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I2hub Shutdown Due to Legal Pressure
djabbour writes "I2hub, the only p2p client that catered to internet2 users has shutdown today due to legal concerns. A few hours ago, any user on i2hub got a message which read 'RIP 11/14/2005. It was a good run. Forced to shut down by the industry.' The i2hub site has been shutdown, and new clients can no longer login to the i2hub server."
I can no longer copy and distribute music on a network I never belonged to.
Oh the injustice.
I guess that lawsuits, even the SLAPP type do indeed work. So much for information wanting to be free.
Does this mean I get a refund on my VIP membership? ;) Seriously though, I2hub was an awesome project while it lasted. The whole point of this network was to bring together college students using highspeed networks. While some students chose to share copyrighted files, a lot of others uses I2hub for legitimate and semi-scholarly purposes. I can't tell you how many times I've helped kids with their C++ and Java questions, found good game competitors, and reconnected with old friends. The whole point of the I2 network is to see what researchers and academics can do with large amounts of bandwidth. I2hub certainly explored that question. So... what's next?
That's a shame. Especially with the speeds they would get, the bottle necks would shift back to the computers themselves, rather than the network.
I was one of the ops on i2hub, and it was used for many legal purposes as well as the file-sharing. It will be missed, but RIAA can't get us all, no matter how hard they try.
It's only a matter of time before some college student starts hosting another Internet2-only DC++ server out of his/her dorm room. I personally have one restricted to the University of Kentucky IP block. The music industry doesn't seem to realize especially after napster that for every P2P network it shuts down, three more spring up.
But another concern is about the future of P2P. Grokster shut down last week, now i2hub has been forced out... what's next? BitTorrent? Kazaa? Ares?
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
It sounds like they shutdown a server which made the clients work, or have the redefinition elves been busy? (Granted that with p2p, exactly who's a server or a client is vague. Director/peon architecture?)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
What amazes me about the current copy paranoia is that PCs have been copying perfectly for decades. The Internet has been copying perfectly among strangers en masse for decades. It's been popular globally for a decade. Nothing has changed. The legal risks are exactly the same, our rights are exactly the same. Our laws protecting our rights are a little different, and the politicians are a new bunch. So I guess that's why there's a wild suppression running amok among the copyright industry. But they waited too long: the masses have grown accustomed to copying whatever we want. Momentum is against them - they might make some inroads, some local successes, but copyright was protected by inadequate tech for too long, and now has been exposed to disruptive tech for too long. The smart money is on the copyright holders who can harness the new distribution media, not those who fight it.
--
make install -not war
Wasn't Internet2 supposed to be for academic uses anyway?
On noes! We can't clog up this incredibly powerful and incredibly expensive network trading terabytes of movies and music! The humanity!
Seriously now, the whole point of the thing was to move multiple gigs of data coming out of CFD simulations and the like, not to get the latest episode of Lost.
A P2P protocol that requires a centralized organizing entity, such as a hub, tracker or server, isn't really a P2P protocol. Decentralizing the bandwidth and the storage isn't enough to ensure unimpeded file sharing... the indexing needs to be decentralized as well. This way, there is no single point of attack to take down the P2P network.
This just isn't to protect music pirates from the record companies, but to protect legitimate distribution systems from malicious attack, either governmental or criminal.
SoupIsGood Food
The funny part about a well written P2P is that you shouldn't be able to shut it down. I envisioned P2P taking over where Napster left off as soon as they shut down Napster. I was partly right, but there's no reason to have P2P shut down. The fundamental flaw in P2P software today is that it banks on main servers for user list files. If instead, it simply kept a record of everyone's IP address on the client side, it could then:
A) Scan every single IP that was active last run. Not everyone has a static IP, but out of thousands of people, at least one person should.
B) As soon as you find someone with an active IP, you become on the network, and recieve a new list of IP addresses(all the active ones) from the client that's online. VOILA YOU'RE ONLINE WITH NO CENTRAL SERVER
The other fundamental flaw of P2P software is that the coders are very lazy, and use a single port. Once this port is identified to your software, ISPS can block that port and you're screwed. To be robust, it should use a variety of random ports of software that you're not using. I mean you can get really complex about what ports you're using: Up to and including scanning the computer for software so it knows which ports not to use... But that's getting crazy indepth, just a standard: Random number between 10000-30000 should do. And everyone keeps this port number along side your IP address in the list.
God spoke to me.
...would somebody post a link to a site with the news that the site had been shut down...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
Maybe FreeNet will win in the end. Don't know how they can threaten that one, although I'm sure they're trying.
