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Peer-to-Peer Cell Phones
AlfaNatic writes "Seems like a new company has developed the technology to turn a cellular network
into a peer-to-peer network. Soon you'll be able to share music and files off of your cell. Gotta love it!"
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all i need is someone exploiting a bug and getting all my personal information as well as EVERYONE I KNOW.
cell phones are full of sensitive data, and enabling file sharing is simply a bad idea.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
I'd rather share my voice over a cell phone, not mp3's.
what range could it be boasted to?
Great
Yes, that's right folks, from the same folks that brought you the Icy Hot Stuntaz, brings you the latest, ILL Mitch!
How is massive P2P going to change the way wireless networks are loaded? Will the networks keep up and still have space for voice calls?
Sounds like a great way to end up in jail.
PATCRP
Or does it literally hop from phone to phone, and leave the base stations out of this?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Who is Stephen King?
[since Bandwidth it's a sort of new God..]
:) ... not to mention the RIAA coming to meet you in person while you're sharing.
It would be cool to hog bandwidth with cellphones
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
I suppose this means telecoms will now be held accountable for the traffic passing across their networks. That should be fun for them......... will they be pushing legislation that will allow them to h4x0r j00r cellphone now, as well?
And I'll just carry a car battery around to keep the little thing going...
;)
Please.
So will these things route through one another until they reach an internet connected node? Sure that has inherit flaws, but it seems like a cheap and easy way to get the wireless internet going.
Is that your average cell phone rarely transmits or receives information. As an example, my T68 gets me about 300h battery life on 'standby' with just keepalive equivalents to the network. When I'm talking, this decreases massively, to about 5 or 6 hours. With a P2P network, as described recently on both /. and El Reg, you have continual data transmission and receipt, as you act as a data path for those around you. The battery life of the phones acting as nodes would be massively reduced. In addition, the phones would get warm, as they disappate the whole battery over a much shorter time interval than they are meant to.
People won't use a system where they can get a battery life of about 6 hours, and where their pockets are always curiously warm. Add this to the uproar already about cellphone radiation, and you lose all possibility of such a aystem being accepted. (What's that? This cellphone is ALWAYS TRANSMITTING? SHUT THEM DOWN!).
Be able to make peer to peer calls. If amongst friends you can setup trusted relay access through a network of phones, I'd be one happy camper.
That's the cellular peer 2 peer I'm waiting for. I don't give a rats ass about p2p sharing of files over my cell phone. I have GSM with full internet access and bluetooth on my phone. I'll use that, thanks.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
but if you ask me, this will be the death of the music and movie industries.
--Jack V.
I seem to remember France having even more restrictive pirating/distribution laws than the US. I could very well be wrong about, though. If true, it seems odd that this technology would come from a French company.
My sig sucks.
I'd rather use it to call other folks on the network for free than exchange files. I just don't have enough storage on my cell phone to be sharing files, but a nice, cheap VoIP or similar would be great.
this will last until the first movie or mp3 is stored in thier servers. then they can be sued and the "unlimited memory" is going to disapear.
Cell phones are still expensive to use if you want to use it during normal "business" hours. And even if you don't care about the cost, they're still not particularly secure (though their security IS improving). Add to that the number of completely tech-clueless cell users and the lack of antivirus/security software for cellphones and you've got a nightmare waiting in the wings.
Definitely a BAD idea...
I very much doubt it. In fact, I don't see where they're going to find the radio spectrum to support most of the applications that are supposed to roll out when 3G gets implemented. Hey, we're fighting over spectrum now, and half the things people want to do with it haven't even been implemented.
Peer to peer is an application layer network "topology," that is, a description of connectedness.
It is NOT A SYNONYM FOR NAPSTER.
Yeehaw! 56k file sharing, until I get a static burst or lose my cell connection.
Oh, and I guess my 200 minutes a month just ain't gonna cut it anymore...
blek..
it looks more like you just upload content to a server and then other people have access to download it.
Seems like the cell phone industry would have a lot of technological catching up to do to make this at all useful. Your average cell phone doesn't have enough memory to store much.
