Slashback: P2P, OS X, Blinkenlights

Slashback tonight with more updates, responses and corrections on scalability in P2P networks, TV shows which may not actually be cancelled, tentative wireless service in the Mile High City, and what exactly OS X is. Read on below for these and more.

The difference between theory and practice ... Paul Harrison writes: "I see your theoretical discussion of a scalable gnutella, and raise you a working, open source implementaion! Details in this linux.conf.au talk."

I was in Berkeley at a party, and then things got hazy. In response to the recent story on fixing the UNIX configuration mess, jbloggs writes: "OS X is not on top of NetBSD, but rather is a BSD compatibility layer on top of a Mach kernel. Its closest BSD-lite would be FreeBSD, which is used as a reference platform."

The problem with unstated motivations. Reader app writes "Tim O'Reilly responds to the BountyQuest piece on Salon and featued here. Tim makes some interesting points and clarifications -- especially where he refers to theodp as a crank."

You can't watch, and neither can they. UberOogie writes: "Who didn't see this coming? The MPA shut down Movie 88 today. What should be noted by everyone is that they took no legal action: they just went to the ISP, HiNet, and got them to shut off the pipe. (Movie88 was legal through a loophole in Tiawan copyright law.) So much for process, even in Tiawan. Movie 88 vows to find another provider."

I hope they use the time to reconsider. Cynical_Dude writes: "David Cohen, one of the producers of Futurama, was interviewed on Cinescape. He says that Futurama is not really cancelled, but will run for another year or so ... at least that's how many episodes they've got more or less ready now. FOX hasn't ordered any additional episodes, but Cohen asks fans to "write those letters [...] in physical form, not email" to the FOX executives."

And in other TV News, Glitch Tybalt writes: "Working for Hot Topic has its benefits. We recieved an e-mail saying that Invader Zim will not be cancelled after all. It seems that it was getting no ratings whatsoever, because they kept changing the time slot for it. Once they had decided to cancell it, they left it in one slot to finish playing the remaining episodes out. Then, since everyone could figure out when it was on, it got great reviews. (plus, the Schweet Schwag has started selling like crazy)the Invader Zim petition must have been pretty convincing as well. I guess one of them stopped to read it before wiping his ass. Maybe there's hope for a megaconglomo like Nikelodeon after all..."

Won't someone start making money with unmetered wireless? tabbser writes: "According to Aerie networks, the folks that bought bankrupt Ricochet (www.richochet.com) tests are being conducted in Denver, CO with the support of the City and county of Denver's Office of information technology. Ricochet will test and evaluate the network as part of an initial step to reactivating the service. The full story can be found on Ricochet's web site news room at http://www.ricochet.com. Go Aerie!" Aerie announced this a while ago, but in these uncertain times it's nice to see it actually happening.

Ashes to ashes, little blinking lights likewise. spike666 writes: "Blinkenlights.de is coming to an end! The Blinkenlights project by the Chaos Computer Club will be ending its run February 23, 2002. It was exposed to /. back here They are having a big party, and we're all invited. One last chance for Taco to embarrass Kathleen ..."

In Asia, money talks

[Ryu2]

I'm from Taiwan, and have been to many Asian countries. Corruption is rampant -- Taiwan is relatively good compared to places like China, Thailand and Vietnam, but even so, if you pay the right authorities the right amount of money, you can pretty much skirt nearly any sort of law.

I wouldn't be surprised if the MPAA paid the ISP some "money" to do so...

Hate that!

[Aknaton]

Even though they may have a case, I just don't like the fact that some major corporation can shut down your website based solely on their word.

In my opinion, this is something only a court should be able to order.

Re:In Asia, money talks

[CDWert]

In ASIA ???????

You smoking crak or wearing blinder....its rampant EVERYWHERE , here in the states more so than ANYWHERE, we just put, civilized names on it , like 'soft-money' , Lobbying, etc.

You wanna talk about Sheer volumes of money sxchanged in pursuit of a single commercial goal, thats right the good ole' USA will win hands down every time.

I have a hope that the next major war wont be fought between countries with differing ideologies, but rather between the people and the corporations. But alas I am just an old crank....

I hope they do find another ISP soon, I have often wondered what ever happened to the Alternet idea ?

Possible antitrust?

