p2psim: Roll Your Own P2P Protocol

Anonymous Coward writes "p2psim is a free, multi-threaded, discrete event simulator developed at MIT to evaluate and investigate p2p protocols. You can quite easily add your own p2p protocol and compare it with others to make sure it runs well before you write the real thing. p2psim runs in Linux and FreeBSD."

Comments

Pretty clean code, too...

[tcopeland]

...at least, in terms of duplicated code clumps as reported by CPD.

Here's the report... not bad at all.

Interesting parallel

[TheBrownShow]

Hmmm, both p2p and "rolling your own" are two things that people could make a lot of money off of if they just made it legal :-)

Re:Interesting parallel

[blankinthefill]

I don't think I have ever seen or read anything that states that p2p is not legal. Maybe I'm just way behind the times, but it was my understanding that p2p itself is legal, it's what the network is used for that is illegal.

Re:Interesting parallel

[Anonymous Coward]

p2p is used 99% of the time for illegitimate purposes, so it wouldn't surprise me (or upset me, actually) if it was made illegal.

Re:Interesting parallel

[Anonymous Coward]

99%? Where do you get your statistic?

and if you make P2P illegal (how?), the resulting law would also have to make FTP, HTTP, and other forms of information exchange illegal

Re:Interesting parallel

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, 99% is too low.

Re:Interesting parallel

[Anonymous Coward]

Those wiley little commies at MIT are always trying to find new ways to break the law, under the guise of "research"

Re:Interesting parallel

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it's a joke, but if we were allowed to "roll our own" the whole drug underground thing would disappear. It's called supply and demand. With the drug war we have relatively low supply, and relatively high demand.

So drugs would be a lot less lucrative of a business if they were legal (in this case, specifically everyone's favorite drug, marijuana).

Re:Interesting parallel

[Anonymous Coward]

everyone's favorite drug, marijuana
I prefer cocain, you insensitive clod!

Re:Interesting parallel

[cgenman]

Pot doesn't kill brain cells, Inhaling THC until 6 in the morning while watching TelleTubbies kills brain cells?

Re:Interesting parallel

[TheBrownShow]

Ah, tax the hell out of it and pay for my retirement.

Re:Interesting parallel

[djeaux]

No need to roll your own if you have a big enough pipe ;-)

Re:Interesting parallel

[Anonymous Coward]

It's spelt cocaine, so you must be one of those inferior crack users!

Re:Interesting parallel

[Anonymous Coward]

[definition of cocaine,cocain

Re:Interesting parallel

[Anonymous Coward]

Yawn... Another moron. Do you know, I actually found several sites where these Microsophist Litany monkeys had banned technical topics regarding p2p dev, protocols and their clients because they *think it's illegal because America"WemakechangestoyourfilesystemandOSwithouty ourpermissionandifyoudidthisyou'dbethrowninjailfor averylongtime"OffLine and Microsophists say so*. It amazes me how many of these morons exist.. they can be spotted by noting that they often can't tell the difference between a new protocol and an embrace&extend piece of crap, or that they think Microsoft Products are more cost effective and reliable than others (say, i don't know, the products used by most of the world's more sensible large banks, that is free and has regular updates and support from coders across the world for nothing.)

They need to implement older protos

[Zanek]

They need to implement older protocols like Gnutella's and Fasttracks.
It would be interesting to see if there simulator comes close to real world performance of these networks after that !
Yay, we have networks simulating networks. Kazaa Reloaded !

Re:They need to implement older protos

[aardwolf204]

Yay, we have networks simulating networks. Kazaa Reloaded !

Once I was playing The Sims (Hot Date I believe) and I went to town to pick up some flowers and in one of the stores I found a copy of The Sims. So I had my sim buy the game and install it on his computer, oh the hours of fun my sim had playing The Sims. Thank god it wasn't The Sims Online my sim was playing though, I dont know if my poor athlon could simulate that!

Anyway I was gonna say something cheeky about neo but I'll leave that for the next poster

How complete is it?

[DJProtoss]

I mean, does it contain a simulated RIAA that will come and sue you for distribution of copyrighted simulated material?

Re:How complete is it?

[dcphoenix]

Why bother with a simulated one? I'm sure the real Gestapo.....er.......RIAA will be glad to lend their 'services' to the simulation.

Re:How complete is it?

[Brad Mace]

I mean, does it contain a simulated RIAA that will come and sue you for distribution of copyrighted simulated material?

Yeah. It's not so bad though. You can pay them off with monopoly money.

