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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."
The solution is not authentication - it's building better network infrastructure.
Here's a clip from an email I sent sometime ago to someone, it might or might not have something in it, judge yourself.
:)
- the system must reorganise itself automatically based on current
analysis of the nodes available on the network. - the system must have a dynamic trust model, based on "paranoia".
- the trust model must be utilized in combination of other characteristics of each peer(node) to select best population of the nodes as more important servants. Untrusted/neutral nodes are not to be given any crucial tasks. No-one can do anything crucial alone, confirmation for the action must be confirmed from other trusted ones. - All functionality of the network mut be replicable automaticly. Tasks done by any node must be transferrable transparently.
- Weak nodes will not be given any "community work"
- Every node must pass constant quality criteria to be able to perform any actions on the actual network.
Just to mention a few points. In short, anarchy does not work - even in P2P networks. We need a government, but one which is always on move, but still governs population using strict - but adaptive - rules.
The biggest problem with gnutella is not technical. It is that gnutella was invented so that true hardcore underground people such as myself could complete our collection of harcore underground things, such as the entire run of Evangelion. However, gnutella is cluttered with people only interested in Brittney Spears. Here is an idea I first proposed on everything2 for making gnutella less crowded.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
How about implementing per-node policing using a credit system like gnunet? (http://http://www.gnu.org/software/GNUnet/)
Nodes individually keep track of the behavior of their neighbors. Bad or expensive behavior like out-of-spec activity or excessive querying lowers the 'credit' of the node. Good behavior like answering queries increases a node's credit. Credit determines the probability that a node's queries will be answered or passed along and the priority with which they will be treated. Abusively written clients will eventually be ignored out of the network.
I always find it amusing when someone takes a specific implimentation that happens to be similar to a philosophy that they know about, and take that specific example as proof that the whole theory is worthless.
In actuality, gnutella doesn't paralell any serious anarchist philosophy that I have seen very well at all. Most such systems that I have seen proposed generally call for communities of people that work together for benefit of the community and are run by a direct democracy rather than a representative democracy.
In fact anarchy doesn't advocate a state of chaos or lack of laws as much as a lack of hierarchy. It calls for elimination of the concept of "positions of power" where the laws of the land are decided directly by the people themselves and where no person is forced to live by those rules except as the voluntarily accepted price of living within a given community.
gnutella on the other hand is more of a "free for all". More of an "frontier", which isn't very anarchistic at all, as hierarchy is easily created in the frontier, all it takes is a small gang or some guns. Whoever has the most ability to weild deadly power is the top of the hierarchy.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
IIRC, the big players on the Gnutella network at this point (Limewire, Bearshare, etc) are able to exchange version information, and to confirm that version information. If this is true, and it's not possible for a rogue application to masquerade as another servent, I believe it's time to lock abusive servents out of the network. If they aren't playing fair, don't let them play at all. Period.
This means you, XoloX. As well as all the other servents which send requeries at ridiculously short intervals, send download requests tens of times per minute trying to force their way into a download slot, support downloading but not sharing, encourage or emphasize web downloading as opposed to participating in the Gnutella network, etc. Freeloaders are as much a problem as they ever were, but (IMO) only because they're being allowed to be such a problem.
The time has come when abusive servents need to be shown the door. I don't mind sharing most of the time. But when the same asshole is hammering me 100 times per minute trying to get a download slot, or sending the same query every 5 seconds trying to find more sources, my desire to share files goes down the toilet. Something needs to be done.
They had those on BBS's. They sucked. Unethical people uploaded trash files for credit. And the rest of us, frankly, ran out of quality files to upload after a while.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I was a part of the Gnutella development clique a while back, and had made a few proposals on improvements to Gnutella clients.
One such proposal, GNL, was to provide a way to define alternate Gnutella networks from the main system, and include ways to limit their behavior. Another proposal, GNV, was a method for administering these networks, and said administration could be performed anonymously.
Many people liked my ideas, until I made the mistake of mentioning that the end result would probably be differentiation of Gnutella into several networks, each specializing in different types of files; it would be like making Gnutella into IRC, with separate server networks providing different flavors of service. I also mentioned that I thought the original Gnutellanet would wither on the vine. They looked on this with horror and dropped my suggestions.
*shrug* I dunno. Considering that, at the time, the Gnutellanet was scaling itself into bloated nonoperation, I thought splitting the Gnet into different specialty networks was a good idea. Clients could even log onto more than one Gnet at a time.
