Slashdot Mirror
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."
Shut up already, let them think it's dying!
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
P2P "researchers" still unable to find suprnova.org...
DRM = Digitally Restricted Media. This is a viral sig, pass it on.
MS-DOS is not dead. It just smells funny.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Current connected Kazaa users: 2,319,581
Sharing 1,360,174,152 files (38,675,976 GB)
I don't think peer to peer networks will ever die out; they're simply too good a way to distribute files and information, and I don't Just mean warez and the like, just look at the number of torrents running for various linux distros and the BSDs. The thing general populous is beginning to realize that the fasttrack network Kazaa uses is a pile and are moving to decentralised networks like bittorrent and as such the various organisations which would like to monitor the usage of peer to peer networks are having a much harder time getting accurate figures.
There's mischief and malarkies but no queers or yids or darkies within this bastard's carnival, this vicious cabaret.
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.
Tools such as Waste make this very easy to set up.
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
>Bin Laden
That's no moon... that's a .torrent of Star Wars being hosted on Al-Jazeera.com!
(Allah Ackbar, IT'S A TRAP!)
It means people aren't scared of RIAA-MPAA hyenas and that more and more art and information is shared on the Internet for all of us to enjoy. Good. Anyway I think, given the bad legal situation of file sharing in USA (and soon in Europe), that we should begin to use more secure P2P clients. The eDonkey network is easily traceable, let alone networks like DC or SoulSeek. I'd like to try MUTE or FreeNet, but I'm not fully sure about how hard their security is, and about the possible drawbacks. What do you think about?
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
... It's just pining for the fjords.
www.clarke.ca
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
That networking would be more and more private? Basically it's gone back to word of mouth and individual trades.. much like it's been for years via "sneaker net".
(y'know we only have rotate the port frequencies... or was it port harmonics... to keep them from getting a bead on us...)
as I tried to state before, I didn't really mean to actively target you, more like you were the tlast on a long list where I finally had to rant.
:)
no offense
As far as the more specific subject at hand, let me ask, when was p2p derided? Granted I havent been up on the p2p scene since the beginning, but my knowledge of p2p is this....
1. This college guy shawn fanning made napster, the first(?) p2p app, certainly the first that had any impact. along with the brand new mp3 encoding format...
2. See, here's where I cant remember any 'derision' before the 'attacks'... Metallica, Dr. Dre, some other losers slapped a lawsuit on napster, court orders to reveal IP addresses, so on.
3. Kazaa
4. *AA vs Kazaa
5. EMule, Gnutella
6. ??? (profit?)
So im just saying I dont see where P2P has been derided or laughed at, mostly they've just been attacked.
and I don't think I've said anything _against_ p2p. re-reading the above, I dont think ive been anti-p2p in any way. Im quite pro p2p, bittorrent, open source, and all else that is good. I do seem to be in a rant mood I guess. No harm meant.
I know all my favorite buttorrent trackers are going under ground. This for example...
Well we know what you're downloading now don't we...
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
Take away the porn, riaa poisoned music tracks, dodgy cam rips from the cinema, users documents or system folders, and your left with approximately 47kb of actual free publically accessible "legal" information ;)
liqbase
If it was a literal Gandhi quote, it would be too easy to detect, wouldn't it? (Think Google, Slashdot search etc.)
Of course they're misquoting Gandhi, it is like changing the port numbers for P2P protocols. Next they will think of a polymorphic engine to mess up the quote to evade the virus scanners err..Gandhi quote filters.
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
Not only is it not dying but it is being more and more adopted for non wzrez/moviez/pr0n related tasks. You can find pretty much any distro of unix/linux on p2p which takes a lot of strain off of the ftp sites. There is also a few schools i know of that use bittorrent to distribute movies that students create in class. So maybe the "P2P? Oh that is that software/movie piracy thing??" mindset is being corrected slowly but steadily?
They wouldn't be very well hidden if we told you.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
47kb of actual free publically accessible "legal" information... should be enough for anybody.
TCP was designed with the assumption of a symmetric bandwidth path between the involved end points.
To try to put a figure on it, for around 80% to 90% of the Internet's history, the Internet has been run over symmetrical bandwidth links eg. 56Kbps full duplex point to point links, T1/E1s, T3/E3, Frame Relay, ATM, Token ring, the Ethernet variants etc. Asymmetric links such as DSL and cable are the exception.
