Forget Napster & Gnutella: Enter Mojo Nation 227
burris writes "Salon's Damien Cave writes "Forget Napster and Gnutella. Jim McCoy's Mojo Nation is the coolest file trading service on the net." This OpenSource distributed filesystem uses digital cash technology to create a barter economy for idle disk space, bandwidth, and CPU. Now you can get paid for sharing your computer."
Re:Cash-out option puts you at real risk. (Score:2)
I did not mean to imply that DA is guaranteed by law to get paid, but he does have the right to place restrictions on who is allowed to copy his work and in the case of most professional authors one requirement is that the copier pays the author some money.
The GPL is an example where copyright holds but does not require payment.
Lack of payment does not negate copyright, as it says in Title 17 section 107 paragraph 1 (the exclusive right to make or allow copies - no mention of selling or giving away the copy: a copy is a copy) and in para 3 (phonorecords) it specifically states "by sale or other transfer of ownership" of copies.
The flaw in your argument is that you are suggesting that copyright law has nothing to do with copying and is instead about selling. I know that there are some differences in the US copyright law compared to the UK but I doubt that they are as fundimental as that.
Remember that Matrix spoof? (Score:1)
Well the site had to move a few times because it could't handle the traffic. The creator also ended up getting ripped off by a banner ad company that didn't belive the traffic was real.
Wben something becomes succesfull online these days, it almost always collapses under it's own weight unless lots of $$$ come in to prop it up.
Mojo nation (and other distributed system) are hopefully going to ensure that people can afford to publish rich (bandwidth eating) content and are going to get compensated for the effort.
I really hope this takes off.
When it absolutely, positively, has to be there...
This is market infrastructure (Score:2)
That makes the AC poster's comment doubly irrelevant. If he prefers the Napster model rather than give and take then he's precisely the kind of freeloader that the system is designed to marginalize. And if he's only interested in content restrictions then he'd do better talking to the people that provide that content, not to the banks and subcontractors that supply the medium of exchange and the poles and planks. I hope he's good at missionary work; reforming the world will be an uphill struggle.
You're making too many assumptions (Score:2)
You certainly can't be accused of pirating an unknown thing.
In any event, why are you concentrating on pirated goods? Mojo Nation (and more advanced systems which will be even more heavily distributed) have the potential of becoming a far better repository for all information on the planet than anything currently in existence. Only a tiny fraction of all this material is contentious.
Re:Worst Idea ever (Score:1)
It's easy if you are using a Napster clone such as Gnapster [faradic.net] I just set my upload directory to some non-existant directory, and boom, no more sharing.
You moron. (Score:1)
I steal files all the time. I'd certainly never buy the stuff. I didn't before, so what sales, exactly are being lost? The stuff I actually WOULD buy, I do anyway. (Not that it ever does the artist much good the way the business world is currently organized.)
And what's with the example you picked? Salon magazine? Canada's leading magazine for the professional beauty industry? News Flash, asshole; Salon doesn't make a thin dime from their actual paper sales. It's all advertising, baby! In fact, in the magazine biz, if they experience a 20% sell-through on the news stands, it's considered a bonanza. The rest, thousands upon thousands of copies made from prime Canadian rain forest, get hauled to the dumpster. (To the recycle bin? Hmph. All that hot press, clayed, glossy paper doesn't do too well in the recycle vats, kipper-my-man.)
So fuck Salon. They're ad whores. Plus, who the hell cares about beauty secrets, anyway? The whole beauty biz is pretty much totally evil. I like my girls sans make-up, thank you kindly.
Typical of people like you to choose a stupid, evil example to uphold a stupid, evil world view.
-Fantastic Lad, The Most Caustic Lad of Them All!
Economics Question (Score:1)
Eventually this might be related to dollars:
Y dollars = 1 mojo = X CPU cycles.
But avaliable CPU cycles are getting cheaper very rapidly (Moore's Law). So the value of 1 mojo should be decreasing very rapidly right?
A digial currecny that is constantly deflating in value (compared to dollars) seems like it's headed for problems.
-Harry
Re:Doesn't address the underlying problem (Score:1)
--
DigitalContent PAC [weblogs.com]
Re:Web proxy? But I already have one... (Score:1)
The power of the press belongs to those... (Score:3)
How about this for a possibility: what if the cost of pulication was next to nothing (but not zero or else it is too easy to flood the network) and the cost of distribution was paid for by the user who actually download the data. In other words almost no cost to publish to the net. In return for the faustian bargain I will allow users to be fair (by leaving a tip) which is about the only thing we have come up with yet for artist compensation, but if others have better ideas please let us know
jim
Mortal flaw of the Mojo Nation system (Score:1)
Re:Encrypted Anonymous Filesharing (Score:1)
So I download it and try it out... (Score:1)
I don't see a privacy policy on the site either.
wrighty.
Re:Worst Idea ever (Score:1)
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DigitalContent PAC [weblogs.com]
Re:The power of the press belongs to those... (Score:1)
Oob (Score:2)
Mindshare is important for a business selling an image, lifestyle, and name. As for the file-sharing dilution problem, all it takes is for 'interface' gateways that translate one network to another. So that a search on Gnutella gets routed to random machines that, automagically, happen to speak Gnutella and Freenet and Napster, etc, protocols. If, for example, you had a translator for Mojonation to search Gnutella, Freenet, or Napster, it would just look like the entire Gnutella, Freenet, or Napster network is just another user with a large number of files to offer.
Same from the other end.
As for the 'totdc' thing, it just means Mojonation won't allow Gnutella, Napster, etc, to plunder the Mojo network without some function of uploads as well.
The nick is a joke! Really!
Re:READ THE FACTS, PLEASE (Score:1)
That being said, where the vision will fall flat is nobody's going to pay to publish the porn and warez and MP3's that make up 90% of the Napster/Gnutella traffic when you can still get it through Napster/Gnutella for free.
Re:FAQ from site (Score:1)
It's pretty easy to figure out, especially if you bother to read the first sentence of his post. The writer specifically says "Yo, things are really slow on this site, close to being totally slashdotted, so I'm posting this here."
By linking to the FAQ, he would've only contributed to the site's being slashdotted that much faster, for that much longer. By posting the relevant info there, it saves all sorts of "what-the-hell-is-this-thing?" clicks.
I agree that in most cases it's redundant and annoying for people to do nothing other than quote from the source, but in this instance (considering the weight that file-sharing technologies have around here) I think it was justified. Hopefully the meta-mods will be able to see that too.
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
What about us bandwidth-limited people? (Score:1)
Re:dilution (Score:2)
Re:Cash-out option puts you at real risk. (Score:2)
As for your reference to Title 17 section 107 paragraphs 1 and 3, you really mean section 106 don't you ? There is no such phrase in section 107. Another nitpick: in legelese don't say "negate copyright", because that means something else. Say "infringe copyright." I think "negating a copyright" means that the copyright holder looses everything he was given -- for example if he infringed on someone else's copyright by putting their stuff in his work. It is obvious that if I make a photocopy of DA's work his copyright to it does not vanish.
And finally, why are you wrong ? Because of the modifier clause where it says "Subject to sections 107 through 121." Those are the sections that outline "fair use".
The whole of Section 106:
Subject to sections 107 through 121, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
Finally, if you go to look at the Sections 107 through 121 that this is subject to, the first thing you see is:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include - .
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature . .
There's more to it, I won't quote the whole thing here; it is kind of vague, but you have a lot more work to do to make an argument that uncompensated copying doesn't fall under fair use.
If you want to see an actual court rulling, in which someone made thousands of copies of Word and other commercial software and was ruled to not be in infringement of copyrights because they didn't receive money for it, look at US vs. LaMachia. [onramp.net] Search for the phrase "what LaMacchia is alleged to have done is not criminal conduct."
Do you happen to know where I could get a copy of British copyright law online ?
