Category: Technology

Categories
Technology

Golden Gateway

Julian started a Usenet thread at comp.distributed (viewable at Google) about the Golden Gateway — how do you find the first node in a P2P network? Without any reliance on any centralized service?

Viewing the responses, there is an assumption that entry points have to be known at some point — through a friend or a server or some other static entry. Through some form of publication.

To me, a P2P cloud that is dependent on some form of publication, central server, or another centralized method of discovery, has iron in the core and is therefore vulnerable to take down from some external agency. I am not being paranoid; I am stating a technical fact.

This whole point of networks being invulnerable to external pressures is the basis of one of the legal arguments being made by the recording industry in actions involved with P2P music-sharing sites such as Kazaa and Morpheus.

The P2P music-sharing networks say that they are self-sustaining and can’t be shut down. However, this week, a glitch in a software update basically shut Morpheus down. Now Morpheus goes to Gnutella for P2P architecture support — does this make the network safe from take down?

I don’t believe so and in my next posting, we’ll look at the details behind my opinion.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Radio Blog Entry 1

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Interesting doings today with the release of the new Gnutella-based Morpheus preview. For instance, check out the MeFi thread discussing the results. Seems that Gnutella might be feeling the strain just a tad. Still, if Gnutella can handle the load, good on it.

Categories
Internet

Brave new world of the internet

What is going to be the future of connectivity? What is the Brave New World of the Internet going to be?

Is it going to be a system of services linked together through one centralized (but benevolent) agency? Need a service? Want to sell a service? Check into the Agency, the Agency will take care of you. Oh, by the way, you need to add this to your machine. And you need to give us this information.

And you need to understand that we know what’s best for you…and you have no choice, any way, do you?

Or is it going to be a brave new world of content publishing and subscription?

You sitting at home passively on your machine hooked up as a dying man is hooked up to a heart machine, each beat a pulse from the great wire, delivering you all the information fit to print, at least fit enough to survive the filters.

You sit and add your own beat, with perhaps an accompaniment of a pat on the head, job well done. Why seek? Why search?

Now, just put that finger on that mouse and click those check boxes and yes, we’ll take care of you because we know what’s best for you…and you have no choice, any way, do you?

Put your mouth to the nipple and prepare to be fed.

A brave new world.

Connecting to the void you send tendrils out seeking others of like mind, or not, occasionally bumping into something new or unexpected in your search.

Two paths open for every path that closes, and the only locked door you find is standing alone with no walls around it. You laugh into the void as you walk past the door, continuing on your journey of discovery.

Categories
Technology

Morpheus Shut Down

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

And over at John’s the discussion is about the shut down of Morpheus, software based on Fast Track, as is Kazaa.

I believe I mentioned this last week that any P2P network that has iron – no matter how minute – in the cloud can be shut down. I will refrain from saying I told you so. Well, no, I won’t refrain from this. I told you so.

Update: more on this story at ZDNet.

Question: Can you shut down a Gnutella network?

Categories
Technology

P2P and relying on HTTP

The Don Box discussion about HTTP was a good read with valid points.

From a P2P, not a web services perspective, we need to guarantee certain capabilities in P2P services that we take for granted in more traditional client/server environments. This includes the following:

Transaction reliability — the old two-phase commit of database technology appears again, but this time in a more challenging guise.

Transaction auditing — a variation of the two-phase commit, except that auditing is, in some ways, more fo the business aspect of the technology.

Transaction security — we need to ensure that no one can snoop at the transaction contents, or otherwise violate the transaction playing field.

Transaction trust — not the same thing as security. Transaction trust means that we have to ensure that the P2P service we’re accessing is the correct one, the valid one and that the service met some business trust criteria (outside of the technology realm with the latter).

Service or Peer discovery — still probably one of the more complicated issues about P2P. How do we find services? How do we find P2P circles? How do market our services?

Peer rediscovery — this is where the iron hits the cloud in all P2P applications I know of. You start a communication with another peer, but that peer goes offline. How do you take up the conversation again without the use of some centralized resource? Same could also be applied to services.

Bi-directional communication — This is Don’s reference to HTTP’s asymmetric nature. Peers share communication; otherwise, you’re only talking about the traditional web services model.

The file transfer nature of Napster or Freenet, and the IM nature of Jabber don’t necessarily consume all of these aspects of P2P applications, so haven’t necessarily pushed the P2P bubble to the max. However, when we start talking about P2P services — a variation of web services one could say — then we know we’re going to be stretching both our technology capabilities and our trust of the same.

Fun!