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P2P Set-top Boxes To Revolutionize Internet
An anonymous reader writes "The European Commissions 7th Framework Program (FP7) is working on a project called Nano Data Centers (NADA) as part of the its future Internet initiative. NADA will seek to build an Internet architecture that delivers data from the edge of the Internet using set top boxes and Peer-to-Peer technology, instead of the network-centric architecture that stores and delivers content from data centers via Internet backbones. NADA is proposing a network of hundreds of thousands of set top boxes, hugely popular in Europe, to be essentially split into two — one side is the user interface side, the other a virtualised Peer-to-Peer storage client that stores and sends media in the same way a data center would. Ideally there would be millions of these boxes each acting as a mini data center — hence the Nano Data Center moniker.
The NADA project is convincing enough to have attracted some of Europe's largest telecommunications companies. Set top box manufacturer, Thomson SA, and European ISP, Telefonica, are among nine contributing partners to the NADA project.
NADA could see a dramatic reduction in the size and frequency of data centers that serve all kinds of media over the Internet."
I have never even seen a single set top box for Internet access here in Europe. Of course we use them for Cable TV but I doubt that's what they are referring to here.
in Spanish.
In unrelated news, RIAA sues Europe
"But your honor, its not a bittorrent client, its just my nano data center..."
... oh wait.
Develop an application that can inject whatever you want to share (porn, movies, music, pictures, computer software, stolen identity data, the list is endless) and you would have instant and free worldwide delivery. All you would have to do is insert the data at a public box (one not tied to your house or account) and there's no way to track it back to you.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
If something were to happen to your packets...
~C*cast
P2P is vile and evil. The RIAA and MPAA told me so.
I'm sure that the ISPs will not be happy about this idea - I see that none are on the partners list.
since it is derived from greek. suck on it - rest of the world!
USA! USA! USA!
This development was inevitable. P2P just WORKS better than a centralized topography. I just makes sense. I think that eventually, the internet will be exclusivly p2p.
That would allow a highly redundant network to add support to existing wired infrastructure where available and would extend reach of existing networks where necessary.
Of course it opens things up wide to MITM attacks, but any sensitive communication would be signed anyway. In addition, you could develop a system to mark bad nodes and avoid them when routing.
Where were you when they decided heaven was a more intangible idea... and you couldn't... you couldn't really get there...
How responsable would you be for the content stored on your Nano Data Center... I can see tons and tons of lawsuits.
Another thought, how much redundancy would be required to protect the data should Joe-Six-Pack accidently wipe his data. Or get his set top infected while surfing for porn.
This could be a good way to distribute malware, being that we'd (presumably) have access to someone else's data within our datacenter. What would stop me from replacing the content of the datacenter side of my box. Physical access is a bad idea.
There is also a privacy issue. If we know what is on our datacenter, we could track incoming requests and build a database of users/ips that like whatever content we are serving.
While their video sales business is DOA, this is what they're up to: http://www.bittorrent.com/devices/
It's making better use of what we already have. Truth is it has been beta tested to hell and back via torrent users. I guess my first question is tracking, ie your a media delivery site you want to track your downloads. How would you do this with a distributed system and how much overhead would be dedicated to data tracking and security.
That's been changing. People are now more aware of applications they can use to get the most out of their broadband. That's why we saw questions asked recently of the BBC's iPlayer. Who will foot the bill for the increase in bandwidth, we were asked. The ISPs? Or the BBC, who have 'caused' such an increase in traffic?
The answer is the ISPs, obviously. That's what they get paid for, by the customer - and usually the customer has already paid more than once, without realising it. In many cases an ISP's infrastructure has been HUGELY subsidised by public funds, and many have frittered away a lot of money they could have spent preparing for some kind of a high-bandwidth revolution.
But every time a new trend starts, and a new high bandwidth application becomes easily available to the masses, the situation gets a little worse for our ISPs. They're not nearly as prepared for this as they should be.