Repost (Score:2)
Slashdot - Napster Clone With Pay Per Download [July 30, 2000] [slashdot.org]
But I guess it's good to dig up topics from time to time in case anybody missed them last time 'round.
They've gotten a lot of press [mojonation.net] in the last four months, mostly good.
--
Can sharemaps be kept off one's site? (Score:2)
I ask because some people will want to be able to state categorically that it is impossible for them to know anything at all about even a single block on the basis of information held on their own machinery. Possession of a sharemap may undermine that. Without that guarantee, your client base will not grow as quickly as it might otherwise.
iMesh? (Score:1)
The chaps at iMesh (http://www.imesh.com/ [imesh.com]) are trying to do something a bit more distributed. I don't think it's quite there yet, but it's a start. I guess it means that iMesh themselves aren't going to have to purchase a bulk order of KY in the near future, but their luzers might.
Winblows clients only, unfortunately, so I'd also recommend a trip to http://antivirus.cai.com/ [cai.com] for the latest InnoculatePE.
Re:Mortal flaw of the Mojo Nation system (Score:1)
Re:Cash-out option puts you at real risk. (Score:1)
DA has the right to prevent you copying his work. That is granted to him by Congress.
Books do come with a licence: its printed on the page with the copyright notice (this book is sold under the condition...). The bookseller is bound by this and the conditions of ownership normally include a price to the bookseller. S/he may then give away the book, but s/he can't copy it and sell or give the copies away.
As regards 107, the exceptions listed are for portions of a work, the bigger the portion the less "fair" it is. The bit about "commercial nature" is actually saying that the judge should be more generous on the interpretation of fair use if it is not for commercial use, which is in line with para 4 which says that the more you affect the value of the work the more likely you are to fall foul of the law. But saying that non-commercial use gets you off the hook completly is too much to hope for in court. Which is where the discussion started.
Read that section again and think about what it would mean under your system - can it really be saying that quoting small parts of a work is less "fair use" than larger parts or the entire work? It doesn't make sense.
It says that these are factors to be considered, not that these factors are ones which can be used only by the defense.
In short, it is fair use to quote portions, to use a text for education or to make other uses which do not, in the judge's opinion, affect the value of, or market for, the work. Giving the work away for free is definately going to affect both of those. but, again, the judge can be lenient if the effect is small, if s/he chooses.
LaMacchia was charged with the wrong crime and, under the Wire Fraud Statute, found not-guilty. The decision specifically states that it is not a copyright decision, only a fraud one. Indeed, it is hard to see how giving things away can be any sort of fraud.
I can't find UK copyright law on line, with a quick search on Google, but I'll have another look tonight.
TWW
Some obvious problems (Score:2)
This has some serious consequences which IMHO partially defy the purpose of mojonet as a fair, decentralized, anonymous and censorship proof way of file-sharing:
- fairness: The value of the mojo currecy is not only determined be the market but also by the total ammount of mojo available, which is controlled by a single company. Should mojonation.net e.g. decide to double the amount of mojo tokens for some marketing campaign, this alone would halve the value of your mojo account.
- centralisation: All efforts to decentralize technical ressources, while improving scalability, don't make the system itself any more robust than more centralized approaches (like e.g. napster) as the bookkeeping server still remains a single point of failure for the whole system. And for the case that mojonation.net goes out of bussiness, besides from not being able to use the service anymore, users would also suffer material losses as their accounts are nullified over night.
- anonymity: Any user will regularily have to contact the central bookkeeping server. Monitoring the activity of this server allows to identify the IPs of all users and the amount of their activity.
- censorship: A central server also means that there is someone to sue, for whatever reason, legimate or not. Considering the fact that mojonation.net is based in the US, it is only a matter of time until they are forced to implement restrictions or shut down their service. This is especially unfair to non-US users who are put at the mercy of a foreign legislation which has a notorious track record when it comes to intellectual property. (Remember that, unlike a "stateless" system like e.g. napster, with MojoNation, users are forced to pay (money or recources) in advance befor they have a chance to get anything back, so it is legitimate to expect some reliability.)
An obvoius solution for the above problem would be to not only decentralize the resources but also the mojo itself i.e. to allow multiple currencies: anybody who thinks that he is trustworthy enough to other users can issue his own mojo-brand and set up a standardized bookkeeping server.Users can then decide which "currencies" they accept and besides the other 4 services they can run on their brokers, can also offer to change currencies for other users at rates they define for themselves. This way, you can use market mechanisms to sort out untrustworty currencies and give the users the choice to decide for themselves where to put their virtual cash.
Re:It'll get shut down in the states. (Score:1)
Re:Cash-out option puts you at real risk. (Score:2)
But here is the summary: DA doesn't have the right to prevent me from doing anything. He has the right to recover from me in explicit ways for explicit acts. If congress wanted to say simply "unauthorized reproduction is prohibited", they could have said so in those four words. But they didn't. They spent the majority of the effort on the bill building an admittedly vague exception. I believe that under some circumstances photocopying a book might run afoul of the law, even if you didn't get money for that; but the tendency of the legislature is to spell out what you can't do explicitly and leave everything else vague; so the fact it doesn't explicitly prevent me from making copies is in my favor.
I'm not interested in excerpt or partial reproduction at all. Let's leave that out to keep it simple.
What I will send you this weekend, provided I can find them, will be a court case citation in which someone photocopied a book and was let off for it. I won't use the LaMachia case, but the rulling does explicitly state that that his actions didn't run afoul of the copyright statutes; the Judge was observing that the prosecution was seaking to make their case with the Wire Fraud exactly because they couldn't make their case under copyright.
Best Idea Ever (Score:1)
Highly Illegal(and immoral)? (Score:1)
READ THE FACTS, PLEASE (Score:3)
I just thought I'd interject with a few facts about Mojonation.
1. You do not need content to get Mojo. You can let people use your computer's resources.
2. You can exchange mojo for cash and vice versa (ie. if you don't like to trade files, sell your resources instead - this may be a great way for companies to use idle computers)
3. Mojonation is built to scale. It won't choke like Gnutella.
Please folks, read the damn article before you post. You just come off like idiots otherwise.
rLowe
Re:Incentive Engineering (Score:1)
Given enough time Mojo will stabilize on a price the market is willing to bear - making it a true totally decentralized non-state issued currency. The potential of this is incredibly liberating, and I am totally exicited about it. This is great news folks!
Re:Incentive Engineering (Score:1)
Interesting. However, what's to prevent me from publishing to myself? There's a minimal cost to store the maps, and to publish the content description, but (using a custom agent) I simply keep the three gig on hand as a real file (And construct the blocks requested on the fly, to boot)
Now we have a situation much like the fake gnutella links... a fast way to procure mojo.
In fact, storing and offering from your own system (paying yourself to upload) is probably going to be required for things like freenapscourtella (.com) gateways.
I don't know the underlying technology of mojo well enough yet to see if that's possible. (On freenet, it's possible, but the data migrates off your system rapidly based on the closeness of it's content hash)
A system like this would make sure that an inappropriate document (Like, say, the Constitution and the first ten ammendments) dosn't accidentally get lost. One (or more) interested parties can always make sure they have it, likely at a higher price. "mirrors" can download "popular" data and offer it at a cheaper price.
I didn't see a hardcore technical document on mojo's underlying topology, so I'm gonna go back to reading dox and source now.
--Dan
Re:Mojonation and Ross Anderson's "Eternity" syste (Score:1)
do you really think anything as downright subversive as this has a snowball's chance in hell?
The idea is good, but it will never succeed. (Score:2)
Re:mojo (Score:1)
Life is a disease, sexually transmitted and fatal.
Where have I seen this before? (Score:1)
Oh wait, it was on Slashdot! [slashdot.org] Man, this site is always way behind compared to Slashdot!
