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P2P Now and Then

Posted by Zonk on Thu Sep 15, 2005 02:17 PM
from the distributing-stuff-in-little-pieces dept.
The Internet Media Networking
brajesh writes "There was an earlier story on Slashdot regarding eDonkey overtaking BitTorrent in P2P traffic. The BBC story was based on this press release by CacheLogic. To expand on this, there is a comprehensive analysis of P2P trends in 2005 by the same firm. The report makes some insights into the present and future of P2P, particularly interesting in the light of recent steps taken by BBC -BBC iMP and others. The analysis also makes some observations about the break-up of P2P content."
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  • Now and then? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kenja (541830) on Thursday September 15 2005, @02:20PM (#13569289)
    Way back "then" P2P was used for nothing but the exchange of bootleged copies of star wars and porn. Now its used to exchange information noble of purpose that will enrich humanity for all time.

    Or it could still be the porn thing.

  • Now: stealing stuff
    Then: stealing stuff

    Feal free to replace stealing with infriging if it will help you get through the day. And don't give me no "linux ISO" bullshit.
      • "While *some* used/use it as justification and denial, I have also seen, ans have used it because when talking about FACTS (not opinions or personal beliefs), the crimes involving p2p and copyrights involve piracy copyright infringement, not rape, murder, larceny, stealing, theft, etc.

        Copyright infringement (gain + no loss) != theft (gain + loss. Copyright education + RIAA/MPAA/BSA = PROPAGANDA AND F"

        You don't understand English:
        Or are phrases such as "you stole my idea" or "you're stealing cable" not corre

  • To summarize: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2005, @02:22PM (#13569312)

    - There is a lot of P2P traffic.
    - This will not decrease.
    - P2P packages will come and go.
    - Industry had better embrace this.

    • Just some things I noticed...

      • P2P = 60% of All Traffic
      • Edonkey is gaining in popularity (and first in usage - in many locations), Bittorrent is next, then Fasttrack and lastly Gnutella
      • Edonkey Localized, More languages (and hence has more use) - localized versions have a large effect as seen in South Korea (Prune)
      • Video seems to dominate Fasttrack, eDonkey and Bittorrent as what is being shared.
      • Audio dominates Gnutells
      • Of Audio being shared, MP3 = 64%, OGG = 12%, WMA = 22% (roughly)
      • Of Video being share


  • I may sound like an idiot for saying this, but does anyone ever get the impression that p2p is going to be the new conduit for the oppressed ( oppressed being everyone subject to coorprate america). The first conduit was the free press on obstructed information flow allowing abolitionist and the like to band together and spread there cause, then radio TV etc . Now there is p2p another on obstructed means of passing information uncontrolled by the cooprate majority.

    • Re:a new conduit (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Neil Blender (555885) <neilblender@gmail.com> on Thursday September 15 2005, @02:29PM (#13569373)
      I may sound like an idiot for saying this, but does anyone ever get the impression that p2p is going to be the new conduit for the oppressed ( oppressed being everyone subject to coorprate america).

      I'm sorry but not being able to get music and movies for free is not oppression.

      • Re:a new conduit (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        p2p does not == stealing movies and shit.

        p2p also offers darknets and structures such as hidden services on tor, I2P sites, and freenet and freesites. This allows for *any* information to be distributed. If someone wanted to start a site leaking thousands of corporate secrets and doing things that are blatantly illegal they could. If someone wanted to oppose policies of a repressive govt. they could. p2p offers a new method of distributing information. Certainly copyright infringement and the like are the m


      • some unknown genious comes up with a new codingmethod that allows a true form of AI. and wishes to keep it out of coorprate hands and make it free to all. Can you think of a better way of passing it to the world at large ? trust me it's much more than music and porn.

      • I'm sorry but not being able to get music and movies for free is not oppression.

        No, but it may lead to less oppression.

        American TV and movies export American culture. Part of American culture is traditionally strong protection of personal freedoms. While American TV and movies will often prevent a flawed view of the US to enhance the plot, its still presenting a view of the American culture.

        Imagine what would happen if P2P and the internet existed in Soviet Russia back in the 80s? Would it ha

    • Re:a new conduit (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Raindance (680694) <johnsonmx@@@gmail...com> on Thursday September 15 2005, @02:37PM (#13569457) Homepage Journal
      Maybe. There's nothing inherently egalitarian about the internet.

      Lessig's "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" touches on this. Code is law-- how the 'net is structured determines how it's used, with the nigh force of law.

      The internet is fairly favorable to the "little guy" right now, but Lessig says there's nothing inherently unchangeable about the internet's Code. The battle for the internet *has not been won*.
    • That's all well and good but mostly it's just for downloading stuff for free.

