Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

2005-03-14 Thread gwen hastings
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1
Hi Steve,

~~long time no si.. BT trackers could easily be put into DNS and
stored for TTL times in fact talk at code con 2005 in the lounges and
corners were discussing the very possibility after the OZYDNS demo by
Dan Kaminsky, since most of the DNS servers practice recursion, it is
practically impossible at the current time to prevent the flow of
information via DNS in and out of internet connected spaces even if
firewalled. Dont you remember my beach talk in anguilla about stashing
a complete banking system software/websites and persistant transaction
into DNS running the E language interpreter  which would be loaded by
the java hooks in mozillas name resolution mechanism, it could simply
be done by operating as a local socks4a/5 proxy same as tor, privoxy
etc so that the special domain names would be recognized PRIOR to
going to DNS.
problem about hiding the trackers is easy in MY opinion, the hard
problem I see is that for people who have loaded the torrent by what
ever means now see the other members of the swarm of users
uploading/downloading the proprietary content ,as in bit torrent
content is directly related to prosecutable evidence.
And having said tha,t the user level source code for  M of N slices
secret sharing algorithms I have seem practice extreme data expansion
in their implementations.(ie secretshar etc). 4kpgp keys expand to
several 65k slices. :(
~~ regards
~~ gwen


Steve Schear wrote:
| At 12:15 AM 3/10/2005, Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
|
| I worked with Bram and Zooko at Mojo Nation (where both BT and
| Mnet got
| their respective genesis) and was frankly surprised when the
| MPAA
| was so
| easily able to target and put out of commission BT's trackers.
| The
|
| Why? BT is designed with zero privacy in mind.
|
|
| And this was a profound error, IMHO.  One of the epiphanies from my
|  work at MN was that a secrecy-oriented proxy network development
| and successful deployment needed to precede P2P file sharing if
| such networks were to survive determined technical and legal
| challenges. End users often care little about what 'under the hood'
| of their P2P app only that they can get the content conveniently
| and they are not subjected to annoyances like spy or adware.
|
|
| exposure of the trackers was a prominent topic of MN planning
| discussions
| and its odd that precautions, like distributing the tracker
| functions into
| clients or hiding them inside a TOR-like proxy network weren't
| taken
|
| You can post BT links on a P2P network.
|
|
| But trackers must still be widely accessible by the general
| population of BT users and can you offer the content or obtain it
| without likely identification?
|
| Steve
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Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

2005-03-13 Thread Steve Schear
At 03:42 AM 3/11/2005, Eugen Leitl wrote:
*** PGP Signature Status: good
*** Signer: Eugen Leitl (makes other keys obsolete) [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
(Invalid)
*** Signed: 3/11/2005 3:42:52 AM
*** Verified: 3/11/2005 12:49:27 PM
*** BEGIN PGP VERIFIED MESSAGE ***

On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 10:48:12PM -0800, Steve Schear wrote:
 Why? BT is designed with zero privacy in mind.

 And this was a profound error, IMHO.  One of the epiphanies from my 
work at

It was a deliberate decision on Bram Cohen's part. BT is a very useful medium
to deliver software updates, movies und most for what there are currently
broadcast media for.

I didn't say that Bram didn't do this on purpose, I just think it was a 
mistake in judgement.


If you want to be invisible to lawyers, you have to use something else.
or run BT-like apps within something else.  For BT clients its 
straightforward to run most  (e.g., Azureus) via a proxy that keeps no logs 
(e.g., Metropipe).  For Trackers its more difficult.  All I am saying is 
that Brahm should have paid a bit more attention to tracker protection.


(Or at least run BT on a large zombie cloud, so you have plausible
deniability).

Like TOR/I2P.

