Collapsing P2P Networks

Andrew writes "I'm a undergraduate at the University of Washington, and after seeing this article on Salon, I dusted off a paper I had written last year. I examined P2P networks under a model usually used in describing animal populations, and found that it may be possible to cause a collapse in the network based on the intrinsic nature of the technology. Just as in animal populations, P2P networks require a sizable "critical mass" of users, and overharvesting can cause a systemic collapse - what if this were done on purpose? Quite ominously, my second recommendation on disruption was carrying damaged or incorrectly named files. You can read theabstract and the actual paper"

Comments

Re:Ask a silly question...

[capt.Hij]

Some native populations have an amazing capacity for rebounding. This is especially true of insect populations which have a reputation of getting through population bottlenecks better than any other animal. However, the "Allee effect" is a well known biological phenomenon.

Many populations have a critical population level, and if they fall below that level they have a low probability of rebounding. For example, fruit fly maggots are more efficient when eating in groups and cannot survive if they cannot get enough eggs on the same fruit.

By the way if you pick up an ecology journal you are likely to find at least one paper on this subject. Trying to understand the Allee effect is an important aspect of understanding an organism and how it interacts with its environment.

Re:Start of a bad trend

[ColaMan]

I think this is one case where they could simply set up some distributed PC's (different IP's in different class C's) and just have P2P clients serving 'bad' versions of their own copyrighted music.

Somebody is already doing this ,to some extent.
Searches on gnutella (for just about anything) bring up hits with file names like "your search terms.MPG" ... at 20k or so, I'm not interested. But still, it means somebody's written a client that replies to the P2P network with flawed data deliberately.