Scour is Dead

jathos writes "The Scour Exchange is dead -- see the announcement here. Does this just prove once again that one company cannot own a peer-to-peer file-sharing network?" Scour actually was a reasonably useful tool for finding wierd images. I used it regularly to find clipart for my own devious projects. Guess we'll have to wait for that multi media peer to peer system until Gnutella is solid.

Unless YOU do something, the net is GONE.

Another insane lawsuit by giant corporations that not only deprives us of our rights might destroys another internet company that is doing nothing more than move humanity out of the dark ages of information monopolies.

The eff has a article pleading for reform to the archaic copyright laws that are being twisted to destroy your internet freedoms.

It's not altruism, it's culling

The reason Gnutella, Scour, and the like were born doomed isn't that people aren't altruistic. Enough of them are -- let's remember that a tiny handful of people responding has kept spam alive all these years. For every 100 greedy Republicans who take but never give, there's one Naderite who opens up a whole pile of files. Even one altruist in 1000 would be enough, given a sensible number of people on the air.

The reason peer to peer sharing technologies are currently doomed is that, if they're successful, there will be considerably more than a sensible number of people on the air.

I've been on Gnutella when half the net went there, and let me tell you, it wasn't pretty. Like most people, I had to hang up or get overwhelmed.

A similar problem has come up in shared VR. If a tenth of the people who signed on to Cybertown [cybertown.com] showed up at the same time, it would be madness. If the net is a "never-ending worldwide conversation", as Judge Steward Dalzell said [epic.org], then a conversation of 10 million or 10,000 people, when you can't tune any of them out, is a conversation in Bedlam.

The easy problem is how to filter out the noise. The hard problem is trying to figure out what, to a particular user at a particular time, is signal and what is noise. Area of interest culling is only a partial solution. While I might be interested in erotic photographs of large aquatic mammals today, I'm not exclusively interested in Flipper and his friends. I might be interested tomorrow in the polyphonic motets of Lassus.

An even harder problem is identifying which of a particular set of resources offered that are allegedly within my current areas of interest are of actual interest. I'm not interested at all, for example, in Flipper stills of the Ranger and the stupid kids, and I already have the picture where Flipper stands on his tail. While the file name conventions that have arisen among mp3 file sharers are a step in the right direction (and they picked an easy domain), the conventions are far from universal, and as people have found out, sometimes spoofed and sometimes just ignorantly wrong.

(I'm tempted to say that a central server that acts like a Library of Congress classification system may be needed, and certainly would be a more useful role for a central server than mere file name storing.)

And, of course, this must be accomplished without the overhead that makes Gnutella such a pig. And remember, Gnutella hardly tries to accomplish any of this area of interest culling.

While the developers of Gnutella et al have spent considerable time on networking technology and user interfaces (despite appearances!), they haven't yet taken more than baby steps toward solving the real problem that will make peer-to-peer sink or swim: determining and using areas of interest.

Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen

Until then..

CuteMX, by the makers of CuteFTP [cuteftp.com]
----

Mojo Nation solves the leeching problem

In Mojo Nation [mojonation.net] users must contribute some service to the system and thereby earn "Mojo" (karma) to exchange for download or relay credits. Everything is market-driven (bitstreams become just a commodity to be passed around) and the market is the best system yet devised to take a bunch of selfish, dishonest/distrustful actors and work towards a collective goal -- the market works.

The digital tokens used are the internet equivalent of the old upload/download ratios of BBS days applied to a distributed, decentralized P2P system. This isn't a "sharing" system, so it doesn't walk through your disk looking for things to give away; instead other users publish data to the system and it gets broken up into pieces, these pieces get RAID-like error correction and then they are sent out to other peers in the system. Downloads can use a swarm approach to pulling in data, taking a small piece from lots of peers (including those who might be on slow connections) rather than trying to shove the whole file down someone's (already overloaded) narrow upstream link.

Previous releases were a bit unstable, but the new 0.920 release that is available for download [mojonation.net] has a much better installer and significantly faster publishing and downloads. Check it out!

Overrated tripe

The capitialists just chalked up a kill.

WTF do capitalists have to do with this? The victims were capitalists too. The problem is specifically with assholes, some of which happen to be capitalists.

---

Re:Birth And Death

Can Someone tell me why a search engine needs 60+ employees? I could understand with yahoo or something. But Scour could have been done with 5 good programmers and spare time.

Yea that is a really good idea, I could see it now:

"Hey, what is the deal with this trash can it won't accept any more trash"

"I don't know, lets have a look here, hrm yes, it appears to be full, to it's max capacitcy. Since it is complete full, anything attempted to be placed inside just rolls off the top, that would explain why that used coffee filter just rolled onto the floor"

"Yea, that is a logically explaination of why there is a 2 foot ring of coffee grounds baked into the carpet around this trash can."

