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ISPs & P2P, Getting Along Without Getting Cozy
penguin-geek writes "Researchers at Northwestern University have discovered a way to ease the tension between ISPs and P2P users. As we all know, there's been a growing tension between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and their customers' P2P file-sharing services, and this has driven service providers to forcefully reduce P2P traffic at the expense of unhappy subscribers and the risk of government investigations. Recently, some ISPs have tried to fix the problem through partnerships with certain P2P applications. The Ono project represents an alternative solution: a software service that allows P2P clients to efficiently identify nearby peers, without requiring any kind of cozy relationship between ISPs and P2P users. Using results collected from over 150,000 users, they have found that their system locates peers along paths that have two orders of magnitude lower latency and 30% lower loss rates than those picked at random by BitTorrent, and that these high-quality paths can lead to significant improvements in transfer rates. In challenged settings where peers are overloaded in terms of available bandwidth, Ono provides a 31% average download-rate improvement; in environments with large available bandwidth, Ono increases download rates by 207% on average (and improves median rates by 883%). Ono is available as a plugin for the Azureus BitTorrent client, an open tracker and an standalone service you can integrate into any P2P system."
Should be made standard into the apps if it does all that it claims.
nice idea...but looks like its piggybacking on Akamai's database for geo/ip mappings. I wonder if Akamai's TOS is friendly to this sort of stuff. In any case, this sort of feature could be built into the BT protocol itself to achieve the same end if necessary.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
As such, this will likely get spun as making the process of copyright infringement more efficient. Will that lead to this being blocked or otherwise pushed back against?
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
They are looking at the PHYSICAL location of the machines.
... that means NOTHING with regard to hops and latency between us.
As far as I am aware, most bittorrent clients already search for the machines with the fewest hops and lowest latency. Translation: machines on the same NETWORK as them.
Because if I am on Comcast at home and you have DSL through ATT at home and our homes are within 500' of each other
That's been the trouble with these "peer to peer" protocols. The routing algorithms have been horribly inefficient. It's quite possible to have the same data flowing in both directions on the same pipe. Multiple copies, even.
It might be cheaper for the telecom industry (which is big) to buy out the music industry (which is tiny) and just cache the RIAA's entire output on local servers. Just cacheing the top 100 releases or so might cut traffic in half.
(This won't scale to movies, though. Movies are bigger and more expensive to make.)
Sorry Mr AC, but in the US downloading MP3s is legal. Distributin copyrighted works without the copyright holder's permission isn't legal, but downloading anything except child pornography is legal.
The FBI may or may not come after you for uploading, but they will NOT come after you for downloading.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I'm no expert in this field, but this sounds to me like computers in isolated areas would suddenly get the shaft. Am I missing something?
Can't the torrent clients simply check the TTL value and then prefer closer peers?
Man talk about re-invent the wheel.
One thing that many people do not think about at first (but realize when it's pointed out to them) is that mechanisms which try to identify peers on the same ISP's network are anticompetitive. (That's why only the biggest carriers, like AT&T, support them.) Here's why. The cable and telephone monopolies have so many customers that the odds are there will be someone else on the same provider's network with the requested files. Small ISPs, on the other hand, will rarely if ever have someone with that file and so will still experience a great impact from the cost shifting and congestion caused by P2P. Hence, you can see why the big guys are cautiously embracing schemes like "P4P" as an anticompetitive weapon to block new entrants -- particularly wireless ones.
Setting aside the Net Neutrality implications of this development if it were to enter mass deployment (use this P2P software!), ISPs will loathe to actually install this technology. It would leave them implicitly condoning P2P, the majority of which is used for copyright infringement. Besides, it'd cost them actual money, compared to lobbying and whining at government.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
It's an interesting approach - you can also do things like identifying IP addresses by BGP Autonomous System Number, which will tell you what sites are in the same ISP, but you might get better P2P performance by connecting to a peer on another ISP in your same city than a peer who's on your ISP but across the country. (Most ISPs seem to assign ASNs on roughly a continent or country level.) So sometimes you'll get better P2P performance by picking close ping times, but as the article says, pinging lots of potential peers can take a long time.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But since this was about torrents you will indeed upload parts of or the whole work yourself aswell.