Here's a new application of P2P, one that could very easily replace regular scheduled television, and it's as easy to use as plugging in a box.
Eventually, the ISPs will have to raise those prices, and not just by a little bit, but by enough to tear up and relay a lot of their infrastructure.
It sounds like part of this plan includes passing on the electrical and cooling costs of the internet across the grid, vs. making the network centers pay for the power. Yes, the article says that the devices are more efficient ("these set top boxes don't consume a lot of energy,) but I'd still have to foot the bill for that energy.
This was bound to happen. P2P is very useful technology. The RIAA and friends have approached the copyright issue by (more or less) tarring this technology as either immoral or just plain wrong. Sooner or later, somebody else with a bit of backing was going to leverage P2P to solve a problem and then come face-to-face with the RIAA. This is just another illustration of how the RIAA have approached this whole thing all wrong.
I'd like to see NADA become commercial to see how this would pan out.
The problem with putting anything that provides bandwidth to others on the edge is that it is really inefficient from an aggregate cost-of-bandwidth view.
Bandwidth to a colo facility costs an order of magnitude less than bandwidth to an end-user's location. Thus shifting to a P2P or distributed architecture like this for providing content doesn't actually reduce the costs, instead it substantially increases them. It just shifts the cost from the content provider to the end user or the end user's ISP.
The only real savings is cooling: at the user's home, they don't have the thermal load so they don't need the AC to cool the end-point node. But OTOH, the end user's cost of electricity is higher, so that may be a wash as well.
Test your net with Netalyzr
What exactly is the edge of the internet? Can you cut with it? Should there be some kind of safety warning?
And how exactly does a series of tubes have an "edge"?
Those who live by the sword, get shot by those who live by the gun...
I gather Cable + movies (maybe eventually games) is what they are after here. It seems as though the idea is to be able to deliver content faster and with less stress on a centralized data center than we have now for things like digital cable et al.
The thing I am wondering though is how would they maintain quality with such an uncontrollable system. Basically it seems that it will, of course, benefit the content delivery company in reducing bandwidth overhead. But where is the benefit to the user? What happens when a particular "torrent" is less popular? Will it be able to stream fast enough for the end user to see the video in reasonably close to real-time? Or, would they be distributing every file equally? essentially consuming the user's bandwidth and hard drive space for files they don't use/need/watch?
meep
The internet revolts more often than post-colonial Africa.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
I plan to prove this false once and for all, by sailing around the internet and arriving on east Asian web sites from the other side.
From the IETF P2PI Meeting are here.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Well, NADA (spanish) means NOTHING (english), that's what's all about, hot air, and beatiful and inexpensive bridges.
What's in a sig?
So while this may be fun and neat for content providers or data centers: what incentive does the user have to participate?
Company: Hi! Try our new box, it passes off our expenses to you by utilizing your personal internet connection and utilities. It's great! Hopefully you won't have to ever use your internet connection for something personal though, because it's our box, and we need your bandwidth. Please kindly pay, and enjoy, any bandwidth overage fees on our behalf.
It could be that the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
1. This article is very thin on facts.
2. How does the consumer benefit? Will my entertainment costs be lower? Communication costs get lower? Doubtful. This is before RIAA members either torpedo it, or use it to raise entertainment costs.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
As if thousands of Comcast execs screamed, ripped their own intestines out with their teeth and fell silent.
"Hundreds of thousands" of these little boxes will surely use more electricity than a proper data center with equal power/capacity.
Well it should be obvious by now that local-range P2P is the solution to today's and especially tomorrow's traffic problems; i have a 30MBit/s connection and 100MBit/s over cable is on the verge here.
On a sidenote it should be noted that most telcos, unlike what most people are telling you, are only interested in throttling BT or other P2P because of the massive traffic load this causes, and not because of legal issues; in fact they couldn't care less whether a file is legal or illegal as long as you pay the traffic, court orders and being held responsible in your stead aside of course.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
NADA que ver aqui, por favor pasar ahora a lo largo de
/. did not want to put the correct character in, at least during the preview!