Imagine a beuwolf cluster of these!!
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
Get rid of 3 way calling or the RIAA will ALWAYS call during your download.
I recently used a cell phone to browse (dont remember the name) and found the buttons to be too small to do any useful browsing. Moving back and forth between pages was tiring - and this is for someone who used to be crazy about game watches in those days.
When they talk about PTP - the phones would have to be way more sophisticated than the one I tried. Wonder how they dealt with usability issues there.
I see Video enabled cell phones to be the limit in squeezing features into the cell phone real estate. Anything beyond that like the PTP belongs to the handhelds.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
"Oops I did it again"
Gotta love it!
man, just make a connection to this post from 2 days ago, and understand why "Dude, you getting a phone BILL!" will be new popular motto.
This kind of reminds of this article: SMS Relay -- An Idea for Fault-Tolerant Communications on O'Reilly. The guy suggested that text messaging should have a fallback peer to peer mode, in case of disasters like 911 that wipe out all the transmitters.
"The file you have selected to transmit is copyrighted. To cancel this transaction and avoid us completely discharging your phone's battery into your ear, press 1 now"
I found this funny (from the article):
Soon you could be using your phone to share music, games and images with almost anyone, just like you used to do with Napster.
I guess PTP getting dubbed as a piracy ring starts right here with the media.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
Until battery life gets better this sort of thing will not take off.
Trying is the first step towards failure.
just get everyone to walk around with narrowcasting cb's? Are there even digital, "sophisticated" cb's on the civilian market? I mean like with encryption and such... not to even broach the idea of signal hopping...
Sounds similar to http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/14/194121 4&mode=thread&tid=100 'cept it's a different company.
Wonder who gets the right to sue the other for patent infringement...
I'd rather see a mobile with private wireless domain-like abilities... enter your friends cell phone numbers and anytime they're in range (ding! think MSN messenger), you can use the phone like a walkie talkie or a NIC card. Put me at the top of the royalties list for that one when it comes out.
I suspect that would follow as hacks to the ptp networking in these new phones...
Security? Bah! Who needs it?
Does anyone put their computer 'on the internet' anymore? Most people who have a dsl line have a firewall, or at least a NAT that shuts down most services there.
You can live in the stone age of cell phones if you want.
A possible solution to the problem of battery life and heat is to enable the cellphone P2P only when it is in it's caddy. This might limit the system quite a bit, but with a smart system maybe not. Also, a lot of people leave their phones in chargers at work, in the car, and at home, and they would do it even moreso if it was the only time their downloading worked.
You could still browse, search, and use normal cellphone operations while your phone was in hand, but it wouldn't begin downloads or uploads until returned to a charger.
I'm not sure how the noding would work, but with leaf node shielding and stuff, you might be able to limit searches enough to allow phones to receive upload and search requests while portable, but queue uploads and downloads until caddied.
Of course, they could always make new batteries and better phones that use less power while transmitting data too. Now they'll have a better reason to (instead of just making them smaller).
"Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil." -Philips
Some phones use software known as Java that lets them do much more sophisticated things.
Has anyone heard of this "Java" thing? Sounds like it might catch on.
-g.
Sucks to be a Windows user.
-g.
What kind of caption is that? That phone may show pictures, but it's the ugliest phone I've ever seen. Moreover, I don't want my phone to do all this crap. Here are the list of features I want in a phone, with a divider before those that would take my PDA out of the picture:
1. Ability to make calls, with clear reception all over the globe at all times of day (this is partly a service problem, but better phones could help)
2. Cancer-free
3. Ability to digitally download voice mail to the phone (with error correction) so I don't have to listen to it on a scratchy connection
4. Ability to act as a modem with just a cheap serial cord, no $500 kits
5. LONG battery life - I mean 1 week standby and 5 hours talk-time, worst-case
--
6. Ability to store phone numbers along with other contact info
7. Alarm clock, todo list, and datebook calendar
That's it. No mp3s, no videos, no file sharing. Just the things that would rock to have in a mobile, self-contained unit. It shouldn't have unnecessary buttons and gizmos. It shouldn't have musical ring tones (customizable ringing, yes; music, hell no). I simply don't understand the impetus for putting crap into a cell phone that would be better taken care of by other devices, separate from the phone.
