No, I was going to be flying out tonight. It was starting tomorrow. I doubt that air travel is sufficiently close to normal for most participants to get there. My plan of bringing along my two sons was definitely out and I'm still not sure about the postponed conference.
OK, what you need to do is come up with the crack yourself and publish it so we can all see how it's done. I think Phil Zimmerman did a great service for his country by standing up to the thugs (over PGP). But I don't expect anyone to willingly expose himself to litigation, imprisonment, and possible bankruptcy so some slackers can quietly cheer in the background. What I do hope is for people to speak up about truly despicable laws like DMCA and boycott companies like Adobe that invoke it.
Re:Is better TV definition needed ?
on
The Joys of HDTV
·
· Score: 1
Oh, bite me. I was traveling in Holland and Germany last summer so I watched some PAL. Big deal. 25 Hz interlaced at barely more resolution than NTSC. And the programs were wretched: either recycled American TV or poor imitations thereof. I'll take American (and Canadian and British) TV any day over what I saw in Amsterdam. Just to reiterate there is a huge difference between HDTV and the previous weak ass systems but you need to get material that was produced for it, not the lame upconverted stuff.
I suppose I should admit that impressive though it is I'm not willing to pay the prices requested so far. There are too many other more interesting things to do with that money. But the price and time will come. So far I've spent $50 for a WinTV-D card.
I think it is a foregone conclusion that ElcomSoft will be releasing the source code to this program in any case. That is what they indicated they would do if Adobe were to try to make things more difficult for ElcomSoft. Unlocking a binary may be the least of the damage. With the source code it will be possible to produce versions for several other platforms.
Who is the dumb fool? You can't make a digital copy of anything you want from a DVD? DeCSS software is available for multiple platforms. I use DVDExtractor for the Mac but there are many options. The newer examples don't require knowledge of a specific key since CSS is so weak it can be cracked on the fly. Before insulting the intelligence of everyone else try to avoid making uninformed, over-the-top claims in the same breath.
You need to work on basic concepts like the requirement that a cause has to precede an effect. Napster did not happen early enough to be the cause of any of this. All of this technology pre-dates the brief flush of excitement over Napster. Specifically all the planning and engineering for encrypting over the air television has been in process for years. If there had never been a Napster, we would still be facing this crap.
I agree with the sentiment of the previous article. Furthermore this has no impact on P2P exchanges of files and information. My impression is that this proposal just improves the situation both for those who want to purchase their cable TV via the net and those who don't care for that idea.
All of you seem to have missed the real reason why the cube failed. It's because the flat panel displays were still too expensive. The 15" display was too small and the 17" display came too late with a defective price tag (too high). If you could throw in a sufficiently inexpensive (and large) flat panel then you have the entire futuristic package and possibly herds of folks buying them for their living rooms. A wireless keyboard and mouse (RF, NOT infrared) like I have for my grungy PC would have been nice, too. But if you team it up with a plain old CRT then you've canceled out most of those style points. It also leaves you vulnerable to demands for expandability. If the whole package were a work of art you could simply dismiss and ignore such quibbles.
Jeez, you sound like the executives in Dilbert who get stuck in a conference room and die because they get locked in and can't figure out how to use the telephone. Why not look through the menu choices and select "Eject" to remove the floppy? That you don't understand the trash can short cut doesn't excuse you from using the obvious solution and then engaging in sarcastic, pinheaded commentary.
For those who want to know here is the historical reason for the trash can short cut. Apple introduced the ubiquitous 3-1/2" floppy disk to the world (it was made by Sony). They promised to make available an external floppy drive (this was before hard drives were readily available) but took forever because that would limit their ability to deliver computers. So the problem was how do you implement a GUI to move files from one floppy to another?
Instead of completely removing a volume when it was ejected they left behind a grayed-out image. It was still possible to interact with this ghostly image and in particular you could drag an icon from an unmounted floppy to a mounted floppy. At that point the OS would eject floppies and request the other until the transfer was complete. When you were really done with a floppy you would drag the greyed-out image to the trash.