Well...really - NADA to see here, now please move along...
Note: sorry about the 'i' instead of "Ã" (i+ascent). For reason
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Vaporware from an organization called Nada.
I laughed out loud with that summary.
Eek!
Am I the only person who had a mental image of the Cisco Systems campus breaking out into the Hallelujah Chorus when I read this headline?
I proposed this, along with a number of other similar and supporting technology many years ago. We worked on it for a while and pitched to quite a few big (multi-million dollar single investment type) venture capitalists after working on it for a few years in 2005.
Some where interested, some where not. Of two notable ones, one wanted some more work on it before investing and another said they'd be interested if we found some one else to join up with. I stopped looking when we spun another company was spun out from the project which required less resources to run.
I still have all the documentation though.
Let me get this straight in my head. You want to charge me for your service and then use my bandwidth and electricity? You want to run bittorrent 24/7 on my internet connection to distribute files that I may not be allowed to view myself? How does this benefit me? (Listens to crickets chripping in the deafening quiet.) That's what I thought...
I seem to recall an April Fool's prank post from the 80s, in which someone "discovered" that he could store his backups "for free" on other people's systems by uucp'ing it via a circuitous path that would bring it back to him two weeks later. (Sort of like a big, slow ring buffer.)
For some reason, this scheme reminds me of that...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
It's like Miro player or Joost, except half a dozen years late and controlled by big European media conglomerates!
I guess we were misinformed. Peer to peer transmission of data is wonderful... as long as the Right People are the only ones allowed to use it.
If you use P2P instead of centralized server to move the same total amount of data, what's the problem? In fact, it should be beneficial for the ISP if most of the traffic is going within its own network; any decept P2P software should prefer the topologically nearest peers. I thought it's mostly external traffic that the ISPs have to pay for, while their own infrastructure has fixed costs.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Here is what is going to happen:
The big media companies are going to have a finger in designing these boxes.
They are going to lock them down.
They are going to use YOUR bandwidth to push THEIR content that you may not even have bought or have access to.
I am not going to let a media company leech off my bandwidth so that they can push content I don't even own, want or can access.
Move along. Nothing to see here.
The similarity, conceptually, between NADA and Freenet is quite interesting.
I have only been explaining this architecture since 1990 or so, "Head in hands shaking it" why doesn't anyone get it when I explain it!
Worse yet when they do "get it", it's like some new invention as if they never heard it before.
I have tried 3 times to get set top box companies going to do this since 1994 only to have "money people" not "get it".
Decentralized is the solution with high demand, high up time services for the internet.
Like Google for example. It's also worked great for Torrent and Skype.
There isn't any reason, Set top Boxes, for video aren't doing it right now, but fear and incompetence. When they do, Cable as we know it IS DEAD!!!! Oh youtube may also go by the way side.
They just need to get that couch potato channel flipping going correctly. This several seconds to change channels blows.
If I sound in an off mood maybe my Mc Donald's coffee wasn't hot enough.
I also have a badly explained idea for an OS that does this type of "millions of these boxes each acting as a mini data center"
http://www.dnull.com/os/ Amorphous OS - It came out better in the talk...
Isn't this the whole frigging concept of Peer to peer and the WHOLE Internet FTP Unix bla bla bla back in the 1970 and 80!!!! I mean before PC's were even allowed to play on the Internet as more then Dumb Terminals.
Has the web perverted people view of things so much that when they realize they can use their local PC for more then viewing web pages it's some major revelation.
Some of you need to go read the "Hobbes' Internet Timeline" and learn a bit more about how this network came to be.
Below is a good paper I did on this in 2003.
http://www.videotechnology.com/economics_of_video.htm
2005
http://www.videotechnology.com/startrek/
Video Internet: The Next Wave of Massive Disruption to the U.S. Peering Ecosystem (v1.2) By William B. Norton
http://www.blogg.ch/uploads/Internet-Video-Next-Wave-of-Disruption-v1.2.pdf
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Johnson: Why don't we get the users to use peer to peer software to distribute media to each other?