Maybe yesterday will be remembered as a golden age in music when anything could be found and tried. I sure don't feel the same about the "legal" replacements I'm seeing coming to replace them. It still doesn't make me want to buy anything from Sony-BMG.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
site is shutdown, and then /.ed. nice. and if that's not bad enough, it will be /. again in a few days for good measure.
There's an internet TWO?!?!? I haven't even finished the first one!
A guy walks into a bar... well, I forgot the joke, but the punchline is that he's an alcoholic.
Why not put the index on more attack proof networks like freenet, and use a faster p2p app for the actual downloading.
I'm not sure that I would spend my time coding a massive P2P application for a network that isn't what most consider an ISP. .Edu networks are highly monitored and are not as "free" as the open, unfiltered networks provided to residential customers by ISPs.
I went to a university involved with the Internet2 project and even before Internet2 was even introduced their, the network administrators were already cracking down on high bandwith usage due to high bandwith costs per month that needed to be justified to the university's president.
College networks are usually stated as being "only for educational purposes" and students can't lash out at network policies teh same way paying residential customers can.
Hagrin.com
But can they not use BitTorrent over Internet2? If not, porting would be a worthwhile and rewarding task. They could aslo fix the UI up - it's absolutely hideous, or at least outlandish on Windows, but native looking on OS X and Linux
I am Spartacus
Three problems.
1) If you use a random port, you have a harder time enacting a firewall. Unless I misunderstand firewalls, they close all ports except the approved ones. Won't you have to change the firewall every time you log-on? And wouldn't a simple program that gets authority to automatically open ports in the firewall be dangerous from a security perspective? Esp. since P2P is already clogged with viruses?
2) If every computer has the IP address of every other computer, then the RIAA can bust one guy, and if he isn't quick enough to wipe everything (and he may not get the chance), they have the master list of all the file sharers, who they can sue or send threatening letters at will.
3) It looks like this lets all people with dynamic IPs be leechers, and keeps them from sharing their files.
4) Yeah, I only had three in the beginning, deal with it. If you download the software from a mirror somewhere, how do you get this master list? For that matter, how does User #1 find User #2, User #3, and so on, on Day 1?
Our economy will remain stable, thanks to great weight of legal pressure. Clearly, University students ought to have NO say on what will happen to the future of the arts and should remain that way.
Soon, we will acheive blazing fast Internet access AND have little worry about such criminal behavior over the Internet(2).
the end of the internet. I thought this seeing this website was one of the entry requirements for college and thus the reason for internet 2 to be created in the first place.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
The article claims the i2Hub network has been shutdown. Yet Wiki claims i2Hub was a peer-to-peer filesharing program.
I assume the i2Hub website is the only thing that's closed and that the software is still out there. And if it's P2P it should be able to operate regardless. Right?
Any real network security appliance (like a PacketSure or ManHunt or SNSA) will do actually layer-7 traffic analysis and block the connection by packet 2 or 3, regardless of the source or destination port. Sure, having a constant port makes it somewhat easier to block (if you're willing to generally restrict traffic based on IP-level attributes), but changing the port frequently doesn't really solve the problem. It also means that your network doesn't work with anyone who relies on port forwarding (think 1000s of NAT users).
The problem with random ports is that a lot of us have to configure our firewalls everytime to the new port. Although a static port the user configured themselves would work fine.
Rather than that, couldn't we just use an unblockable port...like 80 so that if the isp wanted to block it they would drown in complaints. Port 80 with ssl would work nicely I think, and add in firefox to the p2p so you don't have a program clash problem.
Recap; Can't block port 80 without all your users screaming and if they want to decrypt ssl then every financial institution will scream as well.
/. bug #926803 - Why I can post.
Here
Since there seems to be some confusion about the i2hub... Internet2 is the name of the network that links a lot of universities, research labs, etc. I2Hub is the name of a Direct Connect* hub that only allowed users who were on the Internet2 network to connecct. So they just shut down the direct connect hub, not the whole network. You can still do everything you could before -- including sharing files using alternative methods -- except connecting to the I2Hub server.
* Direct Connect is a file sharing protocol
#include ".signature"
There's an internet TWO?!?!?
So I guess President Bush was right about the existence of multiple internets for spreading rumors.
Fire everyone, disband, and create a totally new company with the same employees and equipment. Call it "i2nexus". And host it in a country that doesn't care about the stupid laws and legal system of the US of A.
Yes, it is impossible to shut down true P2P. It's also impossible to control it. That means the RIAA/MPAA can easily infiltrate your network and setup honeypots and/or actively poison it.
What happens when the first "working" address is an RIIA machine that lies to you and gives you a list of hundreds of other RIIA machines. Everything looks normal, but you've just been pwned.
