P2P - From Internet Scourge to Savior 131
microbrewer writes "The MIT Technology Review has up a feature discussing the future of p2p networks. Specifically, they look at their role in content distribution, in the age of ubiquitous video services. Soon, the article asserts, the very same p2p-style networks that 'threatened' legitimate business may be the basis for most video-on-demand services." From the article: "So how could additional P2P traffic actually be a good thing for the Internet? Carnegie Mellon's Zhang points out that because peer-to-peer networks exploit both the downlink and uplink capacities of users' Internet connections, they distribute content more efficiently than centralized 'unicast' technologies. Zhang also says it should be possible to label P2P traffic so that service providers can track it and decide how much of it to allow through their networks. He and colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley have founded a startup, Rinera, to develop software that will give service providers such control."
Legal Use of technology (Score:3, Insightful)
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Once you have discounted the illegal uses it becomes bloody obvious that most P2P uses are nothing but halfbaked emulation of multicast done by people with poor understanding of networking. Node discovery, node promotion to hypernode, sending single request to multiple interested parties are all trivial in a multicast environment. On top of the in a multicast environment the provider can easily enforce and control QoS, administrative boundaries, s
The answer is obvious (Score:2, Funny)
Every technology developed by man, from animal husbandry to television, has eventually resulted in its use to improve porn. Scientists refer to this as the "Porn Point". Once that is reached then a new technology to even further the use/distribution of porn will be developed until we reach the "Porn Singularity". The "Singularity" is a point in the future when porn progress will improve at an incredible rate unprecedented in human history.
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It costs an isp money for backbone bandwidth and it costs an isp money for routers and infrastructure.
ISP's are A business like any other business they are in it to make money. They do this through the simple numbers game.
They buy a 10 meg pipe and sell 1 meg to 600 people.
Not all of the people will be using there whole 1 meg all of the time. Therefore this becomes an affordable
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ISP Bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)
Cap bandwidth or GB of transfer per day. Don't tell me what I have the "right" to use this data capacity for. I know Zhang is only suggesting that it's possible, not necessarily a good idea, but don't give the ISPs any stupid ideas.
-b.
Re:ISP Bandwidth (Score:4, Insightful)
It is my firm belief that if you pay for 3M down, 512K up, you should be able to use that for whatever the hell you want. No caveats, no addendums. That whole "BT and HD are choking the internet" thing is a load of bull.
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BTW, I have no problem with capping total daily transfer at something less than (Mbit/s)*(8bit/byte)*(3600sec/hr)*(24hr/day) if that's what the ISP needs to do. Just state that limit explicitly in the contract and don't fuck with me unless I actually go over it.
-b.
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Not only suggesting (Score:2)
Seems that Slashdot is not only giving ISPs the stupid ideas but also giving free publicity to a company that implements themUnfortunately:
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1. X is brilliant! In the future everyone will X!
2. Of course, to do X, you need Y.
3. Oh, did I mention, we're starting a company for producing Y?
I don't know how many venture capitalists they'll find on slashdot, but we finally know step 2.
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Caps are the wrong approach. Dynamic traffic management is the only viable option, with priorities set by the time-critical nature of the data.
If BitTorrent protocols carried a data type specifier, perhaps a simple MIME type identifier, then the traffic management facilities might be enhanced to consider that information. It would also be reasonable to implement local BitTorrent cache servers so that when you do a transfer, you're effectively getting most of your data from within the ISP.
If the data
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Thinking about it, the one hole to the approach is that you're relying on content providers/publishers (including individuals) to be honest about the content of crypto containers. But as the key infrastructure provides identification of the signing encryption authority, that can be used to monitor abuses and automatically choke off those who claim they're sending a media stream or application library, but actually distributing illegal or infectious content.
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The legal issues of personal privacy, copyright duration, consumer rights, etc. are not so clear cut, and have to be set by individual governments. American businesses need to remember they are but one player on the global market, and their law is not universal.