+/- cash flow... (Score:2)
The question is tho, can you make more money than it costs to purchase the hdd space?
Or do you just do it for sheer fun of it?
(good) Human nature. (Score:1)
Ok, so you read the article. Why are you making points about a businessman when Jim McCoy is a programmer? A lot of this stuff is still up in the air because they are creating a new market and essentially just a big grey area. Sometimes things are just a little less cut and dry than what we'd like, but we still try them out
People will flood the system with 3 gig files titled 'nakedgirl.mpg' in order to cash in.
That might be true in the short term, but the people that upload crap are going to be labelled as users that upload crap (and when they open a new account they start with no mojo again). If your theory was correct, a web site (and business model) like eBay just plain wouldn't work at all. People would be too busy ripping other people off than having productive auctions - and this just isn't the case.
Sometimes people just have to be trusted. Of course, a good system (like eBay's) helps, but ultimately it comes down to good people who want to use the system as intended.
rLowe
Re:+/- cash flow... (Score:2)
Re:this sounds like... (Score:1)
So you admit that Phlogiston holds up almost 90% of th3e Celestial Sphere?
Not all BBS's went away... they just aren't on the net (for the most part) and so they have low visibility.
Too difficult to use (Score:1)
For this to be viable it needs to be available in a single windows executable package. Otherwise it'll be doomed, like so many other neat toys, to the hacker-nerd doldrums.
Re:dilution (Score:3)
With Hotline, if you "share" your MP3 collection, yet collect banner revenue, it's illegal, because the sharing is not non-commercial, and therefore is not protected by "fair use".
With Napster, sharing your MP3's with the world IS legal, because it's non-commercial - protected by "fair use".
With Mojonation, you're in-effect, selling your MP3's that you share for Mojo. Which gives you the privilege to buy more MP3's. Which means Mojo is a form of currency (like Slashdot karma, ho ho ho!), I suppose enough ambiguity there to keep a whole BMW-dealership-full of lawyers in Armani socks for the next 5 years. Perhaps it's more of a commodity. Goodie, then the gummint can TAX it. (which is why I troll, because I'm afraid that if Gore's elected, I'll be paying the IRS for my high-karma next April).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticising Mojonation, I'm not trying to say it's a bad thing, it's just that, for a global (world-wide, earth-encompassing) search, fragmenting humanity's free-MP3 library under these various services will make certain rare bits harder to find, and, of course, there's that commercial ambiguity with Mojo.
True, the "genetic variety" issue makes it more survivable, as a whole. . . I guess it's an inevitable stage of evolution. (with the final stage being no further legal inhibitions, and all systems being interoperable such that a single point can be searched for that Bathroom recording of Wierd Al's "Another one rides the bus".
Re:This is CRIMINAL, NOT 'COOL'! (Score:3)
Even if some people (mis)use it that way, it's a content-trading scheme and a Generally Cool Idea.
That's why I care -- not because of how people will or won't use it, but because the way it works is based on a novel idea. It's called 'geek factor' and is an important concept 'round here. 'Twould be a good thing if you'd familiarize yourself with it.
Re:A Mojo Millionaire, and can't afford a Starbuck (Score:2)
Second, what 'voluntary' thing? I just grepped through the article and didn't see that word on any of the three pages. It most certainly _isn't_ voluntary -- when you download something, you pay everyone else involved in the transaction like-it-or-not. Maybe you've got the ability to choose to give people some additional Mojo, but you don't get anything free.
Problems for such tools (Score:1)
Napster has also an Advantage, they have many registered users using their Tool and Network.
At last but not least there meight be problems with the Law. I think, that we don't know whether it is illegal to offer tools like Napster (even if they are "Free Software").
One advantage being overlooked... (Score:1)
That feature alone may be Mojo's salvation.
Re:Cash-out option puts you at real risk. (Score:1)
If congress wanted to say simply "unauthorized reproduction is prohibited", they could have said so in those four words. But they didn't.
No, they used the words:
which is more than 4 but it means the same thing. The following section (107) then lists exceptions which I covered in the previous answer and revolve around a) educational use, and b) use which is not likely to reduce the market for the work.
I believe that under some circumstances photocopying a book might run afoul of the law, even if you didn't get money for that;
Every UK library has to have (by law) a notice posted above the photocopiers stating that copying >5% of a work (maps have a special section) is illegal. Have a look in your local library; perhaps US ones have a similar notice. In any case copying a whole work (which you do not own a copy of) for non-educational/research use seems very clearly against the combined statements of 106 and 107. If you copy a book from the library, say, you have reduced the market for that book by 1. This is not allowed.
the fact it doesn't explicitly prevent me from making copies is in my favor.
But 106 does specifically say you need the author's permission. Copying it without permission is the very first thing section 106 says you can't do. Therefore its up to you to show that you fall under one of the exceptions.
Well, could be, but I suspect that in fact the reason was that they were unsure if copyright covered software (it didn't in the US until quite recently).
I will send a more detailed reply via email this weekend.
Okay, I look forward to it.
TWW
Re:Repost (Score:1)
How much bad press did you expect them to put up on their own page?
Malk-a-mite
Re:Some obvious problems (Score:2)
The anonymity/privacy of transactions are handled through two mechanisms, cryptography and credit. We use signed tokens as our "coins" and it takes a simple three line modification to the coin builder code to create blinded coins. This prevents us from watching our users' spending habits. The blinded coins are the crypto solution, but credit between peers makes observation difficult as well. Each agent actually establishes a line of credit with another agent and begins conducting transactions. A token exchange does not occur until the balance between two agents drifts outside the credit limit. This means that the bank sees only occasional bursts of activity. Determining what the coin exchange was for will be very, very difficult (and in fact it will probably be for lots of different services and transactions that occurred over a long period of time.)
Shutting down the token server will be harder than it first seems. For starters, you are incorrect in assuming that we are a US corporation. Autonomous Zone Industries is a Cayman exempt company, this choice was made a while ago because it made following the PGP/NAI crypto export route (publish a book and scan it in over in Europe) easier when US crypto laws were a problem. It is also quite simple for us to distribute the token servers. While a denial of service attack is not trivial we have tried to make the system less brittle than it first appears, for example the microcredit system that is running the show is lenient about the token server disappearing for a while, it will just up the credit limits a little and see if things keep working.
The fairness problem is an issue of trust. We plan on having third-party auditing of our procedures and simple issued vs. redeemed checks should prevent insider problems (a bigger cause for worry in terms of what happens in the real world.) We have bigger plans for this than something as simple as just another Napster clone, but for the moment we are asking people to trust us that we are not going to burn any credibility we have for a quick cash-out. If you crunch the numbers you will eventually see that there is not really much money in being the token server, but the marketplace which is created by the existence of a single token server can have all sorts of useful properties. I want to enable Intel to buy CPU cycles from you and everyone else in Mojo Nation on an as-needed basis and purchase a support contract for this service from yours truly...burning the consumer market is the last thing I want to do.
If AZI goes out of business then people would be able to create thier own coin systems, slot them in to existing code, and pick up the dropped baton.
Multiple currencies will be supported as a licensing option, but after giving this way too much thought over the past decade or so I am not so certain that people really want to make the "do I trust this currency choice." Our original plan during the design phase of the marketplace was that _everyone_ would act as a token mint, creating reputation-backed coins that others would exchange and redeem for services. This turns out to be a general nightmare in terms of system complexity. Trying to figure out a solution to this is what led to the insight that what was really needed was micro-credit between the peers. This peer to peer credit is reputation-based and uses the digital coins for settlement; what is happening in the background is that agents are trying to make these same sorts of trust and reputation decisions that you are talking about in a multiple-currency world but by using a credit system the agent only needs to deal with the currencies of agents with whom it actually conducts transactions. By tweaking the business logic you could create the sorts of trust distinctions you desire without breaking interoperability with the rest of the marketplace.
