Closed Gnutella System to Prevent Bandwidth Hogs

prostoalex writes: "Salon.com is running a story on Gnutella developers contemplating the creation of a closed or authorization-only system to prevent bandwidth hogging. Turns out, numerous applications, including Xolox and QTraxMax employ quering algorithms that are capable of bringing the network traffic to a halt. While it gets better download speeds for the users of the aforementioned applications, the damage to network traffic as a whole is substantial."

Comments

P2P and DOS Attacks

[herwin]

I have gotten the impression that these P2P networks are not good netizens. I access the net via a dial-up connection. Within a few minutes of logging on yesterday morning, I found myself dealing with what appeared to be a DOS attack on port 6346 coming from an adsl connection in Lithuania. I have that port blocked, so I was seeing a large queue of security alerts from my firewall. This has not been the first time this has happened with one of the P2P ports. Shto/WTFO?

Re:P2P and DOS Attacks

[Erpo]

What probably happened is that you snagged an IP previously used by a gnutella user when you dailed in. You're getting 6346 connection requests because the IP you're currently using is in the host cache of one or more gnutella nodes out there that are trying to connect. If it really bothers you, reconnect and get a different IP. Otherwise, wait for a bit and they'll realize you're not running a servent and stop trying to connect.

You're right, though. Most gnutella servent software out there doesn't behave very well.

Re:Get rid of pop culture vultures!

[NexusTw1n]

The record industry is already doing this in order to pollute P2P networks.

All is does is piss off dial up users, it doesn't stop them, they just keep searching.

Salon's article on the practice

I think having an enforced standard for the Gnutella protocol is the the sensible way to go. If you're going to design a protocol, do it properly and completely, which includes specifying exactly and clearly what a supernode is and how it should behave. If you don't clearly define every aspect of the protocol then it is going to break down as people interpret it in different ways.

A protocol has to be a set of rules or it isn't a protocol by definition.

Re:Get rid of pop culture vultures!

[Anonymous Coward]

Evangelion is not obscure. If you have any respect for the people who created it, you will buy the DVDs. It's not hard, just go to animecastle.com, amazon.com, bn.com... take your pick.

Problems about UDP

[r6144]

I tried GNUnet last month. The most serious problem I see is that it uses UDP, so I can be flooded by UDP packets (sometimes about 30KB/sec) even after I shutdown everything about GNUnet. And there is no way to stop them --- even icmp-host-unreachable errors aren't respected. The UDP flooding didn't calm down till the next day.

I hope such problems are fixed now, but older clients will continue to eat my bandwidth. I don't want to make my ISP unhappy by letting lots of useless packets in.

Re:Inhernetly N-P Incomplete Problem

[imta11]

Ok, but what does this have to do with NP complete? I don't see an algorithm or problem statement anywhere, so what is the O(n) that we are looking at? Go back to bed.

Re:The solution is to block abusive servents

[Anonymous Coward]

If you would have read the article you would have seen that XOLOX fixed their problem. Learn to read all info. It might help you someday

Opens them up for legal issues

[nurb432]

Once you have to authenicate, that leaves the 'authenicators' open for legal issue.. Remember napster???

Good bye Gnutella..

Yes something has to be done to clean up the bandwidth, but i dont think THIS is it..