I agree with you that some of the more abusive clients are getting out of control. I don't agree with blocking them outright, though. Gnutella is where it is because it's an open network and an open protocol; I think we have to leave it that way if we expect any future genius to appear on the network. Closing things up and locking the doors, these aren't the appropriate solutions IMO.
I think filtering of abusive apps should be done on the client side of the servent equation. The biggest problems I've seen lately don't involve Xolox specifically, but users of varying servents. People who queue up hundreds of different files to download at a time. People using programs which ignore "Not Shared" or "Refused" replies, and continue to pound my box looking for files that don't exist.
I was out of town for a few days last week (all computers turned off, except for my router box). When I came back, I fired up my Gnutella program. Without even connecting to the network, I was immediately serving uploads. That means that someone was trying to download from me for three full days while a) the files were not shared, b) Gnutella wasn't running, and c) the freaking computer wasn't even turned on! Come on, servent authors: pay some attention when you get "Refused" or "Not Shared" responses. Drop such files from the queue after 2 or 3 failed tries, don't leave them sitting there for eternity.
I want a setting that says "drop all packets from hosts who request a no-longer-shared file." I want a setting that says "drop all packets from hosts who attempt to download while the program is running but not connected to the network." I want a setting that says "drop all packets from hosts who send download requests more than $TIMES per minute." My per-user upload limit is set at 1, so someone queueing up 200 files at a time generates an enormous amount of protocol overhead. It might be 5 hours before that user gets all of his 200 files, all the while he's sending a constant barrage of packets which accomplish nothing.
Gnutella is an open network. Yes, we do need to do something about read-only clients, but I think it should be up to the people to decide what gets done. Provide the users with the appropriate filters and let the majority determine what behavior is good vs. bad.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
It's not like this hasn't happened before.
Sun did it with Ethernet. They set their NICs to use the minimum retry interval instead of minimum + random time like the spec says they must. This got better performance for Sun equipment. Right up to the time where someone put a dozen Suns on a single Ethernet segment and the competition between all of them hammered the network down to 10% of the expected bandwidth.
Various TCP/IP "accelerators" tried this too, by ignoring the exponential-backoff and slow-start parts of the TCP spec. They too improved speeds for the people who used them. Right up to the point where lots of people started to use them, when the competition between them hammered their transfer rates down to a fraction of what's expected.
We've seen it on UDP-based streaming protocols, where lack of flow-control mechanisms causes massive congestion problems and slower transfer rates than when flow-control is applied.
So why didn't anyone expect/predict this when they were designing the Gnutella network and protocols?
> And the rest of us, frankly, ran out of quality files to upload after a while.
That's implicit in ratios, though. Ratios are - by definition - about quantity over quality. As you point out, imposing UL/DL ratios increases noise.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Stop the FUD.
: //www.linux.org/linux.iso
:P)
:P No longer can they infect files and make them the same file size/file name.
People need to realize that Gnutella is now fastly becoming a big player in the function and value of the Internet.
Gnutella, in my view (and many others), is not a mecca for porn, warez, and MP3's - but a pool where anyone can share any type of file.
A bigger trend now showing up is linking to files on the Gnutella network instead of the common http://site.com/file.zip. How does this benfit you? You get faster downloads by utilizing partial file sharing, swarm downloads, etc. It also benfits servers greatly. They now aren't the only source for the download, because once the file gets onto a Gnutella client, it searches for more peers, and shares the load with them. This can save TREMENDOUS bandwidth.
For example, Linux can link to Linux links as such: magnet:?xt=urn:sha1:(InsertSHA1)&dn=Linux&xs=http
(not an actual correct MAGNET link, but you get the idea)
When someone clicks that, it opens it up in a Gnutella client. It begins downloading from that source, and searching for the same file on the Gnutella network. Through the entire life of the download, it will continue to add sources. You could then be downloading from over 30 people at once, gaining speeds of up to 10MBPS+.
Oh, the power of Gnutella. Can KazAa (FastTrack) do that?! (Well, it can, kind of
Oh, how do you know if that's the correct file? Hashing. Gnutella servents are implamenting hashing now, where each file has it's own hash. So when searching for files, they can swarm you downloads. You are GUARANTEED that all the sources your downloading from are in fact the same file, because they have the same hash (SHa1). That's whats getting the RIAA so scared
Also new on the scene (well, new as in new popularity) is Bitzi. Bitzi catologs hashs (bitprints). You can search through their database, and find files with hashes. Click the hashes, and you can download a file. Each file on bitzi has a "Bitzi Ticket" where you can rate the file. You can mark it "Invalid/Misleading" which means it is not the file you want. You can mark them if they contain virus's too. I can almost hear the sweat dripping from the RIAA Lawyers foreheads.
