Slashdot Mirror
New File Sharing Networks
An anonymous reader sends in: "Most readers of slashdot have been following the exploits of the RIAA and their attempts to shut down Napster, KaZaA, Morpheus, etc. In response, it appears some live music fans have taken things into their own hands and started new file sharing networks made exclusively for trading live recordings of bands that allow that sort of thing. The main player, RNL has reached version 1.0, features a distributed architecture, supports linux, and is even GPLed. Another peice of interesting software is Furthur. Though still only in beta, Furthur has cool features like allowing a user to piggy-back another user's download to reduce the load of the uploader."
Don't know it's not better known...Check it out here.
Reminder: find a new sig
Haven't these guys heard of etree.org? Etree has been around for a few years, and exists to allow the trading of lossless recordings of live shows from bands who allow trading.
Its not p2p, mostly ftps and burn + post cds, but it has been there for some time. Loads of good shows too :)
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
usenet works just fine thank you. I download at least 1GB/day :)
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
Before files start getting traded that the artists DIDN'T want released as free? Someone will crack it and ruin what these honest people seem to be doing, OR, they won't be able to keep up with cleaning out the non-free, copyrighted material.
Honestly, is it even worth doign anymore? Have a pure idea, watch it get cracked, then fade slowly to the background like the rest of the companies trying to do this. A sad world we live in today.
Or, maybe I am just jaded on these types of things.
*sigh*
Sent from your iPad.
I'm just wondering how they actually control the content of their network. If they really are just trading legitimate live recordings, then I don't really see how the RIAA could touch them. But I don't know how they can keep people from trading standard album recordings that will get them in [more] trouble with the RIAA.
If they do somehow control it, it'll be interesting to see how the RIAA reacts to this.
-Perrin.
Now I want you to go in that bag and find my lightsaber. It's the one that says bad mother-fscker on it.
Even though it's not for copyrighted material, I can't help but wonder what RIAA's reaction is going to be. Will they use the same argument "you can't ensure it is only used for non-copyrighted material?" or will they start pushing stadiums to do a body search for tape recorders. In either case, I doubt they will sit back and do nothing.
... the more people sending you data, the quicker your download will be!
.45kps... not so good... Oh well.. I suppose they mean well
Really? Even on my blazingly fast 56k dialup connection? If I had 1 person sending me data I could get an amazing 4.5kps while if I had 10 people sending me data I would get
This is what capitolism and a free market are all about.
The music sharing phenomenon is too big to be a fluke. There's a serious market here, and that's what really has the RIAA scared. They know that, at some point, a market will flurish which breaks their members' business model.
Now, I have no exposure to this new network, so I don't even know if it's commercial, but I can assure you that with a demand this large, there will be thousands upon thousands of people trying to figure out a way to turn it to their economic advantage, and I say more power to them! The first key is the fact that there are already bands that want their music recorded live (Phish comes to mind). Next, there are new bands who have nothing to lose by sharing their music.
Given these, I think you could build a base of bands that promote their music (more specifically, their concerts) via a file sharing network. Then, you just have to find a way to brand yourself so that you remove the geeky stigma of file sharing (make it easier to use, get some high-profile musicians to mention that they use it, give it away with low-cost student computers, etc).
This is going to be a really fund decade. I suspect that this particular business will not descend into the kind of deccadence of the current music industry for at least another 5 years or so, but then, perhahps I'm just an optimist.
Small excerpt from their About page:
Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds. Freenet is:
- Highly survivable: All internal processes are completely anonymized and decentralized across the global network, making it virtually impossible for an attacker to destroy information or take control of the system.
- Private: Freenet makes it extremely difficult for anyone to spy on the information that you are viewing, publishing, or storing.
- Secure: Information stored in Freenet is protected by strong cryptography against malicious tampering or counterfeiting.
- Efficient: Freenet dynamically replicates and relocates information in response to demand to provide efficient service and minimal bandwidth usage regardless of load. Significantly, Freenet generally requires log(n) time to retrieve a piece of information in a network of size n.
-end excerpt-Current 0.4 version of Freenet is working fine and 0.5 will be released soon, which should be considered as stable for production use.
OS advocatists take note: Freenet has been written with pure Java, so if you can get a Java interpreter for your OS, you can run Freenet. And in this particular case, using Java doesn't always mean the software will run slow. It's all about the implementation.
Why not just open a unprotected share on you computer set max number of clients, run a port scanner that indexes all other open shares on whather class c you tell it to.
