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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: 5, Insightful) by stormwyrm on Tuesday December 06, @03:34AM (5 children)
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday December 06, @12:46PM (4 children)
But as the top of this thread indicates, there were also threats, backed by both ISPs and Congress, to enforce the will of big copyright holders on everyone else. The carrot is all well and good, but when you think about it for 2 minutes you'll notice that pirate streaming is better than the streaming services in terms of selection.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Tuesday December 06, @05:33PM
Yes, there were serious threats, but what I doubt is that those threats by themselves would have been enough to cause the decline in unauthorised copying. It might well have continued unabated had the big copyright holders continued to attempt to ruthlessly enforce their copyrights while clinging to the old, formerly highly profitable 20th century distribution model the way they initially wanted. The more they tighten their grip, the more profit slips through their fingers. However, Apple, Netflix, and their ilk basically dragged them kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Netflix and other similar streaming services may not have as comprehensive a selection as TPB, but they sure as hell are more convenient, faster, and easier to use, which to most ordinary folk it seems is well worth the cost of the subscription and the hit in content selection. Most ordinary folk could not care less about the rights of these copyright holders, and threats didn't intimidate them that much; they care more about getting the stuff they want to listen to or watch as quickly as possible. But they seem to be willing to pay a reasonable price for a service that can give them what they want from the looks of things.
There seems to be a delicate balance for now, which can be upset if Big Copyright gets too greedy and prices their shit above what the market is willing to pay. Increasing the cost of copyright licenses for the streaming companies is the obvious way this can happen; the license costs will be passed on to the customers, who then have to pay with either more money or with ads, which were previously unknown in for-pay streaming. Another way is excessively fragmenting the streaming market, this makes legitimate streaming service both more expensive (as you now have to subscribe to more streaming services to get the stuff you want) and harder to use (as you now have to look in more places to find stuff). Both of these things seem to be happening, which might eventually make the P2P file sharing services more attractive than legit options again.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Tork on Tuesday December 06, @10:55PM (2 children)
Was there ever a wide-spread belief people would actually get caught? Certainly not in my circle of friends. Back in the infancy of streaming TV/movies the ppl I associated with all had the skill to acquire pirated content and play it on the living room TV, but instead preferred buying a smart-DVD player and $20ish/mo to places like Netflix or Hulu. Paying for it wasn't the issue, but the time involved in building/maintaining a media server and ripping/downloading content was.
I'm not saying their anti-piracy tactics were fruitless but according to the *AA 3 zillion bits of content were getting pirated every month and that as time went on it was always gaining. Those claims didn't stop after a successful anti-piracy campaign but they DID slow down quite a bit when iTunes became a runaway hit and Hulu became a household name.
Personally I think anti-piracy threats increased piracy instead of decreasing it. I'll never forget sitting in the theater when they ran one of those "You wouldn't steal a car..." and and hearing people in the audience go "wait, you can download movies?!?" Brilliant move.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Wednesday December 07, @01:57AM
OK. That was funny.
There's some really good points here.
Making access much easier (less technical) was something i didn't think about being a tech person.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Wednesday December 07, @06:04AM
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.