If you wanted to create your own little world of Mojo agents that traded their own currency nothing would prevent this. We are only creating a currency for use in the public market and are not trying dictate all of the possible uses for this system.
jim
Re:What about us bandwidth-limited people? (Score:2)
We hear you. The first two bandwidth throttling features which will appear will be a flat "cut the line after X many bits in and out" and will soon be followed by the much nicer "just raise prices as we get closer and closer to the X bits/hour|day|week limit." One advantage of having a market behind things is that we can use pricing to signal resource availability. We will probably not have this in our
jim
Re:Cash-out option puts you at real risk. (Score:2)
While your observation that the compensation aspect of this makes a big difference, you shouldn't imply that uncompensated file copying is in anyway illegal. The big copyright holding interests out there would certainly like to spread that idea, but let them spread their lies on their dollar, don't help them out for free.
MojoNation's privacy policy (Score:2)
<O
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs [8m.com]!
Incentive Engineering (Score:5)
1) You get credit for content you publish so there is an incentive to publish lots of random crap.
This is untrue. You do not get Mojo to posting content, you get Mojo for reselling blocks of data to others. In fact, in Mojo Nation there is a minor cost imposed for publication to prevent people from doing the sorts of stupid attacks which you mention. Mojo Nation is built assuming a society of dishonest, distrustful agents. Your agent doesn't get paid (by my agent) until you deliver the goods.
We are also working on a simple collaberative filtering system to allow users to filter out the bad metadata in the system. If someone publishes 3 gb of random noise it will get a few hits and the users will be able to pass back to the content tracker a complaint that the description did not match the content, as a few of these pile up the content description gets fewer hits on search requests and eventually the blocks fade away because no one will buy them.
2) What is the "price" of Mojo.
The reason I tried to avoid that question is that the answer is a little too complex to distill into a sound bite. A unit of Mojo represents a slice of the current capabilities of the system as a whole. If you perform work for me now I give you credits, in the future when the network is larger those credits will represent a slice of a much larger pie and so have increased in value when you spend them. If the network collapses (as you predict) then the only value of those credits are that the company running Mojo Nation will redeem them for storage/message passing service on our own systems.
The problem with quoting a "price" is that everyone will dig it up later and call you a liar for not being able to successfully predict the future product of several different unknown variables in this equation (how large is the network vs. total tokens in circulation, what is the raw replacement cost of the resources, what sort of discount are users willing to make on these resources to attract customers, what is the current demand for each resource in our basket [is bandwidth scare this hour, perhaps disk space?])
Mojo is a mechanism for keeping score in peer to peer systems. The real-dollar value depends on the demand for the services and the supply in the pool. Please don't claim that I am an idiot just because I have a basic understanding of which claims one can and cannot make regarding a future market condition.
jim
FAQ from site (Score:3)
1. What is Mojo Nation?
Mojo Nation is a worldwide system that enables us to publish and share any kind of data, like
text, sounds, moving and still pictures, and other binary files.
1.1 What makes Mojo Nation different from other file-sharing systems?
Other file-sharing systems are plagued by "the tragedy of the commons," in which rational folks
using a shared resource eat the resources to death. Most often, the "Tragedy of the Commons"
refers to farmers and pasture, but technology journalists are writing about users who download
and download but never contribute to the system. In Mojo Nation, every transaction costs some
Mojo, and as one's Mojo credit limit is reached, one must contribute *something* -- whether
resources or cash -- to the community.
1.2 Is Mojo Nation rated G, PG-13, R, or XXX?
We have no idea. Each file published to Mojo Nation is broken into several small pieces, and
then each of those pieces is broken into eight more pieces and encrypted so securely that finding
the key to the code is as difficult as finding an atom in the sun. The result is that one cannot learn
whether a file is on Mojo Nation or not except by trying to download that specific file.
2. Why isn't the Mojo Nation software working for me?
The three most common reasons we have encountered are:
* The user hasn't started his Broker before launching the gateway page on his web browser.
Under Windows, double-click "Start Mojo Broker" on the desktop. Under Linux, run Broker in
the command shell.
* The Windows software didn't install because Internet Explorer for Windows stripped the
extension from the installation program.
Right-click on the label under the mojonation-beta-0_90-win98 icon and rename the file
mojonation-beta-0_90-win98.exe.
* The user hasn't set the web proxy.
Internet Explorer 4.0: Go to the View menu, pull down "Internet Options...", then click on the
"Connection" tab. Select the "Access the Internet using a proxy server" checkbox, and enter
"localhost" into the "Address:" field and "8000" into the "Port" field. (Users running a later version
of Explorer also have to click "LAN Settings".)
Netscape Communicator 4.7: Go to the Edit menu, and pull down "Preferences". In the Category
window, select "Advanced". The "Advanced" tree will open, then select "Proxies". The Proxies
configuration window opens, then select the "Manual proxy configuration" radio button, and click
the "View" button.
2.1 What does the web proxy do?
If the web proxy is enabled, your browser -- instead of connecting to the host specified in a
http://mojonation.net URL -- connects to the proxy. It is then the proxy's task to make the
connection and return the requested resource. This will be invisible to Mojo Nation users.
2.11 Does using the web proxy reveal my browsing activity to mojonation.net?
No. The proxy runs on your local machine, and it does not log any of your activities nor does it
ever contact mojonation.net for any reason.
When you view a normal web page like "http://www.plastic_daisies_for_sale.com/", the proxy is
transparent -- it doesn't do anything but pass the web page through to your browser, exactly like
normal web surfing. When you view a Mojo Nation page, like "http://mojonation.net/broker/" or
"http://mojonation.net/id/XXXX"[XXXX Zooko: insert cool mojonation id here--Zooko
2000-09-28], the proxy intercepts your request and satisfies it without ever contacting
mojonation.net.
2.2 What if I don't want to use the web proxy?
In Linux, with your Broker running, open the intropage in ~/.mojonation/broker/intropage.html. In
Windows, with your Broker running, open the intropage in C:\Program Files\Mojo
Nation\config\broker\intropage.html.
2.3 Why do I get a symbol not found error from Windows when I try and run the
software?
One error we have seen (most often on Windows NT) is due to older versions of
MSVCRT.DLL being on the system elsewhere and in use by another application (check in
C:\Windows\System\). Our install program does not currently handle this properly. You need to
manually replace the old MSVCRT.DLL file with the new one from the mojonation directory.
3. What is Mojo?
Mojo is Mojo Nation's "digital currency". In the Mojo Nation distributed computing environment,
in which all the computers are joined by a common software, users may choose to contribute
disk space, bandwidth, and processing cycles to the network in exchange for Mojo. Users are
enabled to set their own prices for these online resources.
3.1 How many Mojo are in one dollar?
There is no fixed Mojo-to-dollar ratio. Mojo is exchanged for unused disk space, bandwidth,
and processing cycles, and Mojo is transferred from user to user with tokens -- when we move
past beta, users will be able to buy and sell the tokens for what the market will bear.
3.2 What do the "Mojo coming in" and "Mojo going out" numbers on my Stash page
mean?
The Mojo Nation barter system revolves around credit one user's Broker extends to another.
The Mojo doesn't move until one Broker owes another 10,000 Mojo -- because every
conversation between Brokers on Mojo Nation involves some cost in Mojo, it would be too
burdensome to make a digital token payment each time. So, the "Mojo coming in" total is the
sum of all the Mojo promised to you in an IOU but not yet delivered. The "Mojo going out" total
is the amount of Mojo promised by you.
3.21 I thought beta users were granted one million Mojo to start! Why do I have fewer
than one million Mojo? Auuuugh!
When you first use your account, it takes a little while for your Mojo to gather. Eventually, your
Stash page will report that cool million, give or take that couple of Mojo you earn or spend while
you're on the network. Also, if you halt your Broker while that million is still being credited to
your account, that won't stop the accumulation.