Want to see the future of Gnutella? Check out Shareaza (WINE Compatable).
Supports all of what I discussed in this post.
I'm not a coder myself, and am probably not very up to date on the whole p2p scene (other than knowning that Limewire doesn't seem to work real well on my box at work), but one of the real problems on the p2p networks seems to be trust. With the recent news about entertainment industry bodies seeking legislation to DoS the networks, and the common user experience of crap files on the network (incomplete, or incorrectly labled files), I wonder whether someone could make a system based on the same sort of web of trust model than PGP/GnuPG uses.
The Keyserver infrastructure is already there, and the apps (like GnuPG) are readily available cross-platform. So why can't p2p clients allow content to be signed, so that you can establish a web of trust as to whose content can and cannot be trusted. Downloading a signature of a file to check it's validity would certainly help reduce the chance of downloading dodgy content. This should be especially useful as you tend to get groups of people who are all interested in the same sorts of files (anime, divx, certain bands, etc), so you could imagine a good web forming fairly rapidly.
Making a valid OpenPGP key is a computationally intensive task, suggesting that few people would make thousands of them on the possibility they would be blacklisted. They also don't require any form of real identification, making them effectively anonymous. Also gaining a good trust metric would be an incentive to keep the same key, especially if downloading was restricted based on your trustability.
I can't think of any good reason that this couldn't be worked into an existing p2p network. Whether it would work in practice I have no idea. Anyone who knows more about this than me care to comment? Anyone done it already?
Well, my idea is slightly different..
.
You don't have to upload files manually - all you have to do is to share specified amount of traffic before you can download more from other users.
Example: you want to download 600Mb file from other users. Admin server will check your account and verify amount of traffic you allowed to download If you don't have enough traffic stats you have to wait until somebody will download something from you.
Good example is Edonkey protocol: then downloading big file you HAVE to share parts of it in order to finish download.
When someone points a gun at you, it isn't anarchy any more, so none of your examples apply.
What would Lemmy do?
The problem in general arises when you've set up a situation where if each user acted in both a rational and self-interested way, the system overall would collapse for all the users.
When designing any kind of multi-user system, it's critical to plan for the "what if all the users (or half of them) suddenly got very selfish." What results are things like disk quotas: central-system-enforced limits on individual behavior.
In a system like the gnutella network, where there is no 'central system' to enforce 'community-minded' behavior, the eventual collapse of the system can be predicted as a function of overall population, presuming that there are always a few people who are more selfish than the rest.
Centralized systems like Napster actually had an advantage in that the centralized servers could establish and enforce 'fairness' policies that kept selfish users from triggeringa 'Tragedy of The Commons'.
-Mark
Actually, you mostly don't want to ignore these constraints. The P2P should make use of closer servers (mostly, but not exclusively).
In order to get better performance for themselves, people play "the prisoners dilemma", and rat everyone else out with clients that gang up on requests to ensure disproportionately favorable service.
I don't see that this is necessarily a real issue. After all the server that has the file you want can keep a queue of requestors, and serve it in strict first come, first served order. 'Take a ticket and sit down over there.' It works. Asking more than once doesn't get you anywhere; and may even get you lower down the list.
The only real way to deal with this is to define a new protocol that is not virtual point-to-point linked.
Unclear. Very unclear.
Now take active attacks. "Automatic Karma" can deal with dummy files -- "poisoning"... at least until they start intermixing bad with good.
Yes, but users can usually play files before they've finished and cryptographic hashing of file contents can preclude people spoofing files, even when downloaded from multiple servers simultaneously.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Do you expect the same people who use the network predominantly for breaching copyright to care about the greater good?
Do you actually think they copyrights they're breaching have anything to do with the greater good?
Four companies have collectively monopolized music distribution, using copyright. Is this a good thing?
Get real. Record companies are scum. The artist would get more money if I mailed them a quarter, than if I bought the CD. Meanwhile, I would be giving the RIAA more money to keep it illegal to play legally purchased DVDs on my PC. I hope they all go bankrupt. Then we'll have competition.
I'll participate in a free market, but not the current abusive, short-sighted ologoploy. Tell me where I could legally download my 300 favorite CDs for a reasonable fee? I can't. Thankfully record companies don't have a long term business plan. They just keep trying to stifle new technology and get their business model legislated. They should be trying to provide the services people want. That's what they'd be doing in a free market economy. They're trying to tell me what I want. They can bite me.
Life is too short to proofread.