P2P | Ian Andrew Bell

There’s no real innovation in telecom

Ian — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 17:37:27 +0000

Telecom has, generally speaking, become a zero-sum game. In fact it probably always was, despite numerous attempts by governments at deregulation. The fact of the matter is that even today, full-duplex voice conversations between two parties is almost entirely controlled by a cabal of international telecom companies, both wireless and wireline, who manipulate and milk their effective monopolies with customer lock-in and draconian pricing. Furthermore third-party access to these networks is hugely restricted thanks to highly limited and uneconomical network-side interfaces, fundamentally incompetent internal provisioning and support, and of course the omnipresent threat of lawsuits, manipulation of regulators, and political pressure.

There is, in most respects, not much room for the little guy. Still, many companies attempt to eke out a living by raising capital and earning free cash flow on the basis of moving the needle down a couple of stairs in the telecom industry’s giant race to the bottom. Frankly speaking, as consumers, we need these guys … they create the price pressure that leads to market pressure that forces the cabal to lower their prices. Without them we’d all still be paying $1/minute to call one or two counties over. But rarely (and I suspect Bernie Ebbers would verify this) do they ever make any real money over the long-term.

Because of my history as one of Cisco’s early Packet Telephony product managers, and having architected and helped to launch a few different services including BuzMe and RingCentral, I see a lot of VoIP deals. I’ve taken to referring to many of them as “stupid phone tricks” (in a nod to Letterman) which are clearly designed to take advantage of some gap in arbitrage within the telecom industry.

Unfortunately, this has been the model of telecom “innovation” for many, many years. The first Cowboys in the telecom game were of course the CallBack kids. They allowed you to make calls from Brazil to the USA, for example, paying the long-distance rate for calling from the USA to Brazil instead of the other way around by “ringing both ends” of the call after you first dialed their local or toll-free number to instantiate the call. This significant inconvenience was trumped by the massive savings incurred for folks living in Brazil calling to their USA-resident relatives.

With long-distance deregulation came the rise of prepaid calling card services, which did something similar. Again you traded the convenience of just simply dialing the person you wanted to call for having to call a pilot number, entering a complex string of unmemorable digits, and THEN entering the number you wanted to call in order to save a little dough. The services made money, though, because you and I would usually lose our cards or forget our numbers before we fully expended the value in the cards. This model is called “breakage”. To my utter disappointment this represented the larger part of the market I was dealing with while at Cisco.

More than 8 years ago I recall being asked by my boss, Alistair Woodman, to write an opportunity evaluation of the recently-ratified SIP protocol. My response, over the course of weeks of researching and talking to everyone involved, was a breathless vision espousing nothing short of a complete re-think of the entire Telecom industry. SIP has some epic flaws and paradoxes, like its assumption that we’d all be on IPv6 by 2001, and its paradoxical empowerment of edge devices while making no accommodations for firewall/NAT traversal or P2P.

But it was a pretty good stab at unhanding control of telecom from the cabal and placing it in the hands of scrappy innovators. And as the VON shows once attested, there are some pretty feisty and intelligent people lurking within the telecom business. For a time I hoped to have been one of the more noteworthy ones.

With the benefit of hindsight we now know that SIP just hasn’t panned out (certainly not in the way I had hoped it would). It’s become just another signaling protocol in the transport of fairly uninteresting voice calls within the existing structure of telecom. Let me repeat that in another way: The incumbents took a protocol which was conceived and designed to blow them out of the water, and used it to cost-optimize their networks. As a protocol, SIP is incredibly successful in having propagated in Telecom in the less than 7 years it’s been deployable, but I suspect its effects on the industry would today leave its creators a bit cold.

My breathless assertions that thanks to SIP the web geeks would take over Telecom — first derived in 1997 and held by me until at least 2002 — have never even come close to fruition. SIP, because it unbundles signaling from the calling path and especially because it allows for rich metadata to travel through the network with SIP messages, is rife with potential for adding value — but no one, not even Skype (which uses a protocol clearly inspired by SIP but which fixes a lot of its problems) has deployed it in a way that takes complete advantage of this to stimulate innovation.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Cubic Telecom. There’s a small amount of real innovation there, but it largely falls into my “Stupid Phone Tricks” category. It might or might not save you a lot of money making and receiving long-distance calls while you roam on your mobile phone, but does nothing to abate the greater crime that is mobile roaming charges. After I wrote about Cubic, David Pogue of the NY Times was attracted into their orbit, but got burned when others realized Cubic’s rates weren’t quite so attractive as they’d said they were. Controversy erupted and their launch marketing was irreversibly damaged (see here also) by the Streisand Effect of their attempts to correct and adjust perception.

