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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Google wants to be your Internet
On Sat, Jan 20, 2007 at 05:55:49PM -0600, Gadi Evron wrote: > Some examples may be: > -. Working on establishing new standards and topologies to enable both > vendors and providers to adopt them. Keep this point in mind while reading my below comment. > For now, the P2P folks who are not in most cases eveel "Internet > Pirates" are mostly allied, whether in name or in practice with > illegal activities. The technology isn't illegal and can be quite good for > all of us to save quite a bit of bandwidth rather than waste it (quite a > bit of redudndancy there!). A paper put together by the authors of a download-only "free riding" BitTorrent client, called BitThief. The paper is worth reading: http://dcg.ethz.ch/publications/hotnets06.pdf http://dcg.ethz.ch/projects/bitthief/ (client is here) The part that saddens me the most about this project isn't the complete disregard for the "give back what you take" moral (though that part does sadden me personally) , but what this is going to do to the protocol and the clients. Chances are that other torrent client authors are going to see the project as "major defiance" and start implementing things like filtering what client can connect to who based on the client name/ID string (ex. uTorrent, Azureus, MainLine), which as we all know, is going to last maybe 3 weeks. This in turn will solicit the BitThief authors implementing a feature that allows the client to either spoof its client name or use randomly- generated ones. Rinse lather repeat, until everyone is fighting rather than cooperating. Will the BT protocol be reformed to address this? 50/50 chance. > So, instead of fighting it and seeing it left in the hands of the > "pirates" and the privacy folks trying to bypass the Firewall of [insert > evil regime here], why not utilize it? I think Adrian Chadd's mail addresses this indirectly: it's not being utilised because of the bandwidth requirements. ISPs probably don't have an interest in BT caching because of 1) cost of ownership, 2) legal concerns (if an ISP cached a publicly distributed copy of some pirated software, who's then responsible?), and most of all, 3) it's easier to buy a content-sniffing device that rate-limits, or just start hard-limiting users who use "too much bandwidth" (a phrase ISPs use as justification for shutting off customers' connections, but never provide numbers of just what's "too much"). The result of these items already been shown: BT encryption. I personally know of 3 individuals who have their client to use en- cryption only (disabling non-encrypted connection support). For security? Nope -- solely because their ISP uses a rate limiting device. Bram Cohen's official statement is that using encryption to get around this "is silly" because "not many ISPs are implementing such devices" (maybe not *right now*, Bram, but in the next year or two, they likely will): http://bramcohen.livejournal.com/29886.html ISPs will go with implementing the above device *before* implementing something like a BT caching box. Adrian probably knows this too, and chances are it's probably because of the 3 above items I listed. So my question is this: how exactly do we (as administrators of systems or networks) get companies, managers, and even other administrators, to think differently about solving this? -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
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