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Over at ACM.org, Carlos Baquero wants to know, what happened to peer-to-peer as a technological concept?
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems became famous at the turn of the millennium, mostly due to their support for direct file sharing among users. In the 80s, the music industry had already evolved from selling analogue vinyl records to digital compact disks, but only with the introduction of lossy data-compression techniques, such as the MP3 coding format, it became feasible to upload/download music files among users' personal computers. Still, content had to be catalogued and found, and P2P systems such as Napster emerged to provide that functionality.
Some of the early systems, such as Napster and SETI@Home, exhibited a mix of P2P and classic client-server architecture. Gnutella and Freenet, the second generation of systems, provided a much larger degree of decentralization. The emergence of P2P greatly impacted the business models of the music, and later film, industries. With time, these industries evolved to offer flat rates and subscription services decreasing the incentives for, music or video, file copying and sharing.
[...] Looking at Google trends, we see that the concept almost faded from our lexicon. Nevertheless, the technology is still used; it evolved and became more specialized. A good portion of the fabric beneath modern data centers (web 2.0) and blockchain technology (web 3.0) evolved from early P2P research.
The author chronicles the rise of systems like Gnutella and Freenet, commenting on their benefits and their eventual downfall into obscurity due to routing algorithm problems that had trouble consistently delivering content from local sources, which impacted lookup times. He then continues:
The next generation of systems, in the early 2000s, solved this problem by introducing topologies that exhibited locality. The closer one came to the target, the more paths one had to the target and the routing algorithms could pinpoint the next hop with local information and a distance metric. Functionally, these systems provided the users with a Distributed Hash Table (DHT). These efficient content-addressable networks (Chord, CAN, Pastry, Tapestry) allowed structuring N nodes in a topology that supported log(N) routing steps while only storing log(N) network contacts on each node.
[...] The paradigm shifted again in the late 2000s. In 2007, Amazon's Dynamo presented a pragmatic system design that built on prior research in DHTs and Eventual Consistency (leveraging filesystems research from the early 90s, Coda and Ficus, that exhibited P2P characteristics before the term was fully established). In Dynamo the focus was high availability, and, unlike prior P2P systems, the nodes were placed under the same administrative control and inside the data centers. The number of nodes scaled down from millions to hundreds, albeit more powerful ones, allowing some simplifications on the DHTs. Availability and low response time were now the key concerns, they were good for business.
[...] The phrase "all successful systems attract parasites" is often cited in biology, and the same can be applied to P2P systems. Filesharing users terminated nodes once their ongoing downloads finished and did not further contribute to the system. Some nodes refused to forward queries from other nodes or lied about their uptimes to improve their position in the network.
Different strategies were tested to control free riders: enforcing download and upload quotas to avoid unbalanced downloads; partitioning files in blocks and sharing them in a random order, to prevent nodes from quitting when they were close to having the full file. These strategies tried to coerce users into contributing to the collective, but an important tool was still missing: a clear incentive system.
He concludes with some words about Blockchains, commenting, "We probably need to wait for another 20 years to study the legacy of blockchain systems and see which technological concepts turned out to have a lasting impact."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fliptop on Monday December 05, @11:23PM (5 children)
I assume you're talking about torrenting legal content, like the latest Ubuntu release? If they're harassing you about that, yeah, that sucks.
To be oneself, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity
(Score: 4, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday December 06, @06:31AM (4 children)
My position is that copyright being unenforceable, based upon a wholly artificial scarcity, is a secondary concern. The primary issue is that no one, not even creators, should want copying restricted even if it was possible. Yes, I do want artists fairly compensated. I do not agree with the taking of the natural right to copy, by fiat, as the means to that end.