Now, a Rio or some such that can wirelessly bounce around mp3s (even at a reduced bitrate) might be nice, but a Rio is made for playing music. A cell phone is made for communicating with people.
Some phones use software known as Java that lets them do much more sophisticated things.
... Java?
Java, you say? Facinating. Tell me more. What is this
Software Wars
If you didn't go broke on the costs of your cellphone calls yet, here's your chance !!
I always thought cell phones were for making phone calls
It's simply centralized data storage, a sort of global clipboard that allows users to share data. It seems they're simply buzzword huckstering. A real P2P phone system wouldn't be cell-based at all, but would transmit data directly phone to phone. There are projects like that out there, but there are serious issues of bandwidth and battery power, particularly with mobile phones.
This is a great line:
love that software known as Java!
I did a bunch of work on this idea for a school project in an adhoc networking class. We tried to implement it using bluetooth technology (already found in many pda/cell phones). It's pretty cool stuff, but the security implecations are scary, it is virtually impossible to be 100% sure your data is secure in this type of enviorment :P
proxy
Honestly is there any real use for this type of technology, besides for maybe the medical profession. So, from now on, instead of having to deal with asshole drivers talking on cell phones, we will have to deal with asshole drivers getting pr0n, dvd rips and mp3s.
I hate sigs.
Peer-to-peer also seems to be the cornerstone of getting your ass sued back into the Stone Age.
With VibraCall alert!
(it's a walkie-talkie)
Don't get me wrong!
...as if P2P on the Internet were not enough of a bandwidth blackhole.
l eN ews/tech/RTGAM/20020906/gtcybsept6/Technology/tech BN/
http://rtnews.globetechnology.com/servlet/Artic
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Something the cellphone carriers can charge us an extra $20 a month to do. Sounds good for ring tones, if you're into that kind of thing, but as someone mentioned, your cellphone does contain some pretty private info - emails and phone numbers. Hmmm.
Relive the BBS Past - One Byte at a Time! www.ssabbs.com
$.02/KB (or more) over 2MB, file sharing sounds like a steal! Seriously, until the rates for data tranfers goes down (save for maybe the Hiptop device) file sharing over a cell network is not going to be popular.
This isn't even true peer to peer. Sounds more like XDrive or other online backup services, but with the ability to use it with your cell phone and send stuff to other people's storage areas. The data isn't stored on the phone, and you can't directly share things between phones without network coverage. Why are they bothering with this? Work on getting phones, wireless pdas etc to use cellular or a longer range variant of 802.11 (With better security of course) to create a strongly meshed network that links up to cell nodes. The end result, direct connection if someone is within a few hops of your device, network service with fewer dead spots, since your signal can hop phone to phone until it can reach a network node, and better control over the energy use on the phone. If you are within range of X other phones, lower the power output of the phone to conserve battery life. As long as you have a few possible paths to the main network, you don't need your phone to be able to transmit over a range of X miles between cell towers. Verizon, Cingular, Voicestream and AT&T, hope you are listening.
From the article:
Mr Bisaz said mobile phone operators got most money from customers calling each other or sending text messages and passing on ring tones than they did from other services.
oh fucking christ please say it ain't so! just what we need, soccer moms downloading the lastest celine dion while driving their stupid suv's all over the road.
Nokia ringtones
I dont understand? Do what?
P2Pish phones.
Upload from my home PC to my phone. Upload (from the phone? how much memory space you have there?) to your friends space on the central server. And he does what with it? D/L to his phone? Why? To listen to music? ewwww...watch a video clip? again...ewwww.
So he waits until he gets home, d/l's it to the house PC, and then listens to the MP3. OK, so tell me why did we need to go through the cellphone to do this?
Why not just use the current way of stealing music. My PC through gnutella or whatever, to his PC. Of what value is the cellphone and their network in all this?
Instead of file sharing, why not voice sharing?