 MN was that a secrecy-oriented proxy network development and successful
 deployment needed to precede P2P file sharing if such networks were to
 survive determined technical and legal challenges.  End users often care
If a network has been declared illegal, and you're a part of that network,
and somebody receives packets from you which are part of IP-protected binary
blob, and your ISP rats on you, your ass is grass with the right kind of IP
nazi legislation.
Obvously, the only way to prevent that from happening is not be part of that
network, not make your ISP rat on you -- or, much better, do not let that
legislation happen at all.
Its quite unlikely, at least in the U.S. that networks (e.g., those 
operated in a truly distributed fashion) will be declared illegal.  Its 
even less likely that such networks will enable ISPs to capture anything 
significant about your activities.

 But trackers must still be widely accessible by the general population of
 BT users and can you offer the content or obtain it without likely
 identification?
Web pages have static addresses in DNS. Search on P2P in dynamic IP is much
more ephemeral, and requires ISPs to keep track of (customer IPv4 time_period)
tuples long enough so that their logs can be subpoenaed.
Using DNS to resolve the addresses of future trackers is probably a fools 
errand.

Steve 



Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

2005-03-13 Thread Steve Schear
At 12:15 AM 3/10/2005, Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 I worked with Bram and Zooko at Mojo Nation (where both BT and Mnet got
 their respective genesis) and was frankly surprised when the MPAA was so
 easily able to target and put out of commission BT's trackers.  The
Why? BT is designed with zero privacy in mind.
And this was a profound error, IMHO.  One of the epiphanies from my work at 
MN was that a secrecy-oriented proxy network development and successful 
deployment needed to precede P2P file sharing if such networks were to 
survive determined technical and legal challenges.  End users often care 
little about what 'under the hood' of their P2P app only that they can get 
the content conveniently and they are not subjected to annoyances like spy 
or adware.


 exposure of the trackers was a prominent topic of MN planning discussions
 and its odd that precautions, like distributing the tracker functions into
 clients or hiding them inside a TOR-like proxy network weren't taken
You can post BT links on a P2P network.
But trackers must still be widely accessible by the general population of 
BT users and can you offer the content or obtain it without likely 
identification?

Steve 



Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

2005-03-13 Thread Morlock Elloi
 If you want to be invisible to lawyers, you have to use something else.

Whoever wants to design something 'else' should first see Monty Python's How
not to be seen sketch (or was it Importance of not being seen ?)

It applies pretty well to all current techniques for moving unpaid copyrighted
content.



end
(of original message)

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Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

2005-03-13 Thread Eugen Leitl
On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 10:06:45PM -0800, Steve Schear wrote:

 I worked with Bram and Zooko at Mojo Nation (where both BT and Mnet got 
 their respective genesis) and was frankly surprised when the MPAA was so 
 easily able to target and put out of commission BT's trackers.  The 

Why? BT is designed with zero privacy in mind.

 exposure of the trackers was a prominent topic of MN planning discussions 
 and its odd that precautions, like distributing the tracker functions into 
 clients or hiding them inside a TOR-like proxy network weren't taken 

You can post BT links on a P2P network.

 earlier.


-- 
Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a
__
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net


pgpYTRGso4T7m.pgp
Description: PGP signature


Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

2005-03-13 Thread Eugen Leitl
On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 10:48:12PM -0800, Steve Schear wrote:

 Why? BT is designed with zero privacy in mind.
 
 And this was a profound error, IMHO.  One of the epiphanies from my work at 

It was a deliberate decision on Bram Cohen's part. BT is a very useful medium
to deliver software updates, movies und most for what there are currently
broadcast media for.

If you want to be invisible to lawyers, you have to use something else.

(Or at least run BT on a large zombie cloud, so you have plausible
deniability).

 MN was that a secrecy-oriented proxy network development and successful 
 deployment needed to precede P2P file sharing if such networks were to 
 survive determined technical and legal challenges.  End users often care 

If a network has been declared illegal, and you're a part of that network,
and somebody receives packets from you which are part of IP-protected binary
blob, and your ISP rats on you, your ass is grass with the right kind of IP 
nazi legislation.

Obvously, the only way to prevent that from happening is not be part of that
network, not make your ISP rat on you -- or, much better, do not let that
legislation happen at all. 

