The article seems to imply that Cohen invented multi-source downloading, for example:
Cohen realized that chopping up a file and handing out the pieces to several uploaders would really speed things up. He sketched out a protocol: To download that copy of Meet the Fokkers, a user's computer sniffs around for others online who have pieces of the movie. Then it downloads a chunk from several of them simultaneously. Many hands make light work, so the file arrives dozens of times faster than normal.
Yet this feature has existed in other P2P applications for years.
Personally I think BitTorrent's core advantage over other file sharing technologies is also its core architectural weakness, namely its centralised nature.
This allows an editorial filter on content made available through BitTorrent, yet also makes a juicy legal target. Until recently BitTorrent's obscurity has protected it, but clearly this is no-longer the case.
(Disclaimer: I am working on some free software that is competitive with BitTorrent)
Bogus. One has to wonder if this is an effort by some company to force Apple to open up the iPod without having to pay Apple to license it like HP has. Somebody somewhere is always trying to get something for free.
I can't believe that someone is seriously defending DRM and blatently monopolistic practices, and not only that, but getting modded up for it.
If it were Microsoft doing this slashdotters would be unanimous in their condemnation.
In economics this is called the broken window falacy.
Only by some economists who are assuming full utilisation of resources, a bogus assumption.
If, by breaking the window, the boy causes the shop keeper to spend money that it might otherwise have kept in his wallet or safe, then it could be argued that he is helping the economy.
This is how World War II revived the US economy by taking it from serious under-employment during the great depression to full-employment during the war.
Unfortunately Freenet is an incredibly inefficient method of data transfer. Remember it was designed with security and anonymity as top priorities, performance comes as a distant third.
There are certainly some inefficiencies as a result of the anonymity, but they aren't as serious as you suggest.
For example, there is padding and encryption of all data, but the impact of this is minimised because the data is split up such to minimise the need for padding, and the encryption is childs-play for a modern CPU.
Further, Freenet does some pretty clever stuff with caching and minimising inter-node latency that is still, in many ways, way ahead of any other P2P applications (see this article for more info on that).
If, you could create a freenet that only hosts torrents, and not the files themselves,
Bad idea. Freenet is extremely capable of distributing large files. Just using it to distribute the.torrent files would provide no anonymity to those participating in the file distribution.
had searching for torrents (which they don't have),
Wrong, take a look at Frost, a client which sits on-top of Freenet and provides searching.
and then somehow tracks the downloads totally anonymously,
Which it will do provided we don't follow your first suggestion of only hosting the torrents on Freenet.
Going off-topic, freenet is not designed for unreliable peers, but yes potentially millions in number. The routing in freenet is dependent on historical data are requires nodes to be around for longer periods of time. It is one of the many reasons Freenet has *cough*issues*cough*.
Its a question of degrees. By "unreliable" I mean that it is relatively easy for an attacker to introduce a trojan node. Of course NGR requires that nodes stay around for a while.
This is the old myth that decentralized systems are always more scalable.
Strawman argument. I never said that all decentralised systems are always more scalable. Freenet, an example of a decentralised system, is more scalable than Tor, an example of a non-decentralised system.
I think the general problem with this kind of architecture is that it dodges the hard issue - which is how new peers get integrated into the network, and how do you ensure their reliability.
In Tor's case there is a centralised global list of all peers which must be added to manually by Tor's developers. This is fine with a small number of users, for which Tor clearly works well, but isn't practical when dealing with large numbers of users.
Freenet, for all its faults, is designed to deal with potentially millions of unreliable peers. It is its ability to do this that makes it such an ambitious project, and makes any comparision between it and Tor a situation of apples and oranges.
There is such a powerfull distribution mechanism in P2P network, if only the studios/majors/etc would understand it and use it
As someone who as lived this conversation many times with these people, the RIAA has nothing to gain from P2P, except, if they are lucky, a quick and painless demise. These people thrive on controlling the means through which people acquire entertainment. P2P, and the Internet in general, provide a far superior alternative that they don't control.
RIAA = Dinosaurs
Internet = Mammals
They are going to cause lots of people lots of pain as they go down, but down they will go (and it will be good for everyone but them).
And this is worthy of a /. story why?
on
Trillian 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
So a company releases a new Windows-only non-free piece of software that isn't exactly groundbreaking (yet another IM client - BFD!) and it deserves a slashdot story now?
Wow, the stories they don't post must be really boring if this is what does get posted.
I spent 4 years in the US as a H1-B worker (during which I created a company that employed 20 Americans and one other H1-B worker).
I never experienced any resentment. I am white, Irish, and as I acquire accents quickly, many people thought I was North American.
Humans are humans people! The place you happened to be born does not give you more of a moral entitlement to wealth or employment than someone who may have been born somewhere else.
If software patents pass into law, and negative effects become obvious, it would reinforce the anti-software-patent movement, and increase support to scrap software patents at a later time.
Perhaps, but in the mean time consider the incalculable damage that will have been done. This is the best possible time to prevent the introduction of software patents, if they do make it in to law then getting rid of them will be many times more difficult.
...as the representative of all Slashdot users*, I would like to publicly thank you and everyone else on the front line of this battle - I personally don't know where you must find the energy, but am very glad that you do:-)
Believe me, some of us have been writing and writing.
As have I. It is rather saddening to see how utterly useless many MPs are, Labour MPs in particular. My MP is Labour, at least he forwarded my letter on to Lord Sainsbury, to which I received a form reply, but he avoided actually taking a position against that of the government, irrespective of the persuasiveness of my arguments.
Sometimes I really wonder why these people bother getting in to politics just to be the puppets of their party whips...
