P2P BitTorrent Tool Could Replace Pirate Bay 413
With the US and other G8 countries trying to outlaw The Pirate Bay and its ilk, an anonymous reader suggests that a solution may have emerged out of Cornell University. A new open-source project called Cubit is an Azureus plugin that provides decentralized approximate keyword search of torrents in the network.
Dude. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dude. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. What's unconstituional (Score:5, Interesting)
I've read the GP's post and I've been pulling out the Old Constitution trying to figure out where he's coming from.
We, the US, are governed by the rule of law. And sometimes, the rule of law is very unfair for a few of us. BUT, it will correct itself eventually and to be honest, I prefer "eventually" to a bloody revolution. I mean "bloody" in the "folks are dieing in the streets" bloody - not the British version.
Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Interesting)
Digital files can be copied without depriving the original owner of theirs, be it software or music. Your money was taken from you leaving you with less (I hope your insurance covered it).
Now just imagine once 3d printers become cheap enough for the common household... Manufacturers of small cheap trinkets had better be worried because their time is next.
Oft Repeated Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
Eh... duh? The issue isn't that "copying" a work deprives the original author of his or her copy. See the definition of "copy". You'll find that it's a very old word.
The issue is that in so doing, you destroy the merchantability of the work in question. Since economics require a balance of supply and demand, and since copying can be done infinitely (killing any such balance) then economic restrictions are in place so that economic activity can continue.
This is a *good thing*. If you want to do anything, push to have the copyright terms brought back the reasonable timeframe they initially were...
Now just imagine once 3d printers become cheap enough for the common household... Manufacturers of small cheap trinkets had better be worried because their time is next.
Hopefully, copyrights will apply then.
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The issue is that in so doing, you destroy the merchantability of the work in question.
Not really. You just change it. Instead of making an economic calculation based on how many people wanting your intellectual production might see themselves obliged to pay for it, you'll do it based on how many people wanting your intellectual production are willing to voluntarily pay you for it. There will still be paying people, just in a somewhat smaller amount, and under a different distribution. The end result will be a changed market, not a non-existent one. But it's not possible to predict in which
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Mind you, there is a lot of economic evidence that our current copyright system decreases production(Long copyright periods produce income streams that can be lived off).
But the solution, is to change copyright per
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The much more important issue is that virtually all progress is a derivative work. Long copyrights disallow the creation of derivative works of anything under copyright.
Thus, virtually all potential progress is inhibited by long copyrights.
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not the one I work on but newer and smaller http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2007/0805-digitial_dentist.htm [sciencedaily.com]
Then you are pretty fucking clueless aren't ya (Score:4, Informative)
they do-- in lots of form factors and pricepoints.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=3d+scanner&spell=1 [google.com]
Get a real job (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
The only purpose of IP law is to increase production of information and research.
And as it stands now, it's an empirical near-certainty that copyright periods are far too long to serve the public interest.
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Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, the first posted reply to this comment by jcgf points out why, but in his or her brevity jcgf doesn't bother to point out what everyone who's actually THOUGHT about this already knows: P2P is NOT inherently to be used to spread copyrighted information. Download a popular linux distribution with bittorrent and you'll max out your pipe (at least with residential broadband, 6MB down here), proving conclusively that P2P isn't remotely 'evil' no more than a gun is evil (in fact it would be LESS so, if both weren't EVIL==0).
The next point that you are (purposefully) ignorant of is a point mentioned in the summary of the article we're discussing; namely that wikileaks, a site that would be ludicrous to accuse of 'piracy' or 'theft', is going to come under the same draconian shield as distributors of Brittney Spears' new album (those evil unrepentant bastards). Now, I know that -some- people (those who very much enjoy their rose-colored lenses) are offended that wikileaks has the audacity to disrupt the 'socially acceptable' order of things, and will latch on to the flimsiest of pretexts to shut it down, but even they know they're trolling, but they're willing to troll for 'a good cause'.
Or, to sum this up: Quit trolling about piracy. You KNOW by now (as I've seen you be told numerous times) that your arguments are completely based on distortion and FUD, you're just making yourself look fanatical.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
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Contrary to popular belief, property rights are a very modern invention, and large chunks of the world still do things relatively communally.
Developed nations implemented wide scale property rights only in the late 19th century, so as to avoid "tragedy of the commons" situations by giving owners of property an inventive to maintain it.
