Slashdot Mirror
Putting P2P To Work
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like some folks at IBM have had moderate success in getting P2P adopted within the corporate enterprise. One new paper on the site describes experiences in deploying a decentralized search network spanning machines in 43 countries. Another describes a system for peer-to-peer sharing of dynamic web applications instead of static files. The idea is to support development and distribution of simple modules that themselves form meta p2p networks. Neat."
What stops you from doing a man-in-the-middle attack, as so to speak? I.e., what assures the integrity of the original files, and how do you know that you're obtaining an authentic file?
But how long before the RIAA calls this evil and attempts to shut it down?
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
As the linked webpage says, we've already had a story on this here. All that is different is a new version (and name) of YouServ, and that the currently active users number has risen from 900 to 5,000. Good job to the guys at IBM, and keep up the good work!
www.jxta.org does this now, p2p search, and much more.
MP3s from IBM's OC-192s?! Sign me up!
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
What they need to do is synergize by making more robust b2b real-time applications using p2p e-solutions.
First academia starts contributing to peer to peer development, now it is being used as a business app. Looks like the folks who would love to see p2p dissapear are out of luck.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
a P2P network that isn't evil spyware? must pretty cold in hell bout now.
But as usual, the examples are of the trivial, "hello world" class.
In the real world, dynamic content and web services are linked to some back end database server. Doesn't matter what kind of fancy distributed malarkey you put in place, everything gets serialized back to a skinny pipe when you reach the database server.
Now a distributed database server based on P2P - that would be news. Oracle had such a project, code-named Andromeda, some 8 years ago but it came to naught cos it ain't that easy.
Well, /. on a DRM solution I was deploying for a major record label. Some of you also know that these labels are paying companies to distribute files that look like real audio files, but turn out to be ads, or silence.
.wma files and not mp3's. However, most p2p users use apps like kazaa where selecting "audio" files will return wma's.
Earlier I posted to
With the system I built, they are going to give downloads of actual music files protected by DRM on these p2p networks, where upon playing it, you will be prompted for payment. You can make payment in the licensing window of WMP. It should be noted this only works for
It will be interesting to see how this works. It can obviously be circumvented using one of the DRM hacks, but I'm sure at least some will buy the files. Especially those on dial up who spent 15 minutes to get one song.
Is it evil? Sure. Not as evil in my mind as those companies that distribute silence or ads on these networks. Please understand, I have all the same feelings as the concensus here has. But this is a necessary step for the industry to get with the times. The DRM at least will have unlimited play, cd copy, and move to portable device.
Baby steps. Slow and steady wins the race.
You'd think a huge corporation like IBM would have enough copies of 'Jenna's built for speed' to around so employees wouldn't have to share DiVX's. Damn ecconomy.
uServ + Java p2p DDNS server = Dynamic Javanet = Good times for pppoe dsl users with dynamic ip's.
The american anthropolgist and all around genius Gregory Bateson was among the first to investigate theories of meta bracketing as sources of information. His two best books 'Steps to an Ecology of the Mind', and 'Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity' are both excellent reads and brilliant insights into the human psyche.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
When will microsoft make a p2p filesharing app, will they include it with the next release of windows? That should piss the riaa off but I don't think microsoft cares as long as they use a propriatary protocol so it only communicates with windows boxes. I mean, Microsoft can afford to keep an eternal court case going with the riaa.
IBM gets ancient client-server systems to work, news at 11...
Slap "P2P" on something old and watch people drool...
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
p2p at work? Pr0n will acquire a whole new meaning when you can pull it in over your company's T3 line.
OLPC Australia
At the rate P2P is going people will be able to use 100% of my CPU power and hard disk space to remotely code DivX files reliably in just a few years!
If a chair is thrown in a forest, and there are no witnesses, did Ballmer still do it?
So they're going to block port 80? It's ok if posters don't want to read the articles, but the moderators should before modding someone up as insightful.
Colleges could cut down on bandwidth due to the "abuse" of P2P applications by students and staff. With most networks at 100baseT, local P2P would be quick, easy, and efficient, and save bandwidth for other stuff. Still, someone would get onto Gnutella or Kazaa and download stuff, but then again, if one person downloads the new Harry Potter movie, the local P2P network can send copies all over the campus in a few seconds...that would kick a$$
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
One great feature of 10.2.x has become apparent through use of Rendezvous (aka OpenConf) and iChat. Rather than connecting to a central iChat (ie AOL) server, you can easily and automagically create an ad-hoc iChat network between any capable (running 10.2 and have a network connection) machines. This enables people to easily chat, exchange files etc. wherever they may be, by setting up simple wired or wireless networks. Look out for more of this at various conferences (wireless ad-hoc networks) and in the workplace.
This sort of technology is being pushed by Apple and will be included in future updates to various "iApps" including iTunes...
IBM plans to license this technology at $45,000 per processor.
" First academia starts contributing [slashdot.org] to peer to peer development, now it is being used as a business app. Looks like the folks who would love to see p2p dissapear are out of luck."
No it's the half-n-half rule. Those on the business half can do what they want because they have the money to do it. Those on the residential side (our side) will have to put up with bandwidth limits and download caps, as well as port blocks, because we DON'T have the money. Isn't it nice how the world DOESN'T work.
A worse one (for YouServ compatability and anything else reyling on dynamic DNS) is the fact that Mozilla caches IP addresses until the browser is completely restarted. How's that for stupid?
Please vote to have this issue fixed right here.
What we REALLY need is P2P software for slashdotters, to counter the slashdot effect.
It's practically the perfect application for P2P.
I don't follow your point, sorry :(
The only time you access the central server is:
1) When a brand new client connects to the internet and needs to get the server's public key(s). This is when the client is at its most vulnerable from man in the middle attacks etc. You could try hard coding them into the client, but you get the same problem - basically you have to start off just trusting someone you don't know.
Then you have two choices. The server could either trust everything, say, apache spits out. To do this, the server would sign apache's public key. This is done once, and then never again do the user or apache have to contact the server again.
OR
The server could just sign individual files. The coder would then sign one of his files, then send the file and signature to the server. Some human would look over it, decide if it is good sign, then sign the signature.
In both cases, when the end-user downloads a file, they get 3 files directly from the coder - the file, their signature of the file, the signature of the signature/public key.
Yes, this means it does exhibit a single point of failure, but as the system is not intended for piracy, porn, evading censorship, or other uses that tend to get systems "shut down", the benefits of centrally coordinating the system outweigh the functionality and performance limitations of a fully decentralized approach.
The difference from this and a completely server-based solution is that there are no central requirements that involve a large amount of resources. The central servers are a pair of old 400MHZ PII boxes, one for DNS, and one for the coordinating services. A one man operation can easily run this system on cheap hardware and a pipe with only moderate bandwidth, and still serve tens if not hundreds of thousands of users.
And how do you know whether somebody hasn't maliciously replaced both the binary and the md5?