The *AA are particularly blind to this issue. The US restrictions are not even constitutional in other nations.
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The BitTorrent protocol has a very easily identifiable header, which can be quickly detected by an ISP's protocol analyzer and throttled as necessary.
Or, I should say, HAD an easily identifiable header. Several ISPs did just this, but throttle the traffic to practically zero. The end result? Azureus created, and other clients adopted, an encrypted version of the BitTorrent protocol that is nearly impossible for ISPs to recognize.
Perhaps BitTorrent bandwidth usage can become abusive, but when ISPs bec
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The header does NOT identify content type in the sense I'm talking about, and anonymous/unsigned traffic bypasses the personal responsibility. As long as leeches and pirates use the torrents, the legitimate uses continue to be hampered.
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TFA was talking about the *authors themselves* tagging the traffic to make it more recognisable by ISPs. Still doesn't make it a good idea, IMHO.
-b.
Yeah but (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yeah but (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Yeah but (Score:4, Informative)
The LX Systems techology in Peer Impact that is mentioned in the MIT article uses peer clustering techniques to keep as mach data in a ISPs domain as possible and they also use geo-location techniqies so the trafic doesnt travel long distances if it doesnt have to .
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What upload bandwidth? (Score:3, Informative)
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Charge more of a premium for higher upload bandwidths, or cap total "free" upstream transfers with additional charges for usage beyond that.
Its hardly as if ISPs (many of which are also hosting providers) haven't already had to deal with the "some people use too much bandwidth if there are no consequences" problem already and solved it in other contexts where the solutions can be directly applied to t
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Banwdith gets cheaper and cheaper. Unless ISPs are planning on radically dropping their prices, they'd better be planning on continued bandwidth upgrades.
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Of course, that may be why comcast refuses to stop the DoS attacks coming from their own network....
But are the existing channels ready for this (Score:5, Interesting)
I am agreed that P2P isn't necessarily bad - in fact if P2P algorithms could favour traffic within the same subnet, or indeed allow an ISP to somehow inform the P2P client which nodes are on the same ISP, then an ISP could actually benefit as traffic fills up the internal pipes and less traffic has to be purchased from other ISPs.
To expand on this point, perhaps a multicast protocol like DHCP on the local subject could be implemented; call it the "ISP IP Directory" protocol, or IID, and basically a P2P client would send a multicast query to the IID address with a query ("is x.x.x.x within your network? Or within your preferred peers?") and the IID server would respond with a yes/no. Then P2Ps could optimally download from preferred addresses..!
A shift in thinking in the design of P2P protocols is required if we really want to optimise bandwidth and content distribution.
Your networking knowledge exceeds mine... (Score:1)
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But there needs to be a way for clients to easily obtain an answer from their local network as to whether or not an IP can be regarded as "local" or "inexpensive". GeoIP look-ups are at best a guess; I've known many situations where two unfriendly ISPs in a country quite happily route traffic between each other via another country (it happened in New Zealand where two ISPs would commun
Ooh, goodie, p2p day on /. (Score:3)
This is with a 2.4 kernel and iptables 2.7.
So. Back on topic. Internet scourge? Dunno. Intranet Scourge? Yup.
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That said, it's still somewhat difficult to limit incoming traffic, since you can't always control what the sender does. But most of the methods work
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DD-WRT can help. (Score:3, Informative)
I'm the "unofficial sysadmin" for my house, which is shared with several other single guys, by virtue of having the router in my room, and DD-WRT makes QoS fai
Label P2P data? Is he effing kidding me? (Score:5, Insightful)
We have lived in such a rare time. We had access to a communication tool like no other in history. And for a brief moment, it was free - totally free. Unencumbered by the dictates of rich and powerful, it was without parallel in history. Anybody who connected to this great web of systems had just as much chance to make his message heard as anyone else. My email of undying love to my wife-to-be received the same access and dispatch as the advertising messages of multi-national corporations. Anybody with a good idea could put it out there for the world to see and if it had merit, it would gain in popularity. Google sprang from this freedom. So did Slashdot. And goatse. And it was the unusual confluence of public money and free enterprise, along with some very smart and generous folks, putting energy into something new and unprecedented that made this happen. Take one bit out of the equation - say the taxpayer-financed Department of Defense, or a Linus Torvald, or a Netscape or the many other pioneers who contributed to this vast project - and it doesn't happen, or it happens in a way that prevents the kid in the basement in Des Moines the opportunity to play.