TCP has performance issues when run over paths which involve asymmetric bandwidth links. They are described in RFC 3449 - TCP Performance Implications of Network Path Asymmetry.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
If the RIAA had even a microscopic degree of intelligence, rather than simply being a cabal of cash-fixated boomers, they might have been able to predict this.
I remember going to DCC warez channels a few years back on IRC, and seeing constant ads/notifies there about bedroom FTPs set up via dyndns and so on...not to mention the "leet" (private) IRC servers you'd hear about. (although I heard about those a lot less often)
If the RIAA had been realists, they would have realised a couple of important things straight off the bat:-
1) The Internet was designed to be able to withstand a nuclear exchange, and P2P in particular probably operates more purely via decentralised mesh topology principles than just about any other net application in existence. (As opposed to say IRC, which typically uses branch topology...which is why a single netsplit on the wrong server can lobotomise the entire network) In other words, they have less than no chance of EVER being able to stop it, or even tracing the origin node of a given file in most cases.
2) Given the fact as stated above that they'd have more chance of moving the rock of Gibraltar than shutting down P2P, the truly clueful thing for them to do would have been to try and figure out a way to use it as a source of revenue for themselves. On a network where anything is available, the neatest trick is isolating/finding what you want...so they could have had "featured" lists stacked with their own artists and used a subscription model for their search service, OR run their own private show AKA Kazaa and again used the subscription model for that. For another thing...in an environment of files, just about everything is a generic copy of a copy of a copy. With the "mashy" thing a bit back, David Bowie's fans demonstrated that what they really wanted was personalisation...something that an individual could feel was uniquely theirs, and not just an identical copy of what everyone else had. This would be more difficult to make money from, to be sure, but in different ways I'm betting it could be done.
Yet *another* way they could have made major cash for themselves would be by mining the online indy scene. They encourage the proverbial bedroom DJs, who then not only produce more fodder for the subscription model, but could even in some ways go towards satisfying the "individual" demand mentioned above via exclusive/semi-exclusive concert type recordings, individualised remixes, etc. The possibilities are endless.
3) The very LAST thing they should have wanted to do was push this underground, because once they've do that, they lose the ability to a) monitor/police it AT ALL, and b) profit from it because they either don't know where it is, or because they've already destroyed user goodwill by previously attempting to destroy it.
The problem with too many corporate bodies these days is the desire to make money via scorched earth techniques...but what they never think of is that by destroying the host environment today, (whether online or off) they lose the ability to make money from it tomorrow...whereas if they were smart, they could capitalise on these things indefinitely.
You can take away my porn when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
If that's what you're holding, I'm not going anywhere near your fingers.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
the likes of programs such as protowall and peerguardian, both of which have huge active communities constantly updating IP block lists, blocking all the p2p evils out there like bayTSP and other monitoring agencies.
A huge amount of p2p clients (most kazaa lite buids, azureus, one of the most popular bit torrent clients) have methods built in to support these block lists, and are turned on by default.
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....
and are moving to decentralised networks like bittorrent
As much as bittorrent is the greatest thing since sliced bread, it is not decentralized. It is 1st gen P2P with a centralized tracker, despite actually being better than 2nd gen networks like KaZaA. And I certainly wouldn't want to compare it with 3rd gen networks like Freenet, MULE etc. which are at present even worse. So there's no shame in calling it 1st gen, far from it.
Of course, bittorrent more or less emulates a decentralized structure as each torrent operates independently of each other, but bittorrent itself is not. That does make it considerably harder to take down torrents than e.g. Napster, though.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
From RFC 3449: "performance often degrades significantly because of imperfection and variability in the ACK feedback from the receiver to the sender."
prioritizing ACK packets with PF on OpenBSD
This was posted on Slashdot a while back. I personally use this for my home network with pretty much the same results posted there (as far as I can tell without doing formal testing). It's pretty much the only way I can keep my connection usable when my web server or torrents are having a good day.
PF is now available on OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and DragonFlyBSD. I think some of them may still be lacking ALTQ support (needed to do the stuff in that link), but I'm not sure, I don't keep track of all of them.
I'm vaguely aware of NetFilter on Linux having similar capabilities, but AFAIK you need to tell it how to detect ACK and URG packets, it doesn't "just know" like PF does. I could be wrong about that, as it's been a long time since I looked into it. IPF and IPFW may or may not be able to do this, I have no knowledge of their capabilities in this area.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
With more and more people discovering the community enhanced joy that is bittorrent, I'm not surprised.
BitComet's default setting is to use a randomly generated port, and you can switch from port to port with the click of the "Random Port" button as often as you'd like.