The short cut became to drag a floppy to the trash so that it was ejected and and grayed-out image was also removed. For some mysterious reason this behavior was preserved for years before it finally became customary (with OS 8 or 9?) that ejecting a floppy would not leave behind the ghostly image. The transition phase couldn't have been more than a few months but the baggage remained for years. The damn short cut is still there in OSX!
Naw, your reply was to a different anonymous coward. I didn't want to directly connect my business with my personal opinion. The second person you were replying to has a very important point. Until quite recently copyright law only applied in a meaningful way to companies in the copyright industries who would employ lawyers to interpret and influence its evolution. Now that they need and want it to apply to everyone they plan to extend their industry brokered deals as if it were legitimate public policy, for example the theory that every time a digital copy is loaded into memory there is an actionable copy that requires a license. Ha, try to get that one to pass in the clear light of day. Read Littman's book "Digital Copyright" to see all the sordid details.
Anyhow, buckling under preemptively to every outrageous demand of these robber barons (don't forget the Constitution introduces this topic to encourage the eventual enrichment of the public domain, not its evisceration in back room deals) will do nothing but encourage their rapacity. This is much bigger than just a specific case. Don't forget they already lost this case in "Sony vs Universal Studios" so they are trying to rewrite history by fiat.
Please remember that copyright law is only something which a state decides to promote or not based on its purported beneficial effect. While copyright is specifically in the US Constitution, there is nothing about intellectual property which tends to be a term used to obfuscate by setting up false analogies. Copyright is a government enforced, time-limited monopoly used to promote the dissemination of knowledge for the advancement of arts and sciences. Fair use is there because it also promotes the dissemination of knowledge for the advancement of arts and sciences. The primary good here is not the government enforced monopoly despite the beliefs of the copyright cartels. Insofar as the current law tends to impede the advancement of arts and sciences, the case could be made that it has become mostly counter-productive and a possible candidate for the ash heap of history.
With the existence of nearly zero cost replication of digital data of any type it may no longer be logical for society to try to do anything as fraught with danger as attempting to prop up monopolies. (Especially if it requires the introduction of police state laws and practices). The usefulness to society of maintaining these monopolies may have been mooted by the new dynamic inherent in digital media. If the only (or principal) beneficiaries are media cartels which as a result promote the dissemination of meretricious tripe to the near exclusion of all else, maybe we should consider getting off this particular train.
In the end I don't know if it matters much how we reason about some of these issues. When a dam is proposed for a specific location it might be discovered that its presence could lead to the extinction of a particular species which could not survive in the new habitat. People might have the option of moving the proposed dam but in this case we are talking about foregoing some of the principal benefits of a ubiquitous, unfettered, digital network. If the choice comes down to extending copyright law as media cartels desire or building a robust, largely unconstrained internet, I'd rather work on building the infrastructure of a new P2P framework where a number of new applications can evolve.
No, file type and creator information is not stored in the resource fork of Mac files. That is directory meta information which is in neither fork. When a Mac file is transfered it is first flattened together with directory meta information which is extracted at the receiving end in order to reconstitute the file. One such standard is MacBinary. On the other hand your observation about file name extensions is mostly valid. However, services like Internet Config tries to provide PC style mapping according to file name extension on the assumption that such a file comes from a PC.
Am I missing something crucial here? You get DeCSS and that's all she wrote. All this wailing and moaning about the end of civilization seems pointless. You don't think there will be a "DeCSS" for this pathetic encrypted digital TV effort? The reason these schemes are ALWAYS cracked is that they are peddling snake oil, not because their opponents are always brilliant. It doesn't hurt that the opponents are often brilliant, but the fundamental problem is the attempt to share a secret with a few million of your closest friends and hope it doesn't get out. This is compounded by the phenomena described by Bruce Schneier. When one person successfully analyzes the scheme, that knowledge is encapsulated into software which is distributed to the rest of the world.