But people who have acquired wealth and power don't like it when any old slob can do what they do. I mean, what good is being rich and powerful if it doesn't let you move to the head of the line? Now, a race is on to crush the experiment in liberty that has been the Internet. I guess it was too radical, too much of a danger to tyranny and concentrated wealth, to last very long.
We should all feel privileged for having seen the rise of this rarest of creatures - the fully open agora of information and ideas - and we should all feel sad that it couldn't be defended from the greedy and power hungry.
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Here is the gist: It's the corporate/governmental entities -versus- the people. But the cat is out of the bag, my friend. I mean, the PEOPLE have been able to collaborate and communicate with each other on an unprecedented scale ever before witnessed in human history. We the people, are a collective you see. OUR collective efforts against theirs. Not to sound too corny, b
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P2P not 'Long Tail' friendly (Score:1, Informative)
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Soulseek is best for music, especially obscure stuff.
eMule kind of fills the gap in the middle for me, it's usually a quicker DL than soulseek but not as wide a variety of music, it is good for other obscure stuff like eBooks, old TV episodes and sports events (stuff
"scourge"? try "broadband sales driver"... (Score:5, Interesting)
yeah... all those people are using that 4-10 megabits a second so cnn.com will load faster.. riiight.
Practicality and reality (Score:5, Informative)
Aside from technical issues, I think decentralization, peer-to-peer and so forth is the way to go. I don't want to be the little receiver of content from the Giant Corporation with DRM, monopoly price increases and whatnot. To me it makes sense (like Mbone did) and gives me more freedom. It allows me to publish content, which Youtube and whatnot can not censor if they wish. Which is precisely why it won't happen - we don't live in some federated decentralized anarchist council structure, we live in an imperialist, capitalist society where capital is centralized in a few hands, along with the media, political power for the most part, and so on. Which is why peer to peer decentralization has been under attack since day one.
Re:Practicality and reality (Score:5, Interesting)
You're right, of course. But that's tangential, it simply provides the mechanism by which monied interests can make sure they get their way.
The issue I see is that the content distributors and the bandwidth providers can work together to get a lock on high profits for both. We're all familiar with the DMCA. But with the right tools (like what the author has created a company to do) the bandwidth providers can lock out the last competing method of distribution.
The best solution I see is to designate bandwidth providers as common carriers, so that it will be illegal for them to discriminate between packets. Then again, that's government interference, so I'm sure a lot of the libertarians and anarchists here will disagree...
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Unfortunately, the real world is still as it is, so allowing ISPs to traffic shape, and block packets - otherwise they wouldn't be able to block spam-spewing clients on port 25.
Most ISPs don't want to ban P2P traffic, they just want to spread it out so the network is fully utilised instead of saturated at 6pm and unused at 6am. There are a lot of pro
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I do. But the history of false claims by a lot of ISPs is disturbing. Before I switched to the business account, I never got even 25% of the "up to" speeds I signed up for.
Under common carrier status, the ISPs could still shape traffic, but it would have to be independent of content or source. One easy way to differentiate would be tiered pricing (like Fedex uses - pay more for quicker delivery). I th
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ISPs do traffic shap for P2P, and I think they should be allowed to do so to keep prices down, however a lo
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What would be really nice is something like Bittorrent with a multicast system that was synergistic. Every time anyone uploaded a chunk, everyone in the swarm would get it.
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1) That makes absolutely no sense. Multicast distribution is as effecient as you can possibly get.