/IBM is going to remove the ability to network file share, make this p2p an extension of that. Most modern operating systems have the cabability built in.
:)
Set up an index server that does this as well as downloads a lists.txt file that has all the songs in your share directory indexed, a shell script on a cron tab to reindex and upload you lists,
FUCK the RIAA and MPAA, they would have to remove network capability from all computers.
Im not trolling Im serious. Make it as grey as possible. There is no way MS / SUN
GREY, GREY, GREY .
Make it about the comanies violationg free speech, not in the lame ass way others have tried, ALSO a point you can sue judges, and cout officers, police etc, IF IT HAS BEEN PROVEN they VIOLATED you basic civil rights, Making people stop sharing whatever they wish I belive is a violation of my free speech. Set up a honeypot service, that only trades uncopyrigthed materials and lie in wait for the RIAA and some overzealous most likey bribed judges, and open fire, first nail the RIAA on hacking attempts, then go after everyone in line.
If the courts become succeptiable to injury as weel, maybe some of this crap would never make it in the first place.
Yes, I have reached karma cap and need no more, please mod this down as needed
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Though I am no byte-level expert, this isn't really anything new or its misleading. What this seems to refer to is how the traffic would be routed. IE, if "Joe" has live Pearl Jam and 3 people request it, the network is smart enough to take bytes from people farther along in the download. Even then, thats more load-balancing.
Otherwise, this is no different from any other P2P filesharing mechanism where files naturally propagte from a source and are eventually downloaded from other nodes. Still, if your network were *smart* enough to resend packets as little as possible (IE, if the network would multicast concurrently-requested packets) then this would be leaps-and-bounds above current P2P.
As far as illegal uploads are concerned, there is a list of the bands and material types that are currently allowed. I haven't tried this app yet, I will as soon as I get off work, but I would imagine that client communicates with a centralized server to check MD5 sums and also check filenames so the only way to actually put up a illegal file for sharing is change its name to something like 11.29.98-Phish-David-Bowie03.shn and post it as a new file so a MD5sum is created. BTW my domain, http://www.phataudio.org was originally an old school phish mp3 site ;)
I have been using Etree for three or four years now. For those not aware here, etree site-op's release their server content on the etree-announce mailing list periodically. Users can download, through FTP, high quality concerts from folks like The Grateful Dead and other microphone friendly bands. I think what keeps etree pure currently, is that with only a (relatively) few site-ops, control over content, is easily implemented. This will undoubtedly collapse under the massive abuse inherent in peer-to-peer networks.
.shn's of Brittney Spears 2/18/02 Cleveland Show being traded alongside some of music's most influential live bands. For what it's worth check out what is being traded on etree at their database site
It would be quite sad to see
Welcome to RNL!
/etc/hosts.allow.^C^C^C^C^C....^C^C...
/etc/xident.conf..^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C....
Would you like to install xGator? xGator allows you to fine great deals on products specifically tailored to you!
[ ] Yes [*] No
installing RNL-1.0-01a.rpm.....
installing xGator-2.4.1....^C^C........
modifying
modifying
Congratulations! RNL has been installed!
your jesus is another mans xebu. chew on that hypocrites.
a good overview of different p2p architectures is over here at openp2p.com.
One system the author fails to mention is Circle, which uses a decentralized hashtable system., more about it at his system is in a pdf slideshow he'll be giving at linux.conf.au
My favorite quote from his page: "FastTrack (aka Kazza/Morpheus) is kind of like trying to optimize a bublesort", which leads me to believe he has a regular quicksort at hand. (actually he does claim O(n log n) seachs, so its about right)
Also to note are Chord and GISP which seem to use simular schemes, where Chord is pure acadamia (someones masters thesis). GISP is an implementation of something from JXTA, suns p2p framework.
this is my sig.
At this point, the question needs to be asked:
Why doesn't the RIAA come out with their own damn P2P?
It could be fully under their control. They would be able to block certain songs, and maybe only let certain 'hot' singles out. Most of all, this would give them stronger legal basis when fighting current P2P companies and networks. They can point to their own network saying they own all rights to distribute their music, and thus other programs are violating their own legal market. Their refusal to distribute music electronically has hurt them more than anything else. We 'steal' music online, because there isn't one good for-pay network out there.
But, of course we still don't buy into the fact that P2P has hurt music sales. I believe one problem is the fact that a average CD costs $15! When I was still paying for music a CD usually cost $12.99 - if it was $15 I wouldn't buy it. I was shocked to see "SALE!" signs over CD's at Media Play reading in the upwards of 15-16 bucks.