Re:How complete is it?

[gnu-generation-one]

"How complete is it? I mean, does it contain a simulated RIAA that will come and sue you for distribution of copyrighted simulated material?"

Anybody who uses genetic algorithms, who 'breeds' computer programs rather than writing them, will tell you that the secret to success is good predators.

So yes, if you wanted to design a system for rating the quality of P2P protocols, one of the most important steps in that simulation is to have evolving predators, who try and intercept others' data, who try to slow the system down, who try to leech without sharing, etc. A system where data can be traced to an originator might score less than a system resiliant to this kind of attack.

The testbed mentioned in the article doesn't contain this sort of capability, but if you're involved in designing such networks, then it would be useful to dedicate a lot of effort to trying to attack the protocol using RIAA methods.

Read more about what a P2P application should have in its design.

Real world problems?

[Chris_Jefferson]

I've seen this program a short while ago, so feel I can comment :)

While it is a good idea, and can be worked on it does have some small problems, mainly that it isn't quite "dirty" enough. It tends to believe people will behave better than you'd expect them to, not be evil leechers and also not have very dodgy net connections which go up and down every 10 minutes (which to be fair happens to alot of people on ADSL and such like, their uploads get saturated and all their download connections drop because their ACKs aren't getting out)

Having said that, this is a good program, and I hope will be improved as one of the hardest parts about p2p networks is keeping up a good solid network without it taking up a significant proportion of the network, and nowadays few people want to risk running a server if they can avoid it...

Re:Real world problems?

[jd]

They probably assume you'll use their RON (Robust Overlay Network) software. :)

Of course, you can always use ns-2 to simulate the low-level nuts-asnd-bolts, and use its noise generator to dirty the connections.

Re:Real world problems?

[Anonymous Coward]

Both problems, saturated ADSL and significant portion of network bandwidth, are fairly well solved in linux kernel. Check out the cbqinit project.

P2P Simulation

[ospirata]

Does p2psim simulates RIAA suing you? This would be the "de facto" p2p simulator.

Re:P2P Simulation

[garcia]

no, it just sends you a form letter via email demanding your current life savings and says that if you respond to their blackmail they will leave you alone.

Re:P2P Simulation

[Dicky]

Does p2psim simulates RIAA suing you? This would be the "de facto" p2p simulator.

I think you'll find that would actually make it a 'de jure' sim :-)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:my p2p protocol

[Anonymous Coward]

> Employed in the computer industry.
> ... long walks in the woods.

Works with computers *and* gets outside? I'm confused, now.

coming tomorrow...

[Savatte]

roll you own lawsuit against your p2p network

What about the cost?

[the real darkskye]

Do you have to pay a virtual SCO for every virtual linux node on the virutal network?

Its a virtual post, but I have karma to burn off.

Re:What about the cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah,

but you pay them with virtual money

Here's an idea

[shish]

How about, instead of having a few dozen networks, we just come up with one? It works fine for things like the phone system and email (even though there're seperate companies, they're one network), so why not just have one protocol with everything built in?

Re:Here's an idea

[gorilla]

That works fine, if there are only one set of goals. But if you have more than one set of goals, you'll find that if you optimize for one set, you'll make it worse for the other set.

Re:Here's an idea

[SkArcher]

Patience grasshopper, such is inevitable, but it will take some time

Look at the english railways - for a long time, seperate companies used their own parallel rail network, often running different gage track (different width) and having to step around one anothers infrastructure, creating clumsy and non user friendly railway stations and services.

Eventually rail regulation came in, standardising all rail networks to one standard gage, allowing rolling stock and engines to work on any rail companies track and making the whole exercise better for customers and more profitable for the companies.

Sooner or later, p2p filesharing (and maybe chat client) protocol will become standardised, and it will simply be a matter of which piece of software you use to connect to a complete network.

Mind you, it'll probably be the one without any advertsising, and will lead to the end of civilisation as the marketing droids know it, but some sacrifices must be made for the good of the internet :)

Wow! Look at that, a transport analogy for the internet and computers that isn't about cars! Thats got to be a first :)

Re:Here's an idea

[LostCluster]

Because nobody's trying to sue the PSTN or SMTP providers out of business. It's also easy for those two protocols to be tapped if somebody is suspected of doing something illegal with them.

P2P is currently trying to accomlish two goals, moving files arround, and also hiding identities...

Re:Here's an idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever you do, don't look at the American railroad system. Which fell apart because the federal government paved interstates everywhere and let freight trucks run pretty much for free on them.