In other words, property rights were designed to o
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
A student of the "paraphrase what he said and negate it" school of rhetoric, I see.
Anyone who has tried to make this work -- fairly -- realizes it can't. Trying has brought us to legal reductio ad absurdum, with USPTO overwhelmed by nonsense concept-squatting and the court system burdened with eight-figure (hence, "important") infringement suits.
In a perfect world, maybe the ancient Greek who figured out the major scale is entitled to royalties on every piece of tonal music ever "invented" (and for Jack Valenti's duration of "forever minus a day"). The rest of us realize that's idiocy: does the practically negligible difference in intonation from changing temperament count as materially different? What about timbre? Who ought to own the 12-bar blues?
Your suggestion our legal process need concern itself with the pockets on my jeans is ridiculous. I challenge you to argue "Amazon's" 1-click claim is any less so.
None of "original," "idea", "implementation" is well-defined. Even the comparably hyper-cooperative world of math publication sees hot debates over independent discovery. We therefore conclude "ownership" in this context is neither obvious nor natural. Enjoy your Monday. You will, no doubt, condemn any corporationy corporation, that is caught violating GPL
In much the same way I believe murder is wrong despite my willingness to shoot a guy who breaks into my home. Doing the best you can with the cards you're dealt doesn't make you a hypocrite.
Re:Yes. What's unconstituional (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies spend literally millions of dollars lobying the lawmakers. They give them various gifts, incentives, and outright bribes. Pretty much anyone elected to office, beyond the very local level, is in somebody else's pocket. Which means that the laws that get passed are not the ones that the nation as a whole wants, but rather what the people with lots of money to spend want.
The only thing that we the people can do about it is oppose those laws at every possible opportunity, and oppose them loudly. Protest peacefully but loudly. Civil disobedience. Circumvent whatever technical hurdles are placed in our way.
Perhaps this law is not actually "unconstitutional" in the literal sense of the word... I sincerely doubt if there's any text in there about a right to P2P... But I garontee that the founding fathers did NOT want us ruled by a government that doesn't listen to its citizens.
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Excellent comment, but I just wanted to add to this. Vocal opposition is important, but we have an obligation to get our society's social infrastructure to the point where we can do more than that.
One thing we're seeing is grassroots funding of candidates via small dollar d
Re:Yes. What's unconstituional (Score:5, Interesting)
"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is
wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts
they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions,
it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.
And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not
warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as
to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost
in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It is its natural manure."
by:
Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source:
November 13, 1787, letter to William S. Smith, quoted in Padover's Jefferson On Democracy, ed., 1939
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yes. What's unconstituional (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree that free sharing of information (in all its various forms) is beneficial in a utilitarian sense. However, I think it's more important to point out that we do have the individual right to freely share information. The constitution and the law can infringe upon that, but they can't revoke it.
Re:Yes. What's unconstituional (Score:4, Insightful)
And guess who has the power to amend the constitution [wikipedia.org].
Re:Yes. What's unconstituional (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yes. What's unconstituional (Score:4, Informative)
Mod Parent up!
So many people in the US don't seem to understand this point. If they did, I personally think we'd be in much better shape overall.
The point of the US Constitution is NOT to delineate peoples' rights - it is there to explicitly state the ONLY circumstances in which the government can infringe upon them.
The Tenth Amendment specifically clarifies that powers that the Constitution does not delegate to the United States and does not prohibit the States from exercising, are "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Essentially, all rights not mentioned in the Constitution one way or the other, no matter how obscure, are still in force.
Re:Yes. What's unconstituional (Score:4, Funny)
Who/What would that be?"
Chuck Norris.
Re:Yes. What's unconstituional (Score:5, Interesting)
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Should be interesting.
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Just because it's written in the constitution (Slavery?) does NOT make it constitutional, and if it isn't there, it by no means isn't constitutional.
The courts decide, not the pedants.
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You might want to read the bill of rights closer (Score:2)
* Ninth Amendment â" Protection of rights not specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
It was put in there for a reason, to keep tyrannical laws from being passed that are clearly against rights that should be guaranteed to a human being but weren't specifically thought of during the writing of the constitution/BOR.
Re:You might want to read the bill of rights close (Score:2)
Specifically:
* Ninth Amendment â" Protection of rights not specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
It was put in there for a reason, to keep tyrannical laws from being passed that are clearly against rights that should be guaranteed to a human being but weren't specifically thought of during the writing of the constitution/BOR.