But by their own account P2P saves the Recording Industry money. They haven't admitted this out loud, but read this from their website: [speaking on why the price on a CD isn't 30 cents]
Then come marketing and promotion costs -- perhaps the most expensive part of the music business today. They include increasingly expensive video clips, public relations, tour support, marketing campaigns, and promotion to get the songs played on the radio. For example, when you hear a song played on the radio -- that didn't just happen! Labels make investments in artists by paying for both the production and the promotion of the album, and promotion is very expensive. New technology such as the Internet offers new ways for artists to reach music fans, but it still requires that some entity, whether it is a traditional label or another kind of company, market and promote that artist so that fans are aware of new releases.
Huh? Makes sense... kinda'. But when I search for an artist I find all sorts of new songs. Many of which are great, but never make it to the radio.
If the RIAA adapted the Fast Track technology [and of course make other than Windows clients] they could promote their own music on that main page. They could even tag certain songs as "hot" or "new".
I mean, they can iron out the details, but considering they've got loads of cash. They've got the marketing minds that brough us O-Town and the like. Why can't they put this together?
Why are we hard at work marketing their songs? Why are we using our bandwidth and time? Why are we donating our computers to distribute music? Why are we bothering with P2P?
Simple: It works. We've found a better way. It's not free music. It's because they refuse to step into the year we live in.
Wake up RIAA, you can't fight it any longer. Go after the guy pressing thousands of CD's and making money off of your work. Leave us alone, we aren't making a thing. It's wrong to be making cash on their works. It's not wrong to refuse to go back to an old system that is dying quickly.
Every computer today is sold with a CD-RW. Let us do it.
Get your Unix fortune now!
For Windows users:
There's an Open Source project hosted on Sourceforge called Gnucleus. Here is the project page.
It supports multiple hosts download, so if you were an user of Xolox, but want a client that development still continues and you want to get those large files using multiple connections, get it now. Sadly, download of partial files from other hosts is still not possible (since there's no consensus from the Gnutella protocol developers about how this should work).
Gnucleus even has a LAN mode, so you may run it to share files over your network that has locked ports or net access blocked (great for colleges!).
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
It's been a pain in the ass to find A place to get Mp3s of live music. Napster was a breading ground for mislabeled music, and the other programs are just as bad. Don't get me wrong http://www.nugs.net is one of the best places to find Phish http://www.phish.com and dead http://dead.net . Other sites dont update or are slow, unreliable and tend to have very little buy way of new bands.
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
many may not have heard of SHN vs. mp3 (debates for or against these 2 can cause a war), but SHN is a lossless compression of a WAV file, and it compresses the wav file approximately 50%. This is compared to mp3's where they are lossly compressed about 90%, but it throws out information in the original wav.
For one thing, FLAC performs a few percent better than SHN and has a more free license. For another, tests performed by r3mix.net have shown that it's possible to encode MP3 at a variable bit rate centered about 192 kbps and lose nothing audible. (Whether this is legal under the Fraunhofer patents is a different story.) MP3 and Ogg Vorbis produce significant quality loss in only the following situations: 1. low bit-rate operation, 2. crappy encoders, and 3. repeated conversions of wav -> compressed -> wav.
A lot of the hard-core collectors of the live music refuse to collect mp3's due to the loss in quality from original wav->mp3
What about the loss in quality from analog->wav? It's negligible, but it's still a measurable loss.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Jibe has a wonderful product for enterprise file and data sharing and I think is making some good progress and will be quite successful.
My employer, Onion Networks, is focused on building enterprise content delivery solutions using P2P. 2002 is off to a great start for us as companies are immediately seeing the value of P2P for cutting costs and increasing reliability within their networks.
--
Justin Chapweske, Onion Networks
We did a significant amount of work in this vein with Swarmcast and have been building a lot of the (rather complex) technology necessary for Reliable Multicast
Multicast is not panacea though, because it is not very widely deployed on the Internet, and since there is no caching in Multicast, all of the receivers must be downloading near the same time to realize the bandwidth savings...So in many ways P2P caching has advantages over multicast, which is why we do both.
--
Justin Chapweske, Onion Networks
I run a website called Murmurs.com, which is for the band REM. We run a Napster-clone on our servers using SlavaNap as the main server (Windows yes, I know, but it was more stable than OpenNap). The desired client is WinMX.