Re:Here's an idea

[gorilla]

But even person to person messaging (which SMTP is an example of) isn't a single protocol. SMTP, the various IM protocols, and even the crufty old talkd protocol are all different solutions for the same problem - send a message from one person to another. Each of them has different optimizations, with SMTP being best for reliability, IM being best for speed and not caring about where a user is connect, and talkd being best for speed but without having to have a server, but with knowledge of where a user is currently connected. Similar with P2P file transfers we've got different goals. SMTP can be used, for file originator based transfer, freenet is best for privacy and secrecy, the original napster protocol was best for quality of searching, and the current P2P protocols are good for decentralized searching. As I said above, when you have different goals, you're going to get different instances meeting those goals.

Re:Here's an idea

[burns210]

kazaa and others have a 'fasttrack' network, but they are not secure(and not anonymous, for that matter). The problem with 1 network is that you are limited to the features of that network... give it some time, and then lets look at a unified p2p network

Re:Here's an idea

[pacman on prozac]

Wow! Look at that, a transport analogy for the internet and computers that isn't about cars! Thats got to be a first :)

As a Brit and regular victim of the rail service here I'd suggest not using them as an analogy of anything you want to get better :)

Re:Here's an idea

[Kailden]

One must learn the Tao of innovation.

Unfortunately standards are not usually able to break free from the force of mediocracy due to concerns about compatibility and current limited toolsets. Because of this, as soon as a standard is set, another cutting-edge technology will probably ignore the standard and introduce greater functionality at a reduced compatibility and with the burden of requiring a new toolset.

Take railroads for example....a quick google search on railroad standards will land you on this link which begins:

'The US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet,8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used?'

The answer is funny. Who was it that said 'The problem with standards is that there are so many of them'. It seems as though everything past its initial burst of innovation is in the process of being standardized or restandardized.

This is all a necessary evil of course, but remember that there are lots of cases where standardizing shamed the technology because of the brutal impact of commitee decisions.

Grasshopper, beware!

Re:Here's an idea

[DrEasy]

...or how about at least give the creator of a P2P community a framework to help him build one from scratch, and pick and choose specific protocols and other attributes based on his/her needs? Ideally not much programming knowledge should be required.

Check out our U-P2P effort, it is going in that direction.

Re:Here's an idea

[mcrbids]

How about, instead of having a few dozen networks, we just come up with one?

<SHAMELESS AUTO ANALOGY>
Try this on for size:

How about, instead of having a few dozen models of cars, we just come up with one?

</SHAMELESS AUTO ANALOGY>

So, would it be a four door sedan? 18-wheel rig? California convertible? With my five kids, that one four-door, 18-wheel, convertible California convertible car had better seat seven!

I'm reminded of a Simpsons episode where Homer is given the chance (by a long lost family member) to design the *ultimate* car - which, in trying to please everyone, disgusted anyone who looked at it.

Every protocol is not equivalent. Each is optimized for a particular purpose. Games and DNS use UDP over IP because its capabilities fit the needs of games and DNS servers far better than, say, TCP or FTP.

And, while VOIP is growing, it's still quirky (at best) compared to a POTS connection, because the ubiquitous, cheap, anarchic connection model of the Internet just doesn't work well with voice, where a .25 second delay is noticable, and .75 second is PULL-OUT-THE-HAMMER-AND-SMASH-THE-PHONE aggrevating...

Re:Here's an idea

[Lord_Dweomer]

" How about, instead of having a few dozen networks, we just come up with one? It works fine for things like the phone system and email (even though there're seperate companies, they're one network), so why not just have one protocol with everything built in?"

I can tell you the exact reason why this won't happen.

The RIAA

P2P as we know it today has evolved around the need to constantly evade whatever measures the RIAA comes up with. It's an electronic cold-war so to speak. While it may be a good thing for there to be one standardized network, I also have high doubts that such a standardized network could be made without big corporations lending a big helping hand...and thus implementing DRM.

It works well enough this way, lets evolve it from there.

Re:Here's an idea

[julesh]

Look at the english railways - for a long time, seperate companies used their own parallel rail network, often running different gage track (different width) and having to step around one anothers infrastructure, creating clumsy and non user friendly railway stations and services.

Eventually rail regulation came in, standardising all rail networks to one standard gage, allowing rolling stock and engines to work on any rail companies track and making the whole exercise better for customers and more profitable for the companies.

Sooner or later, p2p filesharing (and maybe chat client) protocol will become standardised, and it will simply be a matter of which piece of software you use to connect to a complete network.

