Peer to Peer and Spam in the Internet

RobertDHaskins writes "A very interesting series of papers from Helsinki University of Technology on the topics of P2P and spam. Written by PhD students they are a little long, but some very good coverage of the state of the art."

Comments

Re:P2P is in its infancy

[Dukael_Mikakis]

What you say is true, and is the perfect solution ... in the same sense that Communism is the perfect government (don't call Homeland Security).

Communism depends on every person contributing (essentially) equally and taking equally, and the system falls apart if one (or worse, several) individuals decide to take advantage of the community.

This is why Blizzard had to instigate centralized servers where all the games are run, and all Diablo characters were stored. People were hacking and HexEditing their characters too much to be trusted.

The trust ring would help, but, like you say, a mob of cheaters can bring the whole thing down by sufficiently fooling the community into believing the hack over the truth.

I mean, just look at P2P (or filesharing) today. When grabbing something off of Kazaa, music you're downloading could be pr0n, or a different song, or a 30 second sample that the RIAA put on to prevent the real one from being grabbed. However, from a centralized, controlled server (iTunes) you know what you're getting beforehand (essentially) cheat-free.

Of course, with true P2P everybody gets access to the product mostly free, whereas in the capitalistic model of iTunes, one entity has all the power and control, and hence will be profiting from all of this.

A collection of amateurish papers

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like a collection of papers from a first-year compsci class assignment.

For example, this is in the introduction to the Freenet section:

While censorships are necessary in maintaining law and order in a society

Um, many people might disagree with that little gem.