That would be one way to get around having some many cell towers. Share your excess bandwidth with others.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Do we really need 100x more microwaves pervading our bodies??
This is not that great, IMHO... From the article:
Its peer-to-peer system gives users their own storage area into which they can upload images, music files and games for use on their handset or to pass on to anyone else.
First of all, if the storage is central as this suggests (and it is, _average_ phones can't store this much yet) then it is not true P2P. Also, if it is central then it is legally defeatable, so forget sharing CD tracks.
Third, at the current data speeds (even the best networks) heavy media transfer will be slow.
Don't get me wrong, this does have a place -- about 1.5-2 years from now, and for sharing personal media, like photos, voice clips, sound clips (like your cat meowing or your kid saying something funny), maybe screenshots from future mobile games, etc.
Come play Moral Decay!
I guess you keep missile launch codes on your cell phone. On mine I keep phone numbers.
I dont think that DiMenna Pizzeria's phone number is a national secret and while I dont like the idea of someone pervert calling her up at 2h00am breathing heavily on the phone, it might be a good thing, she needs to meet new people.
Dont worry Im sure youll be able to PGP
your address book.
This is like the shut-ins who are afraid that 'the terrorists' are gonna smuggle some Anthrax out of US labs so they can stick it in her coupon rebate check.
My kid brother sells phones and more than half the people dont even bother(or know)to even use the address book.
zeke
Article says users get storage on server where they can put their file and then "share" them. So all it boils down to is a big server, where you can upload something and then pass the bookmark to it to another user. Given that more and more of independent hosting providers support mobile platform, such p2p "invention" is not important, though it can be branded as "3G killer app".
Given that users will have to upload files to the storage place, it probably will be done through home computer. And at that point it's easier to send email to a friend, with link to user's homepage with file, rather than try to do it through the telephone (with less speed and more surcharges).
Hyperom.com
[Quoting from the article...]
"Some phones use software known as Java that lets them do much more sophisticated things."
Sigh, I hate it when I see evidence that I'm learning about a new technology this way.
Shoot, I may as well just start learning about foreign policy and macroeconomics from my political leaders on TV.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Cool. Now I can download p0rn and have my cellphone vibrate at the same time.
Connecting phone to a phone directly, bypassing the cell-cell routing?
If the calls on the same cell was free, it would be a big lost fot mobile companies. They will warn about technical problems and never let it happens. At work the mobile it is a lot of time used between people on the same building, and of course "Come on Mam, I am waiting on the car", etc....
Damia
i've been thinking hard about this kind of thing.
to get true p2p wireless for hand-helds (which will soon include all cellphones), there are a number of things that need to happen, all of which will.
step one:
free throttled (but otherwise unlimited) internet service on an open-standard wireless bandwidth. bear with me here... this actually makes sense.
- a cellphone provider gives out free bandwidth to a popular park and nearby coffee shops or something.
- people use it to such a degree that there's never any bandwidth not being used and people have to wait in line.
- two devices come into the market: a client-only pda/modem which connects to the network and a router pda/modem which connects to and extends the network in the same kind of way as freenet (from what i understand of freenet which is very little)
- routing pdas get more bandwidth and priority over client-only pdas because they serve other routers and clients (thus an incentive to get a router)
step two:
this wireless network's range is extended by routing pdas and is later helped by a connection to another connection to the internet via somebody else's routing pda or via a similar network. now we see a true wireless internet form in much the same way the public internet did.
step three:
large wireless networks like the originals are no longer needed; pdas are almost all routers and are common enough to always be near one that is chained into the internet.
the basics behind this are simple. here is my vision of the future:
there are no central servers. let's say little john is on the bus going home from college. it's a long ride, so he takes out his pda, sticks the earbuds in his head, and starts playing music. that's all he needs to know. this music is not stored on his 64mb pda; it wouldn't fit. the pda instead sniffs out another pda, which gives him a peer-to-peer connection to his home computer (or maybe somebody elses, which has the music he wants). no satellite or cell-tower, and no isp, wireless or not.
this assumes that everybody's pda is always on (oops), so these suckers need really big batteries (not impossible; i've seen an ipod play continuously for 16 hours).
