Slashdot Mirror
BitTorrent Community Running For Cover?
govatos writes "Bandwidth issues and DOS Attacks brought Bytemonsoon, a popular BitTorrent
page down, but now pages are closing for scarier reasons. Torrentse.cx 'recieved a cease and desist letter during the day of Wednesday, July 16, 2003 for copyright infringement. The entire website has been removed and will not return.' Will corporate pressure kill the BitTorrent movement, or will it keep flying from site to site before it settles somewhere 'safe' like Sealand's HavenCo?"
Just a question, the main problem with bittorrent is exactly the same as it used to be in the very early days of MP3, before most of you knew what the internet was and they shut down sites all the time that were just linking directly to the mp3s. You don't see that any now days, no one does directly linking, and the setup would not scale anyway. What do you see, we all use p2p search software. So why can I not use KaZaA to download the .torrent file and run it from there? Of Freenet? It still needs a tracker, but it decentralises the collection of .torrent files. How much work would it take to use KaZaA to get BT files?
Warez never truely dies, it just gets a good solid punch, you know the type where you can't breath for a few seconds, and then it catches its breath and comes back with a vengence.
Just to summarise it:
Warez started with BBS, when found they were easy to kill.
Moved to password and ratio BBS, a little harder, but not much.
On the internet it really came of age with FTP, often with ratio still, this was still trackable thou and sites got killed often.
Somewhere along the line, someone figured out that using centralised distribution methods was sorta the real problem leading to getting caught.
Along comes P2P, mp3's at first but it scaled well, and so moved quickly to anything.
So they started killing the search servers, ie napster, so we moved to P2P searches too.
Here is where it gets interesting, the problems with P2P were not created by the copyright holders as much as by the users. Leechers are a huge problem, and basically that leads to speed issues.
Now appears bittorrent, it attempts to resolve a lot of bandwidth issues, but it was not designed to be used in a obscured way. It tells the world everything and does not have search built in, but it is fast.
People come up with search engines for BT files, but those are like Napster servers, easy kills for the copyright holders.
That is where we stand now...
So the next step is to create, either as a hybrid of BT and something else, as P2P network that allows for distributed searches with content insertion abilities and BT style forced bandwidth sharing.
What is the attack that occures after that? The copyright holders have found it hard to kill KaZaA and the like, but they are too slow for a lot of people, and they can kill the fast BT. What happens when the two merge? No one has figured out how to DoS the P2P nets, and you cannot successfully sue everyone who uses it(there is more to the world then the US)...
Just some thoughts and ideas...
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
This in a non-US country without a DMCA-equivalent.
More than mere navel gazing.
Maybe there was a lot of unauthorized content on BT, but there is a large group of users using it to download legal, live music. Look at Etree's Box of Rain forum, Groove Salad, and Sharing in the Groove as just a few example of the many message boards that have gigabytes of 100% legal, 100% lossless (.shn and .flac) music posted daily.
When the Phish summer tour aud sources come out, BT is going to be key. It sure beats trying to log in to someone's 3-slot FTP.
I think its a mistake to categorize tracker decentralization with "warez". Frankly, at this point tracker decentralization is absolutely necesary if bittorrent is going to thrive in a competitive (legal) environment. This is true for 2 reasons: 1.) 2 really cheap servers can do the same job as 1 really really expensive server and 2.) redundancy is necesary to achieve stability. If my downloads (or my clients downloads) are mission-critical, I can't depend on a single tracker, regardless of how cheap it is.
As for anonymity I totally agree with you, however you're already too late. I can already turn off my upload (and the *AA's seem preoccupied with only those who are serving).
Yep. I'd be happy to do a slashdot interview or write something for people to link to about this, either before or after defcon.
There is still hope for secure hosting -- I'm doing distributed hardware tamper-resistant location in a multiplicity of jurisdictions, which I think is ultimately a much better solution.
Sealand is still physically there, but I'd no longer consider HavenCo a "data haven" after the events in 2002 and 2003.
You can use a chainsaw to cut your winter firewood, or you can use it to commit a Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Does that mean we should outlaw chainsaws? No, of couse not. The act of killing is already against the law and has nothing to do with chainsaw technology. It is about actions and not tools.
So too is it with technologies like BitTorrent. Yes, certainly a large community of cheap-ass slackers who want goodies for free have exploited this great content delivery system for their own purposes. But to be sure, there are so many other legit uses for it. The LEGAL online music trading community has also taken up BitTorrent to distribute high quality live recordings of bands that permit taping. (The Dead, Phish, Dave Matthews, Pearl Jam, etc to name even a few!) Sites like Sharing the Groove and eTree provide legal lossless audio in FLAC and Shorten format to fans of the music. These lossless files can be quite large and the demand for them can be quite strong the night after a good concert. Well, gosh... This is Just the sort of thing that BitTorrent does and does well. It serves high bandwidth and high demand files with grace and ease. This isn't about piracy. It's about access to technology. The Supreme Court ruled in the betamax case that there were enough legit uses for the technology that it couldn't be outlawed simply because some people were using it to copy porn tapes. I reserve the right to use this technology in a lawful fashion despite what others may choose to do with it.
More than once I have turned to a Torrent link to get a copy of some content that was in high demand at the time. (Animatrix previews, Gollum's Acceptance speech, etc.) All were legit downloads when the normal methods of acquiring the content were under heavy /. effect.
Let's try to keep this in mind during these troubling times of heavy litigation by big media. They killed Napster, they'll try to kill BT and any other centralized system they can find. The chilling new bill introduced in congress should be a warning to us all. The concept of p2p itself is under attack. Fight for your rights to these tools.
(Stepping down from my sagging soapbox.)