corner. Definitely illegal.

North American society seems far more permissive of things done in the privacy of one's own home. Illegal things done visibly (even if only electronically-visible) in public, is far more risky, I'd say.

I think the technological possibilities of this type of system are very exciting, but pirating music and software isn't likely to be the best use of it. (Swapping restaurant reviews for the area, and other city-information type of thing would be very cool.)

-me

Re:Couple of thoughts

[AvatarADVathome]

Except for the biggie - police don't autonomously enforce copyrights like they do with criminal law. If you get pulled over and the cop finds a huge stash of warez in your car, he doesn't haul you into the pokey and contact the BSA! Police do carry out court orders, which can be issued by courts that receive complaints of copyright infringement, but they're not proactive in this arena AT ALL. Now, this might not apply to a couple of the various FBI offices, but they're hardly thick on the ground...

P2P conference coming up

[Sick Boy]

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.

Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Already being done...

[SpookComix]

IMHO this vehicle for data sharing would be very discreet, anonymous, and unstoppable.

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

What part of the chain..

[SteveX]

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

There's already a kids game available that does it

[codemonster]

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.

You're Forgetting Something

[istartedi]

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.

Nice idea, but a hard problem

[legLess]

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.

Everything can be controlled

[Eloquence]

It's nice to fantasize about a world where all existing barriers to content distribution are broken. But as long as the law is practically controlled by large corporations, these fantasies will remain just that: fantasies. In the given example case, it would be simple to impose restrictions on the manufacturers of such devices not to include distribution mechanisms without built-in DRM. (Black market is not an issue here since these devices are only relevant when you reach a certain critical mass, as some manufacturers such as Cybiko have already learned.)

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:

• Rating mechanisms that allow people to find high-quality content, as well as reputation mechanisms, that make it possible to select ratings according to the people who have expressed them. This makes traditional mass marketing obsolete if widely deployed. Think Slashdot (or rather Kuro5hin) effect, but on a p2p network.
• Easy and secure user-to-user payment standards. Don't think "micropayments" (the basic micropayment idea is to have incredibly tiny payments running transparently in the background all the time), think mini-payments that are clearly associated with specific transactions. Support a website, request a feature for an open-source-product, support an especially good artist, support the production of a movie or book by a renowned creator Street Performer Protocol style etc. etc. -- but much easier and more wide-spread than possible with Paypal. Probably best implemented with prepaid digital coins.
• Distributed, secure voting systems. Currently even open source projects have not yet agreed on such a standard. Optimally, the voting process should be combined with the information gathering process, so that people who vote will also be able to discuss and rate comments on the same page.

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.

Pocket P2P - Multihop Wireless Networks

[hakker]

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!

Re:Pocket P2P - Multihop Wireless Networks

[jbf]

The standard reference, incidentally, is

Phil Karn, "MACA - A New Channel Access Method for Packet Radio". Proceedings of the 9th ARRL Computer Networking Conference, London, Ontario, Canada, 1990.

There are four multihop routing protocols currently under consideration at the IETF MANET WG.

Tracable? Yes that's part of the beauty

[sker]

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.

Deep Eddy

[fm6]

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".

Two problems

[Salamander]

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.

The users are far from sharing mp3's

[Lumpy]

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...

OT: Drugs + Terrorists

[invenustus]

So now, if you use drugs, you support terrorists

Oh my God, you noticed that during the Superbowl too? Let's see, the Taliban was the group in Afghanistan we destroyed for harboring and protecting terrorists, right? If I'm not mistaken, the US government sent the Taliban $73 million in January of 2001 to help destroy the Afghan heroin trade. So I propose a new slogan:

If you support the War on Drugs, might be supporting terrorism.

(And that's not to mention Colombia at all....)

Re:A very exciting idea...

[sethg]

Plus, the minute the MPAA/RIAA decides this is a problem, they write up a handy little app that shares an unending stream of random data.

For a long time, I've wondered: why didn't RIAA use this technique to deal with Napster, rather than suing it into oblivion? For the amount they spent on lawyers, they could have easily set up a few thousand computers on DSL lines running Napster, claiming to have every top-40 song that's been published in the past fifty years, and sending out MP3 files of white noise. If nine out of ten customers who try to download a song end up getting one of the noise recordings instead, what are those customers going to do -- sue? They'd just give up on Napster in a New York minute. Problem solved.

Then it hit me: if they revealed that Napster is so easy to defeat without resorting to the law, they can't tell Congress and the media about how The Entertainment Industry Will Be Doomed unless stiffer copyright legislation is passed. Bwah-hah-hah!

I keep saying, and I'll say again.

[tcc]

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.

Already here

[Zerth]

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)

Oh come on.

[markaa]

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

Codecon P2P conference coming up Feb 15-17

[billstewart]

Codecon was
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 :-)

(IANAL)

[los furtive]

So, Does a cop asking for your list and then a file constitute soliciting?

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 Vehicle