ISP CEO: No that's a terrible idea! They'll get sued by the RIAA and MPAA. I have a better idea. Why don't we get the users to use peer to peer *hardware* technology to distribute media to each other?!?!?
Johnson: Brilliant idea sir! That way we can charge them for the hardware :P
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
FINALLY, IT'S HERE!!!!
/.'ers here concerned about personal security, liability, and energy cost associated with this sort of move, but consider this:
... decentralizing networks at the same time as decentralizing energy resources, has the potential to effectively rebalance the power structure of the western world by neutering greedy telcos and oil profiteers of power while enabling and empowering individuals and communities to have a more effective, participatory democracy.
Words can't describe how stoked I am that distributed computing technology is finally being implemented on a large, public scale. So far, I've noticed many
The boxes will likely be intended to function as a single large data-center cluster, spread out over the entire net, with the "distributedness" of it all being transparent to the user of any particular node. This means that they will probably encrypt the locally-stored data caches , both to protect the data from tampering by the local user, and to protect the local user from liability associated with the data.
Likely, individual files will be stored in pieces across the network, much like a striped raid, or existing BitTorrent networks, but with the potential of additional redundancy of the pieces mirrored across several nodes. Files may even be mirrored to more nodes the more often they are requested or accessed. This should allow for ruthless checksumming, and for files to be rebuilt in the event that a node's cache has become damaged, corrupted, infected, or whatever, not to mention that files could be fetched from elsewhere if a particular node is simply not available.
Energy costs to the individual user will probably increase, but bandwidth costs don't ultimately have to. Once the data and transmission methods have been successfully decentralized, then bandwidth can be decentralized too! Imagine if all you needed in order to have a gigabit internet connection in your home was a single gigabit-wireless router (which might be invented by the time this is plausible)... because it just connects to your immediate neighbors' gigabit-wireless, which just connects the whole damn city on an ad-hoc network, connected to other cities with existing wireless transmission lines (cellphone towers that might have been/could be publicly funded)... and since the data is all spread-out, the network traffic is all spread-out too, limiting congestion largely to those long-distance transmission lines.
Although I am generally against increasing energy cost to individuals, this new network model, together with increasing pressure and prices from centralized energy providers, may spawn more public interest in a distrubuted switching power grid of home solar cells, windmills, etc, to power the distrubed network evenly.
The result of these two possibilites combined
LET FREEDOM RING!! I'm on board!!! Who's with me?
-=[You cannot consistently judge this statement to be true.]=-
NADA!
You want ME to power and host part of YOUR datacenter to distribute data, some of which might be questionable, like CHILD PORNOGRAPHY, for which I can be held liable?
</hyperbole>
I don't think so.
I knew there was a reason I don't watch TV: no need for a set top box that I don't control.
In Liberty, Rene
Gamers and Pirates? And yet this helps neither party stop strangling the internet?
I suppose turn based games would be playable through this, but then again, those are not bandwidth intensive. So this doesn't lighten the load from real games, you know a part of that thing called the video game industry, you know that thing that's the biggest entertainment industry now. And, getting bigger.
This doesn't lighten the load from pirates either. As I'm sure, through the infinite wisdom of the people behind this project pimping themselves as contributors to the future of our internet (you know those people with that personality like the damn people at Saint Jude's Hospital for cancer patient children) they would not let their precious NADA project go wrong. When they're asked to address piracy and porn (you know, those things that get stuck in the inter-pipes like hair in a shower drain) they're gonna say "Oh no! Porn? That's immoral! We will guarantee that no porn gets on your local internet servers! Piracy? That's like stealing! There won't be a drop of pirated data on there!"
The response of the interviewer will be the bird, flying high and dipping left and right until ultimately poking him in the eye and flashing it again and again in his remaining eye while he walks out the door. With any luck it will be a writer for Techdirt, you know, that one who always pimps piracy and finds crafty ways to make everyone who's not down with piracy look like a mentally disabled person. A mentally disabled person that was hit in the head one too many times.