If it does happen, freedom becomes illegal. 

 little about what 'under the hood' of their P2P app only that they can get 
 the content conveniently and they are not subjected to annoyances like spy 
 or adware.
 
  exposure of the trackers was a prominent topic of MN planning discussions
  and its odd that precautions, like distributing the tracker functions 
 into
  clients or hiding them inside a TOR-like proxy network weren't taken
 
 You can post BT links on a P2P network.
 
 But trackers must still be widely accessible by the general population of 
 BT users and can you offer the content or obtain it without likely 
 identification?

Web pages have static addresses in DNS. Search on P2P in dynamic IP is much
more ephemeral, and requires ISPs to keep track of (customer IPv4 time_period)
tuples long enough so that their logs can be subpoenaed.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a
__
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net


pgpiQZGVFVAjY.pgp
Description: PGP signature


Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

2005-03-13 Thread Steve Schear
At 12:14 PM 3/9/2005, Eric Cordian wrote:
If you had a thousand hours of genius programmer time, would you spend it
embracing and extending Bittorrent, or shoveling through the
indecipherable bowels of legacy Mnet and Freenet code?
I worked with Bram and Zooko at Mojo Nation (where both BT and Mnet got 
their respective genesis) and was frankly surprised when the MPAA was so 
easily able to target and put out of commission BT's trackers.  The 
exposure of the trackers was a prominent topic of MN planning discussions 
and its odd that precautions, like distributing the tracker functions into 
clients or hiding them inside a TOR-like proxy network weren't taken earlier.

Steve 



Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

2005-03-13 Thread James A. Donald
--
On 9 Mar 2005 at 12:14, Eric Cordian wrote:
 Now, I think we can all agree that it would be lovely to have
 a distributed filesystem, with a global namespace, that
 anyone can put stuff in, and take stuff out of, which
 guarantees anonymity for both producers and consumers of
 content, swarms downloads, has an redundant distributed
 encrypted backing store that lasts forever, is easily and 
 quickly searched, can be instantly set up by anyone who
 wishes to use it, never breaks, and starves users who
 unreasonably leech large amounts of resources without
 reciprocating.

Bittorrent, alone, starves users who leach without
reciprocating, but only in certain very limited ways.

As a result of that and swarming Bittorrent has far more
bandwidth available than any other file sharing network.  You
can download big files faster.  If you want to download big
files, use Bittorrent, or hell will freeze over before your
files complete.  But it does not have more files available,
indeed it has fewer, because there is no reward to users for
making a wide range of files available.

The enormous success of bittorrent, and its limitations, should
tell us that the principle of rewarding uploaders and storers,
and starving leachers, is pretty much central to the success of
a protocol and its software.

--digsig
 James A. Donald
 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
 MHH97gJAm7xaefDsVkckpP3M1T3kFYcHHE4T6q6e
 4sy0PVrzWWflVPEeAHnZN9+Cf4YNPT7P4feuRNy00



Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

2005-03-11 Thread Eugen Leitl
On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 10:48:12PM -0800, Steve Schear wrote:

 Why? BT is designed with zero privacy in mind.
 
 And this was a profound error, IMHO.  One of the epiphanies from my work at 

It was a deliberate decision on Bram Cohen's part. BT is a very useful medium
to deliver software updates, movies und most for what there are currently
broadcast media for.

If you want to be invisible to lawyers, you have to use something else.

(Or at least run BT on a large zombie cloud, so you have plausible
deniability).

 MN was that a secrecy-oriented proxy network development and successful 
 deployment needed to precede P2P file sharing if such networks were to 
 survive determined technical and legal challenges.  End users often care 

If a network has been declared illegal, and you're a part of that network,
and somebody receives packets from you which are part of IP-protected binary
blob, and your ISP rats on you, your ass is grass with the right kind of IP 
nazi legislation.

Obvously, the only way to prevent that from happening is not be part of that
network, not make your ISP rat on you -- or, much better, do not let that
legislation happen at all. 

