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P2P Population Growing Again
An anonymous reader writes "Slyck news is reporting that the file-sharing population has recovered from its mid-year plateau and is once again growing. At 9.45 million users, it is only slightly below its greatest height of 9.6 million users in August. Keep in mind however; these numbers do not represent the population of the BitTorrent community, which would surely add many millions more."
The article says, "Various reasons, such as returning or departing college students, broadband penetration, computer and MP3 player sales, all have an impact on the strength of the P2P community." However they missed 1 all-important factor, and that is simply that the content that's up for grabs also affects the numbers. The article goes on to say, "Indeed, the month of November 2005 represents one of the strongest months yet with a total of 9,465,000 total connected users.....", odd how that coincides with the release of Half-Life 2...
Isn't that like doing a survey of search engines and not including Google?
Keep in mind however; these numbers do not represent the population of the BitTorrent community, which would surely add many millions more."
Damn right they don't. MPAA and RIAA don't quite know how to tackle that one. Kazaa et al are small potatoes compared to the really good, private, Bittorrent trackers.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
TFA mentions that the survey was done by Big Champagne, and if i remember correctly, apps such as Peer Guardian, etc, typically block Big Champagne's IP ranges. So this could potentially misrepresent numbers of real-world P2P users. Not sure if that has been factored in, but if not, the reported numbers will definitely be on the conservative side.
Let's not forget what happens when you go "bigtime" with P2P.
2 6228 shows.
As this related Slashdot story http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/25/2
There is a case to be made, I think, that if certain ports were disabled for home users a serious dent could be made in this P2P population -- not to mention the great deal of bandwidth freed up for more serious Internet activity.
O RLY?
"In fact, some Bittorrent clients are pick alternate ports at random during startup to help avoid ISP filtering.
I would recommend a high port range, like 59052-59059, and also be sure you have those ports forwarded if you own a router. I've done this with Azureus, ABC, and Bitcomet and could leech and seed fine."
link
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Because there are a LOT of legal uses for them. Just because something can be used improperly does not mean you should just automatically penalize those that are not.
The 'pirates' would just go father underground and as long as you allow any connections then the data will flow. You *cant* stop all flow of data, or you wouldnt be providing a service anylonger.
The only way to stop it is to make bandwidth so expensive its cheaper to go buy the item. ( but of course lose all your customers in the process )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A very short, but dire, slippery slope that is.
When an ISP is seen as capable of administering your traffic, an ISP can be seen as authorised to administer your traffic.
When an ISP is authorised to administer your traffic, an ISP can be seen as responsible for administering your traffic.
When an ISP is responsible for administering your traffic, they can be seen as responsible for turning you in to the authorities.
No thanks. I believe in free speech. But I believe some people need to use free thought before free speech.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
...because removing anonymity is the Holy Grail of the RIAA/MPAA strategy. They've been flogging their legal team to produce results now, and after Trusted Computing takes hold, expect the lawsuits and 'cease and desist' orders to increase (although I have great faith some smart person on the side of good will have TC broken before it goes mainstream). Lawsuits don't work now and they're not going to work in the future.
NeverEndingBillboard.com
NeverEndingBillboard.com
1. Downloading music with crappy bit rates, clicks, pops, and incomplete songs.
2. Downloading "fake" songs that are only garbled nonsense.
3. Downloading songs in zip or rar format that require a password to unzip.
4. Ominous feelings that the RIAA will slap my neighbor with a cease and desist letter because he lets me use his wireless connection.
Perhaps the record companies could take a look at #1 and release some decent quality songs with caveats. Something like reduced quality, incomplete, or with a small advert at the end of the recording that says: Purchase this song, video, and other exclusive features at www.youmustpayforyourtoppings.com. Maybe if they flood the networks with new releases with these annoyances, people will pay for legitamate full-featured, full-versioned copies.
Namaste
http://hymn-project.org/jhymndoc/
If you can't buy downloadable music online without DRM, piracy begins to look pretty appealing. Pay and be restricted, or pirate and play anywhere?
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
The only way ISPs could block P2P is if they blocked every single goddam port excluding 21, 80 and a few others for AIM.
Want a bet on this? Any service can run on any port. You can also run any protocol through a tunnel through another. Further more, you can even do a file download over DNS that looks like DNS traffic to evade detection.
Trust me when I say an ISP would have to disconnect paying customers to stop it. Which is lucrative enough they will not. Only a fool with too much stupidity would even try to stop it.
So long live freedmon of the Internet. No one is going to stop it.
Actually with deep inspection of data/packets you can accept/deny traffic based on no what source/dest ip/port but rather on the content in the packet.
Of course, all you'd then have to do is encode your P2P traffic in html headers etc and you'd be away laughing again. Or just use openVPN to tunnel your traffic to a ISP that doesn't do this. There's many ways around it.