3.3 On my Stash page, I have more Mojo going out than coming in. Why?
The two main reasons are:
It costs Mojo to publish something to the system. When you publish a file, your Broker has to
pay block servers to store the pieces. Further, too much supply, not enough demand. The system
hasn't yet attracted enough users whose Brokers will pay for downloads.
If you're using a relay server, you're paying for it steadily. Mojo Nation users behind a firewall
need to employ a relay server outside the firewall that will hold messages for them until their
Broker goes out to pick them up. However, each time the Broker asks the relay server if there
are any messages there for it, the Broker has to pay the relay server a bit of Mojo.
3.4 How do I earn Mojo?
By running services for other users. Clicking "configure" at the main menu enables you to run
block servers, content trackers, publication trackers, and relay servers, and to set prices for each
of those services.
3.5 If I accumulate enough Mojo, can I buy beer/friends/France?
Eventually. The best-known distributed computing project -- SETI@Home -- accumulated
about 300,000 years of computing time in its first year of operation. If they shared that time with
Mojo Nation for a year, and ran every service while charging default prices, they'd certainly earn
enough to buy beer.
3.6 Can I earn Mojo in Mojo Nation while writing The Great American Novel in my
word processor?
Yes. You don't have to be using the Mojo Nation gateway in order to earn Mojo, as long as
your Broker is running in the command shell (Linux) or MS-DOS window (Windows). Some of
us leave our Brokers on all day, running in the background while we perform other tasks.
4. What is a relay server?
A relay server works like a mailbox for users who are behind a firewall. When the firewalls block
incoming messages from reaching the Brokers -- the agents which run the whole show -- the
relay servers sit outside the firewall and hold messages for the Brokers. The Brokers can go
outside the firewall and retrieve the messages, then bring them back in for processing.
4.1 Why should I choose to run a relay server?
Users who elect to operate a relay server (by clicking "on" for "Relay Server" on the Configure
page) earn gobs of Mojo because the Brokers who work behind the relay server (that is, those
folks behind the firewalls) are continually asking it if there are any messages there for it and are
therefore paying a steady toll in Mojo.
4.2 I'm behind a firewall, but the Mojo Nation software didn't detect it, so my Broker
isn't getting any replies to the messages it sends out. How can I make sure I use a relay
server?
There is an option on the configure page called "Behind A Firewall" that you should change to
"On", save the config, and restart your Broker software.
Alternatively: edit your Broker configuration file (in Unix systems, it's
~/.mojonation/broker/broker.conf, or in Windows, the default path is C:\Program
Files\mojonation\config\broker\broker.conf) and change the "SERVE_USING_A_RELAY"
setting under "YES_NO" to "yes".
4.21 Editing my Broker configuration file seems to be hazardous, since it determines
how my Broker interacts with the system.
Yes, so keep a backup copy, and keep in mind that the tabbing is vital.
4.3 I'm behind a firewall, but don't want to pay a relay server. How can I punch holes in
my firewall?
Consult your firewall documentation.
4.4 Which TCP/UDP ports should I open for Mojo Nation?
Once you've started your Broker, look in its output or log file for a line containing
"TCPCommsHandler: successfully bound to port NNNN" to find out the port number you are
using.
If you wish to use a specific port number, edit your config file and change these settings:
TRANSACTION_MANAGER_LISTEN_PORT:
This is the port you are actually listening on locally.
TRANSACTION_MANAGER_PICKY_PORT: false
If true, this means "barf if I can't get the listen port listed above." Otherwise it'll keep trying other
port numbers until it finds one that works.
People setting things up behind firewalls with tunnels through them may also need to change
these:
TRANSACTION_MANAGER_ANNOUNCED_PORT:
You are announcing to the rest of the world that this is the port on which you are running. If you
have a tunnel through a masquerading/nat firewall, you want to set this to the appropriate port on
the masquerating/nat firewall.
IP_ADDRESS_OVERRIDE:
This is the IP address that your Broker announces to others. If you have a tunnel through a
masquerading/nat firewall, you want to set this to the IP address of the masquerating/nat firewall.
5. Where's the Macintosh version of Mojo Nation?
Ask again after OS X is released. It will be easier to port Mojo Nation to Macintosh under
Macintosh OS X because it is derived from BSD Unix, and the engineers around here are all
Unix nerds.
6. May I publish content to Mojo Nation that no one else can see?
Yes. In the Publish window, click "Browse" to publish a single file, or type a directory path into
the "Select File or Path" field to publish a group of files. Then pull down "None" from the "Select
Content Type" menu, after which this message will appear:
Warning: Content published under the type "None" is afforded absolute privacy because it will be
invisible to searches and content trackers. That also means that the file cannot be found through
normal means should the file's Dinode be forgotten.
If content is published without a content description, the trackers on Mojo Nation are not notified
of its presence and neither can they find it later. However, if you lose the Dinode URL to the file,
you won't be able to find it again, either.
6.1 What's a Dinode?
When your Broker submits a file to Mojo Nation, it first breaks up the file into several small
pieces, then the pieces into smaller blocks which are encrypted for privacy and duplicated for
reliability. The Broker draws a "sharemap" to the location of the blocks, and for further security,
tears up and encrypts the map, too. The list of the blocks which makes up the sharemap is the
"Dinode". Nothing on Mojo Nation can be retrieved without the Dinode. References to Dinodes
in the Mojo Nation web interface are almost always presented in MojoID form, a
human-readable URL.
Mojonation and Ross Anderson's "Eternity" system (Score:5)
Way back in the day, Tim May (cypherpunks)
created a distributed communications prototype
called 'BlackNet', communicating through anonymous
remailers and doing file service, etc. It was
lacking in a viable anonymous payment mechanism,
but was a totally adequate proof of concept for
a totally secure filestore and info-market.
http://www.cl.cam.ac. uk/ users/rja14/eternity/eternity.html [cam.ac.uk]
Ross Anderson, a professor at Cambridge University
(and member of the SERPENT AES-candidate team),
worked on specifications for a system which
provided a "global filestore" capable of storing
popular or unpopular content in a distributed,
censorship-resistant fashion, based on electronic
payment, network communication, etc.
Adam Back then implemented "Eternity USENET",
using USENET as a backing store, with a special
web proxy to enter/retreive files.
Napster, Gnutella, Freenet seem to have come from
a completely different direction (particularly
Napster), rather than from the Eternity/BlackNet/etc. tree. Napster is
certainly the least general, but has had the
most commercial/userbase success, which may
be linked. It's certainly a lot easier to understand "Napster is sharing mp3s" than
"mojonation provides distributed file sharing
backed by electronic cash and a system of reputations and agents and brokers and
will tell.
Publius is probably most directly inspired by
Anderson's Eternity Service, but I didn't check
citations.
Mojo Nation is from the same intellectual heritage
as BlackNet/Eternity/etc., but I believe the
foundations were laid at about the same time as
the others, with implementation waiting quite
a while for resources to be available. It looks
like the first viable opportunity to get
electronic cash widely deployed on the Internet...
I think that aspect of Mojo Nation (the mojo part)
is by far more important than the file-sharing
aspect, but it's a bootstrapping problem.
Easier to shut down? (Score:2)
H. Rosen: So users buy and sell content using Mojo Nation, right?
Developer: No, ummmm, well, they don't buy content, they buy, ummm, the right to download content!
Judge: Piracy! AHRA does not apply! Shut it down! SO ORDERED.
Tell me how this won't happen.
Re:This looks cool, but... (Score:2)
Re:Go check it out before you assume (Score:2)
)O(
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
Very valid point, moderate this up! (Score:2)
Locally stored bits are opaque (Score:5)
1) The file will be encrypted with the hash of the file. (feature in release 0.920 which will be out this week)
2) The encrypted file is broken into fixed-length segments.