And it'll be a sorry day when it does. And we can see why, thanks to your analogy. There were, in fact, two standard track sizes used in English railways before the business was nationalised, if my history isn't failing me... those were 4'8.5" and 7' (which was only used by GWR, I think).

Of course, when everything was standardised, everyone had to come down to the smallest of the two standards, because existing tracks can be made smaller much more easily than they can be made larger.

Which is a damned shame. Because trains built on 7' tracks can run faster due to the more evenly spread power load (I'm not an engineer, but I have been told by one that this is the case...), are less likely to be derailed by damaged tracks, and can carry more passengers for the same mass of train, so are more fuel-efficient.

I can see that we are all going to converge on KaZaA, despite the fact that there are file sharing protocols out there that are much better at detecting corrupted downloads, finding files to download, enabling community activities like rating the quality of a file, and working against adverse network conditions, simply because KaZaA is the lowest common denominator that we'll all have to come down to in the name of standardisation.

Yeuch.

Re: p2psim

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone else think it's odd to have a screenshot of the program running in an X-terminal?

<pre>Paste text from xterm here</pre>

Preemtive strike

[argoff]

Just one note, before anyone goes spewing about copyrights and morality, could you please type in "Against Copyrights" into any internet search engine and get your facts straight first. Hint (copying is not piracy, nor steeling food out of the mouths of artists, and it's not property).

Thank You, now please continue....

Protocol Stub

[Lizard_King]

In addition to a cool sim, p2psim gives you a stubbed out protocol to play around with. Build your own and guage efficiency! Check it:

protocols/sillyprotocol.h and protocols/sillyprotocol.C contain the outline of a new, but unimplemented peer-to-peer protocol. Implement join() and lookup() to your liking. Look at the other protocols (in the protocols/ directory) for more example code. Then run your SillyProtocol as follows:

p2psim/p2psim example/silly-prot.txt example/silly-top.txt example/silly-events.txt

Kudos to a great release and the promotion of additional research and general purpose learning.

The answer is easy:

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

He cleans the floor at the Interland's NOC.

Re:nullsoft

[Malk-a-mite]

It lives on here:

http://waste.sourceforge.net/

Re:my p2p protocol

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh...I think you want Fark.com and their personals. It's personals for geeks. You'll fit in nicely.

Re:nullsoft

[frission]

i believe it was called WASTE and you can still easily find it on places (like suprnova.org) and other places, hopefully something will come of it soon. since Nullsoft (justin) also released the proof of concept Gnutella client and that's huge now, hopefully the same will happen with WASTE.

Not the only game in town

[sideswipe76]

This tool seems like a stripped down version of NS2. With NS2 you can roll your own protocol and implement it using their reasonably powerfull scripting language (oTcl .. pronounce Oh - tickle) or create your own C++ code to do the job. They have every wired protocol I can think of implemented, 95 percent of wireless ones (including some satellite) and it also comes with NAM; a GUI to show you the nodes and flow and such. Runs on *nix and windows with cygwin

Re:Not the only game in town

[moanads]

If concurrency and running your software on multiple hosts in parallel are very important and you don't mind picking up another language, you could try Erlang. Recent conference proceedings can be found here and here.

You don't even have to write your code in Erlang. You could wrap C code with a wrapper which uses sockets to communicate with the rest of the Erlang environment. Erlang runs on *nix, Windows, BSD, VxWorks and Mac OS X.

Re:nullsoft

[smd4985]

WASTE seems to be stalled. I'm not sure about the sourceforge project (page seems pretty minimal), but I know the Yahoo group devoted to WASTE is pretty silent. There are tough use issues with WASTE - you need to be an expert user to get it working (and sometimes that is not enough). I'm sure some company out there is working on making secure, distributed groups easy to use.

OT: The Morris Worm author involved

[robslimo]

Very interesting. So Robert T. Morris has cleaned up his coding since the days of the Morris Worm

Read the above link and then read RTM's bio page. Same guy?

Re:OT: The Morris Worm author involved

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, most probably this is the same rtm. Look at H.T. Kung reference in both of the links.

Yes, the same guy

[Anonymous Coward]

Btw his dad was working for NSA back in the days of the worm. Coincidence?

Meta p2p?

[Pope Raymond Lama]

I imagine the technology used to simulate p2p netwroks can also be embeded in an app that could have a dynamic user configurable protocol one could change on the fly.

That would be the ultimate chaotic p2p network, and would be something ultimately funny to see go live.

