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P2P - From Internet Scourge to Savior
microbrewer writes "The MIT Technology Review has up a feature discussing the future of p2p networks. Specifically, they look at their role in content distribution, in the age of ubiquitous video services. Soon, the article asserts, the very same p2p-style networks that 'threatened' legitimate business may be the basis for most video-on-demand services." From the article: "So how could additional P2P traffic actually be a good thing for the Internet? Carnegie Mellon's Zhang points out that because peer-to-peer networks exploit both the downlink and uplink capacities of users' Internet connections, they distribute content more efficiently than centralized 'unicast' technologies. Zhang also says it should be possible to label P2P traffic so that service providers can track it and decide how much of it to allow through their networks. He and colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley have founded a startup, Rinera, to develop software that will give service providers such control."
Powerful technologies can be used for powerful things. Blizzard hired the bittorrent developer to help it distribute patches for World of Warcraft. P2P isn't illegal, using it for stealing is... P2P doesn't steal files, users do.
Cap bandwidth or GB of transfer per day. Don't tell me what I have the "right" to use this data capacity for. I know Zhang is only suggesting that it's possible, not necessarily a good idea, but don't give the ISPs any stupid ideas.
-b.
how are ISP's going to take to users maxing out their upload bandwidth 24/7 running commercial p2p clients? Somebody's got to pay for the infrastructure. I can't imagine the current networks aren't optimized for web browsing and light uploading in short bursts (i.e. pictures, word docs and the occasional wmv).
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It is a good theory that moving distribution to many decentralised locations will improve content distribution. But present-day distribution networks and large-bandwidth sites have already bought and installed the infrastructure to send large volumes of bandwidth to Tier-1 ISP distribution points, and so forth to smaller ISPs etc. This works today.
I am agreed that P2P isn't necessarily bad - in fact if P2P algorithms could favour traffic within the same subnet, or indeed allow an ISP to somehow inform the P2P client which nodes are on the same ISP, then an ISP could actually benefit as traffic fills up the internal pipes and less traffic has to be purchased from other ISPs.
To expand on this point, perhaps a multicast protocol like DHCP on the local subject could be implemented; call it the "ISP IP Directory" protocol, or IID, and basically a P2P client would send a multicast query to the IID address with a query ("is x.x.x.x within your network? Or within your preferred peers?") and the IID server would respond with a yes/no. Then P2Ps could optimally download from preferred addresses..!
A shift in thinking in the design of P2P protocols is required if we really want to optimise bandwidth and content distribution.
Please, for the love God, somebody post a recipe to limit gnutella and bit-torrent traffic through a masquerading linux firewall. My home firewall just dies even though ip connection tracking seems to have WAY MORE than enough free connections.... every time two of my kids fire up a p2p client simultaneously. Bouncing the iptables kernel module DOES bring everything back to life.
This is with a 2.4 kernel and iptables 2.7.
So. Back on topic. Internet scourge? Dunno. Intranet Scourge? Yup.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Wait. I pay for these networkes, Is ME who decide anithing. And I decide with my money to have P2P in full use, and not as 2th or 3th level.
No, you aren't paying for "these networkes", you are paying for exactly what the service agreement tells you, which is probably not unlimited usage. If you want to make the decisions, then pay the big $$$ for commercial, unrestricted internet access.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
"Zhang also says it should be possible to label P2P traffic so that service providers can track it and decide how much of it to allow through their networks."
We have lived in such a rare time. We had access to a communication tool like no other in history. And for a brief moment, it was free - totally free. Unencumbered by the dictates of rich and powerful, it was without parallel in history. Anybody who connected to this great web of systems had just as much chance to make his message heard as anyone else. My email of undying love to my wife-to-be received the same access and dispatch as the advertising messages of multi-national corporations. Anybody with a good idea could put it out there for the world to see and if it had merit, it would gain in popularity. Google sprang from this freedom. So did Slashdot. And goatse. And it was the unusual confluence of public money and free enterprise, along with some very smart and generous folks, putting energy into something new and unprecedented that made this happen. Take one bit out of the equation - say the taxpayer-financed Department of Defense, or a Linus Torvald, or a Netscape or the many other pioneers who contributed to this vast project - and it doesn't happen, or it happens in a way that prevents the kid in the basement in Des Moines the opportunity to play.