3) These segments are pushed through an error-correction code, expanding the N bits into 8 N/4 length segments. (any 4 of the 8 shares are sufficient to reconstruct the orginal block)
These resulting block fragments are then published and are passed through the system. Each block fragment is only identified by its SHA1 hash, to reconstruct a piece of data you need a sharemap which tells you that if you collect a certain set of blocks and reverse the publication process using the instructions contained in the map you get the original file.
If you are holding blocks you have no idea what they are, it is effectively random noise on your system. If you have a map which contains a reference to block that you are holding locally you can figure out that small part of the puzzle, but looking at what is stored locally and knowing what you have is more than just searching for a needle in a haystack...
jim
Re:This looks cool, but... (Score:2)
Just speculating here, but if the blocks are encrypted before they're stored on your disk, then you can't be expected to know what's in them. You don't have the key (the system does), and even if you did, you can't encrypt your blocks without the IV from the previous blocks (assuming CBC mode or similar encryption) -- which are stored on someone else's computer.
--Jim
Go check it out before you assume (Score:3)
Yes, critical mass will be important, but security is one of the primary reasons for its existance. Worried about someone using up your disk space? Don't worry because if they do, they have to pay for it (it costs the sender money to publish a file). Worried about someone using up all your CPU? Don't worry, because if they do, you're compensated (virtually). Worried about someone running something on your machine that you don't approve of? Can't happen as the system is currently designed, because noone (currently) provides an open-ended cpu service. You can only do searches, and you are compensated when someone uses your machine to search the network.
The major goals of mojonation are security, privacy, scalability and decentralization. Everything within the network is distributed, including trust. I may be mistaken, but I believe even the compensation medium (mojo) is going to be decentralized. There will be no federal mojo reserve or official Mojo Authority.
A lot of the goals are still unimplemented, but some of the features exist now. The best example of where this is headed is how files are published: When you publish a file it is broken up into eight blocks, any four of which can be combined to re-create the original file. Those blocks are sent out to different servers without indication of their contents.
It's not done yet, but it's also not a bad start.
Re:READ THE FACTS, PLEASE (Score:2)
I read the damn article, and he sounds like a bullshitter to me.
Whenever I ask a businessman what his service cost and I get a lot of hee-hawing about how "it depends", red lights immediately start flashing.
So you get credit for content that you put online. Seriously people, how much content do I have that I created myself that anyone would want to see? Want some cool jpgs of my summer beach vacation? No, you want the lastest Quake demo. Guess what, Id has that online. If I want it, I'll go there to get it. The little game this guy is playing with "Mojo" was tried with the old BBS. People immediately slam the board with trash in order to get points to download the good stuff. This will be no different. People will flood the system with 3 gig files titled 'nakedgirl.mpg' in order to cash in. The people who download the file will be upset, but the perpetrators will be out cashing in their Mojo (remember the system doesn't know that 'nakedgirls.mpg' is an encrypted core dump, and you have to pay for what you download regardless).
And of course there is no incentive to put new content into the system. "Heh, people are nice and they'll pay me for my work, just because people are nice." Sounds like a road to the poor house for anyone that actually wants to make a living creating content.
No. This 'utopian vision' will fall flat on its face.
Re:It'll get shut down in the states. (Score:2)
Burris
Re:dilution (Score:2)
There is no stereo (Score:2)
If you have a stereo that's been identified as stolen, ignorance is no excuse because the object of the crime has been identified. It's there before your very eyes, and it's provably a stolen stereo.
But what if you have only an amorphous blob in your possession, with nothing to indicate what it is? It may be one block of the free recipes FAQ, or part of one of a billion other innocuous items, but neither you nor anyone else can say whether it is or it isn't. Furthermore, whatever it is, it's only a fragment, one among countless others, not a complete object at all.
So there's no point talking about the stereo. What stereo? Not only can no such thing be identified. It's not actually there, and it's not there by design.
Re:This looks cool, but... (Score:2)
The answer is "no" to all three. I am sure banks are aware that odds are some of their boxes hold coke, weapons, stolen property. They are renting boxes, not going into business with the people that rent them. The law doesn't require them to run drug dogs through the vaults to make sure. This is the same thing.
The stuff on mojonation seems to be as impossible to decypher as anything out there.
Shit, data is ones and zero's. The contents of every kiddie porn, weapons plans, whatever could be pulled from anyones hard disk if you know the pattern. It's freaking ones and zeros.
The question is, do you knowingly store, copy, transfer anything illegal? No. I couldn't find out what I am transferring/storing/copying if I wanted to.
I thought we all went through this argument about freenet/napster/gnutella before.
Local security (Score:5)
For preventing problems like eating up all of your CPU time or a rogue agent running rampant through your filesystem, we are trying very hard to do the right thing (for starters by not even trying to execute distirbuted code, CPU cycle costs are included in the costs of reselling or delivering a message.) We have used strong crypto where appropriate and we are aware that all control and trust boundaries are local so we are trying to create the basic infrastructure which takes advantage of this fact.
The market was chosen as our model for resource allocation and trust management because it seems to work. No one trusts other agents in the game, everyone is (usually) trying to selfishly maximize the utility of the system for their own needs, and successful cheating can carry great reward so risk management is built into the basic assumptions about how things work. Still this distributed system ticks right along without Alan Greenspan needing to keep track of where each dollar is spent or the local shoe factory needing to know exactly who is going to be buying the shoes it is creating.
In Mojo Nation you don't trust anyone, your agents are very paranoid about what is outside of their direct control, and choices about trust, performance, and privacy/anonymity can become economic choices on the part of the user.
jim
ISP's will wig out (Score:5)
Re:This looks cool, but... (Score:2)
I agree. What is my liability if someone else stores stolen credit card numbers, kiddie porn or (gasp!) DeCSS source code on my drive?
--
J, Internetist
Re:Sun have already done this..... (Score:2)
Re:+/- cash flow... (Score:2)
Not real cash, but "digital cash". Sort of a "I'm letting you store my files here and then you'll let me download the files on your hard drive." or something.
Anyway, like I stated above, I didn't read the article, so don't mod me as informative.
MN looks to local info (Score:2)
Right now it does not make sense for the market to try to select the closest source unless it has a significant impact on performance. Making choices based on network topology, selecting what price lists you will present to a agent depending on its identity (e.g. being able to locally subsidize a worthwhile project or effort), these sorts of things are basic business logic decisions. We have created a skeleton set of these little rules, but as the market matures it will support whatever clever rules people can think up.
jim
This looks cool, but... (Score:4)
Colin Winters
Re:Mojonation and Ross Anderson's "Eternity" syste (Score:4)
1) If someone does a complete reinstall on their computer, won't that result in the loss of the content? (I assume that you have some redundancy of data, but the more duplication, the greater the cost in mojo... - Perhaps offer redundancy for a greater cost, but the default be non redundant...)
2) You offer 1 Million mojo for beta testers, what is to stop someone from creating numerous false beta testing accounts (say a skript kiddie installing the mojonation on rooted boxen...), and then transferring all of the mojo to his account.
3) It would appear that your company would be in a similar position to the Federal Reserve - capable of 'printing' additional mojo, causing price inflation. What types of safety mechanisms are in place to keep you (or a clever hacker) from openning up their own 'mojo printing press'?
4) Givin that Mojo transfers have 'float' - that is, payment is not made until a certain level of Mojo is 'owed'. Could not an individual make transfers that were only to just below the threshold, and then no longer use the services of that individual? Thus one could 'owe' 9999 to ten thousand entities, and yet only have a total of 10,000 mojo.. Or create multiple anonymous accounts that each only use 9,999 credits.
5) Can large content easily be broken down into smaller pieces? I realize that a user could break the content apart before uploading it, but it would be nice if I could download partial content of a movie in smaller parts so that my payments are over a longer period of time.
