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P2P Not Dead, Just Hiding
adavies42 writes "Contrary to media reports, P2P is not dying (PDF); it's just becoming harder to detect. In a paper for CAIDA, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, researchers present evidence that the supposed decline in P2P traffic is actually due to a decline in easy-to-track protocols as those that change port numbers on a regular basis become more popular."
I use torrent most of the time these days...
they laugh at it.
second, they fight it
Third, they accept it as truth.
The journey that is p2p is just starting.
It WILL gain proper mainstream recognition, someday.
Timang tinggi tinggi
parang sudah asah
alang alang mandi
biar sampai basah
Freenet - not only hidden, but actually impossible to find and decrypt. This is the future of illegal (illegal pr0n, piracy, avoiding censorship in oppressive regimes) P2P. Actually, it is not the future. It is the present. The only disadvantage is speed, but it is getting better and connections are getting faster anyway.
if the conclusions of the article turn out to be true
Breaking the asymmetrical bandwidth assumption. If P2P
traffic continues to increase and legal complications are overridden,
the P2P paradigm will bring dramatic changes in supply and
demand in edge and access networks. Bit rates of many access
links, in particular for DSL and cable modems, are currently provisioned
asymmetrically with significantly lower upstream bandwidth.
This provisioning was based on the expectation of users
downloading much more data than they send upstream. The relevance
of such technologies will be challenged and their market
share will dwindle if alternative broadband technologies can offer
comparable upstream and downstream performance.
The effect of P2P could propagate from the access points upward
the network hierarchy to Tier 2 and even Tier 1 ISPs creating
the need for more peering among ISPs. Current practices
require balanced bidirectional load among peers10, a stipulation
easier to achieve with symmetric link utilizations as the
norm. There is no doubt that the P2P paradigm will change Internet
engineering as we know it today. Given the observed trends,
the only remaining question is when, not if.
as I can not find anyone whod be willing to give me a symetrical here in worlds end; maybe thatll finally change.
Life has become the ideology of its absence - T.W. Adorno
How could you accurately (and more importantly quickly) determine whether some traffic is some P2P program as the article suggests when you have a really BIG haystack and a tiny needle?
dtach - A tiny program that emulates the detach feat
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons but here is a simple thought experiment. Feel free to punch all sorts of holes in my argument. My aim is to expose the futility in regulating P2P or cracking down on infringers if you can't do that legally. If the content cartel want to put P2P out of business, make the media too attractive and too cheap to bother stealing on P2P.
Anyway, here is the proces:
1) Take copyrighted-song.mp3 and XOR it with copyrighted-song.mp3-prndbits.bin of the same size to get prndbits.bin-copyrighted-song.mp3
2) Share both files BUT NOT AT THE SAME TIME ON THE SAME MACHINE! In fact, with this approach, the files could be posted on the World Wide Web in an analagous fashion.
3) After time, both files are on the P2P network of your choice. You need both to get copyrighted-song.mp3 back and yet mere non simultaneous possession of either of the two files on a machine that 'form' the song is not (seemingly) illegal. If the labels come after you for sharing such a file, tell them to sod off as the file in question is worthless without the other file which you did not share at the same time, did you?
The only way the content cartel can get the last word in is to simply make encryption illegal worldwide except for authorized parties.
That means no more legal use of such encryption software like PGP, GPG, CipherSaber, PCP, and the like by the average Internet user.
Just envison the backlash such a move would cause....
I share about 2GB of my own photographs as well as ton of open source software tar-balls. I know people who share their own music.
I use Gnutella for this, and what I find amazing is the amount of genuinely useful information you can download IF you know how to look for it.
I'm still shocked no one has build a decent Gnutella search engine.
I am the lead coder of a BitTorrent client. A few months back I began to receive reports of ISPs either blocking or severely throttling the upstream (to a point where the protocol became non-functional) of BitTorrent connections. As a result, I modified my codebase to by default choose a server port randomly, rather than within the default BitTorrent port range.
Lately, I've gotten more reports indicating that these ISPs that have been blocking BitTorrent have been using more sophisticated methods of detecting the protocol, by apparently sniffing the initial protocol handshake.