A Googling of “telecom innovation” yields 10,700+ hits but, sadly, no real innovation. What you will read, instead, are examples of creative cost-optimization (Voice Mail was really a way to eliminate the answering machine at home, and the receptionist at the office). You’ll also see some incredibly creative and extravagant attempts to defeat the inconvenience associated with the CallBack model. Cool, but not fundamentally enabling.

What Cubic is presently caught up in is the fact that their dubious cost savings are hampered by the fact that calling mobile phones, for example, in Europe is always going to be expensive and hugely differentiated in terms of pricing from calling land lines in Europe. The rise of draconian mobile pricing models combined with the steep decline in global long-distance calling rates results in a more and more limited opportunity to cost-optimize and more and more pitfalls for the consumer. Unfortunately, Cubic’s a great example of how this happens and how it can bite one in the ass.

There are a number of artificial bottoms in the telecom industry. Long-Distance was the first and most obvious of these: when there was sufficient market pressure from a few successful VoIP guys (and other telco competitors) to reduce costs, the incumbents simply did so. Why? Their costs to provide long distance were arbitrary. Their only consideration was how much margin they could take without losing customers.

There are a couple of false bottoms in mobile at the moment (who am I kidding, there are half a dozen) including roaming, long-distance, and SMS. SMS is a great modern example of this and here’s why:

The cost for a mobile network to transact an SMS message are incalculably small — on par with your ISP handling an email message. Yet it’s become an enormous cash cow for the mobile phone industry — imagine if your ISP charged you a penny for every email sent or received. A small number of companies such as hotxt (now trutap) rose to try and take a notch out of the carriers on this front, but were ultimately thwarted by the fact that they have to take pot shots at the carriers from within their own ecosystem.

It’s not that easy to attack the SMS business model by requiring users to instead install an app and send and receive messages over wireless data, which is also ridiculously expensive.Â It’s kind of like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, and in any case I’m not sure what it accomplishes for the third-party service.Â Not fun. And not particularly innovative.

There is encroachment now, by mobile telecom into terrestrial telecom, and subsequently by platforms like the iPhone and OpenMoko and the rumored GPhone. I guess this means there’s some hope for change. But all of them appear to be embracing the traditional approach to telecom and stepping up to milk the cow in collusion with the big carriers. And this, friends, is a shame. Because innovation will only be barely perceptible if we continue to allow Telecom Monopolists to write the rulebook.

-Ian.

Copy Protection is the Enemy of Content Distribution

Ian — Fri, 25 May 2007 00:01:15 +0000

The MPAA has, believe it or not, heard you. You want to copy the material you buy, for use in other devices, etc. You want to, as someone once said, be able to “Rip. Remix. Burn.” your media. And why not? You paid for it. MPAA Boss Dan Glickman is actually a proponent of home copying, albeit with a 100% margin $25.00 price tag for you and me to do it, which means that he still doesn’t get it.

Over at NewTeeVee there’s an interesting post by Jackson on the struggle that the MPAA et al have had coming up with a specification for allowing you to make “managed copies” of your purchased content. Of course, the fact that each successive specification is cracked within weeks of its drafting would deter the efforts of any organization compelled by logic and customer responsiveness, but this is the MPAA we’re talking about.

The problem is that the RIAA/MPAA cabal have effectively tied their own hands, by petitioning the supreme court in their fruitless pursuit of Peer-to-Peer networks for a judgment. They may have, way back in 2005, gotten more than they bargained for when Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter said:

“We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.”

Oops. Now the MPAA and electronics manufacturers, under such a sweeping definition, could themselves become liable for the copying and redistribution of material. In fact, they can’t produce a standard which they know has been haxx0red and unleash it on the market.

And as EFF’s Susan Crawford has pointed out, they’re in league with even the network carriers to take us all backward in time. In draft language, the FCC is asserting that it:

(a) has authority to adopt such regulations governing digital audio broadcast transmissions and digital audio receiving devices that are appropriate to control the unauthorized copying and redistribution of digital audio content by or over digital reception devices, related equipment, and digital networks, including regulations governing permissible copying and redistribution of such audio content….

This means that they will be ceaselessly back to the drawing board perfecting easily-hacked technologies, and layering their media with difficult to use interfaces, handshakes, and protocols (as I found out when I had my my run-in with HDCP). The result is that media coming through official retail channels such as Best Buy or the iTunes Music Store that you try to watch on your PVR or HD-DVD player will be more difficult to view and manipulate than the DIVX-encoded material you download by fiddling with a BitTorrent client.