I was a rep for i2hub on the UMass campus (UMass is where the founder Wayne Chang went to school and i2hub was based out of Amherst). Working with Wayne was quite an experience. He was constantly thinking of new ideas and strategies. I have no doubt he'll be successful in the future. However, Wayne needed money to take the RIAA to court, and even with a solid defense he wouldn't have a chance without the resources.
The students I collaborated with on i2hub were some of the more motivated and intelligent students I know. I'm sure that their support and campus networking will help foster bigger and better projects in the future. Over 500 of the more active i2hub users still chat every day on IRC, which is a testament to the strength of the i2hub community. I hate to say this, but i2hub marketed itself as a "student collaborative network" but the closure of the hub by the RIAA might just prove to force i2hub into the true collaborative network we had envisioned.
"Man, I am so unbelievably stupid."
Oh no, where am I to get my warez now!? Whats that, theres still IRC, newsgroups, kazaa, bit torrent, emule, and hijacked FTP? Whew, there for a second I thought I was going to have to start PAYING for my digital entertainment.
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
- Winston Churchill
soy el bugreloaded, el mas grande entre los grandes
Warez sites come and go, I have little sympathy for them - they know it happens. But, I've been known to sample a new artist here and there *cough* and I like getting my movies, songs, books, and software through the Internet so I really do want copyright holders to get their heads out of their collective ass and wise up a bit. .wma file won't play on an ipod - something to do with .aac I guess? Seriously it's a mess from an average persons point of view) and then you're limited on how many your devices that can store your purchased copy of the information and millions of other little things that piss me off. What I'm trying to get to is content sources: make it friggin' simple. I want to go from ooooooh! shiny song must buy to got it in seconds with only a minimal amount of new payment complexity (swipe card; enter pin vs. fill out form 1074 in triplicate along with supplemental schedule B and maybe, just maybe we'll let you have a license to it...). Debits here, it works, make it go.
The Internet is the most amazing distribution system for Information ever invented by us and no matter how content is distributed be it bittorrent, gnutella, ftp, or http that is not the real problem the media companies are facing. The real problem is that they don't have a means of payment built into whatever communications protocol is being levereged at the moment to move data. iTunes, Napster to Go, and the like simply suck and I'm not going to bite because in my opinion I will only accept purchasing a copy of a high-quality content source with *no* drm so I could transcode it into an appropriate quality and format for the other devices I own, instead of forcing the purchase of the same content on multiple media types.
Here's how I see it, it's just like making a withdrawal at the bank, I go to a teller, swipe my card, tell her how much I want, and that's it. It's all simple and just works. Getting online information however is a daunting task as usually at the minimum a credit card is required. Then you have to know what format your music is going to arrive in wrapped in drm (which adds further confusion to the market as consumers scratch their head when their
Shh.
Well for me anyway
Internet2 is not a network. It is a consortium of participating universities, research organizations, companies, etc. The IP backbone in question, developed by Internet2, is called Abilene.
Signature.
I have a length of CAT 5 lying around, anyone want to start an internet 3 with me? We can P2P to our hearts content that way.
Wow - that sounds like the kind of stuff I'd expect in a bad Holywood hacking movie, not Slashdot...
Why not reroute the TTY packets through to the SSH protocol while you're at it?
The Direct Connect network at my small liberal arts college may only have 142 users logged and 6.08 TB of data being shared (small stuff compared to I2hub, I'm sure) but at download speeds of over 1MB/s it's worth it. (Sadly, we were never connected to internet two.)
All decisions like this force is networks to go further underground and localize tighter. Clearly 5000 users logged at once on dozens of campuses were far too many to keep their mouths shut. But smaller campus networks work nearly as well and are easy to setup. You don't need official websites or other big targets, just an no-ip.com server address shared through word of mouth.
I'm sure my school is not unique (I've heard another network like this exists for all the UC schools). It's pretty much impossible to stop students from utilizing nearly infinite network bandwidth. Commendable, perhaps, but hopeless.
err, no. Everything over 1024 is blocked by default by damn near every firewall I've ever seen. I think even the Windows XP firewall have it all blocked by default (if you turn on the firewall).
Better just to run it over port 80, so long as you aren't running a web server. But should you really be downloading pron and warez on your production web box? And port 80 is open for web traffic.
The problem with distributed lists though is distributed points of security breaches. Think if someone from the RIAA or Sony joined the party, all they would have to do is search for 1 song they hold the rights to and blamo, they have a list of IPs of every person who has that song. And I don't really mean every person, because the list effects would be huge.
Your best bet would be to use some sort of 6degrees of seperation and social architexture to get file lists. ie: Bob is "friends" with Jim and Jon. Bob invites Saley. Saley searches for a file, her search hit's Bob's (1 degree), Jim's and Jon's (2 degrees) shares, but not their friends. If Saley adds Jon to her "Friends" list, she would be able to search Jon's friends too.
