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World's Shortest P2P App: 15 Lines
soren.harward writes "The New Scientist has an article about TinyP2P, the world's smallest P2P app. It's 15 lines of Python code brought to us by Edward Felten, CS Professor at Princeton and outspoken supporter of the digital rights the Slashdot community holds so dear. He wrote the program as a proof-of-concept that P2P apps are really easy to write, don't have to be complicated, and thus banning them (a la the INDUCE Act) is pointless and silly."
Umm, if I publish a recipe for crack that uses 2 less ingredients than the normal recipe and takes only half the time to make, why would that be a valid argument for making crack legal? Don't get me wrong I think the act is idiotic, but I don't follow Mr. Felton's reasoning here.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
How does the fact that they're simple to make have any ramifications on whether or not they should be banned? Meth is simple to make, but I don't see anyone using that as excuse to make it legal. "P2P can be simple and written very quickly, so to try to ban or prevent the technology is not feasible." What he fails to mention is that while they may be simple and quick to write, they take months to gather serious steam, giving ample time to stop them, at least from becoming mainstream like bit torrent, Kazaa, or edonkey. It honestly makes no sense. I don't agree that they should be made illegal, but this is not really a decent supporting argument as to why.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
I don't understand this. Yeah, it's pretty cool to write a fifteen line P2P app, but just because the concept is simple to implement doesn't mean it's unworthy to ban. Not that I'm arguing for banning P2P apps, I'm just critiquing the logic used here. It's also fairly easy to write a simple virus or trojan. Should law enforcement give up pursuing computer criminals who write viruses and such as a result? Better put: shouldn't the amount of damage to society be the valuation for enacting a ban or chasing criminals, not the ease with which criminals obtain or create their tools of trade? Maybe his original statement was taken out of context or more nuanced than the quoted text... --M
In that case, next time you write a hello world program, make sure you write a custom OS with it and don't forget the thousands of drivers you'll need. Sharing or reusing code is a common and necessary practice.
Regards,
Steve
Quite. But the implication of the article is that the code is trivial because it takes so few lines to write. I could easily write a fast fourier transform program in just a few lines by linking to FFTW, but that doesn't mean that FFT is trivial.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
POOR ANALOGY ALERT:
The nearest analogy I can think of is Prohibition. You can make alcohol illegal and you can punish people for making it or selling it or drinking it, but there are a lot of people who want to drink and alcohol is VERY easy to make. So every time you close down one source another pops up. There is a demand and you can't control the supply because anyone with enough time can create a new supply.
Now feel free to argue the inappropriate nature of my analogy. Have fun!
I don't think, Therefore I'm not.
Perl and python are both interpreted HLLs ... so your "466 bytes" of source code is no more intrinsically meaningful a measure than the number of lines in either program
The existence of MoleSter proves that Perl is 466 bytes away from being a P2P program, that in order to ban decentralized search (the key point of P2P file sharing), you'd almost have to ban Perl itself.