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Microsoft Wants P2P Avalanche to Crush BitTorrent
pacopico writes "Microsoft seems to think it can be the better Bittorrent. You know faster and more well-behaved. The Register has a story on the P2P work being done by Microsoft's researchers in the UK. Redmond reckons its "Avalanche" technology will be 20 to 30 percent faster than BitTorrent. It's meant for legal downloads only, of course."
Will it block access to MP3 files and a big list of other file-types/filename-extensions? Like MSN Messenger 7 does? But, like MSN Messenger, allow .WMA files? And do this under the guise of "security", alleging that MP3 is an "unsafe" format (though unlike WMAs, MP3s can't launch websites or "acquire licenses" and stuff like that)..
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Microsoft Research has been working on efficient, decentralized, and fault-tolerant P2P systems since 2001. See the paper about their DHT (Distributed Hash Table) called Pastry, which was co-authored with Rice and is still under active development there. Note that the Kademlia DHT, which followed roughly a year later and is now used in a variety of P2P networks (eMule, the new decentralized BitTorrent network, etc.) employs a variant of Pastry's routing algorithm of longest prefix matching.
They still have quite a presence if you look through recent NSDI or IPTPS conferences. Note that this paper is for IEEE INFOCOM, which is big.
- shadowmatter
Why do you need to guess what it's about when it's all there in the paper linked to by the article? I've skimmed it, gotten the gist of it, and I think their technique is quite clever. And the paper seems to give full details, so anyone can implement it.
Basically, similar coding schemes make scheduling of data in a swarm easier (so there's no choking/unchoking a la BitTorrent, data just flows) and minimize the risk of a file piece being owned by only one peer (if he leaves, downloading is over). These encoding schemes, through linear combinations of pieces using XOR, combat this (I'm generalizing here). The most attractive, I think, are Rateless and Raptor codes, which have similar performance. (Incidentally, the former was developed by Petar Maymounkov, who was actually one of the inventors of Kademlia.)
Anyway, a few months ago I read the Rateless paper, and thought "Gee, I should code this and release it under the GPL... It would be great for P2P apps!" But soon after I finished its implementation, I discovered that all the ideas authored in the Rateless paper were actually covered by patents of Digital Fountain, meaning that Petar's company, Rateless, had to develop a different, proprietary coding mechanism that is outside the patents of DF, and I can't release my code!
So, getting back to my original point, the paper says, "Network coding can be seen as an extension or generalization of the Digital Fountain approach since both the server and the end-system nodes perform information encoding." Meaning that it might not be covered by DF's patents, and thus should be welcomed by the P2P community, and not immediately disregarded blindly by prejudice. I mean, if it's a 20% improvement, why not give it a chance, huh?
- shadowmatter
And in this case, by creating a BitTorrent work-alike, they can draw up patent specs that INCLUDE BitTorrent's features, and then use that patent to shut down the servers. Time to start informing the Patent Offices!
Also, folks, make a note of the DATE of that paper describing Avalanche. One PTO rule that seems to me gets violated often is that there is supposed to be (or used to be) a one-year limit between the public release of an invention's description and the patent application. After more than a year, it's too late to apply. How many existing dubious patents were applied-for too late and could be overturned on those grounds?