What about the Comcast effect? Although a joint venture would seem to help both sides, the bottom line from the network/legal/politician/*AA side is [voice of James Hetfield] P2P BAAAAD! [/voice].
Making P2P more efficient by aligning peer selection with ISP structure makes the ISP side less grouchy about it. This is good. The more precisely you can do that, the more you reduce the impact on the ISP's performance and costs, as well as getting better performance for the P2P system. So they're generally going to like it, though it's obviously a balancing act, because better alignment means you can also find the bottlenecks in your ISP and fill them.
So no, as long as you're not bothering Akamai too much, and as long as this works reasonably well with your ISPs, it's not going to get pushback.
Back when Napster was still around, it did some work with some universities to set up peering student-student rather than student-outsider, because that way most of the bandwidth stayed on the fat cheap university LANs rather than the thinner and rapidly-overloaded links to the Internet. Some of this happened naturally (students would show up as having fast connections, so students would generally upload from other students, but outsiders would also try to upload from students.) Napster could do this fairly easily, because they had a centralized database. Bittorrent and most other P2P systems today are designed to avoid having a centralized database, because it was a target.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The current torrent clients do not RANDOMLY pick an address. They check latency and hops.
Sure, it's easy to get HUGE IMPROVEMENTS when you choose to compare yourself against something that no one does anyway.
I'll wait to see what their app does when compared to the current methodology of the clients. I'd guess that it would be WORSE than simply measuring the latency and hops. Which is already done and done rather more efficiently than their method of querying 3rd party servers.
AFAIK there are often ISPs in BFE that can give you a decent ttl. It's just a PITA getting them to honor their TOS so your packets don't go MIA.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
I understand why location aware choking is helpful to ISPs - it reduces border traffic and their costs. I can also understand how location aware peer selection on the tracker can help torrents that have too many peers for every peer to be connected to every other peer. So does this client plugin or any other client based location aware selection/choking make any real difference for users? The classic tit-for-tat choking algorithm means you unchoke the peers giving you the fastest download. It doesn't matter if they are close or near, have high latency or not - fast is fast and slow is slow. In the end, throughput is the only thing that matters. Maybe location can be a useful weight for optimistic unchoke, so you can potentially find fast peers sooner, but that seems like a pretty small optimization.
Unfortunately, the paper for Ono isn't available yet.
Check out Lifestyles of the Poor and Obscure's first sentence. "I seem to be having tremendous difficulties with my lifestyle."
.shn file of The Station's live performance of The Fog (written and performed by them) using bittorrent rather than the slower DL from archive.org, how would I know that I didn't download Radiohead's completely different song of the same name? How do I know Madonna didn't record a song named "The Fog"?
"Lifestyle" is linked to uncyclopedia's entry on "your mom", making an obvious joke to anyone who's read HHGTTG (which is mentioned in the second sentence). Now, if a small snippet of a song infringes Sony-BMG's copyright on its rootkit-infested garbage, then I just infringed on the late Mr. Adams' copyright. How is that different from a small snippet of a file, except that what I wrote is readable and recognizable but a small piece of a torrent probably isn't??
Plus, when I'm trying to download the
I've never once heard a Madonna song that didn't make me change the station. There's no possoble way her label could lose a sale to me. However, should I download a Madonna song by accident and like it (not likely but possible) they may well gain a sale. But Madonna isn't the one they want to keep out of your ears, it's the indies that Sony doesn' want you to hear.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Cool, now me and my neighbors will have something to talk about when we get notices from RIAA! Talk about bringing the love to a local level
This may be a stupid question, but if ISPs are looking to save on bandwidth, why don't they turn on IPv6? IPv6 multicast solves the problem of efficient 1:N distribution way better than P2P apps.