Someone could (read: RIAA would pay someone to) exploit the system to make a huge listing. A bit of recursion and friend adding and you could rapidly dig up a pretty comprehensive list. And since the client is in the enemy's hand it would be imposible to prevent. The only bright side is that you could likely backtrack who the person was who sent out the invite to them.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
1) The port [range] could be user-configurable rather than random, meaning the user could change ports if their current range is blocked.
2) True, but anonymity wasn't the point of the original post. The point was creating a p2p network that is impossible to shut down.
3) You seem to want anonymity as per #2. It will be hard to implement any sort of karma system without tying it to identity, which can eventually be tied to an IP at the ISP level.
4) There have been p2p networks with similar premises in the past. One was GNUtella (or just had a client by that name, perhaps). You have to have the address of someone on the network in order to connect. That's simply a fact of life in a system like this. So you gotta join a chatroom, look on a webpage, check usenet, or just have a friend on the network to connect the first time.
NEW YORK -- i2Hub, 2, passed from this plane of electronic existence on Monday (Nov. 14, 2005) shortly before 6 PM surrounded by his loving family. Funeral arrangements will be announced by the P2P Funeral Home, with a viewing of the body this Wednesday. He is survived by his parents, Napster and Kazaa, his cousin Bitorrent, his son darknet, and twin daughters Ourtunes and Mytunes. This is the second loss for the family in recent months, after the death of Grokster.
From Urbis Interminatus
I'm not l33t enough to care.
There are trust-relationship algorithms for dealing with the poisoning/honeypot problems. There are known methods from clustering research that are applicable in terms of bootstrapping without trying to go down a serial list of every possible active node, and for using distributed hashes such that nobody needs to know the entire content index at once. Real p2p is possible, it's just that nobody has yet pulled all the peices together to make it happen (which, in the p2p coders' defense, is a very complex problem for sure).
What sucks is that the neccesity of home NAT-ing and the ubiquity of asymmetric home uplinks make it painful at best for p2p code to do what it wants to do efficiently. Someday (soon I hope) we'll all be part of local loose ad-hoc wireless meshes in addition to the assorted real uplink connections scattered around, and at least then p2p will begin to scale more like it promises to.
11*43+456^2
Well...okay, I can probably get porn somewhere on the Internet. But still, I mourn the passing of i2hub.
As soon as you find someone with an active IP, you become on the network, and recieve a new list of IP addresses(all the active ones) from the client that's online
Riaa computer to hub computer: Can I get a list of all the people sharing files?
Hub computer to Riaa computer: Sure thing!
next gen p2p networks need strong encryption and true decentralization if they want to survive the legal might of the **AA...
Get your torrents...
So, I just opened up my copy of i2hub, and saw the RIP message. Then I continued my downloading as usual. The old client can't connect to its default hub, but the beta which was released a few weeks ago seems to still be working fine.
I guess that doesn't matter though.
I dont even use i2hub I get all my music from trancetraffic, djmixes2k. Porn from fileporn.org puretna.com and other. I dont give a jack shit about i2hub **AA can kiss my ass.
Its nice to be important but its more important to be nice
Could it be that you aren't smart enough to figure out the difference in someone with a pro pirating agenda and someone who actualy uses the system for legal and reasonable uses?
You act as if someone records a radio program we should ban all tape recorders. You even act as if it is someone god given right to ban all tape recorders because some one taped a program. This attitude is bullshit. There are plenty of good uses for P2P that doesn't infringe on anyone copyright. You seem to think because someone just lost a tool they were taking advantage of(legaly) then makes a negative coment about the situation, they are automaticaly supporting piracy. You are wrong.
Rant and whine all you want. The majority of users are not pirates. some may be but if we followed these examples everywere we would ban car because some break laws or use them to steal from others. We would ban almost everythign. Of course that would be just fine with you wouldn't it?
Take that for not hooking me up with a sweet Internet2 Pipe.
Something like gnutella, then?
Yeah, gnutella is wrought with problems, though. Now, gnutella over I2P, that would be.. oh..
in Soviet Russia Information anthropomorphizes YOU!
You can't handle the truth.
but not smart enough to stop trading files that they don't own rights to.
You just described a darknet, aka the next version of freenet.
http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
I've known two people who made money off of pirated money. Now, one of them the RIAA isn't going to go after since all he did was trade pirated cd's for weed, but the other one is the type of person that the RIAA should be going after instead of all this p2p bullshit.