P2P has traditionally existed aside from the mainstream by nature of the fact that it’s a fairly high-friction model for obtaining and viewing digital content. You might not have the right CODEC libraries to view your favourite British TV show, or you might have trouble configuring your linksys router so that all the P2P traffic passes through to the right computer in your house optimally, as examples.

Traditional media (DVDs, Cable TV, etc.) have always dominated the mainstream because they’ve been easy to handle, easy to watch, and of course easy to get. For some of us, that convenience in itself is the primary value of such media, and why lots of us still buy stuff at Best Buy even when we can and do also use file sharing networks like eDonkey.

But imagine if the stuff you bought at Best Buy no longer worked together without Herculean effort. Imagine if the HD-DVD you brought home or the Streamed HD Movie you paid for on your PVR were hobbled by characteristics that made them hard to use. Furthermore, ask yourself why, after ten years of Pay-Per-View Movies, we still have video rental stores?

The answer is the consumer market’s innate resistance to difficulty, and our desire to not have the means in which we consume information dictated by the CEO of some sandbagged, heretofore unknown, media company.

When the media companies set the barriers higher and higher for consuming their material the old-fashioned way, they’re practically begging the mainstream, using the Internet, to route right around them. When they make us all experts in HDCP handshaking, HDMI systems integration, and the finer nuances of Dolby versus DTS Surround Sound, they lower the barriers to grabbing and viewing our entertainment and information on that most dreaded of all platforms: the computer, and the internet.

And despite 20 solid years of effort, media companies have been profoundly unsuccessful in combating what we do on our computers once we get their stuff in our hands. And even with a Bush government, the DMCA, and legions of lawyers they have had little concrete impact except to increase the friction and lower the value of the mainstream consumer media.

I can see this through to its logical conclusion. Computers, software, and the internet will increasingly transact our consumption of movies, music, and what we will one day say we used to call “TV shows”. The big media distribution companies will increasingly become unnecessary, and will have cut themselves out of the action.

And in my view, they’d deserve it.

-Ian.

SBC Won’t Name Names in File-Sharing Cases

Ian — Wed, 17 Sep 2003 21:51:36 +0000

*As proof that market dynamics can influence lawmaking, SBC has fallen into step with Verizon in putting up roadblocks to stop the RIAA’s maniacal tirade against P2P. The quote that says it all? * “We are going to challenge every single one of these that they file until we are told that our position is wrong as a matter of law”. Brilliant. And good marketing, too. If I lived in SBC territory I’d leap to join their network and sign up for ADSL. * -Ian.

—- http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20030916/ZNYT01/309160363

SBC Won’t Name Names in File-Sharing Cases*

By SETH SCHIESEL New York Times September 16, 2003

* â€¢ Discuss this story <to turn over the names of their customers who are otherwise known only by the murky screen names and numeric Internet Protocol addresses used in cyberspace.

SBC, the No. 2 regional phone company and a major local telecommunications service provider in the Midwest and West, has received about 300 such subpoenas and has refused to answer any of them. It has stuck to that position even though Verizon, the biggest local phone company which has most of its customers along the East Coast lost a major lawsuit this year against the recording industry.

The contrast between SBC’s stance and that of its peers illustrates how Internet providers have been caught in the middle of the music industry’s pursuit of individual music swappers. Their range of responses underscores the complexities of the legal landscape in this new area of law, the mounting tensions between copyright enforcement and privacy, and the limits of technology in finding cyberspace pirates.

In the Verizon case, a federal judge in Washington ruled that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 required the company to reveal the identities of its customers even though the industry’s subpoenas had not been individually reviewed by a judge. Oral arguments in Verizon’s appeal are to be heard today by a federal court in Washington.

Most big Internet providers say that the original decision in the Verizon case essentially validated the subpoenas that the recording industry sent to other companies. SBC, however, has sued the recording industry group in California.

“We are going to challenge every single one of these that they file until we are told that our position is wrong as a matter of law,” James D. Ellis, general counsel for SBC, said yesterday in a telephone interview.

Ever since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 remade the communications industry, SBC has been considered by far the most legally aggressive of the nation’s major communications companies. Mr. Ellis is scheduled to testify tomorrow about the copyright subpoenas before the Senate Commerce Committee. With about three million high-speed data customers, SBC is the nation’s No. 1 provider of broadband Internet access using digital subscriber line technology.