I made a bookmark to your paper to take a look later this weekend but after noting your reference to that ignorant, and questionably motivated, paper by Jordan Ritter I don't know if it is worth my time. If the goal is to connect everyone to everyone else for every single query then any scheme that is ever proposed will have a damn scaling problem. But the point is that the gnutella protocol makes no such attempt. Do any of you actually bother to read the protocol documents? I apologize for being so peevish but I'm getting tired of so-called experts pontificating on a topic without making the necessary effort to familiarize themselves with the specific details.
Here is a paper about scaling and the gnutella protocol written by someone who actually bothers with the salient details: Flow Control by S. Osokine. I haven't finished reading it yet, but I know Sergei well enough to trust he won't go off on meaningless tangents unlike some other papers.
The reason why you might not have gotten any comment yet is that it is an incredibly busy time for gnutella developers. There is a lot of potential in the original protocol that requires the slogging of lots of code (UI in particular). If a sustained effort is not made to improve a client, one risks losing the necessary traction to achieve a scale worth addressing. Personally I want to abstract out a layer to allow for deployment of other applications on top of the gnutella protocol. But time is limited and coding opportunities infinite. Choices and compromises have to be made. Don't get discouraged if your ideas haven't received the attention they deserve yet. Maintain your web page and engage in conversations on the gdf mailing list and eventually it might get read.
Don't be naive, of course they can suppress P2P development. All that is needed is to continue to delay deployment of IPv6. With the limited address space of the current IPv4 there aren't enough "real" addresses so vast numbers of computers are "read only" to the internet. They can act as clients but are unable to act as servers. These are computers with addresses in the ranges 10.x.y.z, 192.168.x.y, and the more difficult to abbreviate 172.16-31.x.y.
The hope and strategy of those interests which want the internet to be the next cable TV is to set up the architecture to favor broadcasting and inhibit peer to peer connectivity. To unlock more of the potential of the internet we desparately need to force IPv6 as the norm. Both Apple and Microsoft support it in their new OSes and Unix OS's like BSD have supported it for some time. It appears the bottleneck right now is with the ISP's who are loathe to spend money to offer something that people don't even know they will want. In fact since ISP's are generally opposed to users running server applications at all it shouldn't be surprising that they aren't leading the charge to update the infrastructure to enable precisely that. There are many other important characteristics of IPv6 but for the future of P2P the vastly larger address space (64 bit rather than 32 bit) is the most important.
Damn, you people have heard of Moore's Law haven't you? It is such a simple consequence of that law that people will want to frequently upgrade and, in fact, will benefit from frequent upgrades. This has nothing to do with the stylish, empty headed critique about how "they don't make things the way they used to". Please, read the article that prompted this thread which is a thorny and difficult issue. But it has almost nothing to do with some people's inability to understand the simplest consequences of Moore's Law.
To illustrate what I am proposing I could note that people could insist on only purchasing open source products. Then if a vendor pulled a lame trick like ReplayTV has, the source code could be forked at that point. Of course, that suggestion has little resonance in the real world because people seldom have a choice to pick an open source option. Neither TiVo nor ReplayTV offer open source where it counts.
Tom Wolfe describes an incident involving Gunter Grass, a promoinent German author. He (Grass) is at some American academic event and all the speakers are taking turns complaining about the police state existence they must endure. For quite some time Grass is just staring at the doors rather than paying direct attention to the speakers. Finally, someone asks him why he is staring at the doors and he explains that when the Nazis were in power in Germany the storm troopers would have arrived and kicked down the doors by now. He is just watching so he won't miss the event.
So when no one bans Star Wars or takes any of the silly measures predicted here will those that make these bullshit predictions allow any reality to sink in? What a bunch of morons.
Isn't this whole First Amendment right of free speech thing getting old? I'm getting bored with the whole thing. It has surpassed my attention span. The entertainment cartel can buy laws that trample any of our fundamental liberties so long as they continue to churn out those great blockbusters that don't commit the sin of boring me.