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
This technology has nothing to do with file sharing. What is intended is to make each phone a mini-cell site to increase coverage (ie, the phone acts as a relay to the tower if phone A is close enough but phone B isn't but is close enough to phone A). Reasearch your facts, things in print online are mostly untrue.
Don't buy connection kits from the phone company. Get the cable from a 3rd party-- www.thesupplynet.com had cables for everything. I have a cable for my ancient motorola timeport to connect via the serial port as a modem, and one to connect it to my PDA. No software or ISP needed with Sprint, just use their QNC system (which is free as long as you have wireless web.)
Not sure how other cell providers are, as I don't really have any reason or means to tinker around with them.
Can't wait QoS will go down, spectrum will run out, and we will get "system busy" more often than we are able to place or recieve a call
RF transmissions suck up a lot of juice. A pda thats acting as a "router" is gonna eat through batteries in no time.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
... peer to peer software on my cellphone. How the fuck do you uninstall Gator from a cell phone?
*ring* *ring* Popup ad for a fucking x10 camera *ring *ring
Live web cams
the quote at the end of the article saying something like "key groups of users are currently left out because operators haven't figured out how to charge for it" is extreemly telling for how absolutely useless this stuff is.
phone companies want to bill you for every little thing you do with your phone regardless of wether or not to costs them a thing to provide. ultimately the -only- additional cost to the telco for these services will be the maintainance of a complicated billing network.
get a clue telcos. woo customers too your network with features. don't drive them away by trying to nickel and dime them to death.
P2P networking with mobilephones.. blah.. They speak about Java and Wap, but don't mention that on most phones Java midlets can't store anything on the phone, sometimes the midlet cannot even connect to internet. And when they mentioned Wap I figured out the whole thing.
Simply make a PHP (or JSP whatever) wap site that works as a fileserver that you can browse. Then let other people browse your files too. Now we have "P2P" sharing with mobilephones. But there are several problems. Ringtones etc aren't compatible, or if combatible format is used they sound really crappy. Also logos and picturemessages differ from phone to phone. And it's often impossible to send stuff out from your phone. (except with never models that use "real" OS like Symbian OS).
- Raynet --> .
The Nokia 3650 (warning in swedish) is a pretty slick peice of equpment for a cellphone. This phone is nothing all that new; merely a repackaged nokia 9290 without a qwerty keyboard and a built in camera capable of 15 seconds of grainy colour video and mono audio.
Some key highlights:
MMS - multimedia messaging service - though this one is capable of MMS'ing video/audio taken off of the device to another MMS capable device.
Java runtime env - kewl
XML - yeah.
bluetooh - werd i wont have to toss my hbh-15
4096 colors on a 176 x 208 pixel display - suckier than the palm yet in a cooler form factor.
4MB RAM card + open slot - rumour has it it is expandible to 64megs -- thats more mp3 than my original RIO held.
Best yet is the 4 hours talk time, 8 day standby, not bad for a nokia :P
Yet, i dont know where ya'all are getting this polymorfic ringtones, what this says is that you create advanced ring signal system where you can receive songs. The translation here is sketchy, but untill somone writes an mp3, or better yet an ogg parser for it i dont see this doing p2p.
The old nokia 9110 does
The Tech is getting there, yet the developer base for these things are tiny, despite the fact that GSM/GPRS/2.5-3.0G phones are out selling pc's 2:1. Hey all you l33t-hax0rs go out there and write us some warez for these hot toys!
This communication is secured using Rot-26 Encryption Algorithm, Unauthorized decryption will be subject to laughter.
Neitzert, great post!
--I will never be as 1337 as root...
I saw the intro, and I thought "Woo hoo, someone has come up with a truely distributed mobile phone technology."
I read the article, and it's just some stupid file sharing system.
Bill, *yawn*
Ok so we can now send ISO images to all Microsoft employees and customers and spam them *nix ISO's ? HAzaah!!! the end is near!!!
Have on phone find another and pass the info on w/o using the cell towers. That is a useful approach.