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

Google HTML Link...

[bc90021]

...for those that don't wanna read the PDF:

Here.

Spam is very simple to fix.

[Pig Hogger]

• Follow the money
• Block networks who let spammers send traffic on them, no matter if it's SMTP, DNS, FTP or HTTP

Once a few big guys find themselves turned into intranets, they'll start paying attention.

Re:Spam is very simple to fix.

[ron_ivi]

Or use a "sender pays but only if the recipient wants to charge" scheme.

For example, every email has a button saying "charge the sender $0.10". It's at the recipient's option whether or not to charge the guy.

For emails from friends I'd never hit the button. For spams I would.

Re:Spam is very simple to fix.

[IamGarageGuy 2]

I don't think that will work. You will end up having to hit that stupid "charge sender" button repeatedly, the same way you delete spam now. Also what makes you think you will get a dime from a spammer, how would he pay without havng a Big Brother approach to all email? I wish I had a good idea instead of just shooting your idea down. I would love to see you come up with a way to make that work though.

Re:Spam is very simple to fix.

[powerpuffgirls]

That'll probably create another 'profession' after the Spam-Boom.

(Note in all lower cases now in the post-Spam-Boom era)
work from home and make $3000 a day by clicking the charge button

Re:Spam is very simple to fix.

[IthnkImParanoid]

So spammers rely even more heavily on hijacked machines, and my grandmother on social security suddenly has a $100,000 bill from her ISP.

Don't see that happening.

Re:Spam is very simple to fix.

[Anonymous Coward]

The other question then is who gets this money?

Simple. I do. Hand it over.

Sincerely,
Darl McBride

Way too long

[JohnGrahamCumming]

I don't have time to read a document hundreds of pages long, especially not one that's packed with information: I need a quick summary.

Could someone post a one line summary? For example,

Linux good; Microsoft bad; SCO evil; RMS god.

John.

Re:Way too long

[Tuxedo Jack]

This is Slashdot. You don't have to read the article.

See?

Re:Way too long

[Hex4def6]

This is Slashdot. You don't have to read the article.

See?

I totally disagree with every point you've just made,
will go into great detail about why I think you're
wrong, and as an aside cast inferances on your lineage.

:P

Re:Way too long

[Bob McCown]

This is Slashdot. You don't have to read the article.

See?

I totally disagree with every point you've just made,
will go into great detail about why I think you're
wrong, and as an aside cast inferances on your lineage.

And I'll point out your grammer and speeling mistakes, while makeing some of my own!

Re:Way too long

[Have Blue]

I'll point out that you must be new here.

Bias?

[gid13]

From the paper: "The idea was to learn about the disruptive and also annoying phenomena that have become very commonplace over the past couple of years in the internet: namely, the Peer-to-Peer traffic and applications and the unsolicited and unwanted e-mail or Spam."

I think bundling p2p and spam is either totally missing the point, or attempting to influence the opinions of people who don't know better. The users of p2p want what they get for the most part (maybe not viruses and fakes, but the author seems to be targeting p2p due to the copyrighted content).

Re:Bias?

[dreamchaser]

That wasn't the point being made. The discussion is about the enormous bandwidth requirements of both P2P and Spam on a large scale. Many a college campus network has had it's Internet pipe saturated by both spam and users of P2P software, and many an ISP has been affected in the same manner by both as well.

P2P is in its infancy

[CrazyJim0]

Its true that a bunch of computers can simulate a server for a game.

If you have 6 computers transfering information to each of them, you can create almost the same environment that 6 computers feeding off a server is.

If you place the anti-cheat code on every computer, you form a community to check against cheats.

If you also store every character's information on every computer, then you can watch for hacks there too.

Given its extrodinarily complicated, and fails to mob rule(conspiracy of hackers to overwhelm the system)... Its something that could be done.

I'm sure theres even more complicated things you can do with P2P, such as organizing nodes for filesharing and so on.

Re:P2P is in its infancy

[jjeffries]

I'm sure theres even more complicated things you can do with P2P, such as organizing nodes for filesharing and so on.

P2P filesharing, what a great idea! I wonder when somebody's going to try to do that...

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.

Re:Helsinki? Finland? Why in english then?

[bandy]

The Finns decided more than a decade ago that the Lingua Franca of Computer Science was English.

Re:Ugh, that PDF link hung my browser...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are using windows, it oftens appears that a PDF has hung the browser when it's actually the Adobe Reader sitting in the background with a dialog box asking if you want to upgrade your version. Try minimizing the browser window[s] and see if you can find a dialog like that.