Have you tried using gnutella on a modem recently? Last night I connected with a 56K modem. Did a search which returned about 100 hits. I chose one 4 meg file to download. My first attempt got me about 2.5 meg before a disconnect. But I was able to continue the download by double clicking it again and received the other 1.5 meg. I checked the file and it played fine. I wouldn't want to encourage anyone to try to act as a gnutella hub (ie more than a couple of connections) with a modem connection but it is an exaggeration to say it isn't usable.
Within six months the gnutella network will be better than Napster ever was and it will be for a lot more than just mp3's and people's prurient interests.
Bullshit. Gnutella can run on any port. How are you going to shut it down again? Spreading FUD regardless of your convictions is still spreading of FUD. If you don't know what you are talking about do everyone (and especially yourself) a favor and sit down.
On the other hand if you do have an original thought (not an unshakeable belief, a thought) and wish to share it, by all means please speak up. I am not claiming it is inconceivable that gnutella could be shut down. One way of assisting in that process is to spread FUD so that people don't bother to build up the number of legitimate nodes. Then the attacks against the network by adversaries are just that more effective because the amount of legitimate traffic does not dwarf the crap being injected by the adversaries.
The only thing being proven here is that people who download unknown executables and actually run them will have bad things happen to them. Gnutella, like Napster is useful for sharing data files, but not executables or vbs's etc. The real weakness being shown here is the crappy OS which allows file type to be hidden, enables auto-running of VBS scripts, etc. The extensions to the gnutella protocol which were discussed at P2P will enable new tools to protect users from some hazards but there is no way to protect someone who hands over control of his machine to an anonymous stranger. There never has been and there never will be.
Please forgive me if I've completely missed your point but my reading of your article leaves me with the impression that you are trying to adjust the parameters so that by scaling up you mean that tens of millions should see and have the opportunity to reply. I'm between sessions at P2P so my reading was quick. I did not have anything to do with the formulation of the gnutella potocols but it is clear to me that the intention is for each client to have a limied neighborhood of visibility within a network of arbtrarily large size.
I awaited with baited breath to see what in this vision would lead to a meltdown and I'm still waiting. Just to repeat we set and maintain a reasonable TTL so your search is over an immense number of sources but not every client in the network. Either I don't get it, you don't get it, or you don't want too get it. Please explain if you care to
Um, until someone puts up that "DC ethernet DIY for $5" web page the broadband adaptor is only available for $60 directly from Sega. That makes it a $160 and that is without mouse and keyboard. I believe those are proprietary so without a monitor you're getting close to $200. Of course I would highly recommend a VGA adaptor so you can run it with a VGA monitor (mine is actually a VGA switch, would cost about $50 if I hadn't found it on ebay with the console). The details do get annoying but I hope everyone else buys one also because it is the best console available right now and an even better deal than when I bought one.
Oh, please, could someone here at least buy a clue. Convert hdtv to mpeg???? What a maroon! HDTV formats (720p and 1080i) all specify mpeg2 compression. The signals are all compressed before they are ever sent to you, whether it is over the air in a HDTV broadcast or on a DVD.
If you want to find where signal degradation might occur, consider the issue of how hard it is to make the compression process automated. To get a high compression ratio and retain a high quality image requires considerable skill today. By recording the uncompressed signal (are they really doing this? Undoing the 100:1 compression?) they are leaving the non-trivial task of recompressing to the end user.
Do you know of some source of over-the-air HBO programming? The only source I know of is over cable networks and none of the cable networks deliver a signal that this board can read or store. If and when the usual networks (NBC, ABC, etc) deliver true HDTV content (not just the usual stuff upconverted to 1080i) and your local network affiliate is ready to deliver it (last I checked only PBS offers HDTV or at least DTV in the Twin Cities area), then you could record the 20 mbps signal to a hard drive. You might be able to transcode it to a Sorenson encoded stream on a DVD-RAM that would be playable on a DVD-ROM drive using QuickTime on a PC or Mac that could be better than a DVD Video.
