Real Time Gnutella Visualization

brett42 writes "Some students at Berkeley wrote a python program that connects to the Gnutella network and maps out connections between nodes in real time. " I gotta say thats pretty smooth. Hopefully future gnutella clients will incorporate something like this just for the time wasting potential of watching the graph wiggle while seeing what porn others are searching for.

It just dawned on me...

[GISboy]

...aside from the fact I'm getting old and don't have a lot of time to waste searching for this stuff over Gnutella/bearshare/morpheus/etc and waiting forever for a file to download.

Cripes, I must be a dinosaur because I still use news servers and the occasional bout on IRC for fills.

I, personally, love it when someone (usually younger than I) says "I got a DivX of {insert name} last nite off of {insert client}".
"Oh, really", is my reply "I got a DivX of {movie a, b, and the first part of c} and a vcd of {movie d and e} last nite".

The looks of sheer bewilderment I get are too funny to describe at times (even from ppl I know to have cable modems).

Just goes to prove the old saying; "it is not the size of the wand (or 'pipe') but the magic in it".

Don't get me wrong, these clients do have their uses, I've used them but I just don't currently have a use/need for them.

Dang...my train of thought slipped the track a little.

I can't wait to see some of these maps and superimpose them over some of the thermographic maps I have available...no reason but investigation and curiosity.

Hollywood wants me...

[porttikivi]

My ISP just called. A Hollywood detective agency had contacted them and informed, that a dynamic IP address once given to my cable modem had had Gnutella running at some point in time and it had shared some episodes of Futurama. And now they are after me.

Note that I live in Finland, so I guess somebody has decided to mount a large scale attack against global peer-to-peer piracy.

Oh no, Huberman again

[Animats]

That's one of Bernado Huberman's papers. Huberman sees the world through libertarian-colored glasses. His solution to everything is a market. He writes:

• Another possible solution to this problem is the transformation of what is effectively a public good into a private one. This can be accomplished by setting up a market based architecture that allows peers to buy and sell computer processing resources, very much in the spirit in which Spawn was created

He seems to be mellowing a bit; at least in that paper he considers other solutions.

Actually, if you run into the "tragedy of the commons" problem, it's usually because the protocol mishandles scaling. See my ancient RFC 970 [faqs.org], where I pointed this out back in 1985. Gnutilla is generally acknowledged to have scaling problems.

As for the economic analysis, market enthusiasts tend to ignore that markets both increase transaction costs and consume attention. Some goods are too cheap to charge for, because the costs of pricing, charging, billing, accounting, advertising, and marketing exceed the cost of the goods themselves. This is why the Internet beat out the pay-per-bit services.

Worse, there's the problem of limited attention. If something is charged for, the buyer has to pay attention to its cost and how much they're using. That attention is a limited resource, and people hate wasting it on little stuff. This is why consumer Internet services moved from per-hour to flat rate.