I had a co-worker who used to burn couple hundred cd's a week of pirated music and sell them online. He'd sell though amazon or whomever, would list them under mixed cd's. Now wouldn't it make more sense to go after the people selling pirated cd's rather than those who download stuff? After all there are people buying music, money exchangeing hands, without the artist getting anything out of it.
Strangely my co-worker quit doing this cause he got tired of burning cd's, not because he had any problem selling them or had any legal threats, he just got tired of trying to keep up with demand.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
The GPL gets its legal authority from copyright law, not its moral authority. Thus the moral imperative when one violates the GPL is not that "you violated our copyright" but rather that you infringe upon the freedoms of others.
Hey, I was a representative of i2hub as well, and what happened was that the RIAA basically said to shut down or to face lawsuits. Despite what some people may think, our lawyer said we were highly likely to win if the RIAA were to sue us, so that wasn't the issue. The issue is that the expense of a trail against a cartel such as the RIAA would be immense, and that we simply could not afford such amounts. This is a case of consumer rights being trampled in favor of huge trusts with the bankrolls.
KSU is highly unfriendly to FS and p2p. One of the main network programers has made a software that examines every packet that goes in and out of the campus and has it delete any packet that resembles that of a filesharing clinet. Nothing works. Not even bittorrent (new linux distro? I dont think so). A friend of mine says it is custom and is not out in the wild but it works like this:
Internet(1)/(2) ---> Packet Detector Server --> Routers ---> Campus
the routers may come first but from the sound of things. At least you actualy can share. Kansas Satae University. Forget it. Even new ones will be picked up on fast. Consider yourselves lucky and head back to Gnutella, G2, or another small time network.
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
4) There have been p2p networks with similar premises in the past. One was GNUtella
Gnutella is still alive and kicking - and still effectively impossible to shut down.
"GAH! Every time a discussion comes up about Internet 2, the same misinformed opinions get modded up. Internet 2 is not separate, in that it requires special research grants or whatever to use it."
I think the OP is shooting for INTENT! The INTENT of Internet2 (taxpayer funded BTW, that would be me thanks) is for research purposes. Illegal filetrading DOESN"T fall under that catagory (Which BTW ISN'T the same thing as legitimite research on P2P protocols).
"I2 isn't really all that "separate". It's merely a series of high-speed routers and lines that interconnect member organizations. Being a well-minded student on an I2 connected school-owned network, I would love to have all my gaming and leisure traffic go solely over the commercial internet. It's just not possible. When you connect to other computers at I2 organizations, any and all traffic goes directly over the I2 lines."
And since there's usually university roads that exit out to public roads, thereby "forcing you" to use them if you want to enter and leave. It's OK to speed recklessly down them, weaving side to side. It's nice to know they're teaching the three "R"'s in school. Reading, writing, and irresponsability.
"So since kernel.org is hosted at Oregon State, I can download the latest and greatest over "Internet 2" with no special software or methods required. The commodity internet isn't even touched for such a transfer, and I can usually get between 1 and 3 MB/s, depending on the I2-connected server."
Good for you. Comcast broadband has been upped to 5 MB/s, time to break open that piggy bank.
We can mod it down for the bitching and whining too, right?
because it isnt illegal to run a tracker there!
I KUT J00 M4NG!!!
As much as I agree with you that banning open P2P is little different from banning any recording device, I believe it's wishfull thinking to believe that the majority of P2P users are not pirating. While there is a wealth of uncopyrighted content (from hillarious amature videos made purely to entertain the masses to no-name bands who want exposure), it has always seemed to me that almost all the content I've seen on the various networks I've perused, and the contents of the shared directories I've seen, are almost exclusively copyrighted music and movies. There are many exceptions, but I believe that is a minority. The main legal usage is most likely from peer-distributed software (such as WOW updates, etc), and given time legal usage WILL exceed any other use as use of these networks for efficient content distribution continues to spread into the mainstream.
I have no figures to back that up, and find most of the figures I've seen from both sides highly suspect. But from everything I've seen on p2p, everything I've heard from people using p2p networks, and all my personal experience in general, anyone would be hard pressed to convince me that the majority of p2p users are obedient law-abiding responsible citizens who's intentions (and hard drives) are wholly pure. It's human nature to take what you can get, when there's little guilt involved (and let's face it - who feels THAT guilty about downloading, especially those of us with a large collection of legally-purchased cd's and dvd's?).
That said, legislation and judgements aimed at restricting and even banning p2p are no different from big radio's attempts to block tape recorders throughout the 70's, or the even more brute-force attempts by Disney and others to block the sale of VCRs to the public in the early 80's... or attempts to "tax" all cd and dvd blank sales to compensate for piracy. It's misguided, it's shortsighted, and it's almost certainly going to be shortlived as far as laws go - judging by recent history.