Have a large file you want to distribute and want to do so using 2mbps of bandwidth? Pump the file in parallel using 1mbps, 512kbps, 256kbps, 128kbps, 64kbps and 32kbps so that people with all kinds of pipes can download it, and pump it in a loop. Add some amount of redundancy to each stream, and you are good to go.
It's even easier for real-time content such as TV and radio, as a dropped packet here and there is no biggie.
What am I missing?
There are two seperate issues between the ISPs and the P2Ps. The details of the two issues tend to get mixed according to the perspective of the person making the argument.
The first issue is the amount of data (the bandwidth issue) that the P2P downloader is using relative to the amount of bandwidth that the other ISP users are consuming. The other issue is the ability of the so-called owners the downloaded information to legally extort money from P2P users.
The P2P users are the best customers of the ISPs. In time, the technology improves to handle the growing needs of the P2P community, and the P2P'ers are willing to pay (within reason) for faster access and greater bandwidth. P2P'ers will pay $30-$50 more a month to the ISPs than the dial-up'ers who are mostly checking e-mail, reading specialized websites, and doing eBay trading. This makes the P2P'ers a significant revenue source to the ISPs.
"Significant revenue source", in case you didn't know, is the most important three word phrase in the English language. "You're Under Arrest" is the second-most significant phrase in English. And, of course, the more 'sig rev source' that you have, the less you have to concern yourself with hearing "You're U A!" But, nevertheless, it can still happen. Especially in the current times of great change such as the present when one former source of sig revenue (the music industry) is evaporating and others like the P2P community are rising.
Generally the law follows the money. The golden rule states that he who hath the gold maketh the rule. But, in the real world, money and law tend to be 90 degrees out of phase. Situations arise where a disappearing revenue source has, for a certain period of time, the ability to envoke the legal system to extort money from people in greater proportion than its social usefullness would have it deserve. The music industry, and its extortion arm - the RIAA, is in that position. This industry is entering its 'zombie' phase, in that it is already dead but doesn't seem to know it. Death for a business is a different concept than it is in biology. Zombie businesses are basically unsustainable in the long run because their economic model has been broken, but their structures are still functioning. Basically the RIAA is just the music industry running around like a chicken with its head cut off. It can't last, but you don't want to be in its way before it just falls over.
Since the RIAA uses the ISPs to identify the P2P'ers that it has selected for random extortion, the P2P'ers don't trust the ISPs to come up with a working technical solution to the bandwidth problem. So we have the current situation that is bad for everyone. Personally I work around this by not downloading industry product: I get it in disc format from the local library and copy it from the disc onto my home PC. Then I return the disc to the library for the next person to use.
The music industry insists that this is illegal in their parallel universe. And, there was a time when it appeared that the RIAA was going to take on the US Library Association. But the librarians have been dealing with assholes like this for 300 years and have their arguments in order. It always come down to this point: yes, library users copy the most popular music recordings. Which does cut sales to a minor degree. But the 50,000 libraries buy (at full retail cost) one copy each of thousands of titles that wouldn't be selling 50,000 copies if the libraries weren't buying it. Basically, the library makes available music for people to copy. But the libraries pay off the music industry to ignore it. Everybody is happy.
The P2P'ers need to adopt this model for distribution. They should find out who they are in their local areas, like a university, and then trade physical copies of the materials that they are interested in. Like having ALL the recent music of particular genre or favorite films on a single USB 500Gi
Do you have any sort of citation for that? I don't believe that such a legal precedent exists, either in the courts or on the law books.
As far as I can tell, this is one of those urban legends which follows similar lines to the, "You can download this, but you have to delete it in 24 hours or buy it legally." There's no precedent for that, either, but it propagated for several years on the web.
Thank you, It's a challenge to get the geeks to consider you bizarre. I try and try again, but often get overlooked. It helps to prepare. I have a degree in economics and I write firmware.