But people who have acquired wealth and power don't like it when any old slob can do what they do. I mean, what good is being rich and powerful if it doesn't let you move to the head of the line? Now, a race is on to crush the experiment in liberty that has been the Internet. I guess it was too radical, too much of a danger to tyranny and concentrated wealth, to last very long.
We should all feel privileged for having seen the rise of this rarest of creatures - the fully open agora of information and ideas - and we should all feel sad that it couldn't be defended from the greedy and power hungry.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Seriously.. everyone i knew from close family to the furthest acquaintance didn't think broadband was necessary or worth it until p2p traffic caught on.
yeah... all those people are using that 4-10 megabits a second so cnn.com will load faster.. riiight.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Aside from technical issues, I think decentralization, peer-to-peer and so forth is the way to go. I don't want to be the little receiver of content from the Giant Corporation with DRM, monopoly price increases and whatnot. To me it makes sense (like Mbone did) and gives me more freedom. It allows me to publish content, which Youtube and whatnot can not censor if they wish. Which is precisely why it won't happen - we don't live in some federated decentralized anarchist council structure, we live in an imperialist, capitalist society where capital is centralized in a few hands, along with the media, political power for the most part, and so on. Which is why peer to peer decentralization has been under attack since day one.
On the contrary.. it's been the most reliable and comprehensive way for me to access out of print and obscure international titles.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
This has been said many times in the past few years, but it's still not feasible. One big reason YouTube is popular is because it is "Instant-On." No waiting for it to download. Generally no waiting for "buffering."
BitTorrent and the like are incompatible with that feature. BitTorrent does not download videos (or any other file) in order, and it's actually somewhat harmful to the torrent to distribute the same chunks to everybody. BitTorrent works so well because it gives everybody on the torrent unique chunks to pass along. Not good for streaming.
Secondly, ISPs drastically limit upload. This means that to get even close to realtime streaming downloads, the seeders (the content provider in this case) need to have massive bandwidth available. Otherwise, it will take to long for the torrent to really get going with other seeders, and the first ~50 people will have to wait to watch. So you're back to having powerful centralized servers again.
Plus, what benefit do I have for letting them use my upload? With most broadband connections, saturating the upload makes browsing at the same time slow with high latency. It might make sense for community sharing, where the content provider can't afford the bandwidth, and therefore I would want to contribute, but it doesn't make sense for companies to demand that of me.
P2P has one major problem - most broadband connections are asymmetric. Very, very asymmetric - ratios of 10:1 download:upload are common. Thus, in order for P2P to be able to saturate downstream bandwidth everyone would need to keep their P2P apps open for 10 times as long as it takes to download what they want. I don't think you're ever going to get a useful proportion of people to do this without a definite incentive. The cost of the bandwidth per movie is pretty small - I'd guess a few tens of cents. So econmically that's the value of the incentive you can offer. Are people really going to leave their PC on or an application open for hours and hours when they're not using it for the few tens of cents worth of incentive it would be economic to provide? I just don't see you average consumer doing this. It's cheaper to buy bandwidth from a major ISP than it is to 'buy' a hundred million tiny chunks of bandwidth from ten million customers. P2P works if people know they're helping the 'community' or getting something for free. Linux ISOs? P2P. Warez? P2P. Official Disney movies? Not so much.
If you want to reduce bandwidth usage then reduce the number of packets you have to send. Multicast is the right answer. MBone and IPV6 have been around for a long time now. They just aren't very profitable for ISPs, so the push will have to come from the content providers.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
The Internet is inherently a P2P network. Client/server architectures, though popular now, are a recent overlay on the TCP/IP architecture. Multicast, the Internet version of the broadcast popular in analog comms for decades, is still enough at odds with Internet architecture that it's barely used.