Or you can choose to not listen on any ports, if you're like that, but you'll take a hit to the download speed.
MySpleen is one of the greatest torrent communities I've found, and if you're interested in MST3k, ATHF, Venture Bros, or the other Adult Swim 'toons, check us out!
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
The only way the content cartel can get the last word in is to simply make encryption illegal worldwide except for authorized parties.
We're working on it.
-- Your friends at the RIAA
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
The name of the game is STFU. keep it on the down low. You can do anything you want, ...anything, just keep it quiet. ;) It has alway been that way and always will.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
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.
[Tips for running a successful Freenet node]
3 Most important ingredients:
Permanent connection
Bandwidth
Disk space
Without these you'll be complaining like the rest. Go ahead and set up a node, but optimum performance is a dream without all 3 above elements. Also, count on 2 days of letting it just run before you'll be able to get much done. After you're integrated things run much more smoothly!
If you're behind a firewall you'll need to know how to setup port forwarding. Windows install is the easiest, GNU systems should be trivial and there's a port for FreeBSD. I believe MacOSX can run it as well. If you can run a modern JavaVM, Freenet should be no trouble for you.
(About firewalls - if your $50 router/NAT/switch thingy cannot handle the hundreds of TCP connections Freenet can generate, you might want to either invest in a dedicated box (OpenBSD works well for me and allows me to prioritize traffic behind my interactive_ssh and vonage queues - Linux floppy distros should be fine too) or specify in freenet.conf to limit the number of open connections. Just be aware as connection tables can overload and distrupt the connection for all behind the NAT. Then again your $50 box may have no trouble at all. Port numbers are all random high port numbers making Freenet difficult to detect and firewall. Connections out will be made but the portforward is necessary for other nodes to connect to you. If nodes can't connect to you, performance will most likely be horrendous.)
If you just install Freenet and immediately try and download large files, you will be frusturated and give up. DON'T! Many freesites will not appear at all. NEVER FEAR! Let your node run in the background for a few days and get itself integrated into the mesh. Nodes that are more useful to the network (fast connection, large data store) will end up the most successful when downloading or uploading content. If you can't leave your machine running all the time or want to use freenet over dialup, fine, but your performance will not match those of others that can provide more to the network. Leeching is fine, it allows others to leech off of you - but leave your machine connected and Freenet's performance may end up suprising you.
Towards the beginning you may just want to start a number of downloads and count on many of them not completing - JUST WALK AWAY or do something else. Don't waste your time. By grabbing whatever bits you can, you'll increase the data in your own datastore and your connections within the network. If others find those bits from your node, your status will increase, more will connect to you and they will then be potential sources for more desired bits of your own. The better connectivity you've got, the more you will find. Leaving your node up at all times and keeping your datastore intact are the best ways to increase Freenet's performance (not just for you but for all).
THOSE PARANOID: I've been running my Freenet node wide open (no throttle) on my Earthlink cable connection in the heart of Raleigh, NC for some time. No threatening letters or trouble, my Vonage works fine (I do use pf's ALTQ) and those in my house have no trouble with connections, download or upload speeds)
For those that are already on Freenet and trying to download large files, one tool is critical. FUQUD (Freenet Utility for Queued Uploads and Downloads). Find it. Use it. Fred (the built in web interface) isn't going to cut it.
Regarding disk space. Unless you've got around say 2Gigs to dedicate to a node, your node may not perform as well as it could (200M is practical minimum). Consider the value you choose to be relatively permanant. You can't trade it with other uses - you build a datastore and that's the size, unusable for your MP3's or ogg's for example. They don't grow or shrink. You s
A good, and working, anonymous P2P alternative to Freent is I2P. The creator of I2P has been around for a while and cross talks with Freenet developers on occasion as both the Freenet and I2P community channels are on the anonymous irc network IIP, and irc.freenode.net.
A lot of I2P is put into the public domain, with parts of it being GPL. Try www.i2p.net for more information.
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 copyright merely has to "subsist in" the data, not be the recording itself. Even though worthless in isolation, I'm sure this would not hold water in court; it'd be an absurd interpretation of the purpose of the act if the only reason this file existed was to infringe copyright.
Incidentally, the careful choice of the words "subsist in" originally comes from, I do believe, copying large parts of others books into your own. It is ironic that it would apply on these points. Even if the words were less precise, the golden rule of statutory interpretation would protect the copyright owners: it'd be absurd to have for a user to choose to offer a file that contained data only used for copyright to be free of infringement by not having access to it on his own. The intention to infringe is there, as may be the intention to circumvent the law. At worst, it's contributing to infringement, probably exactly proportionate in liability to the amount that it is shared.