If it does happen, freedom becomes illegal. 

 little about what 'under the hood' of their P2P app only that they can get 
 the content conveniently and they are not subjected to annoyances like spy 
 or adware.
 
  exposure of the trackers was a prominent topic of MN planning discussions
  and its odd that precautions, like distributing the tracker functions 
 into
  clients or hiding them inside a TOR-like proxy network weren't taken
 
 You can post BT links on a P2P network.
 
 But trackers must still be widely accessible by the general population of 
 BT users and can you offer the content or obtain it without likely 
 identification?

Web pages have static addresses in DNS. Search on P2P in dynamic IP is much
more ephemeral, and requires ISPs to keep track of (customer IPv4 time_period)
tuples long enough so that their logs can be subpoenaed.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a
__
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net


pgptt7a3L2KcA.pgp
Description: PGP signature


Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

2005-03-11 Thread Morlock Elloi
 If you want to be invisible to lawyers, you have to use something else.

Whoever wants to design something 'else' should first see Monty Python's How
not to be seen sketch (or was it Importance of not being seen ?)

It applies pretty well to all current techniques for moving unpaid copyrighted
content.



end
(of original message)

Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows:



__ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Make Yahoo! your home page 
http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs



Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

2005-03-11 Thread Steve Schear
At 03:42 AM 3/11/2005, Eugen Leitl wrote:
*** PGP Signature Status: good
*** Signer: Eugen Leitl (makes other keys obsolete) [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
(Invalid)
*** Signed: 3/11/2005 3:42:52 AM
*** Verified: 3/11/2005 12:49:27 PM
*** BEGIN PGP VERIFIED MESSAGE ***

On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 10:48:12PM -0800, Steve Schear wrote:
 Why? BT is designed with zero privacy in mind.

 And this was a profound error, IMHO.  One of the epiphanies from my 
work at

It was a deliberate decision on Bram Cohen's part. BT is a very useful medium
to deliver software updates, movies und most for what there are currently
broadcast media for.

I didn't say that Bram didn't do this on purpose, I just think it was a 
mistake in judgement.


If you want to be invisible to lawyers, you have to use something else.
or run BT-like apps within something else.  For BT clients its 
straightforward to run most  (e.g., Azureus) via a proxy that keeps no logs 
(e.g., Metropipe).  For Trackers its more difficult.  All I am saying is 
that Brahm should have paid a bit more attention to tracker protection.


(Or at least run BT on a large zombie cloud, so you have plausible
deniability).

Like TOR/I2P.

 MN was that a secrecy-oriented proxy network development and successful
 deployment needed to precede P2P file sharing if such networks were to
 survive determined technical and legal challenges.  End users often care
If a network has been declared illegal, and you're a part of that network,
and somebody receives packets from you which are part of IP-protected binary
blob, and your ISP rats on you, your ass is grass with the right kind of IP
nazi legislation.
Obvously, the only way to prevent that from happening is not be part of that
network, not make your ISP rat on you -- or, much better, do not let that
legislation happen at all.
Its quite unlikely, at least in the U.S. that networks (e.g., those 
operated in a truly distributed fashion) will be declared illegal.  Its 
even less likely that such networks will enable ISPs to capture anything 
significant about your activities.

 But trackers must still be widely accessible by the general population of
 BT users and can you offer the content or obtain it without likely
 identification?
Web pages have static addresses in DNS. Search on P2P in dynamic IP is much
more ephemeral, and requires ISPs to keep track of (customer IPv4 time_period)
tuples long enough so that their logs can be subpoenaed.
Using DNS to resolve the addresses of future trackers is probably a fools 
errand.

Steve 



Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

2005-03-10 Thread Eugen Leitl
On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 10:06:45PM -0800, Steve Schear wrote:

 I worked with Bram and Zooko at Mojo Nation (where both BT and Mnet got 
 their respective genesis) and was frankly surprised when the MPAA was so 
 easily able to target and put out of commission BT's trackers.  The 

Why? BT is designed with zero privacy in mind.

 exposure of the trackers was a prominent topic of MN planning discussions 
 and its odd that precautions, like distributing the tracker functions into 
 clients or hiding them inside a TOR-like proxy network weren't taken 

You can post BT links on a P2P network.

 earlier.