The Internet is a network of peer networks of peer hosts. P2P[2P[2P..]] is how everything works already. It's refreshing to see the decentralized, inherently "democratic" and primarily egalitarian Internet model starting to force centralized "old guard" media organizations to admit defeat. If they get on the bandwagon, they can be Ps in the P2P network. If not, they can keep their old network, and we'll barely notice they're gone.
--
make install -not war
MULTICAST.
Why is this technology being, by-and-large, ignored??
Around here at least, the best a consumer can get for upload bandwidth is 384kbps...without going to a T line from the phone company. If they can't handle supporting those paltry offerings, which their customers paid a non-platry sum to get...I'm going to have a hard time mustering much sympathy up for them.
myspace is the public bathroom of the internet.
Fixed that for ya.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
The trouble with "P2P" in its present form is that the topology is designed to evade copyright, not minimize bandwidth. Peering nodes aren't necessarily near each other. You can, and do, get situations where the same content traverses the same backbone paths multiple times. There's no end user penalty for having faraway peers, but it generates unnecessary load.
Reminds me of, many years ago, watching two coal trains passing each other in opposite directions. You don't see that kind of stupidity any more. Somewhere a trader will do a swap, rather than physically shipping the commodity around.
Netnews does this right, assuming you want a broadcast system. Netnews was designed for slow links and bandwidth minimization. As I point out occasionally, Netnews could easily handle the entire audio output of the RIAA, which is only a few gigabytes per day, using far less bandwidth than the present "P2P" systems.
What will work is ISP-level caching. AOL does this, although in a somewhat annoying fashion. In a different way, so does Akamai. We'll probably see more of that.
The DD-WRT firmware for WRT-54GL routers will do this. It can de-prioritize various kinds of packets, I suspect based on header inspection. I don't know whether it's smart enough to pick up on the obfuscated Bittorrent packets used by newer versions of Azureus (which was designed to be resistant to this sort of inspection), but it will get some of it.
I'm the "unofficial sysadmin" for my house, which is shared with several other single guys, by virtue of having the router in my room, and DD-WRT makes QoS fairly simple. Things that require real-time performance like SSH, Citrix, and online games get high priority, HTTP text transfers get medium, HTTP and FTP file transfers (don't ask me how it can tell the difference between HTTP text and HTTP file transfer) get low, and P2P apps get "bulk." This doesn't prevent P2P use, in fact at night it pretty much saturates the connection, but it does fairly well at keeping them from making other services impossible to use.
The other thing to do is just go to each of the client computers and kindly insist that they turn the maximum up and down speeds on their P2P apps down to something reasonable; that can improve the situation dramatically.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"Powerful technologies can be used for powerful things."
Every technology developed by man, from animal husbandry to television, has eventually resulted in its use to improve porn. Scientists refer to this as the "Porn Point". Once that is reached then a new technology to even further the use/distribution of porn will be developed until we reach the "Porn Singularity". The "Singularity" is a point in the future when porn progress will improve at an incredible rate unprecedented in human history. While scientists debate whether or not this event is a good thing, it is inevitable.
I'm sure, that whatever this p2p technology is, the future of it has something to do with porn.
There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think. -Victor Hugo
As the Internet evolves, more and more of everyday data storage for a variety of needs from storing family albums
to medical histories to corporate databases will be done in (highly encrypted and massively distributed)
data clouds, including P2P-hosted data clouds.
And more and more computing will be done in on-the-fly compute farms in grids, and some of this computing will no
doubt be hosted on legions of small P2P edge-of-net computing resources.
With such a scenario, how is it a good thing to allow ISPs to peer inside this cloud of encrypted and fragmented
and dynamically coalescing data to somehow exercise traffic cop (or border patrol) authority over it.
That sounds to me like the worst possible idea.
This idea is effectively the same as saying the ISPs should be staring over my shoulder as I surf or work over the net and
vetoing which websites or webapps I look at or use. No way. The net must be neutral to what it's carrying, or it just
won't work. And the P2P-based net of the future must have the same properties of neutrality to traffic that the
current general internet does (or should have.)
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?