Stanford Researchers Trying to Protect P2P Networks

dirvish writes "New Scientist has a story about efforts from researchers at Stanford to protect peer to peer networks from attacks that could be permitted by the proposed Berman Bill. Neil Daswani and Hector Garcia-Molina of the Database Research Department at Stanford University have mathematically modeled the Gnutella network to discriminate between nodes and supernodes. They then tested the nodes to find which rules could be applied to best avoid a malicious node on the network thus conserving bandwidth."

Comments

Is all this work really worth it??

[TooCynical]

Maybe the goal of all of these legal machinations is to make it all so much work that it is no longer worth the effort to take the short cut.

Re:Is all this work really worth it??

[icewalker]

If the Berman bill is passed, would not this research be considered a circumvention technology according to the DMCA?

Honestly...

[acehole]

The riaa/mpaa are going about the whole P2P debacle the wrong way. Havent they learnt the lesson from what happened when they shut down napster? How many P2P services popped up in it's place? and they were even more sophisticated.

You can't cut the head off the p2p snake, you try and at least two or three take it's place.

RIAA/MPAA should be looking at other alternatives rather than going in guns'a blazin'

Re:Honestly...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thing is, there is no particular alternative for them. They're "scribes in the age of the printing press". Their best hope, which will only slow their demise, is to do as the scribes did in england, and get the king to forbid printing except by royally approved people. That is to say - what they're doing right now, getting the government to pass laws outlawing progress.

They're also trying a tactic not very available to the scribes at the time of the printing press - the production of crippled printing presses that couldn't easily copy some documents. But that's like trying to legislate fixed-type printing presses when the movable-type printing press already exists. Again, won't work in the long run.

In the long run, the internet means that there IS NO "Information Economy". Economy as humanity knows it is effectively the redistribution of scarce resources, and the internet makes information non-scarce. Imagine your neighbour had a magic-car-cloning-ray. Would you begrudge him a clone of your car? You'd still have a car, he'd still have a car, everyone's better off.

It's not like he'd be stealing your car. Well, the internet is a magic-information-cloning-ray.

Re:Honestly...

[ReelOddeeo]

They didn't want Napster to stop trading all music

Ah, but they did want Napster to stop trading all music. I remember on CNet when I saw a major setback in their case when the Judge said that they needed to provide a list of all copyrighted materials that Napster should be blocking. (I'm not discussing here the merits of trying to block selected content.) They weren't able to just close Napster down, because it did have non-infringing uses. If their copyrights were being violated, then they needed to produce a list of the infringed upon works. This was a major setback, and not what they were asking for.

A few years earlier, they sued Dimond for the Rio mp3 player. Stop all playing of sounds on a new type of device, just because it could be used to infringe copyrights. For the same reason this failed.

They also tried to get rid of audio home recording. Remember even back in the 1970's when they started putting these scary sounding copyright warnings on record albums? They didn't want you even copying to a cassette tape.

They want Napster to stop trading all music, because then you would have a way to listen to music that they don't approve of. (This may sound insane, but it is a plausible conclusion from the facts.)

What about Freenet?

[Nicolai Haehnle]

I thought Freenet - http://www.freenetproject.org/ - is supposedly designed with DOS attacks etc... in mind.

Yes, it apparently suffered from /. effect after the 0.5 announce, but things are improving.

What about legal attacks?

[SystematicPsycho]

It seems the most vicious and lawful attacks are the ones that go _noticed. They also come along with large costs and could shut the whole network down. These attacks are from music industry and hollywoood based corporations. Not only that but they probably pay malicious hackers to carry out real attacks.

How to respond: find those loopholes and exploits in the legal system. Patch and re-open with a new and improved legal proof network. Continue the work at Stanford.

Will the riaa ever figure out...

[rynthetyn]

...that they can use piracy to their advantage? In the weeks before Eminem's latest album The Eminem Show was released, people got a hold of bootleg copies of the album, and it became fashionable to be seen driving around with The Eminem Show blaring from your car radio. The presence of pirated cds didn't hurt the sales once the album was released, instead, it just increased interest in the album, and it would be interesting to see how many people went out and bought that album in the first week just because of the publicity from the pirated copies that were floating around.

The RIAA needs to figure out that they can capitalize on the piracy, because whether pirating music is ethical or not, it's going to happen. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the pre-release bootleg copies of The Eminem Show were really part of a stealth marketing campaign or something.