Sort of related question...

[mcc]

Does anyone know what a good sort of p2p "kit" is, say if you want to include p2p networking (like, the ability to create and work with a self-managing p2p network) in an application but don't want to write your own p2p protocol/network code?

I know there must be a couple. What are some good ones?

I heard Sun has one? What's it called? "JXTA"? Has anyone worked with that, is it any good? Can it work with nodes that are behind NAT?

Re:Sort of related question...

[yaphadam097]

I heard Sun has one? What's it called? "JXTA"? Has anyone worked with that, is it any good? Can it work with nodes that are behind NAT?

I am just starting a project using JXTA. So far I am very impressed with the technology, although it is perhaps a bit bloated (This is my impression of the code and is not based on any comparison with other P2P protocols, since I haven't used any others ;-) JXTA does support tunneling over HTTP which gets you around most firewalls and NAT and such. It also has a real interesting architecture where certain nodes can be promoted to act as relays. Among other uses, this could allow a public machine to act as a proxy for messages to peers behind a firewall/NAT.

Re:Sort of related question...

[DrEasy]

Yeah JXTA's nice, but you still need to do some programming to get something useful out of it, as it is a framework, not a network per se. It has indeed a nice pipe-based architecture.

I'm being redundant with my a previous post of mine, but you might want to check out U-P2P. You can set up a Napster-style P2P network without any programming. We're working on a Gnutella adapter too.

Now that we have a quality checker...

[gerf]

Can someone have some AI build a better P2P? Once you think about it, wouldn't that be the easiest way to come up with the next bestest efficient P2P protocol?

Re:Now that we have a quality checker...

[Anonymous Coward]

wouldn't that be the easiest way to come up with the next bestest efficient P2P protocol?

No. Not at all. Nice idea, but you've obviously never done any AI programming before.

Re:Now that we have a quality checker...

[B1ackDragon]

Sounds like you wanted "genetic algorithm" there. And while I haven't actually studied them (yet), I bet this would be a good problem for one.

Re:Now that we have a quality checker...

[Jagasian]

First study complexity theory and computability theory. Then study the current field of AI, if there is such a thing. Finally, realize that what you have just said is silly.

Re:Now that we have a quality checker...

[inerte]

Play Daisy for me.

Re:Now that we have a quality checker...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's so easy I'm surprised no one came up with it earlier!

Re:Now that we have a quality checker...

[Anonymous Coward]

Daisy? Did you mean Bicycle Built for Two?

Don't worry about it. Common mistake.

Re:Now that we have a quality checker...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol, yes. I guess obscure references can be brought to even darker places.

Re:Now that we have a quality checker...

[Sowbug]

I think that's how Skynet got started.

Re:Now that we have a quality checker...

[burns210]

yes, you create AI, i will tell said AI to design a better p2p network....

Re:Now that we have a quality checker...

[jtcm]

Can someone have some AI build a better P2P?

Perhaps...but then the machines win, humanity is doomed, etc.

Re:nullsoft

[drinkypoo]

Since when do you have to be an expert user to get it working? Just follow the instructions. To wit; go through key generation, which you are automatically prompted to do, and then go through a manual key exchange. The problem is that the GUI client is windows-only, a problem which would have been nonexistent if frankel had whipped up a GTK application instead of a Win32-specific one. However I am grateful to him for what he HAS made, as I use it daily.

With those things said, WASTE is not a complete solution. It needs the option for a centralized keyserver, and for the revocation of keys. It also needs some type of per-user access control. Without these items it is only suitable as a tool for very small groups of like-minded people. If you would like to use it for widespread p2p (it could easily do all the things that HOTLINE does now) then you will have to rectify these features, and implement some kind of managed trusts.

New p2p protocol: "In Person"

[192939495969798999]

I have a great new P2P protocol. You get instant exchange of 10's of CD's at a time. It's called "in person". Generally, you have to provide money to the other person, e-mailing back and forth, etc. They burn you the CD's you want, and then you meet "in person", and exchange the money for their time in producing the CD's for you. It's great!

Re:New p2p protocol: "In Person"

[Anonymous Coward]

-10, Lame.

Re:New p2p protocol: "In Person"

[leuk_he]

-1 offtopic.

This is about simuling p2p protocols. Not about file-sharing. Now if you had referenced the "SIMS" this would be more ontopic.