“Clearly, there are serious legal issues here, but there are also these public policy privacy issues,” Mr. Ellis said. “We have unlisted numbers in this industry, and we’ve got a long heritage in which we have always taken a harsh and hard rule on protecting the privacy of our customers’ information.”

Recording industry officials see SBC’s stance not as a matter of principle over privacy but as a matter of dollars from downloading. They assert that SBC is not concerned about copyright protection because the company uses the lure of music piracy to attract high-speed Internet customers.

A record industry official pointed to a past print advertisement from SBC’s Pacific Bell unit that read, in part: “Download all the music you like. And all the music you sort of, kind of, maybe even a little bit like. Go MP3 crazy. Try new music. Build a song library. Whatever.”

“Sure beats going to the record store,” the advertisement concluded.

A spokesman for the record industry group said the ad had appeared in The Los Angeles Times as recently as January 2002.

Matthew J. Oppenheim, the trade group’s senior vice president for business and legal affairs, said the ad was important because it suggested a strong motive for SBC’s position. “SBC believes that free music drives its business,” he said. “That’s the only explanation for why they would relitigate issues that have been resolved.”

An SBC spokesman, Selim Bingol, said the advertisement was irrelevant. “It’s ludicrous to suggest that an ad that has not appeared for many months has anything to do with today’s debate,” he said. “We are opposing these subpoenas because under the R.I.A.A.’s interpretation, they are a threat to consumer privacy and safety.”

The wave of subpoenas that led to last week’s lawsuits began about 10 weeks after the judge in the Verizon case issued his final ruling in April. On July 7, the Monday after the Independence Day weekend, lawyers at Internet providers returned to their offices to find a blizzard of legal requests from the recording association. Comcast, the nation’s leading provider of high-speed Internet access to homes, which it supplies through its cable system, received more than 100 subpoenas in the first two days after the holiday.

“It really was a fire drill,” said Gerard J. Lewis, Comcast’s chief privacy officer. At Comcast and other companies, the first subpoenas were dated July 3, the last day before the holiday weekend, and they required the companies to provide the information within seven days. That meant that Internet providers that thought the subpoenas were legal had only two or three days to comply.

Now, according to lawyers at several major Internet companies, the recording industry has agreed to a looser schedule: 10 business days from when the Internet provider receives the subpoena.

The digital copyright law does not require anyone to notify consumers that their personal information has been subpoenaed. It appears, however, that most major Internet providers including Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon made an effort to send letters to many customers who were the subjects of subpoenas, notifying them that unless the customer signaled legal action, the information would be provided to the recording industry.

According to executives at several major Internet providers, only the barest minimum of customers took any steps to block the disclosure of their information. Of the 261 individuals sued by the industry so far, however, a number have said they never received any notice from their Internet provider.

Tracking down the numeric Internet protocol, or I.P., address employed by any given user of a file-sharing network is relatively easy. In essence, the industry focused on users who appeared to be making large numbers of music files available to others on file-swapping networks like KaZaA and Morpheus. Industry investigators noted the I.P. address of the user and the exact time at which the user was making files available.

The recording investigators could then determine which Internet provider assigned the specific I.P. address. The subpoenas included both the I.P. address and the time so that the Internet provider could see which of its customers was using that address at that particular moment. With many consumer Internet services, the I.P. address for a user can change every time the computer is turned off and turned back on, so the exact time is a critical tool for matching I.P. addresses and users.

The length of time that Internet providers maintain logs of users, addresses and times varies. Comcast and Time Warner Cable, for instance, generally keep those logs for only 30 days. That means that if those companies receive a copyright subpoena with an I.P. address and time more than a month old, they may be unable to answer the request.

Verizon, by contrast, generally keeps its I.P. logs indefinitely.

“Verizon keeps that sort of information for traffic management and to help law enforcement,” said Sarah Deutsch, a Verizon vice president and associate general counsel.

Mr. Oppenheim from the recording industry association said he was generally pleased with the level of cooperation his organization has received. Nonetheless, executives at several Internet providers that are cooperating with the association expressed privately some discomfort with the process.

“We fully understand that copyright protection is a legitimate goal,” said one executive at a major Internet provider. “That being said, it doesn’t seem like the consumers’ privacy interest is really being balanced out here in this process.”

Terrorism, or, You Have No Rights

Ian — Fri, 21 Mar 2003 00:48:38 +0000

—-

From: Jeff Bone Date: Thu Mar 20, 2003 7:53:48 AM US/Pacific To: fork [at] xent [dot] com Subject: [SPORK] X == Terrorism, or, You Have No Rights

(a) “Drugs fund terrorism” [1] (b) “If you fund terrorism, you are a terrorist” [2] (c) “If we even SUSPECT you are a terrorist, the Bill of Right’s doesn’t apply.” [3] — .: (d) Suspected drug users / sellers have no rights.

