Category: Technology

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!

Categories
Technology

Radio and P2P – not

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit I’m a mood today, but there’s few things that tick me off more than this application of “P2P” to any old technology that comes along. And then this proud standing back as if all is explained.

Give me a break.

John throws this simple little sentence out as if the word comes from on high:

What’s the killer app for a desktop content management system?  P2P + Web Services + desktop CMS (Radio).  Killer combo.

I posted a comment to the note asking where the P2P was in this equation. I am not expecting a response.

There is no P2P with Radio. Period. Please don’t tell me “full peers” or any bullshit like that. If there is an assumption of a hard coded IP that is online 7×24 then that is a server. I don’t care what you call it.

Web services. Yes. Desktop content management. Yes. But Radio has no P2P element.

It is a good product and I enjoy using it, and I think it’s interesting that Userland has been able to get all these people to do all this work for no pay via the new publishing paradigm but there is no P2P element in Radio!!

Categories
Technology

Radio and P2P

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

John did respond, in his comments, to my query ,in his comments, about Radio and P2P:

I need a real P2P system to pull this off. Something that can go through firewalls and NATs. Unfortunately, most P2P systems are run by people that are only interested in Napster-style file transfer (essentially a file pile). There is more to this: apps and Web Services.

Appreciation for answering, but one request: don’t go there — don’t go with the limitations of P2P as an answer to the question of P2P expectations in Radio. I can point out more than one application that uses P2P based technologies and whose focus is not based on file manipulation, starting with a mainstream app John probably knows — Groove.

What does Userland want from P2P? Web services imply a server, which implies a traditional approach to serving application needs. Been there. Done that. Next page, please.

If you’re talking publish and subscribe, now we know we’ve been there and done that. Can anyone say “channels”? The technology is neat and seems to be coming into its own — again — but how P2P is this? Isn’t this dependent on a Radio cloud handling the intermittant connectivities of the individual Radio installations? Just as Groove does within its cloud?

Really, with clouds like these, I’ll never have iron-poor blood, will I?

The technology is neat and important and a real step in the right direction, but I don’t think this is what John was talking about. Or is it?

What do you need from a real P2P System, John? If you articulate this, you might find there are people out there with an answer. But we can’t take a shot if you don’t ask the question. Given the right information, we’d enjoy the opportunity, you’d enjoy the opportunity, we’d all learn from the experience, and we’d all have fun.

And we might even come up with some interesting ideas in the process.