Patrick - Slashdot User

+ - New BitTorrent Plug-In addresses RIAA/MPAA attacks 0

Submitted by on Thursday May 22, 2008 @07:30AM

An anonymous reader writes "RIAA/MPAA have recently been targeting torrent aggregators like PirateBay, because the aggregators are the vulnerable components of the BitTorrent protocol. A new open-source project to thwart such attacks was announced on p2p-hackers and released yesterday:

Cubit, a new open-source p2p overlay enables the Azureus BitTorrent client to look up torrents via approximate keyword search... Cubit completely decentralizes the lookup process through an efficient, light-weight peer-to-peer overlay that can perform approximate matches. It performs searches without relying on any centralized components, and therefore is immune to legal and technical attacks targeting torrent aggregators.

This may mark the end of this particular vulnerability in BitTorrent. Do your part by running the plug-in!"

Comment: Re:That's funny (Score 1) 259

by Patrick on Thursday September 23, 2004 @02:39PM (#10331972) Attached to: Big Demand for Digital Music Players

McKinsey, who are about the smartest and best consultants in the world made a prediction for the number of cell phones that would be in the world by 2000 in 1990. They were out by a few orders of magnitude.

Do you have a citation for that? It's hard to imagine how anyone could be off by "a few orders of magnitude" (that's a factor of 1000 or more) on a ten-year prediction for cell phone usage. There are around a billion cell phones in use today. To be off by "a few orders of magnitude," you'd have to have predicted a trillion lines (150 per human being) or a million lines (80% fewer than there were in the U.S. alone in 1990).

Analysts are often wrong, particularly when predicting from early in a product's growth cycle (e.g., digital music players today), but I can't imagine they're often off by a thousandfold.