6) If I download content, can I then advertise that I have it available so that I can recoup some of the cost of me downloading the content?
7) Is a method in place to 'stream' the content, if multiple users are willing to wait to download the content at the same time to reduce the cost per user and reduce the resources used by the sender?
Thanks,
LetterRip
Tom M.
TomM@pentstar.com
Why is the 2x redundancy ratio fixed? (Score:2)
Yet, such items would have the same degree of protection against loss in Mojo Nation as (say) a free recipes FAQ. Surely that can't be right?
Will there be any means of increasing the redundancy on the basis of content type in future versions? It would seem to be needed.
Cash-out option puts you at real risk. (Score:2)
Since there is (suppsoedly at least) the potential of cash payment, anyone breaking copyrights goes from being an amature pirate to a professional one.
You can be liable for up to 3 times the amount you collect in damages to anyone whose works you illegally make available.
I personally don't think this is a bad thing, but you might want to be careful of others' Copyrights when using this service.
Re:Locally stored bits are opaque(bad news for UK) (Score:2)
- decrypt the files for the authorities, and
- convince them you don't have the key(s)
You go to jail. Directly to jail. Do not pass go, do not bend over to pickup the soap.Technophobic law makers everywhere will shut this system down, or make the population nervous enough to effectively shut it down themselves. Unless the revenue model will survive just with ISPs signing up their spare space and bandwidth you're looking at a short future with a messy end.
That said, when cable modems appear where I'm at, and if the service agreement lets me run a "server" I might be interested in something like this if I thought the micropayments would even cover the electricity of leaving my PC on all the time. I would even consider it for work, since we have about 50 PCs with an average of 2Gig spare on their drives, but again only if the micropayments would compensate for the bandwidth (A$0.17 per MB).
This Already Violates my ISP's Service Contract. (Score:2)
http://bell.sympatico.ca/DynamicContentServlet.dyn ?/english/hse/faq.html#q18 [sympatico.ca]
I strongly doubt they would notice... for a while. As soon as cash is involved I think the whole system may break down.
Another thought which occurred to me is that it would be easy to greatly reduce the value of the service by an over-population of servers. If (for example) AOL puts up a gazillion server farms, you or I with our 1Mbps connections and K7-1GHz CPUs won't be able to earn anything from this, and all the information we retrieve will send micropayments to AOL. Getting paid for system resources should ideally offset the cost of the information we request.
On the other hand, success may kill the service, but it would be cool watching it get there. I guess this whole thought could be slain by placing a stipulation in the protocol that no one body can posess more than a certain percentage of the network (or recieve a certain percentage of mojo...).
note from one of the developers (Score:3)
Also, for any newcomers to the software, we are expecting a major new release soon that should improve the download speed from mojo nation drastically. The current sucky speed issues are completely client side due to inefficiencies in the way its current downloading code is written. We are rewriting that.
Happy Mojoing!
Greg - mojo programmer
ugh (Score:3)
Does the person who originally uploads a file to the network get paid?
No.
Then how do content creators get paid -- what's the incentive for them?
You can earn revenue by publishing through a feature we haven't added yet, which is basically tipping. When you publish you can say, Here's a digital signature on this map: I published this file; this is who to give the tip to.
---
Great! Another system in which the publisher (the people with the money and the big iron and bandwidth to host this stuff) rakes in the profits while content creators have to live on whatever scraps get thrown their way.
Re:A Mojo Millionaire, and can't afford a Starbuck (Score:2)
did you miss these paragraphs?
<snip!>
How does Mojo Nation and Autonomous Zone Industries make money through this process?
As the bank, we earn a small percentage of Mojo-to-dollar transactions or dollar-to-Mojo transactions. We act as a market maker: There are some people who will end up with a surplus of Mojo -- they will contribute more than they download. There are lot of people who will end up with a deficit of Mojo. We will put the two parties together and basically let them buy and sell on our Mojo market, and we'll take a small percentage.
At the moment it's 2 percent. It's only for dollar-to-Mojo transactions. If you put $10 of Mojo into the system and keep using it and using it, you never pay the fee.
</snip!>
Looks like real money to me. Of course, I haven't seen money in a while - so you never know.
rLowe
Re:Mojonation and Ross Anderson's "Eternity" syste (Score:5)
> Mojo Nation is from the same intellectual heritage
> as BlackNet/Eternity/etc., but I believe the
> foundations were laid at about the same time as
> the others, with implementation waiting quite
> a while for resources to be available.
The original genesis was the "Internet is a Brown Paper Bag" system created by myself, Doug Barnes, and Jerry Porter back in Austin and presented at the HoHoCon '94 conference. Things sat around for a while because we were waiting for two things: digital cash and a raison d'etre. At the time we did this early work connectivity and storage costs were expensive and there was no digital content to speak of. The growth of broadband and flood of digital content(music, video, images, etc.) made this arena more interesting several years ago so that is why we starting talking to lawyers to see if it would be possible to actually implement some of the wacky ideas we used to have.
A digital cash system was the sticking point. All great cypherpunk projects seem to begin with the line "when we have digital cash, we will be able to do X..." Our insight was in realizing that for a distributed system like what we really needed was a method for fairly allocating resources. We combined a cool idea to base a form of currency on payment in kind with a reputation-backed microcredit system to cut down on token clearing overhead and thus was born Mojo Nation.
One insight that Ryan has made which I hope others pick up on is that Mojo Nation is about more than just swapping music or pushing data. We are trying to create a basic infrastructure for any kind of peer to peer transaction, we just happen to think that trust management and resource allocation are the two important problems that need to be dealt with in this space and have targetted our micropayment system in this direction.
jim
dilution (Score:3)
Unfortunately, when we splinter the "file-sharing community" like this, we get divergent standards, content, and we start to lose the appeal that a system like Napster had, where EVERYBODY was on it, and nothing else, therefore, if you were looking for something in particular, a search of Napster was always your best bet. Now if you were looking for something, chances are, if it's not on Napster, it's on Gnutella, or Freenet, or . . . etc.
Same thing happens with Online auctions. People were afraid to go to other auction houses, because Ebay had THE name. Therefore, they retain most of the business. Mindshare. It's all about mindshare.
Re:The power of the press belongs to those... (Score:2)
The trick we are going to use in the short-term is that when you publish blocks you first publish them to your own agent to try to get the first resale hits from the blocks. If your agent has a reputation for posting blocks which tend to get resold then it is likely that this publish-to-self option will continue to work and your agent profits from the act of putting valuable data into the system. If you agent has no reputation or a bad reputation as a publisher then this will not work and you will have to front the cost of publication yourself.
One should also keep in mind that while we are tossing around numbers like 10,000 mojo for a publish or download these are intended to be very, very small numbers. We are hoping that publishing or downloading costs pennies per Gb as more participants join the network and competition drives down prices.
jim
Re:ISPs will love MojoNation! (Score:2)
Then again, if there was serious demand for bandwidth, maybe it would force the physical network to grow again. But the rising costs! Ack!
Doesn't address the underlying problem (Score:2)
Something like OpenCulture [openculture.org] backed up by a file distribution system like this would be the answer everyone's looking for.
Persistence in Mojo Nation. (Score:2)
Yes. As you have noticed, the filesystem is market-based so that which is most popular is the most widely replicated data. An agent in progress(the "eternity agent") will let you give it a bit of Mojo and it will run around making sure that your blocks are still available and if it finds any of of the shares are missing it will reconstruct and republish the missing shares.
There is also a _lot_ of idle space out there. Back of the envelope predictions seem to indicate that once we pass the ignition point where the whole range of this SHA1 address space is covered in depth there will be enough spare disk blocks out there that any data which is even mildly interesting will stick around. One market opportunity for users who are sitting on lots of disk space but small connections to the net is to collect a narrow range of the filesystem but to great depth, then just charge a higher price for access to the less popular blocks.