—-

It this doesn’t worry you, substitute “p2p file sharing” for “drugs.” [4] Or “SUVs.” Or “commuting alone.” [5] (NB: I like Bill Maher, but sometimes he can be an idiot.) For an opposing view on the relationship between drugs and terrorism, see [6] — which makes the case that drug *prohibition* may in fact fund terrorism — or [7] which merely points out the stupidity in [1].

[NB, Aside: the commercials for [1] above annoy the shit out of me; they point out a new tool in the neo-con rhetorical arsenal that’s been getting a lot of play lately. Basically, it goes like this: assert something stringently enough and often enough, and that constitutes proof — even in the absence of any substantiation. “Drugs fund terrorism.” “C’mon, they don’t.” “Yes they do.” “Really?” “Yes.” “Oh, okay.” Grrrrr…. To see the pattern, consider: this is exactly the same rhetorical technique that was tried (and apparently worked, for most of the mindless drones in this country) in justifying the current conflict. “Saddam is involved in terrorism.” “There’s no proof.” “Yes there is.” “Really?” “Yes.” “Oh, okay.” Grrr….]

[1] http://origin.ifilm.com/ifilm/product/film_info/0,3699,2419299,00.html [2] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_11/b3824050.htm (not the best link, but…) [3] http://www.aclu-mass.org/legal/USApatriotact.html [4] http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0313congrpanel.html [5] http://www.evolvefish.com/fish/product1477.html [6] http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art5150.asp [7] http://www.lindesmith.org/library/bakes_jan2003.cfm

E-Mule Project…

Ian — Tue, 14 Jan 2003 19:59:53 +0000

http://www.emule-project.net/

This is likely the next wave of file sharing. What’s wrong with GNUtella, you ask? Well, unlike Napster, GNUtella clients install with file sharing turned OFF by default. As a result, the GNUtella network is primarily composed of people who “leech” — that is, downloading without sharing.

There’s very good reason why we all leech — none of us wants to saturate our net connection (the way Napster did) with other people downloading files from us.

e-Mule has a good compromise. By default, e-Mule only shares the files you are CURRENTLY downloading. As such, someone who is downloading a file that has been indexed from its original source automatically cobbles together bits from various different OTHER downloaders. If you do choose to share a file, the viral nature of P2P takes effect rather quickly and distributes the bandwidth consumption among you as the primary source and the various other downloaders.

A good compromise that results in the same or better performance as GNUtella, but an otherwise wider selection of material and fewer true leeches.

Brilliant stuff, IMHO.

-Ian.

———–

Re: BitTorrent

Ian — Tue, 10 Dec 2002 00:27:11 +0000

BitTorrent:

I checked it out. It has brutal memory leaks under OSX, sucks up tons of horsepower, and is generally badly implemented. However, I get the concept. GNUtella does do this already, although I presume less efficiently.

HTTP would not have gone anywhere as a protocol were it not for Search Engines, DNS and the evolution of nomenclature. Right now, it appears (given that I could only find a very few active files by googling +”bittorrent”) that BitTorrent is a protocol without a directory or naming schema… kind of like a tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it.

Of the one file I did manage to get going, an old X-Files episode I had no intention of watching, the download ran at about 7k/sec., hardly realizing the benefits of distributed, massively parallel, Peer-2-Peer. So it’s clear that BitTorrent has yet to reach its Tipping Point and spread beyond the community of P2P enthusiasts and slashdotters.

-Ian.

On Sunday, December 8, 2002, at 05:55 PM, Lance Tracey wrote:

> Bram Cohen’s BitTorrent, available in a Mac OS X version, is an
> open-source
> system for distributing high-demand files across a “swarm” of servers:
>
> BitTorrent is a protocol for distributing files. It identifies content
> by
> url and is designed to integrate seamlessly with the web. Its
> advantage over
> plain http is that when multiple downloads of the same file happen
> concurrently, the downloaders upload to each other, making it possible
> for
> the file source to support very large numbers of downloaders with only
> a
> modest increase in its load.