"I think it is defective."

"Why So?"

"I had one of these at my last job, a trash can that is. I would fill it with stuff during the day and when I would come back the next day it was COMPLETELY empty and that white liner thing was replaced with a new or assumed to be new one"

"Yes, I remember at my prevoius job, at night I always ponder when I left that the trash was full but in the morning it was emptied. This trash can has been full for 2 weeks, it is obviously broken."

"Oh I also should note, I think there is a problem with the phone system. The phones just keeps RINGING AND RINGING and doesn't stop!"

"Yea, this place sucks, this guy claiming to be some magical "bill collector" keep coming up to me with this yellow peice of paper trying to talk to me. I got confused and huddled into a little ball on the floor, it scared me. This place is creepy"

Great Alternative

One of the best file systems that I've found is VNN at vnn2000.com [vnn2000.com]. Not only can you share and search for any kind of file but you can password protect and retrieve your own files. I find it really useful when I'm away from my computer... I can access my files anywhere.. and really easily too!

Birth And Death

Wow, I actually saw the entire birth and death of scour.

Can Someone tell me why a search engine needs 60+ employees? I could understand with yahoo or something. But Scour could have been done with 5 good programmers and spare time.

Lack of Money.

I don't see it as getting shut down due to file sharing. I see it as getting shut down due to lack of funding. They weren't making money....they couldn't get another round of funding. There are plenty of these stories around right now.

Re:Peer-to-Peer will never make it

This is only "interesting" if you buy this particular brand of pessimism. I'm a completely different sort of pessimist. I believe that anything like Scour, Napster, or Usenet is largely doomed because the majority of the leeches and non-leeches are so dang stupid, that any content out there is likely to be 95% worthless because it is so banal. OTOH, altruism is not something about which we need to be concerned. Look at how many binaries are faithfully pumped into the Usenet world. Look at Free Software. Look at the United Way. Listen to those damn Salvation Army bells this holiday season. Even dark-hearted selfish louts like myself are glad to use up spare bandwidth (if we have any, that is) -- especially at times when our connection would otherwise be sitting idle or turned off-- to share files that may be of interest to others. So, human nature equals leech nature? I think not.

Clitart

I used it regularly to find clipart for my own devious projects

"Clipart", eh? Is that what you call it?

Peer-to-Peer will never make it

Thats right, you heard me. The simple fact is that Peer-to-peer file sharing is a doomed concept, because it relies on the altruism of the average human being. I don't know about you, but I don't upload files on Gnutella : I'm a leech. That's human nature, and thats why Gnutella does and always will suck.

Posted anonymously because otherwise everyone will think I am Karma-whoring/Trolling/whatever. Just an honest opinion.

Let me use this opportunity ..

.. for some blatant self-promotion.

infoAnarchy [infoanarchy.org] reports on the many, many alternatives to Scour & Napster, be it distributed or centralized. It uses the K5 [kuro5hin.org] site engine, meaning anyone can submit stories and moderate submissions.

In our Resources [infoanarchy.org] section, you can get an overview of the many available file sharing tools. Here's the ones I would recommend:

• One of the best alternative feature-wise is Filetopia [filetopia.com] (its userbase is relatively small).
• And for MP3s, Songspy [songspy.com] is quite powerful.
• If you like Napster, get Napigator [napigator.com]. It allows you to connect to OpenNap servers where any file type can be shared (and which are not concerned by any changes in Napster's business model).
• A good alternative to the Windows Napster client is FileNavigator [filenaviga...argetblank].
• Recently reborn: CuteMX [cutemx.com], has a lot of features but requires IE.
• Somewhat closer to Gnutella, with distributed servers: DirectConnect [neo-modus.com]
• Distributed, anonymous, encrypted: Blocks [kripto.org]

But again, please come visit us at iA [infoanarchy.org] to find out about the best new tools. We know our stuff.

File sharing will never die.

--

MN solves the leeching problem

There are certain systems that are designed to handle leeches and other associated problems with peer to peer systems. The most notable is Mojo Nation [mojonation.net]. It is basically a barter system for computing resources, especially bandwidth and to a lesser extent disk space and CPU.

In order to download, search, or even upload, you must compensate your peers with Mojo, which represents the the resources of theirs you are consuming. To earn Mojo you must contribute your own resources to the network by setting the software to resell your own computing resources. It also features redundancy so servers can disappear without data disappearing. It's really cool, check it out.

Burris