Oh yeah, you can also increase the number of shares for each block to whatever you want, so that downloading a particular block is a "get 32 out of 64" operation for example. The particular error correciton code we are using means that 50% is still the target for number of pieces, but by making more pieces you spread the data across more of the SHA1 address space and increase the probability that someone is online who has the share you need.
jim
Locally stored bits are opaque (good news for UK) (Score:2)
Mojo Nation and other similar system now being created at an accelerating rate just add to this background of unattributable noise. If anything, you're safeguarded by design when storing their content, since in general you simply cannot know what you're storing, and you definitely don't have the key to decrypt it even if you had all the pieces, which you don't. This makes it extremely easy to state convincingly that you don't have the key, since unless you've discovered a way of ensuring that you hold all the bits and have somehow subverted the dinode encryption, you definitely won't have it. By Design is a very powerful phrase.
In any event, this is just the start of the distributed storage revolution. In future systems you might well be able to obtain the key if you desire it --- only to find that you hold one bit of information for each of one billion files spread across 1 million hosts. A fat lot of good that will do you, or the prosecution. Welcome to the new world.
There is no such thing as free lunch. (Score:2)
There really isn't such a thing as "wasted" bandwidth for most every end user. One might be able to sell "his" bandwidth, without negatively impacting the status quo for other users or his ISP, but only if he takes mojo in lieu of his normal personal bandwidth consumption. Anything beyond that necessarily implies that someone else is paying for it, either the rest of the users, the ISP, or the intellectual property owners.
Which brings me to another point. If the user is participating in a legal transfer, how could the payment possibly exceed the cost? If the only service the customer is really providing is bandwidth and nominal storage, you'd pretty much have to expect the cost of bandwidth to be higher. What value does the customer add to the transaction that the ISP cannot do, and do better (i.e., faster and more economical connections)? The only reasonable answer is _illegal goods_ (i.e., pirated stuff). If the ISP cannot partake in facilitating piracy for legal reasons, then one might expect the customer to be "adding value", to speak, which the ISP cannot.
Not. (Score:2)
The "security features" which would be non-content-blind would be things like a built-in virus scanner. I don't expect such features from my mailreader; I don't expect them here either.
Re:may go a bit too far (Score:2)
Actually, if no money is involved, it is most definitely legal. It is precisely because there is no way to pay someone using napster or gnutella that it is protected.
You can download Title 17 of the US code and read it yourself. http://uscode.house.gov/download.htm [house.gov] is the site I used. I printed it out using star office and left it on my toilet for a while, and read more of it each time I took a shit. It's not as hard to read as, say, the C++ standard, or something.
Anyway, it is legal to make copies of copyrighted works if you are not selling them or using them in a business. This applies to software also.
There was a huge propaganda campaign against the fair use of software, which managed to subtlely imply that this type of copying was illegal. Remember the "Just Say No to Software Piracy" posters in school computer labs in the 80s and early 90s ? Remember the ads in magazines ?
If you actually go and read about the cases which came to court, almost no one has ever been sued for non-compensated software copying. All the big cases that were won in court were against people selling software, or against businesses that were using copied software. (Ok, there were a few cases were they brought charges against someone running a distribution site, and then dropped them once they had run them out of money and closed the site -- any one remember that kid at MIT who set up a server on an athena machine in W20 ? His name began with an "M" I think ?)
This effort was pretty successful. Most people today have some sneaky feeling of guilt when they copy commercial software, even if it is for a legitimate use. This type of "thought advertisement" through propaganda and the repeated use of newspeak catch phrases (like "software piracy") was incredibly profitable -- when you think of the amounts of unneeded software purchases this dwarfs Ponzi or Teapot Dome or the russian privitazation or any of those other great ripoffs.
But the dangerous part is that it allows laws to be made, in effect, though TV commercials instead of through our government. The idea that the artificial priviledges provided by Title 17 and Title 35 constitute "property" instead of an entitlement like social security or welfare or crop subsidies is dangerous, but the fact that such attitudes can be manufactured in the populous is more threatening.
So I just want to urge you to refrain from casually suggesting or implying that uncompensated file sharing can be illegal. When you do that you are being used as the tool of those who would enslave you.
Mojo (Score:3)
d just d/l your best stuff and disappear. You had to make things convienent for people who wanted to contribute, and inconcienent for those who wanted to leech. The concept of Mojo is a great step in that direction.
You give a little, you get to take a little. You give a lot, you get to take a lot. Rinse. Repeat.
LK
ISPs will love MojoNation! (Score:4)
As System Administrator and part owner of Got.net, I can say we will not wig out. It's true that part of our niche is over-selling or aggregating our resources: bandwidth, phone lines, modems, disk space. We operate in a similiar way to how banks do. Banks loan out about five times as much money as they have on hand. This ratio is maintained by the government. I think it's called the "prime lending rate" or something.
ISPs sell about 10 times as many dialups as they have modems, and likewise with bandwidth. It's true that if all our nailed-up customers used all their bandwidth we'd be in trouble. However, that doesn't mean we're going to charge EVERYONE more.
We buy bandwidth from our provider under a contract which provides us a minimum committed data rate, and if the lowest 95% of our traffic is over that, we are charged for our overage. We can burst our connection in San Jose at 100Mbps, but as long as 95% of our traffic is under 6Mbps, we won't have any surprises on our bill.
If one of our co-location customers uses a consistantly high amount of bandwidth, we will pass our increased costs on to that customer. If they are doing it to gain Mojo, they will probably want to sell that mojo (maybe to us?). In other words, it's the micro-payments within MojoNation that make it viable. Whereas Napster just drags down a network, prompting private and public institutions to try to block it, an increase in MojoNation traffic is accompanied with an increase in Mojo, and therefore a means for compensating all parties effected.
Most likely, as an ISP, we will be one of the early adoptors and pushers of MojoNation. It will allow us to sell bandwidth and disk space we haven't committed to our official customers yet, which will decrease waste within our company. If our MojoNation agents use too much CPU or disk space, we'll just increase our agent pricing.
POOF! There goes any possible pretense of fair use (Score:2)
~wog
Re:This looks cool, but... (Score:2)
[No, I don't mean to say that copyright violation is acceptable. I'm just saying that in the stolen-car thing, return of the property is all that would be required under the circumstances outlined above -- but that's hardly appropriate here. So maybe your analogy isn't quite appropriate].
Tipping in Mojo Nation (Score:2)
You always have to pay for the download. That is the cost of getting service. Once you have the data things are a little fuzzier. If Sony wants to distributed a bunch of files locked up using InterTrust boxes then we work just great for moving the data efficiently. If the content escapes into "the wild" we still offer a backup solution. We also offer a solution to those who are not big name artists and who can't necessarily get Akamai to return their phone calls and who aren't willing to sell the car to pay for an InterTrust distribution license.
We know that this is not a final solution, but we are trying to keep future options open. If a good digital rights management solution is developed that people think is fair and just then we are ready. If nothing happens then we are still ready, albeit with a less optimal solution. If anyone else has a suggestion let us know and we will try to include it.
The only
Re:Cash-out option puts you at real risk. (Score:2)
"In many countries there is a legal difference, a bit like the difference between a user who shares with friends and a pusher that sells on the street."
In the United States, the difference is like the difference between stealing something and not stealing something. One is against the law, the other is not. If you don't charge money to copy files, or don't do it as part of a business, it is completely legal. You don't have to believe an unknown poster on slashdot; you can download Title 17 of the United States code and read it for yourself. It is available from the House of Representatives web site, amoung other places.
". . . no difference to the fact that you have a copy of Douglas Adams' work and he hasn't been paid for it."
You are simply wrong here, and you have to go read the law for yourself and see. Copyright law simply doesn't guarantee that Douglas Adams gets paid for every copy of his work that comes into existence; it gives him other, more limited, and more enforceable, rights.