———–

Salon.com on Gnutella

Ian — Wed, 10 Jul 2002 19:23:08 +0000

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Lucas Gonze
> Date: Tue Jul 09, 2002 08:54:08 PM US/Pacific
> To: “Joseph S. Barrera III”
> Subject: Re: Reuters.com – Gnutella Developer Gene Kan, 25,
> Commits Suicide – July 09, 2002
>
>
> Gene was a dark guy. Also quiet and smart. I liked him.
>
> Funny the way this happened. Death cements his status as the face of
> Gnutella. It’s wierd the way that Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper
> are still
> hidden away back there behind Gene, right where they’d have to be
> to keep
> AOL Time Warner cool and generally avoid the media shitstorm. The
> whole
> association between them and Gene and Gnutella started because
> they were
> roommates. …
>
>> From
> http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/09/29/gnutella_paradox/index1.html:
>
> It’s June 1999. The programming community is shocked. Justin
> Frankel, the
> talented young programmer who helped create the Winamp and
> Shoutcast MP3
> players, had sold his company Nullsoft to America Online. For at
> least a
> year, Winamp had been the most popular software program in the MP3
> underground, one of the first tools that made it really easy to
> listen to
> music nabbed off the Net. Frankel was an icon for script kiddies
> everywhere, and had a history of doing whatever he felt like
> doing — but
> selling out to AOL? Even though the price tag was rumored to be $100
> million (and Nullsoft was also seeking relief from a troubling lawsuit
> that alleged that Winamp stole its code), many found this hard to
> swallow;
> even more suspected that AOL might not know exactly what it had gotten
> itself into.
>
> For nine months, Frankel and his team worked in silence behind the
> corporate wall of AOL, in the company’s San Francisco music
> headquarters.
> And then, one day in mid-March, the statement: a little program called
> Gnutella, hidden on a back page of Nullsoft’s Web site. It was an early
> “alpha” version of what was to be an open-source (the code would
> be freely
> available to all) file-sharing system, like the increasingly
> controversial
> Napster program, but lacking the vulnerabilities — centralized
> servers,
> lack of anonymity — that made Napster so easy to attack.
>
>
> What was Frankel thinking? AOL was in the process of merging with Time
> Warner, which in turn owns the EMI and Warner Music record labels.
> And EMI
> and Warner Music, as two of the five biggest members of the RIAA,
> are not
> fond of programs that allow users to pirate MP3 files. The program
> appeared on the Nullsoft Web site for just a few hours before AOL
> yanked
> the page down, issuing a terse statement declaring that “the Gnutella
> software was an unauthorized freelance project.” Was Frankel trying to
> peeve his new corporate owners?
>
> Nullsoft engineers had been watching the controversy surrounding
> Napster,
> and threw together Gnutella in the space of a few days as a way to
> prove
> that a decentralized system could out-geek the law. Their goal was
> less to
> annoy their new owners than to figure out how to improve upon
> Napster. As
> one person close to the Nullsoft staff explains, “They have ‘fuck you
> money,’ they can do whatever the hell they want and AOL can’t take back
> what they gave them. I don’t think that Gnutella was just done to
> [thumb
> their noses] — AOL is insignificant. It was just the most interesting
> thing you could possibly be doing, AOL or no AOL.”
>
> AOL’s punishment for its rogue programmers was minor: The company
> publicly
> disassociated itself from Gnutella, forbade Frankel to work on the
> program
> and hoped the embarrassment would end there. (Although Frankel,
> six months
> later, unleashed a second surprise for AOL: a little program called
> AIMazing, which helps eradicate ads from AOL’s instant messaging
> program
> … but that’s another story.)
>
> AOL’s actions did not mean, of course, the end of Gnutella. Avid
> developers were savvy enough to download Gnutella before it
> disappeared,
> and before long they had reverse-engineered the program and distributed
> the protocols; in a matter of weeks, the Web was peppered with sites
> offering both the original Gnutella program and a number of clones. Six
> months later, more than two dozen versions of the software have been
> released by assorted developers.
>
> The initial Gnutella software was hard to use: It had a confusing
> interface, and to connect to the network users had to scramble to
> find the
> Internet address of another Gnutella host (not always an easy
> task). But
> new versions such as Gnotella incorporated friendly Napster-like
> interfaces, let users design their own skins and smoothed out some
> basic
> networking issues. Shaun Sidwall, the Canadian programmer behind
> Gnotella,
> plans to incorporate a built-in host in the next version of his
> software,
> so that newbies can automatically connect to the network.
>
> Dozens of programmers were thrilled to get a chance to tinker with
> Gnutella. But any technology needs its figurehead, and with
> Frankel hidden
> away in the back rooms of AOL, Gnutella needed a new spokesperson. It
> found one in Kan.
>
> Gnutella — and, for that matter, the entire P2P movement —
> couldn’t ask
> for a better representative. Like Frankel, gonesilent.com founder
> Kan is a
> quiet and youthful programmer with a love for technology. Unlike
> Frankel,
> however, he’s a master at industry diplomacy. He’s young and
> soft-spoken
> and chooses his words as carefully as a law professor, excising
> any “ums”
> or “likes.” He sits stiffly, with his hands in his lap, and other
> than his
> collection of zippy cars (including an RX7 and a BMW) is utterly
> lacking
> in ostentation.
>
> Kan has done an excellent job as an evangelist: He’s appeared in
> the pages
> of the New York Times debating industry heavyweights like RIAA
> president
> Hilary Rosen and antitrust attorney David Boies. He’s flown to
> Washington
> to discuss policy with Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and earlier this month
> attended a P2P summit organized by computer book publisher Tim
> O’Reilly.
> Thanks to all the free publicity, Gnutella’s traffic has steadily
> grown: A
> recent study measured 35,000 users in a 24-hour period. Much of this
> growth came during the days after the RIAA won a preliminary injunction
> against Napster, as fans rushed to find a new program to use. (An
> appeals
> court later stayed the injunction until next week’s hearings.) Kan
> estimates that roughly a million copies of the program were downloaded
> from his site that day. Today, on an average day, tens of thousands of
> users use Gnutella to exchange MP3 files, plus porn, pirated software
> “warez,” illegal movies and other digital detritus, both pirated and
> legitimate.
>
> But all the traffic has put a strain on Gnutella, and the program’s
> weaknesses are starting to show. Kan, ever the upbeat evangelist
> for the
> technology, cheerfully admits that Gnutella has had its faults; but he
> also believes that Gnutella is ready for widespread use. “At first you
> focus on building the car, and once the car is built then you focus on
> refining the car,” he enthuses. “We knew the refining was around the
> corner and it just takes some time. We wanted to accelerate the best we
> could by coordinating developer efforts and encouraging them to
> raise the
> bar on usability. And it happened.”
>
>
>
>
>
> http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork

Stamp Out HTTP

Ian — Wed, 13 Mar 2002 00:23:10 +0000

Despite the signatories to Don Box’s paycheck he is correct in assessing that HTTP has reached the end of its usefulness as a protocol for delivering applications. Even Tim Berners-Lee thinks so. Of course, HTTP will always be with us for the simple accessing and retrieval of information, which is the only thing it was designed for in the first place.

What HTTP has never been, and what many people (to their own detriment) believe HTTP to be, is a functional model for user interface (read: application) design. You only need to compare the ease of use of your favourite desktop email client to that of a web-based email service such as Yahoo! mail to see why this is true.

HTTP’s main design “flaws”, if you can call them that, are the lack of a stateful model and the absence of any sort of rich exchange with the server of contextual information about what’s happening on the client.

Sure, you can load lots of Java, VBScript, JavaScript, ASP, Style Sheets, etc onto HTTP but it becomes an uncomfortable fit and most of the client side standards are anything but — as a result whenever you try to achieve a reasonable degree of interactivity on a web interface you’re always kicking a certain percentage of your audience out the door because they don’t have the right OS or Browser. This is the fundamental GUI Paradox that the web/internet faces as we try to adapt the client-server model into more valuable applications.

MSN’s Hotmail is a good example, which uses lots of VBScript and looks absolutely fantastic in Microsoft IE. Their trade off is an obvious (and strategic) one where they decided that universal access (which is a foundational principle of HTTP) was less important than a quality user interface. It’s probably one of the most complex web-based User Interfaces out there.

Anyway, lots of protocols are portending to drive functional user interfaces to greater degrees of relevance in the Client-Server model but the action that fundamentally matters will be in Peer-To-Peer, as GNUtella proves.

My point in forwarding this piece is to further isolate a theme which runs through my thinking, namely the fact that people will always choose a quality user experience over compatibility. That theme was lost to all of these dot coms who threw millions of dollars towards trying to get us to use the web to do everything (including WORD PROCESSING) and ultimately got themselves twisted around trying to break free of the GUI Paradox.

Web pages should be cheap, lightweight, and simple. Applications should be heavy, feature a high degree of interactivity, and highly complex… We need an open protocol to supply that via the network.

I can’t believe I’m agreeing with Microsoft.

-Ian.

