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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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
You do reallize, that apart from possibly nr. 2 if you're the paranoid sort, oh, and nr. 1 with regards to North America you've described what is standard in many GSM models all over the world.