Somehow I doubt the founding fathers had "Dude, they should totally be able to pirate music, movies, and video games" when they were writing the bill of rights.
Although it is funny to imagine George Washington with a surfer accent. "GNARLY, I like, totally can't tell a lie, DUDE."
Having said that, I think they did have some pretty interesting ideas on copyright, trademarks, patents, etc, ideas that would be called "Dangerous Subversive Liberal Commie Nonsense" nowadays, didn't they?
Re:You might want to read the bill of rights close (Score:4, Insightful)
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Having said that, I think they did have some pretty interesting ideas on copyright, trademarks, patents, etc, ideas that would be called "Dangerous Subversive Liberal Commie Nonsense" nowadays, didn't they?
That's kind of the point really. Current copyright law bears no resemblance to what the Constitution calls for. The goal was to ensure that the public domain was continually being enriched with new works. So they implemented an incentive for people to create new works, namely a limited monopoly on the distribution of those works. Under current copyright law, nothing ever becomes public domain and they have turned it into a perpetual right to milk a creation forevermore without ever giving anything back
Re:You might want to read the bill of rights close (Score:4, Insightful)
Even after the teets have run dry, and there's no more profit to "milk" from a work, they will still hang onto the copyright to prevent anyone else from possibly themselves gaining any benefit from it. Sometimes there is no effort even made to profit from a work -- there are quite a few older TV shows and movies and such that are locked up in vaults, sitting there making zero profit for their rights holders, usually because the remaining appeal of the work is considered too narrow to be profitable. (Too small of a customer base for a corporation's lofty financial desires.) If they are no longer making money off it, whether through market forces or by calculated choice, the work should pass into the public domain instead of being held hostage.
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Ninth Amendment (Score:2)
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There isn't a right to share files but I'm pretty sure there's a right to free speech in there somewhere and a ban on "unauthorized information exchanges" doesn't seem very Constitutional to me.
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Re:Dude. (Score:5, Insightful)
It just doesn't make a lot of sense to speak of "owning" something which is an attribute of something else. A haircut is an arrangement of hairs on your head. A poem is an arrangement of words on a page. A painting is an arrangement of color on a canvas. You can't own an arrangement any more than you can own a length or a weight; the idea is ridiculous on its face.
How about you say or sing whatever you want, and they say or sing whatever they want, and neither of you tries to get in the other's way? That's freedom of speech.
Re:Dude. (Score:4, Informative)
Actually they are reserved to the States or to the people.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Re:Dude. (Score:5, Informative)
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Good! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Good! (Score:5, Funny)
I heard this song before. (Score:3, Funny)
This can't stop "graph takedown" attacks... (Score:5, Insightful)
If ISPs move in that direction, this defense won't help, and thats probably the bigger threat for blocking P2P piracy, as there are always countries of convienece to set up piratebay like operations.
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Encryption doesn't help... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:This can't stop "graph takedown" attacks... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope. There are other things you can do of course. Reputation based schemes like Credence ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credence_(reputation_management_scheme [wikipedia.org] ) applied to peers could help you boot off peers out of swarms with no or poor reputation. This would force certain organizations to build reputation up first, but keeping that will be a tough cookie. Won't be fool-proof, but will make it harder. Not many people will give RIAA/MPAA the thumbs up.
Then there is small world theory. Downloading stuff through trackers from people you don't know is somewhat silly. You should be able to get the same content (though a bit slower) through semi-trusted contacts. The only way to defeat that is infiltration by certain organizations, but, rather tedious and difficult.
You can also create a scheme where you us peers as proxies. Instead of downloading something directly, you ask a peer to relay a bunch of encrypted anonymous bytes for you. Will slow down speeds well over 50%, but difficult to defeat.
There about a billion more ways. The fact that they are not implemented yet, is simply because most p2p-apps/networks don't want to start an arms race.
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Thinking a moment about it, I could envision (for instance) a peer-to-peer system that uses rateless codes along with a protocol on top of UDP, and an anonymous DHT. It wouldn't be BitTorrent anymore, but it could work like this: The one who wants files sends his IP through the anonymous DHT. Those with files transmit a nonce to that IP, and the requesting person replies (so as to prove he's giving the right IP). Then
Gnutella (Score:2)
Re:Gnutella (Score:5, Informative)
* All this network is sharing is torrent metadata (.torrent files), while a BitTorrent client is doing the real transfer.