2) From TFA: "they distribute content more efficiently than centralized "unicast" technologies." He said UNICAST NOT multicast. Black and white difference.
Ensuring equality is legitimate governance (Score:2)
Anarchists may disagree ("all government is bad"]. but principled libertarians won't ["government acting as the Invisible Hand by promoting equality: equal access to the marketplace of ideas"].
It's certainly an unusual role for government
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I told you, we're an anarco-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to be a sort of executive officer for the week, but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting; by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a tw
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I'll believe it when I see it (Score:5, Insightful)
This has been said many times in the past few years, but it's still not feasible. One big reason YouTube is popular is because it is "Instant-On." No waiting for it to download. Generally no waiting for "buffering."
BitTorrent and the like are incompatible with that feature. BitTorrent does not download videos (or any other file) in order, and it's actually somewhat harmful to the torrent to distribute the same chunks to everybody. BitTorrent works so well because it gives everybody on the torrent unique chunks to pass along. Not good for streaming.
Secondly, ISPs drastically limit upload. This means that to get even close to realtime streaming downloads, the seeders (the content provider in this case) need to have massive bandwidth available. Otherwise, it will take to long for the torrent to really get going with other seeders, and the first ~50 people will have to wait to watch. So you're back to having powerful centralized servers again.
Plus, what benefit do I have for letting them use my upload? With most broadband connections, saturating the upload makes browsing at the same time slow with high latency. It might make sense for community sharing, where the content provider can't afford the bandwidth, and therefore I would want to contribute, but it doesn't make sense for companies to demand that of me.
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And then theres the Venice project (Yes I'm in the beta) that offers instant on long form ad supported video using p2p streaming .
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I do end up having to wait for buffering -- but this is not specific to YouTube, and I still wish YouTube didn't exist. Existing formats, like mpegs, are well supported pretty much everywhere Flash is, and many places Flash is not.
But at any rate, I think you're missing the point. Remember:
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Asymmetry (Score:4, Interesting)
P2P has one major problem - most broadband connections are asymmetric. Very, very asymmetric - ratios of 10:1 download:upload are common. Thus, in order for P2P to be able to saturate downstream bandwidth everyone would need to keep their P2P apps open for 10 times as long as it takes to download what they want. I don't think you're ever going to get a useful proportion of people to do this without a definite incentive. The cost of the bandwidth per movie is pretty small - I'd guess a few tens of cents. So econmically that's the value of the incentive you can offer. Are people really going to leave their PC on or an application open for hours and hours when they're not using it for the few tens of cents worth of incentive it would be economic to provide? I just don't see you average consumer doing this. It's cheaper to buy bandwidth from a major ISP than it is to 'buy' a hundred million tiny chunks of bandwidth from ten million customers. P2P works if people know they're helping the 'community' or getting something for free. Linux ISOs? P2P. Warez? P2P. Official Disney movies? Not so much.
If you want to reduce bandwidth usage then reduce the number of packets you have to send. Multicast is the right answer. MBone and IPV6 have been around for a long time now. They just aren't very profitable for ISPs, so the push will have to come from the content providers.
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Given that the connection is asymetric (5MB down, 1MB up) with a ration of 5:1, and that video is around 500MB per hour (bearable quality).
I can download 120 hours of video per month. If I have to have a 5:1 ratio, I could download 20 hours (spending 10GB for download and 50GB for upload). That would be 10 movies per month.
That gives a price of $4 per movie!
Blockbuster rents a movie at DVD quality -- one new release
the next generation... (Score:1)
Realm of the Peers (Score:3, Insightful)
The Internet is a network of peer networks of peer hosts. P2P[2P[2P..]] is how everything works already. It's refreshing to see the decentralized, inherently "democratic" and primarily egalitarian Internet model starting to force centralized "old guard" media organizations to admit defeat. If they get on the bandwagon, they can be Ps in the P2P network. If not, they can keep their old network, and we'll barely notice they're gone.