-- 
Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a
__
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net


pgpHpyIpkQTc8.pgp
Description: PGP signature


Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

2005-03-10 Thread Steve Schear
At 12:15 AM 3/10/2005, Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 I worked with Bram and Zooko at Mojo Nation (where both BT and Mnet got
 their respective genesis) and was frankly surprised when the MPAA was so
 easily able to target and put out of commission BT's trackers.  The
Why? BT is designed with zero privacy in mind.
And this was a profound error, IMHO.  One of the epiphanies from my work at 
MN was that a secrecy-oriented proxy network development and successful 
deployment needed to precede P2P file sharing if such networks were to 
survive determined technical and legal challenges.  End users often care 
little about what 'under the hood' of their P2P app only that they can get 
the content conveniently and they are not subjected to annoyances like spy 
or adware.


 exposure of the trackers was a prominent topic of MN planning discussions
 and its odd that precautions, like distributing the tracker functions into
 clients or hiding them inside a TOR-like proxy network weren't taken
You can post BT links on a P2P network.
But trackers must still be widely accessible by the general population of 
BT users and can you offer the content or obtain it without likely 
identification?

Steve 



Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

2005-03-10 Thread James A. Donald
--
On 9 Mar 2005 at 12:14, Eric Cordian wrote:
 Now, I think we can all agree that it would be lovely to have
 a distributed filesystem, with a global namespace, that
 anyone can put stuff in, and take stuff out of, which
 guarantees anonymity for both producers and consumers of
 content, swarms downloads, has an redundant distributed
 encrypted backing store that lasts forever, is easily and 
 quickly searched, can be instantly set up by anyone who
 wishes to use it, never breaks, and starves users who
 unreasonably leech large amounts of resources without
 reciprocating.

Bittorrent, alone, starves users who leach without
reciprocating, but only in certain very limited ways.

As a result of that and swarming Bittorrent has far more
bandwidth available than any other file sharing network.  You
can download big files faster.  If you want to download big
files, use Bittorrent, or hell will freeze over before your
files complete.  But it does not have more files available,
indeed it has fewer, because there is no reward to users for
making a wide range of files available.

The enormous success of bittorrent, and its limitations, should
tell us that the principle of rewarding uploaders and storers,
and starving leachers, is pretty much central to the success of
a protocol and its software.

--digsig
 James A. Donald
 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
 MHH97gJAm7xaefDsVkckpP3M1T3kFYcHHE4T6q6e
 4sy0PVrzWWflVPEeAHnZN9+Cf4YNPT7P4feuRNy00



Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

2005-03-09 Thread Eric Cordian
Zooko writes:

 I am about to accept an exciting job that will preclude me from 
 contributing to open source projects in the distributed file-system 
 space.

 I will miss the Mnet project!  Good luck without me!

Is there a network currently running?  At one time, I had 5 gig of Mnet 
blockstore, but when months went by with no metatracking, and apparently, 
no running network, I grew bored and rm'ed it.

 I'm writing the following as a record of the most advanced design that 
 I have thought of for Mnet. 

[Clippage]]

Yes, well.  My thoughts on this, and other distributed filesystems, are as 
follows.

We have the following useful technologies.

Swarmed downloads, erasure coding, distributed filesystem with global 
namespace, encryption, routing, accounting, and search.

We have various systems which have implemented a various subsets of these 
features, with varying degrees of efficiency.  The killer technology 
amongst all these is obviously swarmed downloading, which, efficiently 
implemented in Bittorrent, currently accounts for a third of network 
bandwidth.

The two systems which implement the most of the above technologies, Mnet 
and Freenet, while theoretically lovely, have at most a niche following, 
and are cumbersome to set up and use, with frequent issues in their 
protocols and codebase.

Now, I think we can all agree that it would be lovely to have a 
distributed filesystem, with a global namespace, that anyone can put stuff 
in, and take stuff out of, which guarantees anonymity for both producers 
and consumers of content, swarms downloads, has an redundant distributed 
encrypted backing store that lasts forever, is easily and quickly 
searched, can be instantly set up by anyone who wishes to use it, never 
breaks, and starves users who unreasonably leech large amounts of 
resources without reciprocating.