Re:nullsoft

[mse61]

Back in the early day of WASTE, after it's relase and subsequent pull, i helped test the network load of 100+ nodes. Nobody really knew what would happen at that load. Turns out that the mesh it creates suckes when it gets scaled over 100 nodes. You could hack the protocol to provide for a central mediation server (and keyserver), but that would detract from the fluidity of the mesh. WASTE is a exellent tool for people who need to share files and chat in an strongly encrypted enviroment, like a dev house, but for a widespread P2P app, it would need some serious development work.

They know how the other systems should work

[cgenman]

P2P as a network protocol is evolving into something that actually works, as opposed to the state that it was at previously. It used to be that you connected to a single fault point, selected a single file from another user, and began downloading. Oh, do that while praying that neither of you got be cut off.

Then download resuming was added. Gnutella removed the central point of failure. Downloading from multiple sources was added. Kazaa added the concept of the supernode. eDonkey allows you to upload files that you haven't finished downloading yet. Soon we will probably see beginning-of-download randomization, so that complete files can be downloaded on a network even if nobody has finished getting it yet. .torrent is adding accountability to the mix, which adds great legal uses, along with better HTML integration.

What more will we see in a protocol? Who knows. Encryption? Better IM capabilities? Webcams? Plug-ins? Preview from remote computer? While we still haven't figured out what the parameters of the network should be we shouldn't agree on the holy standard of the one true network.

"If we knew what we were doing it wouldn't be research"

Re:They know how the other systems should work

[burns210]

i would suggest encryption... somewhere between freenet and kazaa lies a nice medium, of a funtional yet secure p2p network...

one other cool thing about freenet, that is interesting is that it has 'freesites' or basicly, webpages that are distributed over the network... imagine a bittorrent world wide web, over an encrypted connection. Fast, distributed, secure. SWEET.

Re:They know how the other systems should work

[wfrp01]

There are technological challenges to be overcome, but that's just work. But I expect political/legal issues will begin to play a role also. Technically, there's nothing stopping you from building a spark gap transmitter. Legally, you're not allowed to. Technically, you could mix up a batch of high explosives to help you mine your back yard. Legally, I wouldn't recommend it.

Who's going to write these laws? The people who get the most votes. Who's going to vote for them? Will they think about or prioritize the issues surrounding p2p networks? I'd say not. There is still hope. Consciencious legislators try to educate themselves before *they* vote. Or at least we can hope. But where do they get their information? I really don't know. Advisors, the newspaper, their interns, letters from their constituents, lobbiests, ??? Let's elect Lawrence Lessig.

Re: p2psim

[Kent Recal]

I love screenshots. Everybody does.

Plan for building p2p system....

[tekiegreg]

1) Build new p2p system
2) Get sued by RIAA, MPAA, BSA, etc..
3) ???
4) Profit (if you're the Addams family anyways)

Re:nullsoft

[drinkypoo]

Also I believe that the encryption is link level, so everything gets reencrypted as it flows across the mesh, which means a man in the middle attack on waste should be trivial, though it will require you be a member, a router, and in between two people. Still, I don't believe there is really anything in place to prevent such a thing from being done. I don't understand why there is only encryption at the link level and not at the message level. I would think that some of each would be in order.

My ideal WASTE-like P2P app would include centralized management (as an option, certainly the way waste works now fits some usage patterns), encryption at both link and message level, and user rights. The most important of these are rights and the message level encryption. If you have these two things, then while anyone can be added to the network, no one can get access to any of your data without your permission. Adding these two things to waste would make it twice the application it is now - and I like it a lot as it is.

WTF: 10 million for p2p ?

[skybuck]

Gjezus man are they nuts...

I do that for free :D

Re:WTF: 10 million for p2p ?

[skybuck]

Then again neh... :) I just think it sux that's all.. Getting money from the goverment etc.. Try earning some money first :P Hehe kinda funny talk about unfair competition :) Those who get funded and those who don't. 'Those who don't go beg for money' try to earn money fair and square :P by providing some quality commercial apps to end users which they gladly pay for :P Actually this sort of funding will just kill off all the good quality apps etc... because they can't really competite with open source free shit... :) lol. Or maybe they can :P :D Time will tell :P :D

Re: older protos

[alexo]

Speaking of older protocols.

Can anyone post a summary of the currently used P2P protocols (and the clients that implement them)with some pros and cons of each?

Find out all about P2P Simulation

[Tansaku]

MITs p2psim is a little late on the scene - check out all the other p2p sims available in the summary paper in the p2pjournal: http://p2pjournal.com/issues/November03.pdf Think about using the NeuroGrid simulator if you want to simulate something other than just a boring DHT :-)