|
Hello gents and lads
First I want to say I have no programming skills.
I'm more or less between a home user and a power user, whatever this last one
means. So maybe the following letter is a incredible concoction of
misconceptions, misunderstandings and stupidities. Please don't flame me for
being a nekulturny.
------
The last two years I've developed a growing
paranoia about privacy, goverment communications surveillance, private
corporations trading with my data, and yes, black helicopters.
So I've start to look for means to hide
my actions from THEM, other than aluminium foil around my head...
Anonimyzer, Rewebber, Gnutella, FreeNET, this Peekabooty thang from CDC when
available, and others.
All this peer to peer technology seems to be
based in people hosting the contents in their own computers, so the value of the
net is directly related to the amount of people using it that agrees to host
some of the data.
But I've observed that users of AudioGalaxy
who use modems to connect are refusing to host any content, 'cause the upload
stream seems to have an impact on the download bandwidth, and I've seen this
happen too among Napster users.
Me, being an adsl user, thanks, have never
experienced download bandwith loss due to heavy upload, but if broadband becomes
mainstream, maybe I will. You know, hundreds of thousands of broadband-toting
morons like me trying to acces the same wildly popular file, or website, or
something.
And there are more reasons to not to host contents.
Cable companies, almost here in Spain, are charging for traffic, only download
at this time, but maybe upload too in the future as the dot.crash forces them to
maximize their income.
Peer to peer seems to be a good tech due to its
decentralized nature, support for encrypted contents and communications, but I'm
not sure average users will want to host or will be able to pay for
hosting contents.
I've seen what I think is the resulting effect of
this at Napster. Most of the songs are hosted on a limited number of T2-class
peers, and there is little chance you can finish a download from a peer
connected with something below adsl. So almost me, most of the downloads I do
are from those T2 peers.
If the same pattern is valid for other p2p
networks, chances are a good chunk of the contents will be hosted too in a
limited amount of peers, and if these machines are not operated by trusted or
'p2p friendly' organizations or individuals, I guess there is risk
that:
a) due to current state-of-the-law only a few
organizations (universitys, private companies, whealty people:)) will
dare to participate in a 'evil, pedophile ridden, satanists infested, drug
traffickers plagued' p2p network, so there will be little content to look at,
and
b) uh, THEM :) insert their own big undercover
snoop machines and easily host and survey most of the traffic and contents
circulating thru the supposedly secure, anonymous p2p network.
Is this a real issue?
Is this the wrong place to discuss
this?
Do I need more aluminium foil?
Best regards,
Tropezator, Spain
|