——-

http://zdnet.com.com/2102-1105-845220.html

Microsoft guru: Stamp out HTTP By Matt Loney Special to ZDNet News February 26, 2002, 7:40 AM PT URL: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-845220.html

LONDON–Now that IPv4 is slowly being replaced by version 6 as a way of increasing the Internet’s address space, it appears that another bedrock of the Internet, HTTP, is also reaching its limitations.

Delivering the keynote at European DevWeek in London on Tuesday, Don Box, an architect for Microsoft’s .NET Developer Platform team, said HTTP presents a major challenge for Web services, for peer-to-peer applications and even for security. A replacement will eventually have to be found, he said, but it is not at all clear who will provide this replacement.

HTTP, or HyperText Transport Protocol, is used by virtually every Web page on the Internet. It is the mechanism by which a browser sends a request to a server on the Internet, and then receives the response.

“One of the big challenges facing Web services is our reliance on HTTP,” said Box. However, there is nothing wrong with HTTP per se, as its ubiquity and high dependability means it is the only way to get an a reliable end-to-end connection over the Internet, he added. “If people can’t search the Web they call the IT department, so the IT department makes sure HTTP is always working. We have engineered the hell out of it.” So much so, indeed, that Box likes to think of HTTP as the “cockroach of the Internet” because “after the holocaust it will be the only protocol left standing.”

But, he said, we can’t stay on HTTP forever, despite all the investment and engineering that have gone into it. Among the problems with HTTP, said Box, is the fact that it is a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) protocol; something that one program (such as a browser) uses to request a service from another program located in another computer (the server) in a network without having to understand network details.

This works for small transactions asking for Web pages, but when Web services start running transactions that take some time to complete over the protocol, the model fails. “If it takes three minutes for a response, it is not really HTTP any more,” Box said. The problem, said Box, is that the intermediaries–that is, the companies that own the routers and cables between the client and server–will not allow single transactions that take this long.

“We have to do something to make it (HTTP) less important,” said Box. “If we rely on HTTP we will melt the Internet. We at least have to raise the level of abstraction, so that we have an industry-wide way to do long-running requests–I need a way to send a request to a server and not the get result for five days.”

Adapting for P2P Another problem with HTTP, said Box, is that it is asymmetric. “Only one entity can initiate an exchange over HTTP, the other entity is passive, and can only respond. For peer-to-peer applications this is not really suitable,” he said. The reason that peer-to-peer applications do work today, said Box, is that programmers create hacks to get around the limitations of the protocol, and this is not good. “It’s all hackery, it’s all ad-hoc and none of it is interoperable,” he added.

There is work going on to address the shortcomings of HTTP, said Box. Several working groups are working on the problem at the W3C, the organisation responsible for Web standards. And even though Microsoft is working on the problem too, Box did say that Microsoft is unlikely to succeed alone.

“Microsoft has some ideas (on how to break the independence on HTTP), IBM has some ideas, and others have ideas. We’ll see,” he said. But, he added, “if one vendor does it on their own, it will simply not be worth the trouble.”

P2P

Ian — Sat, 16 Feb 2002 04:18:33 +0000

http://www.bizreport.com/print.php?art_id)76

Wednesday, February 13, 2002 Web Services + P2P = Efficiency: Gartner Â

If applied in the corporate world, technology made famous by music file-sharing service Napster could help streamline the flow of data within and outside of enterprises, and cut costs, according to new report by Gartner Inc.

The research firm says it has come up with a way to do it and may very well patent the idea.

Gartner said today it has developed a model that combines the power of Web services and peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies to access designated data files from a centralized server.

The system – which Gartner calls “service station” – would make available data captured in files on desktop computers throughout an enterprise or to subscribers, said Gartner’s Daryl Plummer, group vice president and research group director.

“The service station will do for corporate file sharing what Napster did for music,” Plummer said. “It will make it easy to get what you want when you want it.”

Enterprises would control what files are available through the system, and who has access to them.

“You’re providing service to the people in the scope or the domain that you want to provide that service,” Plummer said. “And if you don’t want to provide it anymore, you would just tell your service station client to shut off access to it.”

Plummer says its model is different than collaborative software already available, such as that produced by Groove Networks.

Security is a concern, but measures to protect files from unauthorized access, denial of service attacks and other intrusions will eventually be implemented, he said.

“The same kind of problems we’ve seen with the Internet will come down to more of a one-on-one issue where you’ve got to solve the same problems,” Plummer told Newsbytes. “Those problems will be solved, of course.”

Gartner will decide whether to patent service station within 60 days, he said.

Gartner – http://www.gartner.com

http://www.bizreport.com//article.php?art_id)76 Reported by Newsbytes