Posted so you know that ip/port's aren't the only way to block traffic (though inspecting any deeper requires specialised hardware and it ain't cheap)
Why the hell would an ISP want to do this? What other reason could anyone really have for a $60 a month 5 Megabit cable modem? If the isp limits you to legitmate web surfing and email checking no-one will need their big dollar broadband anymore...
That and the fact (as mentioned 50 times above this post) that blocking the ports would be laughably ineffective.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
Of course - not everyone can use torrents. Here in Santa Barbara, Cox Cable filters out bittorrent traffic by examining the packet headers. You can't get around it by changing the port for example. Really sucks - I can't even patch WoW without it taking 2 hours unless I find a direct download.
It seems to me that a 'count' of peer to peer users without including BitTorrent (at least an estimation) ... is rather pointless.
... and it isn't like BitTorrent is some secret to the P2P community, heck, Slyck even has a link right on their site with a bunch of info on it... so why they didn't even try to include it is beyond me.
I would figure there are at least 9 million people using BitTorrent (legitemately or not)
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Legit download sales have fallen, CD sales have fallen and P2P users have increased. Hmmmm let me see If I actually want to pay for music I can choose to have either a file which may or may not work with my mp3 player or A DRM'd malware infested CD that may or may not play on my CD player. /me bashes Carrey Sherman over the head with a clue!
DRM and financial persecutions encourage music piracy.
I wonder if we are now seeing the beginning of the end of the music cartels as tech savy teens begin to question the moral ethics of buying music and supporting such corrupt entities.
An industry which treats both the content creators and the fans with contempt should not survive. I'm surprised they've lasted this long.
There is an upcoming new use of the P2P distribution model: P2P TV.
Instead of downloading videos off eDonkey and then watch them afterwards, I watch video streams "live" with PPLive.
Stay tuned, I'm guessing that P2P TV is the next big thing after Napster/KaZaA/eDonkey!
w00t
It is one of those things that most people don't feel like it is a crime and there is nothing MPAA and RIAA can do. No amount of lawsuits, no amount of sappy ads before every movie in the theatres showing poor set designers that are now starving because those pirates stole the bread from their kid's table, is going to change that. Because people don't think it is such a big crime to share and download mp3 files and movies.
I am not saying whether it is good or bad, or that it is right to download music from P2P without paying for it - all I am saying is that most people don't see it as such a bad thing. As it turns out the order and peace and quiet in a most societies is not kept by police or any forceful tactics, but by the fact that the majority of the citizens like it that way. For example if tomorrow morning everyone got it into their heads that pillaging, vandalism, looting and killing each other is perfectly "ok" there will not be enough police or lawyers or soldiers to stop everyone acting in that manner.
I think the same goes for illegal file sharing, the majority of people don't see it as a particularly bad thing and they will continue to do it. In fact what people finally see is how Sony/BMG, Universal, EMI and friends have been screwing everyone all these years by selling crappy music for $15-$20 a disk. The artists weren't getting the money - it was all going into building vacation homes and buying Ferrari's for the executives of those production companies.
Now someone might say that the laws in our supposedly democratic society clearly reflect the attitudes and the will of the majority of people, so how come downloading is still illegal. I think it is because the laws today are created by those who have large amounts of accumulated wealth and can sponsor and lobby the Congress to make it pass whatever they want. Also, when is the last time any of us contacted our local Congressman and petitioned him for anything?
I think the best the recording companies can do is to bite the bullet and re-structure their business accepting that the old days when they could make billions by selling overpriced crap are coming to an end.
At one time the majority of people believed that slavery was acceptable. Ethics shouldn't be dictated by the whims of the majority, but instead on rational thought. So, if you believe there is nothing wrong with violating copyright in downloading music, justify your opinion with a reasonable explanation. Don't just say it's ok because everyone is doing it.
A logical argument always starts with some assumptions. If you want to argue ethics you always start with your beliefs. However what you believe is no way tied to some universal truth. There is no "ethical truth" or what Kant called the categorical imperative.
The reason slavery is unacceptable today is because the vast majority of the world believes that it is wrong. The ideas of personal freedom and free-will have spread around the world. That is why is it unlawful. It is not because we discovered some truth about slavery similar to the way people recognized the Earth rotates around the Sun.
Slavery might return one day when people's attitudes change. You may claim that it is unethical and they would say it is not. Both views stand on similar ground. However people may one day think the Sun rotates around the Earth but it will not change the actual truth.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
I sent them an email: "I am getting a bit frustrated with your packet shaping in regards to Bittorrent. I realize that p2p torrent sharing uses a lot of your bandwidth resources, but I am unable to update World of Warcraft without it taking HOURS since they use torrents as their update protocol. Along with this, I think you may be opening up a can of worms in regards to lawsuits. If you (Cox Cable) are censoring your traffic, and therefore no longer deserve the title of common carrier, you may become liable for the actions of your users in regards to piracy, etc. Ironically, if you think about it, you are also putting yourselves in danger of getting a lawsuit from the RIAA." Used a bit of your wording, just for fun ;)