[Ryu2]

Movie88 had posed an unexpected threat to studios' own video-on-demand services such as Movielink and Movies.com, which are still months away from commercial service.

The Taiwanese site was run on a video-store model, allowing people to "rent" access to movies for three days in return for a payment of just $1. The movies, which were streamed to a computer in RealNetworks' video format, could not easily be saved to a hard drive or downloaded.


So how is Movie88 a pirate site if it attempts to prevent downloading of the videos? (Yes, I know Real Video can be downloaded with some utilities, but then again, you could copy rental video tapes/DVDs with the right hardware too)

How is it different in concept from any video store for that matter?

And most importantly, how is it different than the movie studios getting into the act, except for where the money goes? (Do video stores like Blockbuster have to pay royalties to movie studios? Curious...)

Re:Hate that!

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, though we're rapidly progressing toward a world where you won't be allowed to have a web site unless you're a major corporation. Don't you get it? You're a consumer. Your role is to pay for information and services; perhaps if you're lucky you'll even derive some benefit from them. But that's optional.

We'll talk fondly someday of the time when we had citizens as well as consumers. But face it: at this point, unless you've got money to pass around, your opinion is completely worthless. So just sit back, watch your television, pay your ISP bill, listen to some manufactured pop music (from physical media, of course), and for heaven's sake, don't use too much bandwidth or express an unpopular opinion!

Re:In Asia, money talks

[Commienst]

Corruption in America is institutionalized is the best way of putting it. The best thieves are the men who do nothing all day except own a large corporation and soak up profit from their thousands of workers. The best crooks throughout history have always been 'legit'.

Blockbuster *does* pay movie studios...

[Anonymous Coward]

They pay royalties for both the sales and rentals. There was an article in the NY Times regarding the fact that they make more money renting than selling (specifically DVDs) because of the way the royalties are dished out.

I've become pretty sick of the whole digital media thing and have just abandoned both buying CDs and renting movies froom Blockbuster. I do use my DirecTivo and pay-per-view since between the two I can always find soomething I want to watch. I currently dole out approximately $100 a month for TV/Cable entertainment and hope as little as possible go to the big studios.

HBO Should Buy Futurama

[scotpurl]

Quite seriously. HBO needs something animated to balance all that real-life action stuff, :-), and Futurama isn't a bad choice. Could give the show a little more edge, and supply many more comedy possibilities (and likely a little cartoon nudity), plus HBO won't get hysterical at episodes like "Kwanzabot" and prevent their airing.

David Cohen, you out there? Shop that show around.

Re:Possible antitrust?

[ncc74656]

So how is Movie88 a pirate site if it attempts to prevent downloading of the videos? (Yes, I know Real Video can be downloaded with some utilities, but then again, you could copy rental video tapes/DVDs with the right hardware too)

Movie88 served up movies with Apache, not RealServer. This made downloading/saving almost trivial. I used FlashGet, with Muffin in front of it to rewrite the user-agent string to make FlashGet appear to the server as RealPlayer 8 instead.

Everything they had that was (probably) ripped from DVD had captions, though...stuff like American History X or eXistenZ, not just foreign-language stuff where subtitles would be useful. Given that adding captions back into the video involves extra work when you're transcoding from DVD (the captions are stored as overlay graphics in the MPEG program stream), you have to wonder why they did this.

Re:Futurama? How about Family Guy?!?

[freakinPsycho]

A lot of people seem to be confused about this.

Just because you have a region-free DVD player doesn't mean you can actually watch the movies you buy. If it's sold in the UK, chances are it's in PAL format. You can't watch that format on your NTSC TV, sorry.

You either have to get a TV that can play both or you get a converter. Take your pick, and neither are cheap.

If I'm wrong about this, feel free to tell me. But from the research I've done, this is true.

I wish it weren't.. then I could get Neverwhere on DVD and be able to watch it...

Re:In Asia, money talks

[renard]

Interesting idea; if you can show a payment was made to the Taiwanese ISP then the bribe would be a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (1977, amended 1988) by the MPAA and indictable under US law.

Of course IANAL but see the code itself [usdoj.gov] if you're interested in details.