* Their keyword searching system, while allowing for finding the k-nearest keywords, is not fully general like searches on a Gnutella-like system could be.
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Didn't try that for a long time, but in past searching for (and downloading) torrents off the Gnutella worked miracles.
It was in the times when there were no such sites like PirateBay or TorrentSpy or SuprNova. Private trackers were majority and were pain to use and were often down.
Now it seems to be essentially same principle: search for torrent on one P2P network but download the content off another P2P network.
Re:Gnutella (Score:5, Insightful)
As I mentioned somewhere else, though, people won't move from the index site + centralized trackers + a BitTorrent client until enough indexes and trackers get shut down that they need a new solution.
Linked in the article... (Score:2)
http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html [google.com]
Hoyl ilitrite googaling batmon!
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Dupe (kind of) (Score:4, Informative)
A poor replacement. (Score:5, Insightful)
At least TPB allows file comments which allows fakes to be spotted pretty fast.
Also, do not forget about the amount of traffic private torrent sites get - which this is not a real alternative to.
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Well, private trackers aren't exactly private. They're more difficult to get into, but they're no more private than most of the 'net...
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Damn chickens and their eggs, or eggs and their chickens.
Self Healing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Self Healing (Score:5, Informative)
But... (Score:4, Interesting)
X.
Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
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Installation... (Score:2)
Decentralized? No servers? No trackers? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Gnutella is one decentralized system. They moved to semi-centralized to efficiency. Freenet is decentralized. The decentralization approach here is most like distributed hash tables (I think the Wikipedia entry is pretty decent).
poison? (Score:5, Insightful)
To design a reliable search system, you need to have a good rating system, and a solid trust model. At the same time, you need to avoid making the trust model so tight that new users cannot get any search results (freenet).
Also, I think it should be noted that a lot of bittorrent usage is moving towards the subscription model, so people should be able to search for channels as well, not just single files.
I am interested in seeing where this project leads, but I don't think people will be completely abandoning the well organized, well moderated torrent sites any time soon, but it will be nice to be able to search quickly for files without needing to open a browser.
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Mediadefender has done this many times in the past (as proven by the email leak), and it is a common tactic that is most likely used by other companies in the business as well. This is a pervasive problem on even the most heavily moderated boards, and it is extremely difficult to deal with in an automated way.
pink floyd meddle (Score:4, Interesting)
Lots of hits. But no "pink floyd meddle".
Maybe next year...
Blah blah blah. (Score:3, Interesting)
MEMO TO WORLD GOVERNMENTS: You can't stop the signal. Stop wasting taxpayer money.
The ACTA agreement would also make this illegal. (Score:3, Interesting)
This means ANY p2p client, including open source, will come under the gun.
azureus, newsreaders capable of binary download, limewire clients, and of course this tool.
Re:In *WHAT* network? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a couple months after everyone has stopped using it and is using something else.
Re:In *WHAT* network? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Kademlia (Score:5, Informative)
Other DHT systems are also used to list peers for trackerless torrents and to find peers for particular files on networks like eMule (by searching by hash).
Re:Limewire/Frostwire? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Limewire/Frostwire? (Score:5, Informative)
Gnutella (LimeWire et. al) has more than one way of searching. Through Ultrapeers, Ultrapeers and OOB-replies (e.g. not routed back through Ultrapeers) and Mojito (DHT).
Using Gnutella to search/index .torrents is already a long time feature of G2 (Gnutella 2, though it is NOT the successor of Gnutella), with Shareaza being the main client for the G2 network (along with very basic support for Gnutella, BitTorrent and eDonkey2000).
DHT-networks can be more efficient, but they are also vulnerable to attacks and pollution and are somewhat lossy.
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However, by now I have read the article, their comments on the implementation, and a little bit of their code.
Re:It needs Azureus? (Score:4, Interesting)
I see nothing in the design of their searching network that would preclude implementations independent of Azureus.
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The solution in both cases is the same, legalize it.
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Re:the US is pathetic (Score:5, Insightful)
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The only thing you need to participate in those networks is a seed peer. Yeah, that requires a central server to get to, initially (though once you're there your host cache will start to populate, and you're set). But once you're on the network, it's completely decentralized.
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