Journal: A New, Truer Meaning to Peer-to-Peer Networking

Computer networking was certainly one of the most important technologies to emerge in the late 20th century. It carried with it a most powerful potential to transform society, and is already inducing a transformation that is so fast and far reaching, that is getting beyond our ability to control and even fully understand.

One of the most beautiful aspects of this revolution is the way the network has brought people together to fight for their own rights, to mobilize society and governments around humanitarian causes. Etc. It is also true that this higher connectivity has brought us negative things like Spam, threats to personal privacy etc.

For good or worse, the net has put at our disposal a wealth of information that we are still trying to learn how to cope with. At the core of this problem of dealing with such amounts of information are the questions:

1. How do we categorize it?

2. How do we make it available to everybody in a cost-effective way?

3. How do we store it?

While the corporate world is trying to figure out how to make a profit on this new information market, with mixed results (RIAA, MPAA), civil society has taken the matter into its own hands and is finding amazing ways of making the terabytes go round without compromising privacy and revolutionizing the way we relate to information.

The key technology here are the so called peer-to-peer networks, networks within The network, where huge amounts of information are exchanged daily with (potentially) minimal risks to personal privacy. These networks come in a variety of flavors, always evolving new ideas on how to better solve the three questions listed above.

Lately, peer-to-peer networkers worried with attempts to control the flow and content of information exchanged in these networks by corporations and governments, started to develop new kinds of p2p networks (Freenet project, Entropy) to guarantee basic rights such as freedom of speech and association in the cyberspace. Although these rights have been conquered by the common citizen more than two centuries ago for oral an written communication, In the digital world they are far from guaranteed.

Ideas associated with free networks have begun to circulate in the collective mind of society, spawning a number of interesting projects such as Frenetworks, the Personal Telco Project and others.

However, there is still one big, largely unseen or unrecognized obstacle separating us from a truly free and independent peer-to-peer networking: The fact that all comunication takes place through an infrastructure which is owned an controlled by telecommunication corporations and regulated by governments. But this can change. Society now must face the challenge of emancipating itself from the control of corporations in the subject of communications.

What I propose here is a new kind of p2p network whith people as its nodes. Sounds crazy? Keep reading. The Idea is that on reasonably densely populated areas such as (NYC, LA, Tokyo, Mexico City, São Paulo, etc.) you are never very far from another human being. So, what if we could network people?

Such a network of people would be topologically very different from what the Internet is today. In fact its main characteristic would be the lack of fixed topology! The number of nodes and connections available to each node would be always changing. But, if you have ever been on a p2p network, you are probably thinking that this is not very different from the nature of most p2p networks, anyway!

It is obvious that for such a network to be worth using, we would need a large fraction of the population available as nodes, right? Not necessarily, to get such a network started we could parasite wireless accesspoints of the internet which are so ubiquitous nowadays (people could donate a fraction of their commercially obtained bands). In time, as more and more people became avalable as nodes, more and more of the traffic would take place through the "Peoplenet " instead of the Internet. The viability of such kind of network has been under study from quite some time. Recent results show that nodes in a random network can transmit at the same rate as nodes in an arbitrary network.

The technology for this feat is here, and is already available at prices that the average middle-class citizen around the world can afford. What is needed now, to make this dream come true is that organizations such as FreeNetworks and its members, to get behind it and start to make it work.

How to turn people into network servers

What is the internet building block? Altough some people may not agree with me, I would say: A Linux server. how do we turn a person into a mobile wireless linux gateway with minimum requirements of power, and at the same time adding just a few grams to his/her weight, cheaply? Easy!

Enter the Gumstix, a 400Mhz Linux server on a 128MB SD card, with built in wireless interface (bluetooth), the size of a gumstick, and with a unit price of around 100 US dollars. The power requirements are minimal: 1.2 watts at full power (400MHz) and only 250mW in sleep mode. Ok, you can argue that Bluetooth is not the ideal technology for building a large scale network. However, the next generation gumstix are supposed to come with WIFI capabilities.

A french company named Shinco has similar system, which is more polished, geared towards the consumer market. Its an MP3 player with an entire linux sytem inside which you can boot into, if your computer allows you to boot from USB. Apparently this system is not a general purpose computing platform, being a simple MP3 player when in standalone operation. It does not have wireless networking as well. It is, however a good example of the current trends in portable, open-source, computing platforms.

It does not take much work to combine the capability of hardware such as the Gumstix and flexibility and security of current p2p networking protocols to kickstart the Peoplenet. As a matter of fact I predict that the first local Peoplenets will start to appear in the next couple of years.

By Flávio C. Coelho.
Originally posted here.