-Renard

Re:OS X

[syzxys]

8.WebDAV support for Digest authentication

That's interesting, because AFAIK MSIE still doesn't support Digest authentication for WebDAV shares (a.k.a. "Web Folders"). (At least, IE5.5 doesn't, and IIRC neither does IE6). It seems to get confused and try to access the site using FrontPage extensions instead, which of course doesn't work because it's running Apache 2.0 [apache.org]. That makes it hard to interoperate MSIE with other WebDAV products (like Subversion [tigris.org]), at least if you're using Digest auth. I'm glad to see at least someone [apple.com] is actually trying to implement web standards, instead of mixing them together with proprietary stuff. Anyway, just my $0.02.
---
Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise! [zappadoodle.com]

Sorry, Paul, no cigar

[Salamander]

The previous Slashdot article was about n-dimensional cube or torus topologies. Paul Harrison's "Circle" network (slashdotted - Google cache [google.com]) is...wait for it...a simple circle. Sort of like Chord, it seems, but less sophisticated. It's not at all clear why a reasonable person would expect Circle to scale particularly well, especially in an environment with high node turnover (lots of potentially circle-breaking join/leave operations).

There's nothing wrong with Circle. It just doesn't seem to meet the promise of being a fully functional network that scales better than Gnutella.

Zim.. sniff..

[napa1m]

Zim is in fact, still cancelled. I work at nick, I've seen the ratings from last month, the above statements are, unfortunately, untrue :(

There are still some episodes left to air that are being finished up, including a possible xmas episode, there will be a total of about 27 episodes when all is said and done, but there are no "new" shows nor a "next season" after this lot. Sorry.

Flat search network that scales

[PureFiction]

Circle is cool, but it is really a subset of Chord, with searching kind of hacked on top of a hashing index system (i.e. search is implemented by tying keywords to hashes and distributing this hash space.)

This means that high peer churn rates, hot spots in popular keywords, spamming keywords, etc, all make this a rather vulnerable and fragile implementation of searching. It probably is better than gnutella, but that isnt saying much, and it certainly does not mean it is 'infinitely scalable'. The real world is a harsh place...

If you want a scalable, distributed search/discovery mechanism for large peer networks here is your recipe:

1. Build on a base of juicy lightweight UDP messaging. This allows you to send messages directly to peers, circumvent NAT's, and handle many thousands of virtual connections.

2. Sending queries to many thousands of peers is still a large task, even if only small packets are sent directly. Must optimize this.

3. Optimize by using a social discovery mechanism to keep track of which peers are good at answering your queries. Query them first and more often than other peers. Call this peer ranking the 'relative quality' of the peer.

4. Optimize further by halting the query once a sufficient number of matches are found. This way you only need to query a handfull of peers (maybe 10, maybe 200) to complete a query.

5. Finally, perform transitive introduction using the high quality peers in your group. This way you use peers with a high quality to find new peers, and it is highly likely that they will be high quality peers as well.

This is how the ALPINE Network [cubicmetercrystal.com] works, and it scales. The number of connections any peer may have is solely up to their discretion, based on bandwidth and memory resources. All communication is direct, and every peer is in direct control over his own resources, which makes for a very robust environment.

There are a number of details, the above simply a 30,000ft description. If you are interested you can read more in the ALPINE Overview [cubicmetercrystal.com] and the ALPINE FAQ [cubicmetercrystal.com].

One last comment, this stuff is no longer vaporware [cubicmetercrystal.com] :-)

Re:In Asia, money talks

[Commienst]

"or how about all the adults dying of something like aids globally and the not being able to save them because US companies hold the patents and wont let go even to save fucking lives. "

Remember when slashdot posted the story about Brazil deciding to ignore American companies patents on AIDS drugs and produce it themselves and pay the patent owners a reduced price? Alot of virulent conservatives were producing justifications for why Brazil's act of humanism was wrong. The United States forced Bayer to produce pills to treat anthrax for a very reduced price. I wonder what those conservative idiots who think money is worth more than Brazilian lives have to say about this. I bet they would rather remain silent.

Re:In Asia, money talks

[Commienst]

The owners rob the workers. Why does an owner of a large company deserve to make 50-1000 times the amount of money their workers earn? I would think 50 workers would be working harder than one man driving around in a limo, who does not even cook his own food.

Re:Blinkenlights Boston?

[spike666]

i know that when they do that in some skyscrapers they just use the computer controlled lighting systems that are pre-existant. but they have to usually manually figure out what room is what...