Slashdot Mirror
"It was going to be here in DC next week"
No, I was going to be flying out tonight. It was starting tomorrow. I doubt that air travel is sufficiently close to normal for most participants to get there. My plan of bringing along my two sons was definitely out and I'm still not sure about the postponed conference.
OK, what you need to do is come up with the crack yourself and publish it so we can all see how it's done. I think Phil Zimmerman did a great service for his country by standing up to the thugs (over PGP). But I don't expect anyone to willingly expose himself to litigation, imprisonment, and possible bankruptcy so some slackers can quietly cheer in the background. What I do hope is for people to speak up about truly despicable laws like DMCA and boycott companies like Adobe that invoke it.
Oh, bite me. I was traveling in Holland and Germany last summer so I watched some PAL. Big deal. 25 Hz interlaced at barely more resolution than NTSC. And the programs were wretched: either recycled American TV or poor imitations thereof. I'll take American (and Canadian and British) TV any day over what I saw in Amsterdam. Just to reiterate there is a huge difference between HDTV and the previous weak ass systems but you need to get material that was produced for it, not the lame upconverted stuff.
I suppose I should admit that impressive though it is I'm not willing to pay the prices requested so far. There are too many other more interesting things to do with that money. But the price and time will come. So far I've spent $50 for a WinTV-D card.
I think it is a foregone conclusion that ElcomSoft will be releasing the source code to this program in any case. That is what they indicated they would do if Adobe were to try to make things more difficult for ElcomSoft. Unlocking a binary may be the least of the damage. With the source code it will be possible to produce versions for several other platforms.
Who is the dumb fool? You can't make a digital copy of anything you want from a DVD? DeCSS software is available for multiple platforms. I use DVDExtractor for the Mac but there are many options. The newer examples don't require knowledge of a specific key since CSS is so weak it can be cracked on the fly. Before insulting the intelligence of everyone else try to avoid making uninformed, over-the-top claims in the same breath.
You need to work on basic concepts like the requirement that a cause has to precede an effect. Napster did not happen early enough to be the cause of any of this. All of this technology pre-dates the brief flush of excitement over Napster. Specifically all the planning and engineering for encrypting over the air television has been in process for years. If there had never been a Napster, we would still be facing this crap.
I agree with the sentiment of the previous article. Furthermore this has no impact on P2P exchanges of files and information. My impression is that this proposal just improves the situation both for those who want to purchase their cable TV via the net and those who don't care for that idea.
All of you seem to have missed the real reason why the cube failed. It's because the flat panel displays were still too expensive. The 15" display was too small and the 17" display came too late with a defective price tag (too high). If you could throw in a sufficiently inexpensive (and large) flat panel then you have the entire futuristic package and possibly herds of folks buying them for their living rooms. A wireless keyboard and mouse (RF, NOT infrared) like I have for my grungy PC would have been nice, too. But if you team it up with a plain old CRT then you've canceled out most of those style points. It also leaves you vulnerable to demands for expandability. If the whole package were a work of art you could simply dismiss and ignore such quibbles.
Jeez, you sound like the executives in Dilbert who get stuck in a conference room and die because they get locked in and can't figure out how to use the telephone. Why not look through the menu choices and select "Eject" to remove the floppy? That you don't understand the trash can short cut doesn't excuse you from using the obvious solution and then engaging in sarcastic, pinheaded commentary.
For those who want to know here is the historical reason for the trash can short cut. Apple introduced the ubiquitous 3-1/2" floppy disk to the world (it was made by Sony). They promised to make available an external floppy drive (this was before hard drives were readily available) but took forever because that would limit their ability to deliver computers. So the problem was how do you implement a GUI to move files from one floppy to another?
Instead of completely removing a volume when it was ejected they left behind a grayed-out image. It was still possible to interact with this ghostly image and in particular you could drag an icon from an unmounted floppy to a mounted floppy. At that point the OS would eject floppies and request the other until the transfer was complete. When you were really done with a floppy you would drag the greyed-out image to the trash.
