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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."
Shut up already, let them think it's dying!
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.
good god. am I the only one that is sick of this gandhi quote being used for _everything_???
To compare the struggle that gandhi went through, to P2P apps. Okay, I do see the freedom of speech angle, but really, this gandhi quote turns up about every third article. It only cheapens it. Much the same as the martin niemoller quote "first they came for the communists..." and so on.
And parent didnt even get the quote right!
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Throw a "then profit" step in there, i dont care, at least get it right!
And again, if you use it for each and every topic, it loses meaning. Please reserve such things for _important_ things. Maybe you consider this topic to be that important, okay, in that case I don't fault you directly. Im just sick of seeing important quotes from important people used on non-important topics.
no offense.
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's just pining for the fjords.
www.clarke.ca
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.
And Waste is impossible to detect because each person running Waste can set their own port number (from the default 1337), and even set it to run on port 80 if they wanted.
Anonymous P2P like Mute is calling itself the next generation in P2P, and sacrifices performance for privacy - i.e. you don't know who's requesting a file, you only know who you're connected to, so you could actually be a conduit for dozens of people sharing files.
Anonymity (Mute) vs. Privacy (Waste) are mutually exclusive. You either know who you're talking to reliably, or you don't. You can't both know who you're talking to AND be anonymous.
Private networks suffer from the same problems as ShadowCrew - if you let too many people in, one person could comprimise the entire network and learn the identities of everyone. There are websites out there that share waste networks. That just seems silly to me. Waste is about *privacy* so publicizing your existance is just stupid. The problem then becomes finding a group of people you trust who have different content from you.
I read somewhere a while back about a Japanese DVD trading ring - they actually mailed DVD's back and forth, perhaps pirating them once they had them. When you joined you had the name of the person who invited you in attached to your name until you built up a reputation. People looking to go underground would be wise to adopt such a policy. Invitation only, stay small, and develop a reputation system. Don't these people watch undercover movies like Wu jain dao (Infernal Affairs here in America)?
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....
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.