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Multicast, multicast, (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is this technology being, by-and-large, ignored??
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Why is this technology being, by-and-large, ignored??
Because we're still on a mostly IPv4 Internet and IPv4 has a very limited number of multicast addresses so content providers would have to fight for them and availability would depend on their schedules. Also, providers seem to be worried that it would saturate their networks. (Less bandwidth usage at the provider means that there will be more multicast services, meaning more clients, meaning more traffic across the upper tier provider's networks.) I'm waiting for what China has to show the rest of the wor
P2P is not the solution (Score:2)
Assuming that P2P somehow has to level out at 1:1, on Easynews you essentially buy 20GB upload for $10, or about 64kbit su
P2P topology is all wrong (Score:3, Informative)
The trouble with "P2P" in its present form is that the topology is designed to evade copyright, not minimize bandwidth. Peering nodes aren't necessarily near each other. You can, and do, get situations where the same content traverses the same backbone paths multiple times. There's no end user penalty for having faraway peers, but it generates unnecessary load.
Reminds me of, many years ago, watching two coal trains passing each other in opposite directions. You don't see that kind of stupidity any more. Somewhere a trader will do a swap, rather than physically shipping the commodity around.
Netnews does this right, assuming you want a broadcast system. Netnews was designed for slow links and bandwidth minimization. As I point out occasionally, Netnews could easily handle the entire audio output of the RIAA, which is only a few gigabytes per day, using far less bandwidth than the present "P2P" systems.
What will work is ISP-level caching. AOL does this, although in a somewhat annoying fashion. In a different way, so does Akamai. We'll probably see more of that.
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Does anybody actually call it that anymore?
And yes, once upon a time, nn 6.4 was my newsreader of choice... But then along came tin..
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Good things for the internet (Score:2)
How is getting any creative work on demand (give or take a day) delivered right into the comfort of your house, NOT what the internet was designed to do? The internet was not designed to be a money making vaccum to suck out peoples wallets. There was a really good film floating around on the gootubes from the late 80s with douglas adams and Tom baker called Hyperland which describes what THEY thought the internet would be. Any g
Caching is better than P2P (Score:2)
P2P may be better than "centralized unicast" but that's because centralized unicast is dumb. Add caching at the ISP level, and unicast becomes way, way more efficient than P2P ever will.
ISPs: install caches. Squid is free, and an array of huge disks is cheap. They don't have to be reliable disks -- you can use consumer-grade shit!
File vendors (e.g. iTMS): make sure your server works correctly with caches.
Problem solved, and P2P's so-called "efficiency" is totally crushed and embarrassed by the Real Th
Now only a way to force ISPs... (Score:2)
Good thing? As a secondary effect, perhaps (Score:2)
HOWEVER:
If video drives mainstream acceptance of P2P (and by mainstream, I mean corporate), then it's possible that ISPs won't be able to hide behind the "all you send is clicks and text" rationale that
Service providers have no business looking at it.. (Score:2)
Screw you, internet (Score:1)
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Call me a cynic but... (Score:2)
Terrible idea to give ISPs traffic control (Score:2, Insightful)
to medical histories to corporate databases will be done in (highly encrypted and massively distributed)
data clouds, including P2P-hosted data clouds.
And more and more computing will be done in on-the-fly compute farms in grids, and some of this computing will no
doubt be hosted on legions of small P2P edge-of-net computing resources.
With such a scenario, how is it a good thing to allow ISPs to pe
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I'll be damned if an ISP is entitled to snoop into what I'm doing if it isn't damaging his systems.I'm paying for bandwidth monthly,what I use it for is MY business.
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Wait. I pay for these networkes, Is ME who decide anithing. And I decide with my money to have P2P in full use, and not as 2th or 3th level.
No, you aren't paying for "these networkes", you are paying for exactly what the service agreement tells you, which is probably not unlimited usage. If you want to make the decisions, then pay the big $$$ for commercial, unrestricted internet access.
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Fixed that for ya.