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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"
From the introduction in the paper:
> This paper aims to address the following
> questions:
> 1. How must the depensation model be modified
> in order to account for conceptual
> differences between P2P networks and animal
> populations?
> 2. What are the conditions necessary to cause
> catastrophes in P2P networks?
> 3. What does the model imply about other ways
> to limit or stop P2P networks?
> 4. What is the most effective method to stop
> P2P networks?
I bet if you'd set out to answer a more interesting question, you'd have obtained a more interesting answer.
Natural populations are well known for their ability to adapt to their environment; to mutate or change their behaviour in response to stimuli (threats) in their surroundings. If you truly wish to study P2P networks as if they are ecosystems or populations, there are plenty of more productive entymological questions to be asked.
This paper reads like a biologist saying "given, say, fish - how can we go about killing them?"
Nice to see *some* scientific analysis of this subject, however misdirected.
These sigs are more interesting tha
countermeasure: encryption + the bad press that randomly sueing upstanding citizens would bring.
2. Creating fake users that carry (incorrectly named or damaged files)
countermeasure: webs of trust & md5 hashes.
3. Broadcasting fake queries in order to degrade network performance
countermeasure: evolve to shun the DoS nodes (again, webs of trust & a 'witness system' needed).
4. Selectively targeting litigation against the small percentage of users that carry the majority of the files
countermeasure: This being the most effective [scare] tactic of the four, the best way to deflect it would be hiding your identity, or somehow spreading everything available very thin (freenet style) for plausible deniability, or serving from offshore, or rotating selections...
--
Power to the Peaceful
This is hardly news. I can't remember the last time that I shared a music file from gnutella that was correctly named, labelled, untruncated and not a radio edit (mea non culpla, the first thing that I do is to fix the damn things, before making them available for re-sharing).
For exe's, it's even worse. There seems to be a deliberate misnamimg of some files, e.g. GTA2 labelled as GTA3, or in some bizarre cases files named as "game Foo (actually game Bar)". What on earth is the point of that? If you're warning that there are misnamed versions out there with this filesize, then say that, otherwise just name it correctly and be done with it.
Porn is the worst of all. I've lost count of the number of god damn bangbus promos (or worse, trailers that spawn popups) that I've shared and ditched, and I'm now so sick of it that I won't download anything under 5MB (most of the trailers are smaller than that).
What I can't understand in all this is that I'm sharing these from other gnutella users. Sure, they are injected through malice (or avarice), but what is wrong in the heads of users that they don't understand that this is our network, and our responsibility to clean up the file naming? Nobody is going to step in and do it for us. It's only going to get worse over time, and I'd rather download three different but accurately named versions of the same file than one misnamed version that turns out to be another badly encoded asian lipstick lesbian popup spawning commercial.
Repeat the mantra: our network, our responsibility.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.