Now, if the user didn't intend to share the file, it's a whole different story. As well, there is a question as to whether the person sharing the a 'key' to the copyright infringed it, or contributed to its infringement.
Perhaps steganography would be more viable, being un-prosecutable by virtue of being undetectable.
your dog wants accuracy
This technique was talked about in detail a while ago. The first attack on it is as follows:
- Since the only purpose for distributing the files is to distribute the copyrighted material, it is likely to be legally the same.
- Needing to download two files of the same length as the file you want from different servers is really annoying.
One solution is a large repository of seemingly random data with separately distributed "recipe files" that describe how to rebuild the files you want. If you make the random files sufficently interconnected, you can make it so that any order to stop distributing a specific random looking block of data will prevent numerous legal files from being built in addition to the copywrited data that is targeted.
There are still some problems with that system, mostly in lack of ease of use.
As long as eMule still works, it's unlikely that anyone will actually adopt any system so complex.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I know it seems low - downloadanime.org claims over 300 Terabytes and it's just one of the thousands of public bit torrent sites.
But remember, those are just the numbers for Kazaa, only a fraction of all the P2P traffic.
-- should you believe authority without question?
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
Napster was the first real standalone p2p app, but the precursor to that was IRC channels dedicated to sharing. Much of the jargon that's used in modern p2p comes from that, for example, and the choice of encoding formats, e.g. mp3. Its almost certain that anyone who is at all serious about open source, hacking, gaming and any of a multitude of underground internet scenes has spent a good deal of time on an IRC channel at one time or another, and the scene is as much a social medium as it is a file trading medium.
Hell, if you want to go back even further, you could credit Doom and John Carmack with p2p. I haven't thought a whole lot about this, but it could be argued that the relatively open nature of Doom gave rise to networked group of file traders who would swap Doom mods and addons on BBS's, which were essentially prototypical networked IM and P2P applications (and occasional gaming platforms). The key to BBS's were that they were largely owner-operated -- you could chat with the owners, you knew them, they were part of the community. The notable thing about Doom filesharing was that creating Doom mods was a creative endeavor that benefitted from the free exchange of ideas. The runaway success of the scene spawned the idea that free and open trading of intellectural property was a moral good. Open source may have developed concurrently along the same lines, but I'm not sure there was very much cross-over. OS people were real coders and focused on that, and warez and mp3 people were more social and into gaming and things like that, almost like a collectors club. The intersection of these two groups in recent times greatly expanded on the ideas of the past, and with the addition of real coding ability came modern p2p, where coders no long limited themselves to the simple scripting environment of IRC clients, and went so far as to invent their own protocols and fully-fledged GUI environments designed to address the needs of specific internet sub-cultures. The user-friendly interfaces propelled them into the mainstream, e.g. Napster.
P2P enthusiasts are dead-serious about the importance of open intellectual property, and if its not seen as fundamental as Ghandi's struggle, it is seen as an important rights issue, which is what the parent was probably getting at more than suggesting that the P2P movement exactly follows the Ignore-Laugh-Fight-Accept model. Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA and the DMCA stifle human expression and creativity for profit and this causes immeasurable harm to society. The exact details of this harm are probably best left to another post, I may write a blog entry about it in the near future, but suffice it to say the lack of creativity and contribution in a person's life has a profoundly negative effect.
Ok, I should really go to bed...
"It's Dot Com!"
Actually, I got a letter for downloading but not finishing a movie a while ago. I started to torrent a movie (Black Hawk Down, for the record), and about 10 seconds and 20kb in went "Nah, don't really want to see it and its going too slow to even waste my time on" and canceled it. Month later, my ISP emails me saying they recieved a complaint about me sharing this movie. I was like "WTF!? I barely even downloaded or uploaded a sliver of it!".
:)
So no, they don't take the quantity of the infraction into consideration when mass mailing their letters. I suppose from their view, it makes no difference if you steal one car, fifty cars, or someones bumper: they still think you're guilty of GTA. Though your punishment if convicted would probably be different depending on the degree of your actions. Fortunatly for me, I live in Canada where the MPAA (or whatever the Canuck equivalent is) can bite my shiny metal ass.
The parent modded as a troll? What, is it Retard Day in Moderatorland? Yeesh!
Now, THIS is a troll.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.