REM has a kind of blind-eye mentality toward the sharing network, so long as what is being shared is live or unreleased tracks. As well, we allow sharing of other bands which support this mentality (Wilco, Pearl Jam, Patti Smith, Radiohead, U2, etc).
A lot of the files are sourced by someone running a free FTP server (called ThinkTankDecoy, which makes sense if you know REM history). People download from that server and it permeates through the shared server.
Ice Magazine recently ran a feature on our sharing system, a U2 one and Pearl Jam. Here's a quote:
"At www.murmurs.com, www.fivehorizons.com and www.u2bloodredsky.com- three unofficial but overt REM, pearl Jam, and U2 sites- one can easily nevigate past message forums and band news to locate mp3 concerts uploaded by fans. The U2 site is set up like a database, and provides tips for people un familiar with PTP. The REM site requires user registration, and directs how to install its own custom file-swapping software. It also recently featured an exclusive interview with guitarist peter Buck. when told that both a rare 1980 show and thhe entire, unedited portion of the recent MTV "Unplugged" broadccast had been posted to Murmurs.com, he replied "I like the fact that we've done this huge mountain of work, and that every now and then I'll find a bootleg of some 85 German tv show...."
Ice Magazine is maintstream industry press.
Considering the size of U2, PJ and REM, its nice to see that at least some big bands don't listen to the RIAA's squawking.
Ethan
After dabbling in p2p for a bit. I found PHEXworked for some large files. However I found all the p2p client/servers had a few things problematic about them.
'Piggy-backing' would be nice, but reliabe would be better. In the end it has a ways to go. Large files are the biggest problem.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
I would imagine that client communicates with a centralized server to check MD5 sums and also check filenames so the only way to actually put up a illegal file for sharing is change its name to something like 11.29.98-Phish-David-Bowie03.shn and post it as a new file so a MD5sum is created.
Why would one even need to look at the filename? Calculate the md5 signature, look it up in the database, and if you find a match, you're good to go, regardless of the filename. An md5 signature is 16 bytes long, that's the same length as an IPv6 address, the kind they describe as being sufficient as allowing every atom on earth to have its own I.P. address. Shouldn't it be vanishingly unlikely that someone could alter a piece of music so that its md5 matches with something previously registered?
That's assuming that someone is actually checking out these files before entering md5's into the database, I guess. Is the safety factor just based on the fact that you won't approve a filename that doesn't match the known list of acceptable bands? I suppose if you can't search for something illegal based on name that it doesn't matter in some sense whether it is in the system or not..
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
But, all these issues don't prevent me from running Freenet. I find it comforting to support anonymity on the internet, like in the old days. It's really not up to scratch for P2P file sharing, though. Never will be.
Frost, on the other hand, seems like a really slick attempt at totally anonymous newsgroups built on top of Freenet. I've run it a few times and like it. It's slow as molasses, but that's not Frost's fault (see above).
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
Furthur does md5 checking to group together the files, and once you start downloading it looks at md5's to figure out what it needs to download. AFAIK, All internal file identification is done by md5, and not by file name.
Of the ones that did multi-home download, none ever kept trying to find sources for the files in progress (enhancment/feature?).Furthur will look for other sources every 15 minutes (or whatever you set it to). If you start a download, and the guys you are downloading from all leave, you can just let it sit in the Partial tab. Come back in a few days (or whatever), and the show will probably be fully downloading. You never have to do anything after you click "download".
My biggest beef with all of them is that none could continue a d/l that had stopped. So every time it re-started it would start at the beginning.
Furthur can do this of course. It can piece together downloads from multiple people who already have the file, and even from others who are currently downloading. And if the download is interupted, it will pick up where it left off when a source becomes available.
Only a few of them could resume searching/downloading if the client died(or I killed it) (gtk-gnutella could save the d/l requests)
Furthur can do this, too.
Spammage - you could do a exact title serch, and get hacking info, or porno or ... well you know what I mean. Heavans forbid if any commercial company really got serious about it.
Well, furthur is still dependent on what people put in the file descriptions, so if someone wanted to put a bunch of spam in there, they could. I haven't seen that happen yet, though.
-Mike
PS I'm not afiliated with Furthur in any way, other than as a satisfied user
The idea that Gnutella is more scalable than Freenet is laughable. Gnutella employs a broadcast search meaning that every time you search for content in a proper Gnutella network your request can hit thousands of other peers in the network, in Freenet each request will hit at most 25 other nodes.
If you genuinely believe the drivel you have spouted here, I strongly suggest that you do some research before you demonstrate your stupidity again.