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
DDNS would have lots of uses outside of p2p, such as enabling individuals to host web sites from computers whose IP addresses are assigned dynamically, and/or enabling services to be reliably published over any random port.
Cthulhu for President! Why settle for the lesser evil?
Let's be real here. Maybe you're not a pirate. Maybe you know people who are. But if we're defining piracy as downloading digital copies of music, movies, software, etc. that would not legally be available for free, then I'd wager that the vast majority of P2P users *are* pirates.
Yes, I *do* recognize that P2P has other uses. Torrent in particular is gaining popularity as a distribution method (especially among the nerdly). And no, I don't generally support the actions of those who would define the value of a tool by its more negative uses. But... come on. Many, many people are using P2P to pirate stuff. If this were not the case, there wouldn't be nearly the fuss over all this.
Hi... I'm Larry... the shivering chipmunk... brrrrr!... I'm cold... I need a sweater...
Recap; Can't block port 80 without all your users screaming and if they want to decrypt ssl then every financial institution will scream as well.
Some ISPs, like mine, transparently proxy everything on port 80. Since HTTPS (HTTP protocol over SSL/TLS) doesn't use port 80, I'm willing to bet it will kick and scream when invalid requests are sent to port 80.
For the record, HTTPS uses port 443.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
They would prefer that all traffic possible go out I2 links. I2 connections are much cheaper than I1 connections. Basically, it's a peering agreement. Indania U does need some money to keep the whole thing running but it's not the "you pay us for everything" setup like with I1. So, given that, you want as much traffic as possible to go over I2. People are going to do what they want with the net, so you deal with the traffic one way or another. Better to have as much of it as possible running on cheaper links. We'd rather have an OC-12 to I2 and an OC-3 to the net than the reverse.
Sorry, but if you want to download an 800MB rip of the newest movie, you have to have at least 800MB worth of data arriving at your doorstep...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I am currently a senior CS major at Umass Amherst (The place where i2hub was born thanks to graduate Wayne Chang) and as such I have witnessed the evolution of file sharing here at Umass in the past few years.
As a freshman there was a program called winscan and if my memory serves me correctly, it basically was an index of all windows netbios publicly available shares on campus. Obviously not the best method for so many reasons, but it worked well enough.
Then winscan stopped working and flatlan appeared on the grid, which basically seemed to work the same way, just with a flashier interface and a website to go with it. (I have a feeling flatlan was just winscan v2, but don't hold me to it I was only a freshman.) Something tells me that either winscan or flatlan or both was written by a student from RPI who was shut down by **AA at some point, but I don't feel like cross checking that comment for accuracy.
Sophomore year saw the rise of DC++. I no longer remember the name of the server, but there was basically a limited version of i2hub available to only those on the umass campus network. By the end of sophomore year this server had at least started its merge with another campus network server, and slowly the networks allowed into the server began to increase. First to other colleges in the area, and eventually into something resembling what used to be i2hub.
Junior year i2hub really sprang to life, rapidly gaining its own momentum and making the news on more than one occasion. The traditional DC Connect and DC++ programs were discarded in favor the the i2hub ad-ridden interface, new colleges and people joined daily, and subscriptions became available.
Then disaster struck. The RIAA started going after students on i2hub.
Midway through fall-semester of senior year: RIP i2hub.
My point? These networks at Umass have grown from small to big since I've been here. There have also effectively been 4 different filesharing/p2p networks since I've been here. All have dissappeared for various reasons, but a new one always popped up in its place. For a few years the trend was to grow larger and larger and become more and more public, but I expect in the next few years whatever new network pops up to replace i2hub will remain more private and centralized, possibly restricting use to only the Umass network once again.
I'd be willing to bet that some student is already hard at work on converting bittorrent or an old gnutella client or maybe dc++ (again) to restrict the network to users with internet2 addresses only. Hopefully this student will not make the same mistake as Wayne Chang made - going public with i2hub. As soon as I saw i2hub mentioned in the news and on slashdot, I knew it would be eventually doomed by some *AA.
I'm envisioning a future of invitation-only networks, limited to a certain 'degree of kevin bacon' mixed in somehow. Think facebook + p2p. The only people that can see you and your files are your friends, your friends' friends, your friends' friends' friends... etc to a specified depth level. This would have some limiting effects on availability but would *reduce* (not solve) the problem of trust. Add some basic crypto in there somewhere if you are really paranoid and the *AA lawyer trolls can kiss my @$$
The Gnutella network is based upon that concept.
--> Insert Funny Sig Here
The standard is 443, but you can run it wherever you like.
On the first problem, opening arbitrary ports isn't so hard if your firewall supports UPnP.