-- former windows guy, just trying to be helpful

P2P. SPAM.

[powerpuffgirls]

I think it's worth mentioning this article talks about P2P, then about SPAM.

While it doesn't imply they are somehow related in their functions, the common nature of these two is the bandwidth consumption, which as stated by the author, can be annoying and disruptive.

Very thorough

[dj245]

What a massive article, covers gnutella, freenet, napster, NAT Translation, hordes, all the hows and the underlying technology and concepts. But...

Why isn't there a service where you can get full-speed from behind a firewall without portmapping? College students everywhere would rejoice. When I'm home I port forward and get the full pipe, but when I'm at college the firewall keeps my download speeds nice and slow. I know this because every once and a while I'll get lucky and some BT seed will connect and start sending me 80kb/s for about five minutes and stop. They made Supernodes to make the network more scalable and to make it work with firewalls. Can they make it work at full speed with firewalls?

Finns do a lot of things in funny languages

[Anonymous Coward]

The Finns have noticed that no-one understands Finnish, so they've become extremely good at putting things in more popular languages. For example you can get the news in Latin courtesy of Finnish Radio (today's headline: Kerry candidatus democratarum.)

Re:Helsinki? Finland? Why in english then?

[Anonymous Coward]

In Northern Europe people can speak generally 3 languages fluently. The have good schools there. They generally have better goverments as well.

Did I say that ?

I meant to say that they are a bunch of liberal left-wing socialist radicals who get their english training in order to become terrorists.

Am I American again ?

Phew!

Re:Helsinki? Finland? Why in english then?

[Turing Machine]

Nope, not really. Far more scientific papers are written in English than in any other language, because it's the language most scientists have in common (this is different from being the language spoken by the most people; more people speak Chinese than any other language, but relatively few people who aren't Chinese speak it).

100 years ago, scientific papers were commonly written in German.

200 years ago, they were commonly written in Latin.

Times change.

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.

Re:A collection of amateurish papers

[jcupitt65]

• While censorships are necessary in maintaining law and order in a society
  Um, many people might disagree with that little gem.

But most sensible people would not. Of course there have to be limits on freedom of expression. That's why we have laws on libel, incitement to racial hatred, etc. etc.

A reasonable country will choose a good compromise between the freedom of the individual and the needs of society.

Re:A collection of amateurish papers

[Gubbe]

I believe people do, myself included.

I admit that my original reply may have seemed a bit anti-US, but let's take Finland as an example since the article is finnish and I'm finnish. There isn't really all that much censorship here, so in that respect there is really nothing to give examples of. However, having followed some court cases recently, I can tell you that they are very boring. They are boring because there are no loudmouthed lawyers trying to convince a jury or a judge on why this or that particular tiny loophole or constitutional article should be used to aquit someone who has clearly committed a criminal act.
Up here lawyers state the facts and opinions and the issue is decided based on the applicable laws and Common Sense. If you don't like the results, you can appeal.

And when it comes to "Abuse of power"... I'd like to welcome you to study the recent history of Finland. Yes, there have been events of power abuse, but they haven't ended nicely for those involved and compared to certain figurehead *COUGH*gwb*COUGH* of one big country, any such abuses have been negligible in magnitude.
In fact, our recent prime minister lost her job and is on trial because before the Iraq war she received (arguably because she requested them) some documents regarding the Iraq debacle classified as secret from the president's advisor. The actual trial took a couple of days, was mostly broadcasted on national television and was completely fair towards everyone involved.

I honestly believe that although the Finnish administration does have its faults, it really does have everyone's best interests in mind. I'm sure many Finns agree.
Just because there are people at the helm of the US who care more about the $ than they do about the people doesn't mean that the situation is as desperate in the rest of the world.

Oh, and Mr. Mod. Before you mod me down, ask yourself if you're doing it because this post really should not be seen by anyone, or are you doing it just because you disagree with me. If the latter, I invite you to reply and state your opinion.

It's actually kind of funny

[Atario]

The professor is clearly biased (or purposely acting biased) against P2P, lumping it together with spam as "parasitic and threaten[ing of] the purpose the Internet was designed for". How he figures sending files to one another is a subversion of the Internet's purpose, I dunno.

But the students' papers are all about how effective and efficient the various P2P architectures out there are and how they might be improved. Heh. Bless you, students.