The short cut became to drag a floppy to the trash so that it was ejected and and grayed-out image was also removed. For some mysterious reason this behavior was preserved for years before it finally became customary (with OS 8 or 9?) that ejecting a floppy would not leave behind the ghostly image. The transition phase couldn't have been more than a few months but the baggage remained for years. The damn short cut is still there in OSX!
Naw, your reply was to a different anonymous coward. I didn't want to directly connect my business with my personal opinion. The second person you were replying to has a very important point. Until quite recently copyright law only applied in a meaningful way to companies in the copyright industries who would employ lawyers to interpret and influence its evolution. Now that they need and want it to apply to everyone they plan to extend their industry brokered deals as if it were legitimate public policy, for example the theory that every time a digital copy is loaded into memory there is an actionable copy that requires a license. Ha, try to get that one to pass in the clear light of day. Read Littman's book "Digital Copyright" to see all the sordid details.
Anyhow, buckling under preemptively to every outrageous demand of these robber barons (don't forget the Constitution introduces this topic to encourage the eventual enrichment of the public domain, not its evisceration in back room deals) will do nothing but encourage their rapacity. This is much bigger than just a specific case. Don't forget they already lost this case in "Sony vs Universal Studios" so they are trying to rewrite history by fiat.
Please remember that copyright law is only something which a state decides to promote or not based on its purported beneficial effect. While copyright is specifically in the US Constitution, there is nothing about intellectual property which tends to be a term used to obfuscate by setting up false analogies. Copyright is a government enforced, time-limited monopoly used to promote the dissemination of knowledge for the advancement of arts and sciences. Fair use is there because it also promotes the dissemination of knowledge for the advancement of arts and sciences. The primary good here is not the government enforced monopoly despite the beliefs of the copyright cartels. Insofar as the current law tends to impede the advancement of arts and sciences, the case could be made that it has become mostly counter-productive and a possible candidate for the ash heap of history.
With the existence of nearly zero cost replication of digital data of any type it may no longer be logical for society to try to do anything as fraught with danger as attempting to prop up monopolies. (Especially if it requires the introduction of police state laws and practices). The usefulness to society of maintaining these monopolies may have been mooted by the new dynamic inherent in digital media. If the only (or principal) beneficiaries are media cartels which as a result promote the dissemination of meretricious tripe to the near exclusion of all else, maybe we should consider getting off this particular train.
In the end I don't know if it matters much how we reason about some of these issues. When a dam is proposed for a specific location it might be discovered that its presence could lead to the extinction of a particular species which could not survive in the new habitat. People might have the option of moving the proposed dam but in this case we are talking about foregoing some of the principal benefits of a ubiquitous, unfettered, digital network. If the choice comes down to extending copyright law as media cartels desire or building a robust, largely unconstrained internet, I'd rather work on building the infrastructure of a new P2P framework where a number of new applications can evolve.
No, file type and creator information is not stored in the resource fork of Mac files. That is directory meta information which is in neither fork. When a Mac file is transfered it is first flattened together with directory meta information which is extracted at the receiving end in order to reconstitute the file. One such standard is MacBinary. On the other hand your observation about file name extensions is mostly valid. However, services like Internet Config tries to provide PC style mapping according to file name extension on the assumption that such a file comes from a PC.
Am I missing something crucial here? You get DeCSS and that's all she wrote. All this wailing and moaning about the end of civilization seems pointless. You don't think there will be a "DeCSS" for this pathetic encrypted digital TV effort? The reason these schemes are ALWAYS cracked is that they are peddling snake oil, not because their opponents are always brilliant. It doesn't hurt that the opponents are often brilliant, but the fundamental problem is the attempt to share a secret with a few million of your closest friends and hope it doesn't get out. This is compounded by the phenomena described by Bruce Schneier. When one person successfully analyzes the scheme, that knowledge is encapsulated into software which is distributed to the rest of the world.