Ignore the people who think UPnP is Windows-only. I use a BitTorrent client (Azareus) on the Mac that opens ports on a Linksys multihomed router/firewall.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
The RIAA are a bunch of slackers.
What were they back when the automobile was getting off the ground?
Everyone knows that you can't beat the bandwidth of a station wagon full of HD's.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The thing is this can be done using gnutls and OpenPGP authentication method. By using the PGP web of trust methods you will only let people into the network that meet some threshold of trust. So if I sign your key and you sign my key and we trust each other 100% then if you sign someone else's key then I will trust it to some degree already. They can join the network and then later I could sign their key too after chatting exchanging files or whatnot and then they become 100% trusted too.
This web of trust authentication can already be done and can be utilized fairly easily using gnutls and gpgme libraries. Someone will do it someday.
That's why the second word in "Fair Use" is use, not copy. You can't tell by looking at a copy alone whether any infringement has occurred or not.
A person is a "pirate" if they committed infringement (pretty much by definition). Just because "all the contents [you've seen on shared drives, etc]...are almost exclusively copyrighted music and movies" doesn't mean that the copying involved in putting that material where you saw it was infringement (piracy). Just as simply seeing someone standing on property they don't own doesn't automatically make them a trespasser. Sometimes, yes. But not always.
Remember: infringement is an act considered in context, not simple possession of a file. Ignoring this distinction follows the greedy and corrupt logic of the copyright barons. So while you're right to suggest that people's "intentions" might not be pure, you're wrong to focus too much on their drives. Make the context of the copying -- not the presence of the copy -- the issue.
On the same day more sites were closed.
Check eurodanceparty.com "R.I.P. www.eurodanceparty.com May 5, 2002 - November 13, 2005"
or another great site known for video mixes http://djveryrelentless.8m.com/custom4.html
left with message "RIAA Has Been Here. Have A Nice Day."
RIAA has no access. Straight fiber to every dorm. Porn at 22 MB/s. Campus share of 22TB. gg Case Western Reserve. Too bad the weather in Cleveland still sucks...
Computers can make otherwise intelligent people stupid, much like slashdot.
I wouldn't count on that. At the moment, I think it's far more likely that the ??AA and US Congress are FAR more likely to drive techonological innovation away from the US than they are to fix our laws. Messing up our IP laws "fixes" bottom lines today, or at least gives that appearance, and who cares that we've sacrificed the future of our technology industries.
Perhaps unfortunately, engineers have always been more interested in engineering and making things that work than in politicking, and this is the price we pay. When I graduated from college, I took the first part of the NSPE test, not that I had any plans of becoming a Professional Engineer, but because "There's no better time to take it, when you've just had all the stuff." I got the magazine for some years, and was surprised to see how much of it was taken up by politicking, and that was part of the reason I let it drop. I know better, now.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
As soon as I saw i2hub mentioned in the news and on slashdot, I knew it would be eventually doomed by some *AA.
True. I'm astonished it worked as long as it did. We had a P2P file sharing network which only allowed university people in - even restricted it to IP ranges of dormitories - and it blew up as soon as one person started selling files from the network burnt to DVD, boasting about it. The police raided the person running the server (who did not sell anything) and nobody was ever bold / careless enough to run another server. So it only takes one idiot to bring the system down.
Actually, that was a very insightful comment. What do you suppose people used to use those "boom boxes" with dual cassette decks and 2X "dubbing" capabilities for? Copying tapes for friends, of course. I think I've probably always owned some form of cassette recorder since 1980, and I believe I recorded a school lecture once, and recorded myself pretending to read a radio commercial for a class assignment once. Other than that those recorders were only used for taping music off the radio and copying tapes. So, clearly, cassette recorders should be banned.
The point is not whether there are some, or even any uses of the technology that you think are "good." P2P software is just a tool. It cannot be good or bad any more than a butcher knife is good or bad.
"We have nothing in common, your attitude annoys me, and your political views are appalling."
...and from what I've seen, the majority of traffic along all highways is speeding. (in other words - breaking the law)
The majority of drivers are using our highways for nefarious purposes! Drivers are nothing but criminals! Ban cars! Tear up the highways! Remove their ability to break the law! Won't somebody think of the CHILDREN?!
Okay, to get back to being serious for a second: No, I don't believe that copyright violations are as minor as moving violations...they're even *less* important.
Speeding can be dangerous if the driver and vehicle aren't built to handle the excess. Copyright violations never hurt anybody. That which does no harm isn't worth worry.
And no, nobody has lost any income due to "piracy." They never had that person's money to begin with. No lives have been disrupted due to copyright violations alone. All evidence proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that copyright violations represent zero danger to the income potential of content producers.
So go fuck yourself.