I challenge you to write stuff on Slashdot that is more bizarre than anything that I can write. It's hard at first, but, like all things worth doing, it gets easier with practice. A touch of advice? Get a speech-to-text program and a microphone. That way you won't be limited by your typing skills. Ranting makes better comments.
The stated problem is that ISPs are upset with the P2P traffic because of its heavy load and want to throttle it. The proposed solution is supposed to increase my download speed. This seems to me to sound like exactly what will make my ISP even more upset.
If the ISPs' claims are correct, what would make them happy would be P2P software that throttles itself to a very low transfer rate. The longer it takes me to download (or upload) a file, the less bandwidth I'm using at any given time, and the happier the ISP is.
So why should an ISP be supportive of this proposed "solution"? Yeah, I'd like it. But I'd expect the ISPs to go after it and throttle it to a crawl. Or do as Comcast has been doing, and just outright kill any connections that look like file transfers.
What am I missing here?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Early connectors are likely to have high ratios unless they abandon right after getting their full file, and late arrivers are going to be mostly leaching, and to some extent that's ok - but most people will get their files earlier if people are more generous, and also they'll get them earlier if they download from faster-uploading peers, and obviously it's helpful to keep at least one seeder around so that there's always a source of all the parts. Generosity's a Good Thing in this kind of network.
Also, don't confuse ratios for a given torrent with ratios over a series of files - this isn't Napster. If you've been seeding for a week, that's nice to everybody, but you're only getting rewarded or penalized on This One File, and hopefully you've received it by now and aren't waiting for some tracker to hand out the last block which it's keeping in reserve to force the early participants to reach higher upload ratios before they can leave...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
OK... but the blame lies not on the "big telcos", but reality itself. Network effects exist; better to harness them than kvetch about them. What are the big networks supposed to do, pretend they don't exist and screw their customers in the process?
As you are explicitly mentioning reality: The big networks will do both, harness network effects and screw their customers in the progress.
In Soviet Russia, everything not compulsory is prohibited. In America, anything not prohibited is allowed.
Copyright in the US was originally To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. It protects the author against publishers.
When you upload, you are publishing. The RIAA is creating the urban legend, which is that downloading is illegal. Rather than ask for a citation saying it is legal, instead you should ask "what law makes downloading illegal?"
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Sorry Mr AC, but in the US downloading MP3s is legal.
Sorry, but US Copyright law )and that of most every nation on earth) is horribly broken. Assuming it's not Creative Commons or otherwise authorized, downloading an MP3 is indeed illegal. By downloading you are "creating a copy", and violating copyright law.
In fact it is a violation of law even if if you had no reason to suspect it was an infringement, a violation of law even if you had no particular intent to get that particular file, a violation of law even if the file was misnamed and you in fact believed you were downloading a perfectly legal file.
United States Code, Title 17, Section 504, Paragraph (c)(2) Statutory Damages:
(2) In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000. In a case where the infringer sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that such infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright, the court in its discretion may reduce the award of statutory damages to a sum of not less than $200.
So, lets say you surf to an ordinary website - lets say the front page of Slashdot for instance.
And lets say there's an icon on Slashdot's front page - lets say this one for instance.
And lets say for the sake of argument that someone on the Slashdot staff improperly "borrowed" that image from some company website.
Well, under US law everyone who visits Slashdot becomes an "innocent infringer". If you are sued, and the burden is on you to prove that you are an "innocent infringer", then instead of the usual $750 minimum damages the court is permitted to lower it to $200. Now multiply $200 by the number of people who browse the internet, and multiply that by the number of webpages someone may view, and multiply that by the fact that a page might contain a dozen or even a hundred items - each of which might be infringing and independently liable for $200. Just a single person engaging in several days of ordinary internet browsing could easily rack up a million dollars in technical copyright infringement liability - $200 at a time.
Any sane copyright law should be strictly aimed at the sending side of the equation. If I try to download a perfectly legal Creative Commons MP3, and someone instead sends me a misnamed Madonna song, it is absolutely insane for the law to say that I can be sued in court and be forces to pay Madonna a $200 minimum.