Oh, wait, it is NADA.
In spanish, nada means nothing. That would sound like "AT&T investing in NOTHING".
Will direct tv use this for there on demand any time soon?
Either this scheme's proponents are hoping to sneak a lot of their costs onto other people's plates, or they have a seriously dubious grasp of the economics of IT.
In effect, bittorrent's success is not based on its efficiency as a file transfer mechanism(which is actually quite lousy); but on its effectiveness as a download micropayment system(which isn't fantastic; but is better than anything else we have). Bittorrent reduces the cost, to the distributor, of distributing a file by making it easy for downloaders to contribute their own bandwidth. Even more conveniently, for anybody with a fixed-price internet connection, the marginal cost of their bandwidth contribution is near zero. Unfortunately, the total cost of distribution is actually fairly high, since bittorrent uses a lot of "last mile" bandwidth(particularly upstream last mile bandwidth) which is quite limited and expensive compared to bulk datacenter bandwidth. If micropayment were possible, and if individuals paid for bandwidth per-unit-use, rather than fixed rate, it would be cheaper for them to just pay the file distributor's upload costs directly, at bulk rate, rather than "in kind" at retail rates. The exact same argument applies for electricity and disk space. Bittorrent is great because it is an efficient method of aggregating the limited amounts available at zero(ish) marginal cost, not because it is actually efficient per unit.
Given this, I find it hard to judge TFA's scheme kindly. Either it is based on a frankly delusional understanding of relative costs, or it is essentially a cynical attempt to shift costs onto end users. This will only get worse if the ISP pressure toward caps and overage fees gets stronger, since the amount of "free" bandwidth will decline, and the impact of shifted costs will become much more direct.
Internet bandwidth is most expensive at the edges, and latency to other users is the longest. It's the worst place from which to serve up data; you want to do that from servers in the "middle" of the Net. What's more, the most scarce and valuable resource of the Internet is bandwidth near the edges. Put the servers out there, and you'll raise the cost of broadband deployment and exhaust the resources that are already there. Anyone can buy space on a fast, cheap server at a server farm for far less than it costs to serve data from the edge. So, why don't the people who are running this project just do that? There's only one possible reason: they want to get users and ISPs to give them these resources for free. Which just doesn't wash. If use of these devices became widespread it would either drive up the cost of broadband tremendously or be banned from networks outright by businesses and ISPs. And deservedly so. It's a bad idea.
P2P rebroadcasting: Like multicast, except with multiple competing and incompatible standards, and no need for skilled network administrators.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
What would really be cool is adding a mesh network based on Mobile IPv6 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_IPv6 )
That way if me and the folks in my building all need Vista SP1, it could download to one of our set top boxes over wires and then distribute to the 400 others by means of the local mesh network.
I could envision bringing my mobile mesh P2P set top box to work where we have an open 100Mb Internet connect & letting the node fill, then I could take it home and everyone in my area with sucky bandwidth could benefit from my cache.
This sounds like something that will never occur, and people will probably shut it off or cap its up speed to make the games/voip etc lag less.
What the ISP's could instead do is actually start using IPv6.
1. It removes all the difficulties of NAT, making the concept of P2P a non-issue (all peers will be servers with no port-forwarding-mumbo-jumbo).
2. It will add multicast which will enable TV and other streaming media to be very effective.
But of course, adding another yet-to-be-used-for-botnets layers on top of internet, incorporate it into set-top-boxes will work as good? I don't think so.
I've worked close to this field, in Spain (the Telefonica-country). Telefonica seems to believe that this whole set-top-box-provided internet is something the rest of the world wants, blurrying the line between the network and the services even more...
It's like if someone tried to sell MySpace: "Buy MySpace-internet, $50 per month (can be used for mail too)"...
Yeah, the rest of us might choose a regular internet connection and not some bundled crap.
i think the greatest value in p2p is its potential to defeat network censors