While some students chose to share copyrighted files, a lot of others uses I2hub for legitimate and semi-scholarly purposes. I can't tell you how many times I've helped kids with their C++ and Java questions, found good game competitors, and reconnected with old friends.
;)
I actually met some people from my own university on it, heh. By bringing people together, even for an "illegal" purpose (alas, they should have had the server here in Canada, it might still be up then . . . 'course, cross-border action is not exactly unprecedented) it certainly encouraged people, yaknow, meeting eachother. I know several people on my own campus that I wouldn't have met at all, even just online, if it wasn't for it. Certainly makes use of the term "hub".
Oh well. This year it wasn't that good as far as selection went, anyways; since people were allowed to get away with sharing nothing or close to such, the majority of users weren't really contributing (all together now, p2p brethren: damn leechers!). I actually had introduced one of the people I met on i2hub (who messaged me randomly since he was having problems setting up the client and was just looking for help from anyone of the same university, and I just walked over to the other dorm) to the normal version of DC++ (which, for those of you that don't know, was what i2hub used as a client, albeit in a slightly customized way) and he was quick to use other hubs.
And that, I guess, is where we leave off noting about the fate of i2hub. It was really nice for actual communication, since it was a set selection of places that it culled people from, people were forced to specify where in particular they were hailing from, and the hub itself was a single place with many people . . . but it's too easy to shut something like that down. Meanwhile, you rarely (if ever) hear of any other direct-connect hubs being shut down like this (has it even ever happened?). The distributed method, with many many different hubs one can connect to, is much more resilient to attacks by forces like the *AA's.
And then other moderly successful forms of P2P take this to an extreme (the example in mind being bittorrent); the problem is, the most successful against attempts to shut them down are also the most faceless with the least actual human interaction (generally, that is; this is not always true, ex. small bittorrent communities like demonoid). So we have P2P being shut down because it can (and often) is used for illegal activities, and as a result, as the winning strategy to fight back, it crystalizes this! It hones off the edges, becomes little more than the pure extracted essence of that illegal part! So in fighting P2P apps and methods, all that has really been accomplished it the destruction of anything attached to them.
In other words, the MPAA and RIAA are just causing the refinement of Peer-To-Peer. It makes sense, though it's a bit of a tragedy: these faceless organizations and forces are fighting against the interaction of individual people, and the response via evolution is the creation of opposing organizations and forces. At each turn the expense is any humanity in the interactions between people. Now on every side people face inhuman constructs, and their actions are merely diluted and propagated in distorted forms though these constructs.
Err, okay, I'm going to stop ranting now. Sorry 'bout all that, everyone
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Well, that's an interesting idea but it doesn't always work exactly like that.
Part of my job involves banning p2p users from our (extensive) network. Violators usually come to my attention from a router getting choked up by excessive bandwidth or by users on that net complaining of slow connections. When I investigate, usually I don't even look for the common ports but rather I look for the IP's passing the most traffic. Then I dump all traffic for that IP. If that IP is passing heavy traffic to and from, say, 5 or more hosts then it's pretty easy to see what's going on. I prefer to use this method of weeding out p2p users because it still allows people to use p2p for legitimate uses such as downloading iso's with bittorrent and such. Just my $0.02.
Bittorrent over i2p works very well at this point, provided there are a lot of people in the swarm of course, and works much better than i2phex at this point.
It's strange that these people on the internet2 haven't switched over to a peer-proxied anonymous network considering the only thing that's holding regular users from using the different emerging networks is the considerable bandwidth overhead, something that the internet2 users don't have to worry about.
The betamax case[1] determined that a product "...does not constitute contributory infringement if the product is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes. Indeed, it need merely be capable of substantial noninfringing uses...."
a _v._Universal_City_Studios%2C_Inc.
I think we can all agree that P2P does have substantial noninfringing uses.
The industry wants to argue three points on this: 1) that services (such as P2P sites) are significantly different than products, and so deserve their own precedent, 2) what constitutes "substantial", i.e. if we can show that only 1% of all uses are noninfringing, that is not substantial, and 3) they didn't really mean that whole "capable" thing.
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_Americ
How do you know the majority of users are not pirates?
...if so, I hope you get a refund for your own sake. You'll need it once the RIAA gets ahold of your true name.
Please be aware that this story line is currently under the process of being patented.
/. bug #926803 - Why I can post.
Might be time to read that book again you say? I thought that the ports assigned were just defaults not fixed, but I get what you are saying none the less. They are still going to have to send it to the right port on your computer though, otherwise the packet will be dropped by the firewall.
Oh well, if you think of me, think of me sitting in my rocking chair beside the fire leafing through a four hundred page book trying to figure out where it all went wrong....
/. bug #926803 - Why I can post.