BUT, given that bittorrent is a wild success, which people ACTUALLY USE, 
would it not make more sense to create such a system by augmenting 
bittorrent with the technologies it presently lacks, than by continuing 
development on other systems, many of them bloated and buggy, which have 
been around for years without managing to be made to work well, or 
attracting large numbers of happy and satisfied customers?

If you had a thousand hours of genius programmer time, would you spend it 
embracing and extending Bittorrent, or shoveling through the 
indecipherable bowels of legacy Mnet and Freenet code?

I think Mnet and Freenet were wonderful testbeds, which taught us all a 
lot about what does and doesn't work in grandiose P2P schemes.

But Bittorrent is where the users are, and software without users is like 
network television programming without viewers.  

-- 
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law



Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

2005-03-09 Thread Steve Schear
At 12:14 PM 3/9/2005, Eric Cordian wrote:
If you had a thousand hours of genius programmer time, would you spend it
embracing and extending Bittorrent, or shoveling through the
indecipherable bowels of legacy Mnet and Freenet code?
I worked with Bram and Zooko at Mojo Nation (where both BT and Mnet got 
their respective genesis) and was frankly surprised when the MPAA was so 
easily able to target and put out of commission BT's trackers.  The 
exposure of the trackers was a prominent topic of MN planning discussions 
and its odd that precautions, like distributing the tracker functions into 
clients or hiding them inside a TOR-like proxy network weren't taken earlier.

Steve 



Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

2005-03-09 Thread Eric Cordian
Zooko writes:

 I am about to accept an exciting job that will preclude me from 
 contributing to open source projects in the distributed file-system 
 space.

 I will miss the Mnet project!  Good luck without me!

Is there a network currently running?  At one time, I had 5 gig of Mnet 
blockstore, but when months went by with no metatracking, and apparently, 
no running network, I grew bored and rm'ed it.

 I'm writing the following as a record of the most advanced design that 
 I have thought of for Mnet. 

[Clippage]]

Yes, well.  My thoughts on this, and other distributed filesystems, are as 
follows.

We have the following useful technologies.

Swarmed downloads, erasure coding, distributed filesystem with global 
namespace, encryption, routing, accounting, and search.

We have various systems which have implemented a various subsets of these 
features, with varying degrees of efficiency.  The killer technology 
amongst all these is obviously swarmed downloading, which, efficiently 
implemented in Bittorrent, currently accounts for a third of network 
bandwidth.

The two systems which implement the most of the above technologies, Mnet 
and Freenet, while theoretically lovely, have at most a niche following, 
and are cumbersome to set up and use, with frequent issues in their 
protocols and codebase.

Now, I think we can all agree that it would be lovely to have a 
distributed filesystem, with a global namespace, that anyone can put stuff 
in, and take stuff out of, which guarantees anonymity for both producers 
and consumers of content, swarms downloads, has an redundant distributed 
encrypted backing store that lasts forever, is easily and quickly 
searched, can be instantly set up by anyone who wishes to use it, never 
breaks, and starves users who unreasonably leech large amounts of 
resources without reciprocating.

BUT, given that bittorrent is a wild success, which people ACTUALLY USE, 
would it not make more sense to create such a system by augmenting 
bittorrent with the technologies it presently lacks, than by continuing 
development on other systems, many of them bloated and buggy, which have 
been around for years without managing to be made to work well, or 
attracting large numbers of happy and satisfied customers?

If you had a thousand hours of genius programmer time, would you spend it 
embracing and extending Bittorrent, or shoveling through the 
indecipherable bowels of legacy Mnet and Freenet code?

I think Mnet and Freenet were wonderful testbeds, which taught us all a 
lot about what does and doesn't work in grandiose P2P schemes.

But Bittorrent is where the users are, and software without users is like 
network television programming without viewers.  

-- 
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law