Advances in Decentralized Peer Networks

PureFiction writes "Peer networks are gaining some attention these days given advances in much more decentralized search architectures and swarming distribution networks. Research has indicated that these decentralized networks are resistant to legal and technological attacks. The continued proliferation of broadband and wireless networking will ensure pervasive deployment of distributed peer networking infrastructure that will drive significant innovations in personal and community digital communications services."

Comments

Damn Peer To Peer networks

[nweaver]

As a security person, I hate these peer to peer applications: there are so many worm strategies which can exploit these, creating fast and stealthy attacks.

As such, if I was in charge of corporate security administration, I'd ban them completely. At the universities, I'd packet-shape-them into a much lower priority.

Unfortunatly, they are growing considerably more stealthy as a result of these legal attacks and the effects of packet-shapers. This may be a good thing for those who want their 1337 WAR3Z, D00D!!, but is rather unfortunate for those who want to create secure systems.

Show me a P2P network being used legitimately!

[t0qer]

I'm not trying to troll here. Since napster all i've ever seen P2P used for is piracy of music, applications, pretty much whatever you wanted.

I am that pot calling the kettle black. I am your average joe user. I have kazaa and routinely use it for downloading music. Yes I am a criminal. As are %99.9999 of all other P2P users.

I understand the benifits of P2P, each client acting as a server and bonding the collective bandwidth of all the clients together. Yes I know it can be used for free speech, and I know for legitimate file distribution it can't be beat. That's just it though, it's never going to be legitimate without some type of DRM.

I downloaded doom3 alpha (Sorry Carmack, it kicks ass though :) I saw no less than 100 users sharing the file. Nobody is supposed to have it but I do. Thanks to the decentralized nature of P2P there's no accountability. Websites that were hosting the file got a nasty attorney letter though.

Here is my slashdottish geek comment. P2P creators need to start focusing on making their clients good for legitimate uses. For example, I think it would kick ass if the distro's started using P2P for their distro's, or a P2P based web server/browser. Anything to turn it from a black to a white sheep.

*Note to mods
Sorry I don't mean to be Mr. Obvious here, but I just feel any future P2P doesn't stand a chance if it doesn't have a legitimate foundation to stand on. The RIAA & MPAA has already proven what a great team of legal sharks they have and can overcome any technological advancements made in P2P

my 2 cents

Re:Show me a P2P network being used legitimately!

[PureFiction]

If you had clicked through a few of the links you would have come across BitTorrent which is currently running a widescale distribution of the latest RedHat release ISO images using a decentralized swarming distribution network.

For a limited picture of what future decentralized peer networks can accomplish you need only use your imagination.

This is still relatively new technology with a lot of room for growth and extensible uses.

Re:Show me a P2P network being used legitimately!

[LX.onesizebigger]

IIRC, they didn't lose, they settled out of court knowing they would have lost. Now, I don't know what the case is normally around the world, but how the hell can you set up a legal system so messed up that it allows companies to settle their way out of an antitrust case?! WTF? If you price fix, if you form cartels, if you are using your dominant position in the market to monopolize the market, you go down, you pay damages, you get a big, legal no-no shoved in your face. You don't pay a little money and walk away any more than you settle out of a murder case or a bank robbery.

Re:Well...

[insanecarbonbasedlif]

Given enough resources, large companies can "pollute" these networks with "garbage" (i.e. corrupted songs etc.) that top people's search lists so that it becomes an intensely frustrating thing to find a full, complete, and good quality file.

Then again, I have that problem anyways. Blimey!

But if you are searching for legal/obscure files, it doesn't matter, because they won't be targeted by the companies.
On a side note, can't these large companies be held responsible for all the bandwidth that they cause to be wasted? Or do we run into the same problem we have prosecuting spammers for bandwidth waste?

Piracy defined...

[bziman]

You don't seem to understand the meaning "piracy". There's nothing illegal about downloading stuff off the Internet. Philosophers may argue what's ethical, but that's irrelevent to legality.

Piracy would be buying a CD, making copies of it, and selling those copies to people for a profit. In this case, you entered into an agreement with the copyright holder of the CD, and are violating applicable laws.

When you download something off the Internet, you are under no obligation to be aware of its source, or the license agreements associated with it.

Even posting copyrighted material on the Internet is not illegal if you have not been explicitely notified that you are in violation of the copyright agreement. The notice on your CD case counts, I believe, if you own the CD.

So if you download something off the 'Net, you're well within the bounds of legality, and you can retransmit that until the copyright holder asks you to stop.

American laws are so strange...

Re:Piracy defined...

[evilviper]

If you are aware that such works may be copyrighted, you can be held responsible for downloading it.

And any piece of copyrighted work can not be redistributed without explicit permission from the author in most cases.

Then again... pleading ignorance may still make a good defense.

That is sort of correct, but not quite...

[Jim McCoy]

Just to inject a bit of reality into your pointer to the mnet work, the public prototype of the MojoNation client was always available as LGPL code (pending a patent application on certain bits of the system which may change the license to something similar to RSAREF eventually; Zooko and I are looking for a legit 503c or similar vehicle that is willing to hold on to a license for non-commercial and non-DMCA-infringing use of the mnet system so that we can avoid this if possible...any takers out there?) Prior to the hibernation of the company we had been working on a commercial p2p backup system based upon the mojonation architecture called HiveCache, which is now getting prepped for a beta release. Another fork out of the mojonation work was BitTorrent, which started out as an idea Bram had while we were brainstorming new ideas for mojonation at one point (a cool idea which we did not pursue because it really only works for high-demand, massively replicated content).

Unfortunately, the legal work we did early on when designing the system only prevented people from suing us (the code creators) and it did so by pushing liability off on to the users. That was the closest that one could really get to safety given the structure of the DMCA. Contrary to the widely held fantasy among decentralized p2p systems, "willful blindness" is not a valid defense against DMCA attacks -- something that I think the upcoming Kazaa et al. trial is eventually going to reveal after all of the appeals and other legal wrangling is worked out.

BTW, the only app that mnet provides is a publish-retrieve shared data system identical to the old mojonation (sans distributed resource management), file sharing is not "one of" the apps for the API, it is the only app.