I made a bookmark to your paper to take a look later this weekend but after noting your reference to that ignorant, and questionably motivated, paper by Jordan Ritter I don't know if it is worth my time. If the goal is to connect everyone to everyone else for every single query then any scheme that is ever proposed will have a damn scaling problem. But the point is that the gnutella protocol makes no such attempt. Do any of you actually bother to read the protocol documents? I apologize for being so peevish but I'm getting tired of so-called experts pontificating on a topic without making the necessary effort to familiarize themselves with the specific details.
Here is a paper about scaling and the gnutella protocol written by someone who actually bothers with the salient details: Flow Control by S. Osokine. I haven't finished reading it yet, but I know Sergei well enough to trust he won't go off on meaningless tangents unlike some other papers.
The reason why you might not have gotten any comment yet is that it is an incredibly busy time for gnutella developers. There is a lot of potential in the original protocol that requires the slogging of lots of code (UI in particular). If a sustained effort is not made to improve a client, one risks losing the necessary traction to achieve a scale worth addressing. Personally I want to abstract out a layer to allow for deployment of other applications on top of the gnutella protocol. But time is limited and coding opportunities infinite. Choices and compromises have to be made. Don't get discouraged if your ideas haven't received the attention they deserve yet. Maintain your web page and engage in conversations on the gdf mailing list and eventually it might get read.
Don't be naive, of course they can suppress P2P development. All that is needed is to continue to delay deployment of IPv6. With the limited address space of the current IPv4 there aren't enough "real" addresses so vast numbers of computers are "read only" to the internet. They can act as clients but are unable to act as servers. These are computers with addresses in the ranges 10.x.y.z, 192.168.x.y, and the more difficult to abbreviate 172.16-31.x.y.
The hope and strategy of those interests which want the internet to be the next cable TV is to set up the architecture to favor broadcasting and inhibit peer to peer connectivity. To unlock more of the potential of the internet we desparately need to force IPv6 as the norm. Both Apple and Microsoft support it in their new OSes and Unix OS's like BSD have supported it for some time. It appears the bottleneck right now is with the ISP's who are loathe to spend money to offer something that people don't even know they will want. In fact since ISP's are generally opposed to users running server applications at all it shouldn't be surprising that they aren't leading the charge to update the infrastructure to enable precisely that. There are many other important characteristics of IPv6 but for the future of P2P the vastly larger address space (64 bit rather than 32 bit) is the most important.
Damn, you people have heard of Moore's Law haven't you? It is such a simple consequence of that law that people will want to frequently upgrade and, in fact, will benefit from frequent upgrades. This has nothing to do with the stylish, empty headed critique about how "they don't make things the way they used to". Please, read the article that prompted this thread which is a thorny and difficult issue. But it has almost nothing to do with some people's inability to understand the simplest consequences of Moore's Law.
To illustrate what I am proposing I could note that people could insist on only purchasing open source products. Then if a vendor pulled a lame trick like ReplayTV has, the source code could be forked at that point. Of course, that suggestion has little resonance in the real world because people seldom have a choice to pick an open source option. Neither TiVo nor ReplayTV offer open source where it counts.
Tom Wolfe describes an incident involving Gunter Grass, a promoinent German author. He (Grass) is at some American academic event and all the speakers are taking turns complaining about the police state existence they must endure. For quite some time Grass is just staring at the doors rather than paying direct attention to the speakers. Finally, someone asks him why he is staring at the doors and he explains that when the Nazis were in power in Germany the storm troopers would have arrived and kicked down the doors by now. He is just watching so he won't miss the event.
So when no one bans Star Wars or takes any of the silly measures predicted here will those that make these bullshit predictions allow any reality to sink in? What a bunch of morons.
Isn't this whole First Amendment right of free speech thing getting old? I'm getting bored with the whole thing. It has surpassed my attention span. The entertainment cartel can buy laws that trample any of our fundamental liberties so long as they continue to churn out those great blockbusters that don't commit the sin of boring me.