Our civilization is entering the Information Age. There are all kinds of wondrous things that would be possible, if copyright wasn't blocking access to content. For instance, research into cures for cancer and other discoveries may be held up for years. Suppose, for instance, that there is a food or drug that can increase a person's intelligence, or reduce their bigotry, but we haven't discovered it yet and won't for another century thanks to copyright and patents. That is what the publishing industry demands of us all, and why? Only so that they don't have to bother polishing any of the various other methods available for turning a profit.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday December 06, @09:21PM (3 children)
It's my opinion that anything on the internet should be free to read, hear, watch, record, and copy. That's why ebook versions of my books are all free; it costs almost nothing to give them away, my ISP costs me ten times as much as my web host (R4L.com).
All the music I have now is free. KSHE plays half a dozen full albums every Sunday night and have been for over a half a century, and I record them with Audacity. Back in the '70s I recorded it with a cassette.
And no, I'm not an outlaw; at least, not since 2000 when they legalized ganja. Recording the radio was never illegal in the US, and in 1978 they wrote a law specifically legalizing this activity that hadn't ever been illegal, knowing full well what liars the media are, and more likely, they weren't paying enough for laws they like in our plutocracy that dresses up as a democracy.
The media would have you think that copyright is about copying, but is no more about copying than right to work laws give you a righ to work. A copyright is the right to EXCLUSIVELY PUBLISH. Unfortunately, the law considers P2P to be "publishing".
Microsoft went along with the media whole-heartedly, and disabled recording and playback in my Windows 10 tower and the notebook, although it works on my brand new Asus (meant to replace the aging Dell notebook). I'm thinking of uninstalling and reinstalling Audacity on the W10 tower to see if MS has fixed it (doubtful), but I just replaced the hard drive in a broken computer, installed Linux, and use it to record the Windows 10 tower.
I wish it was easier to use all the data storage in my house, not just the big network drive. But I understand few need that capability, it's set up for offices in businesses and governments. Most people don't even have computers anymore, they don't need them. Of course their phones are computers, but they don't realize that.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday December 07, @04:47PM (1 child)
I have encountered several authors and artists now, and they were unanimously opposed to change in this area. Among them are a couple of well known names: Mercedes Lackey (she intimated that I was an idiot), and Piers Anthony who wrote back that he flatly disagreed about abolishing copyright as it was the only protection artists have. I practically trolled on this matter many of the authors at the only GenCon I have ever attended. Then there are aspiring authors, dreaming of someday being published and loved and at least slightly famous. They're even worse. The people at NaNoWriMo threatened to ban me. Claimed I'd broken the rules on civil discourse, when I had not, that's how touchy they are about it. They don't want to talk about copyright that way at all.
SF authors in particular, who I would have thought should be the most open minded of us all about the future, instead show a shocking narrowness when it comes to copyright. It is jarring to read a futuristic story containing 20th century copyright, such as the Hugo Award winner Hyperion. I have heard Doctorow is perhaps the biggest exception, but other than him, so much for them being insightful visionaries. What a huge fail. The Muses of SF missing the boat on how literature will be disseminated in the future.
It is refreshing and hopeful to read that you seem to understand.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday December 12, @09:35PM
I have encountered several authors and artists now, and they were unanimously opposed to change in this area.
That's very understandable. They're afraid someone will repossess their lifetime+95 year cash cow. Now, I'm not for abolishing copyright but I'm 100% against the Bono act. Had the copyright remained at 20 years, as patents are, I would be quite happy to insist that copyright cover digital media. If you're in it for the money and can't make a profit in twenty years, you never will.
You can't copyright a recipe, so why can you copyright a computer program? They're exactly the same thing, except one is cooking instructions to a human and the other is any instructions to a computer.
Claimed I'd broken the rules on civil discourse, when I had not, that's how touchy they are about it.
And they say writers are against censorship!
It is refreshing and hopeful to read that you seem to understand.
Thanks, but again, I'm not against copyright, just insane, radical copyright. Imagine how technology would suffer if copyrights lasted a century? That's how art is suffering.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday December 08, @11:48PM
I wish I could access my server over sshfs from my Android devices.