My response was this letter. The next iteration of the BitTorrent protocol is already being planned, and if this sort of behavior spreads, the new protocol's handshake will be made nearly impossible to sniff out. Yes, it's true BitTorrent is being misused for trading pirated content, but it's also being used for good purposes, such as publishing Linux distros, and in some cases it is practically impossible to obtain content without doing so via BitTorrent.
This will of course make it difficult to meter how much network traffic is being used by BitTorrent, or to throttle it moderately, but the purpose of BitTorrent is to distribute content, and all other concerns come second.
The solution you provided at the end there is almost exactly how some closed torrent sites work. The good members (Ratio of 1.2+) get invitations they can send to friends. The friend gets a membership, and if they fuck up the person who invited them gets in trouble and the friend gets banned.
Empornium.us for example.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I got a letter from my ISP about this. They got a letter from the MPAA about my online movie grabbings. You know what my ISP did? they sent me a letter TELLING ME in exact steps how to DISABLE uploads in about 12 P2P apps. I love living in Canada :)
K Man
The next iteration of the BitTorrent protocol is already being planned, and if this sort of behavior spreads, the new protocol's handshake will be made nearly impossible to sniff out.
If the protocol spec is open, any decent stateful firewall manufacturer will be able to put together BitTorrent-NG sniffer in under a week. That's regardless of whether it uses dynamic ports, port-hopping or any other evasion techniques.
If the protocol has full-blown privacy and authentication (think IKE or TLS), it won't be possible to fully sniff it, but it can still be detected. And what can be detected - can be blocked.
The point is this - incorporating evasion and obfuscation techniques into an open protocol is a wasted effort. Please think about it for a second, and I'm sure you'll understand.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
They are actauly tracking ppl downloading things on suprnova.org? wow good for them. Not going to do much good.
I wonder, if you upload 99% of a rar archive, did you commit copyright infringment?
You didn't give anyone something that could be used and what you did give was a "random sequance of bytes that happen to be something uesefull once you get the last 1%" lol
"If more people become arseholes like you, then new material will cease to exist because artists will have no bloody reason to release their art at all. If the demand for a work through legitimate channels is too low, it will not be profitable and will not come to be."
Idiot. I'm an artist. You can be an artist. Anyone can be an artist. I see lots of "free" art everywhere, art made without commercial purpose. Art will never die, unless one of those X Associations of America manages to patent fine arts or something.
"This is not a revolution. People participating on a large scale, in this behavior, will soon grossly regret their actions."
This IS a revolution. I don't know ANYONE with computer skills who hasn't downloaded atleast a few songs. Hell, everyone i've met, as soon as they figured out how to use their new computer always asked me how they could use it to download music.
"Can't be killed? You are an idiot. Laws can be passed, that essentially will force ISP's to put into place, techniques to block or severely shape P2P traffic. I am doing it now (technical level, not legal) and know of others, who are doing it with great success. If it can't be done at the packet filtering level, it can be done at proxy level. Every P2P system, so far, reveals patterns that identify that system. It's not hard to then block or shape that traffic."
But is that RIGHT? I mean, you seem to believe that the law is always right. It isn't. I believe the way which P2P is dealt with is wrong. I do not believe in punishing filesharers. I believe in punishing PIRATES. Those who sell and make money from selling illegal copies.
"Law can make the use of P2P very unattractive, at a technical level (legislation forcing ISP's to enforce) and at a personal level (you loose assets, big time or even do time). At the moment, it is being done with great success in the enterprise at their borders, if laws are passed in your country, it will then be done at all ISP's. Then we will see what you have to say about it not being able to be killed."
But that is wrong. An ISP shouldn't be responsible for what traffic goes on over its' network. Just like a phone company shouldn't be responsible for whatever terrorist plans (rofl) are being plotted over it's lines.
And also, the punishment is too harsch. It doesn't make sense to ruin a person just because he has fileshared. That's similar to cutting a thief's hands off. He won't be able to steal, and he won't be able to make money through work normally.
Oh yes. We're probably going to get some nice laws like that here in sweden soon anyway. Removing our rights to manipulate hardware we bought legally in order to make it play media we bought legally (region restrictions). Thanks to the US companies, of course. And we'll probably get software patents too, ruining the european software industry in favour of the american corporate parasites (no i don't believe America is evil, but several companies with rather questionable ethics from there certainly are).
"Wake up!"
I just did. And i think i have a slight hangover.