Have you tried using gnutella on a modem recently? Last night I connected with a 56K modem. Did a search which returned about 100 hits. I chose one 4 meg file to download. My first attempt got me about 2.5 meg before a disconnect. But I was able to continue the download by double clicking it again and received the other 1.5 meg. I checked the file and it played fine. I wouldn't want to encourage anyone to try to act as a gnutella hub (ie more than a couple of connections) with a modem connection but it is an exaggeration to say it isn't usable.
Within six months the gnutella network will be better than Napster ever was and it will be for a lot more than just mp3's and people's prurient interests.
Bullshit. Gnutella can run on any port. How are you going to shut it down again? Spreading FUD regardless of your convictions is still spreading of FUD. If you don't know what you are talking about do everyone (and especially yourself) a favor and sit down.
On the other hand if you do have an original thought (not an unshakeable belief, a thought) and wish to share it, by all means please speak up. I am not claiming it is inconceivable that gnutella could be shut down. One way of assisting in that process is to spread FUD so that people don't bother to build up the number of legitimate nodes. Then the attacks against the network by adversaries are just that more effective because the amount of legitimate traffic does not dwarf the crap being injected by the adversaries.
The only thing being proven here is that people who download unknown executables and actually run them will have bad things happen to them. Gnutella, like Napster is useful for sharing data files, but not executables or vbs's etc. The real weakness being shown here is the crappy OS which allows file type to be hidden, enables auto-running of VBS scripts, etc. The extensions to the gnutella protocol which were discussed at P2P will enable new tools to protect users from some hazards but there is no way to protect someone who hands over control of his machine to an anonymous stranger. There never has been and there never will be.
Please forgive me if I've completely missed your point but my reading of your article leaves me with the impression that you are trying to adjust the parameters so that by scaling up you mean that tens of millions should see and have the opportunity to reply. I'm between sessions at P2P so my reading was quick. I did not have anything to do with the formulation of the gnutella potocols but it is clear to me that the intention is for each client to have a limied neighborhood of visibility within a network of arbtrarily large size.
I awaited with baited breath to see what in this vision would lead to a meltdown and I'm still waiting. Just to repeat we set and maintain a reasonable TTL so your search is over an immense number of sources but not every client in the network. Either I don't get it, you don't get it, or you don't want too get it. Please explain if you care to
Um, until someone puts up that "DC ethernet DIY for $5" web page the broadband adaptor is only available for $60 directly from Sega. That makes it a $160 and that is without mouse and keyboard. I believe those are proprietary so without a monitor you're getting close to $200. Of course I would highly recommend a VGA adaptor so you can run it with a VGA monitor (mine is actually a VGA switch, would cost about $50 if I hadn't found it on ebay with the console). The details do get annoying but I hope everyone else buys one also because it is the best console available right now and an even better deal than when I bought one.
Oh, please, could someone here at least buy a clue. Convert hdtv to mpeg???? What a maroon! HDTV formats (720p and 1080i) all specify mpeg2 compression. The signals are all compressed before they are ever sent to you, whether it is over the air in a HDTV broadcast or on a DVD.
If you want to find where signal degradation might occur, consider the issue of how hard it is to make the compression process automated. To get a high compression ratio and retain a high quality image requires considerable skill today. By recording the uncompressed signal (are they really doing this? Undoing the 100:1 compression?) they are leaving the non-trivial task of recompressing to the end user.
Do you know of some source of over-the-air HBO programming? The only source I know of is over cable networks and none of the cable networks deliver a signal that this board can read or store. If and when the usual networks (NBC, ABC, etc) deliver true HDTV content (not just the usual stuff upconverted to 1080i) and your local network affiliate is ready to deliver it (last I checked only PBS offers HDTV or at least DTV in the Twin Cities area), then you could record the 20 mbps signal to a hard drive. You might be able to transcode it to a Sorenson encoded stream on a DVD-RAM that would be playable on a DVD-ROM drive using QuickTime on a PC or Mac that could be better than a DVD Video.