Slashdot Mirror
Open Content Network (P2P meets Open Source)
Orasis writes "The creators of Swarmcast have announced a new peer-to-peer content delivery network called the Open Content Network. The OCN will allow users to download open source and public domain content from multiple peers and mirrors in parallel. The system is designed to augment the existing mirrors with bandwidth from the p2p network and should eliminate the "Slashdot Effect" for popular open source content."
A secure system for validation and verification of downloads will obviously need to be implemented. Imagine all of the fun things someone could do if they, say, inserted a rogue module into the linux kernel code. Or the latest release of samba, gtk, glibc, Mozilla, ssh, openssl... the list goes on and on.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Maybe it's just me, but this makes me a little nervous that when the "Open Content Network" gets too popular and dragged down in litigation, the "Open Source" folks are going to find themselves tarred with the same brush; guilty by association. Not what's needed at this juncture.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
...longbeards can remember the "good ole days" where the free flow of ideas and not making money were what made the pre-commodity internet a very worthwhile place to be. Everyone was expected to contribute their resources for the benefit of all, and none of it was (apparently) designed to make help smartass b-school dropout come up with enough cash to buy a 4,000 square foot "bungalo" in Palo Alto.
Count me in.
I'm fully expecting that if we ever reach a point where a substantial percentage of users' traffic becomes outbound traffic, the cablemodem and DSL providers are going to start to rethink the current pricing and service packages.
How long before we find ourselves NATted away, able to originate connections only? A few cablemodem providers have already done this to reduce the traffic from file sharing and to knock out code red and other such silliness. And each time a major ISP does this, it leaves a slightly smaller number of other ISPs providing the outbound service, causing the traffic on the holdout systems to rise.
At some point it's going to snowball, and most of us are going to find ourselves NATted away, with only those paying premium prices for real IP addresses getting the priviledge of having their uplink monopolized by strangers.
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
The problem being that people are bastards.
Why is this a problem? Well, what's to stop an ignorant or malicious individual wrapping up some content with an CC complaint license and injecting it into OCR?
I'm thinking of:
Why would anyone do this last one? Pure malice, to open OCN up to DMCA attack, simply because people (as I said) are bastards, and can't be trusted to behave in a rational civilised fashion. OCN will be a trusted network, and that leaves it open to abuse. I really hope that an actual trustable human will vet everything injected into it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Fools, little do they realize the powers they are dealing with!
Okay, I'm sure I'm with the rest of the slashdot communisty when I say that my first reaction was "wow, awesome, score another 3 points for Open Source and freedom."
But I've reconsidered. Before you mod me down, please read what I have to say.
Basically, we are talking about P2P filesharing here. Now remember, other P2P services, like Napster, Gnutella, and IRC, were all originally based on good, sound, legal, moral ideals. But in the course of time, they each became corrupt with those who would use the infrastructure for illegal filesharing and copyright infringement.
Now, I don't want to throw the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. And I don't want to get rid of a useful tool because of a potential for abuse, since by that logic we would not have silverware, cars, or handguns. But we in the Open Source community need to ask ourselves, is now the time when we want to risk associating Linux, *BSD, and Open Source with illegal activities? Don't we have enough anti-hacker rhetoric to fight against?
We need to pick our battles. This isn't one of them.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Maybe you didn't notice that these guys are the makers of Swarmcast. Or maybe you posted before figuring out what that meant.
Swarmcast is a (working!) program for parallel p2p file downloading. In other words, the technology IS implimented. They basically are just making a modified program to work with a somewhat different set of files. No biggie.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
The good old days really weren't so good. It's kind of funny, though, listening to some so-called old-timers constantly whinging about the commercialization of the 'net. Do they really think the huge advance in capabilities would have come about without the economic incentive? Sure, the early days were inventive. They invented the bricks and mortar of the Internet. But the commerce guys have driven the construction of cathedrals, roads, libraries and schools with those bricks.
If the goal here is really to eliminate the "Slashdot Effect" a much more effective solution would be to set up a network of load-balanced caching proxies on geographically distributed fat pipes.
:)
Some will argue that this is in essence what a P2P network is, but why not do it right, using technology we already have that everyone can use(squid.)
Other users' comments regarding the cumulative effects of NAT on P2P networks are incredibly apropos.
But realistically, theres nothing I love more than when the story submitter posts a link to a Google cached version of the content he's posting. We're an agressive bunch and that calls for aggressive measures
This too shall pass.
There are pleny of other open p2p products.
Freenet scaleable, not vaporware, very much beta.
Alpine.
based on trust
Gnunet. Sounds very open. based on electonic money. also seach for gnet.
chord Very efficient to find files.
distrinet At this stage: vaporware.(there is code....) But if you look at the description it beats any p2p software!
But in the end the network with the most data (gnutella/kazaa) will be used. Note that users will switch networks very quickly. Look what happened to napster.
this is what we need to make the open music movment happen.....people will make music, license it as being free to trade, and then folkes will do more and more of it.....who knows, mabye this can become the "good example" needed to show the courts that P2P file sharing can be done with out infringing the rights of others, and even lead to some mainstream artist releasing some music on the system to advertise.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I'd like to draw your attention to the Globe Distribution Network (GDN), like OCN, a content distribution network for freely redistributable software. Its design specifically addresses the problem of deviants abusing the network to distribute other people's copyrighted works and illicit content. In particular, it requires all content published to be digitally traceable to the publisher. If, after publication, someone finds that this content is not free software the content will be removed and its publisher blocked from the network.
The GDN furthermore offers a scalable solution to the problem of finding the nearest replica (i.e., a scalable URI resolver service in OCN terms), and facilities for dynamically replicating content in areas with many downloaders.
Publications on the GDN, the underlying Globe middleware, and its initial implementation (BSD license) can be found on http://www.cs.vu.nl/globe. The best description of the anti-abuse measures of GDN are found in the paper titled ``A Law-Abiding Peer-to-Peer Network for Free-Software Distribution'' published at the IEEE NCA'01 Conference.
We've had several large deployments of files which are a couple hundred megabytes and up, getting sustained downloads of a couple hundred downloaders at once, serving off a dsl line, and it's worked well.
By the way, BitTorrent, Swarmcast, and OCN all check secure hashes under the hood, so data integrity isn't an issue.