Just the other day I wrote another post on how copyright law says a substantial fraction of the entire population are technically FELONS.
The only reason copyright copyright law is tolerated as it is, is because copyright law is almost never a enforced. If copyright law were ever actually and strictly enforced, the entire planet would grind to a halt.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
When you download, you are either copying a file (illegal, per copyright law) or if someone could successfully argue in a court of law that the other person is doing the copying, then you are instigating/inciting copyright infringement by requesting the file. People have been charged with conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, you know.
The RIAA Is playing games with spin, though. They and the media claim that downloaders are being sued, when in fact it's uploaders who are being sued. Originally, this made sense by presuming that if you stop the uploaders, you necessarily stop the downloaders. It turns out, though, that's it's pretty hard to sue downloaders who aren't also uploading because they rarely leave tracks, unlike uploaders who necessarily leave tracks.
It's the best way to allocate limited resources. P2P breaks the asymmetrical bandwidth model not because it is any more efficient but rather because it allows the content provider's costs to be shifted from the content provider to the ISP. The original and explicit contract of the Internet, since its inception, has been simple: each side pays for its connection to the backbone. But some content providers don't want to pay their freight. They want to shift the cost of distributing their content to someone else. So, they turn users' computers into servers for their content. This has the additional advantage that since they aren't serving the content themselves, they can avoid being shut down if the content is illegal (which most of it is). Ironically, some of the people who are lobbying to force ISPs to carry P2P are claiming that they are advocates of "network neutrality." But P2P itself is not neutral! It dumps costs on ISPs, magnifying them hundreds or even thousands of times in the process. (For more on why this is so, see my slides at http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/pg0.html and http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/pg1.html.) As such, it violates the fundamental contract of the Internet. And it attempts to seize priority over traffic which is much more important. Should a kid downloading illegal music take priority over a life-critical telemedicine connection? Left unchecked, that's what P2P will do. It just makes sense to rein it in or block it.
Your linked qoute does not say downloading is illegal at all. It only says that if you infrnge copyright accidentally (for example, you didn't realise that your downloaded tunes were in a "shared folder") the damages are less.
I agree that copyright is horribly broken. Terms are way too long (twenty years, as in days past, would be about right IMO) and the statute should clearly state that non-commercial use of any kine (even distribution) is not infringing.
Oh, and that god-awful DMCA needs to be repealed.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
When you download, you are either copying a file (illegal, per copyright law)
Fair use, per copyright law. If copying for your own personal us is infringement, then please point to the statute that says so.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
There are several tests for fair use. Just passing one test may not be (and in many cases is not) enough to label an instance of copying as fair use of the work.
In fact, reading up on fair use, "personal use" isn't listed at all. Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. Â 107 states: In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. Copying an entire work for personal use runs afoul of point 3. Copying a work of entertainment probably runs afoul of point 2. Point 4 is the only consideration which obviously applies to copying for personal use--if you do so, you aren't likely changing the value of the copyrighted work (though I think that a compelling argument could be made that it does reduce the value when copied in large numbers.)
So again, the burden really isn't on me. Absent a ruling on "personal use" as fair use, there is no evidence I can see that such copying is not infringement. Even if that argument could be made, it's all speculation until a court rules on such a case.
And you still haven't pointed to statute that I, sitting on a jury, would say "yes, that fellow commited copyright infringement".
You are attempting to prove a point to me. I cannot prove a negative. The onus is on you.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Your linked qoute does not say downloading is illegal at all.
Ok, I glossed over that simple part with just the statement "By downloading you are "creating a copy", and violating copyright law". The basis for that is:
Title 17 Section 106 Exclusive rights in copyrighted works
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
etc.
When you save a copy, you are violating the reproduction right unless you have authorization or you can justify a Fair Use defense. Fair Use is an extremely complex and extremely fuzzy issue.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
quit cheaping out & upgrade the frackin' pipes already. gawd.