You gotta admit that its a tour-de-force that they're pulling on us year after year.
What have you done about these issues? As Edmund Burke said:
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing".
So if you haven't actually tried to do something about this (perhaps by writing to your elected representatives, or donating to organisations that oppose software patents) then you have nobody to blame for this but yourself.
The anti-patent lobby in the EU has achieved great things, but the pro-patent lobby is extremely determined even in the face of a clear democratic mandate against software patents in the European and many national Parliaments. They know the system, they seem to have the support of many unelected Eurocrats, and they can and will exploit every possible loophole to legalise the over 30,000 illegally granted patents in the EU. This is yet another example of this.
The important thing is to keep up the pressure. When this topic has come up on/. in the past, there are always a few nohopers, who think any opposition to software patents is futile and we may as-well give up. These defeatists are the greatest allies of the pro-patent lobby, and they are wrong, as what progress we have made has demonstrated.
In short, keep fighting, don't give up, we have won a number of battles, but the war is far from over.
...I was wondering how long it would take for an Apple fanboy to try to justify this disgusting behavior.
Firstly, Apple does not have a monopoly over all uses of the word "iTunes", if that were true then Microsoft could sue anyone that criticised Windows for trademark infringement.
A trademark is only infringed by someone that is using the trademark to cause confusion as to the source or sponsorship of the goods involved. That is clearly not the case here.
This is (yet another) case of a big company abusing the law to crush the little guy. The fact that it happens to be lovely cuddly Apple doesn't change that.
(PS. I am a Mac user, but just because I like some of their products doesn't mean I must defend their every action)
An ISP whose HTTP cache contained child porn *could* be prosecuted and convicted as well. But it would be quite obvious to the Feds that they were an unknowning intermediary, so the likelihood of that would be small.
The exact same logic would apply to the operator of a Dijjer node.
But how obvious would it be to the Feds that the HTTP download from X porn site was being made by someone else but not you? Good luck with that
No more obvious than were it a download from an ISPs HTTP cache.
Yeah but it was proved last week that Dijjer keeps files transfering through your machine that you never intended to have happen. This deceitful and a nightmare for network admins.
Yeah, they are really trying to keep that quiet, which is why it is addressed by the first three questions in their FAQ. How very deceitful of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I think BitTorrent's core advantage over other file sharing technologies is also its core architectural weakness, namely its centralised nature. This allows an editorial filter on content made available through BitTorrent, yet also makes a juicy legal target. Until recently BitTorrent's obscurity has protected it, but clearly this is no-longer the case.
(Disclaimer: I am working on some free software that is competitive with BitTorrent)
If it were Microsoft doing this slashdotters would be unanimous in their condemnation.
I mean seriously, LJ has got to be the most hideously unusable website since Sourceforge - are there any usability guidelines it doesn't violate?
If, by breaking the window, the boy causes the shop keeper to spend money that it might otherwise have kept in his wallet or safe, then it could be argued that he is helping the economy.
This is how World War II revived the US economy by taking it from serious under-employment during the great depression to full-employment during the war.
For example, there is padding and encryption of all data, but the impact of this is minimised because the data is split up such to minimise the need for padding, and the encryption is childs-play for a modern CPU.
Further, Freenet does some pretty clever stuff with caching and minimising inter-node latency that is still, in many ways, way ahead of any other P2P applications (see this article for more info on that).
In Tor's case there is a centralised global list of all peers which must be added to manually by Tor's developers. This is fine with a small number of users, for which Tor clearly works well, but isn't practical when dealing with large numbers of users.
Freenet, for all its faults, is designed to deal with potentially millions of unreliable peers. It is its ability to do this that makes it such an ambitious project, and makes any comparision between it and Tor a situation of apples and oranges.
Or - download it through Dijjer.
RIAA = Dinosaurs
Internet = Mammals
They are going to cause lots of people lots of pain as they go down, but down they will go (and it will be good for everyone but them).
Wow, the stories they don't post must be really boring if this is what does get posted.
I never experienced any resentment. I am white, Irish, and as I acquire accents quickly, many people thought I was North American.
Humans are humans people! The place you happened to be born does not give you more of a moral entitlement to wealth or employment than someone who may have been born somewhere else.
* Not true
Sometimes I really wonder why these people bother getting in to politics just to be the puppets of their party whips...
The anti-patent lobby in the EU has achieved great things, but the pro-patent lobby is extremely determined even in the face of a clear democratic mandate against software patents in the European and many national Parliaments. They know the system, they seem to have the support of many unelected Eurocrats, and they can and will exploit every possible loophole to legalise the over 30,000 illegally granted patents in the EU. This is yet another example of this.
The important thing is to keep up the pressure. When this topic has come up on /. in the past, there are always a few nohopers, who think any opposition to software patents is futile and we may as-well give up. These defeatists are the greatest allies of the pro-patent lobby, and they are wrong, as what progress we have made has demonstrated.
In short, keep fighting, don't give up, we have won a number of battles, but the war is far from over.
Dijjer links to movies:
full set Day one Day two Day three Day four Day five
Firstly, Apple does not have a monopoly over all uses of the word "iTunes", if that were true then Microsoft could sue anyone that criticised Windows for trademark infringement.
A trademark is only infringed by someone that is using the trademark to cause confusion as to the source or sponsorship of the goods involved. That is clearly not the case here.
This is (yet another) case of a big company abusing the law to crush the little guy. The fact that it happens to be lovely cuddly Apple doesn't change that.
(PS. I am a Mac user, but just because I like some of their products doesn't mean I must defend their every action)
This article provides some background.
Or for Dijjer users, click here.