  • This Missing Slice (Score:4, Funny)

    by Nom du Keyboard (633989) on Thursday September 15 2005, @02:27PM (#13569358)
    Would have been interesting to see a pie chart with a slice showing the amount of P2P traffic impacted by the ??AA lawsuits.

    Or maybe it was there and I just missed its sub-pixel width on my high resolution monitor.

    • It would have also been interesting to see the video traffic broken down into subcategories -- ie porn vs non-porn. Yeah, it would be difficult, but you could probably get at least some rough estimates based on certain keywords...
    • When I worked for an ISP, we could always count on seeing the p2p traffic drop off a few percent every time there was a big mass lawsuit. The effect was a lot like seeing someone get pulled over for speeding; everyone slows down for half a mile, then hits the gas on the assumption that it will always be "the other guy" who gets the ticket.

      ISP's are wary of having the percieved benefit of getting "free content" get taken away. Most corvette owners would never even notice if their cars were speed-limited to 8

  • They missed Share for Japanese users (Score:3, Informative)

    by Dracil (732975) on Thursday September 15 2005, @02:30PM (#13569385)
    (Includes Winny)

    Not surprising since the program interface is in Japanese by default (and even with an English interface, you'll most likely still have to search for the files in Japanese if you want to actually find anything).

    But with its relative anonymity, plausible deniability (think Freenet), while maintaining really high speeds (although this may be more a factor of Japanese having much better broadband than we do), I wouldn't be surprised if this was their main source for P2P as well as a glimpse at the future of P2P as lawsuits just drive P2P users into using networks that afford a bit better protection.
    • Didn't Winny pretty much drop off the planet since the author was arrested and several people using the BBS were arrested? I tried Winny after that (PITA, but I'm a geek), seemed pretty dead to me. In either case, I don't think the source was ever released, so there'll be no upgrades or bugfixes. And as far as anonymity vs really high speed goes, one of those two will be false. Since high speed is measurable, well...

      Kjella

  • Why P2P is not like the printing press (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nom du Keyboard (633989) on Thursday September 15 2005, @02:33PM (#13569407)
    Printing presses are large, expensive, hard to hide, and easy to suppress. This is why they have such high Constitutional protections. Their problem is that whomever anc afford and control the press controls the news. For The People this is a double-edged sword.

    OTOH, P2P is small, cheap, everywhere, and hard to suppress. While it cannot merit the need for such heavy handed protection yet, it disseminates information broadly and uncontrollably. For The People this is often a good thing!

    • Printing presses are large, expensive, hard to hide, and easy to suppress.

      The only reason why printing presses are so large nowadays is that the smaller ones have, at least in some parts of the world, been replaced by printers and copier machines, as these are easier to operate (and cheaper) than a printing press is. But I have no doubt that there's still some revolutionaries out there, printing leaflets in candle light in the cellar of daddy's house :7

    • 1800 called. I think you missed the invention of the fax and photocopier.
    • Printing presses are large, expensive, hard to hide, and easy to suppress. This is why they have such high Constitutional protections.

      Huh and double huh. Copyright was created to protect authors from owners of printing presses. Obviously this involved suppressing unauthorized production, but you're still missing the point. A huge printing press making millions of copies would easily outcompete a small pirate press on the whole. It is the copyright holders that get really screwed. That is why you go to the b
    • Printing presses for large runs of daily papers might be large but book presses can be small, in your basement, that's how samizdat publications were published in the soviet states. Also, if a bordering country has a different regime, books can be smuggled over borders.

      While computer to computer traffic is distributed, it faces a different form of threat - the systemic block. This will continue to happen in relation to commercial content with DRM and to political information in states like China.

      Anyway, th

  • method? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by adminispheroid (554101) on Thursday September 15 2005, @02:37PM (#13569450)
    The first question that leaps to mind, which none of the posted info answers, is how the heck do you compare gnutella to bittorrent? I mean, the gnutella network is used only for indexing, and the transfers are done by http, whereas bittorrent is for transfers (and there is no indexing). Did they take this into account? If so, how? Not clear to me how you'd figure out which http traffic was gnutella-related.

    I don't know squat about eDonkey and Fasttrack, so I don't know how these considerations apply to them.

    • I got sick of all these P2P arguments and signed up for Rhapsody. These services used to be really friendly and let you stream listen to the latest and greatest of any album entirely.

      I have begin to notice all the mainstream albums are become 90 to 100% full of 30-second demos in the few months of their release. I swear, even if you pay you can't win.

  • I've tried to download files from edonkey for several months, without success.

    All i've got is "Queue #4339 of 4339" (in the worst case) and average of 140 people before me in my around 20 sources. And I mean anime fansubs, not pron (but it could apply).

    Considering that each file takes around 5 hours to transfer, my ETA would be equal to 29 days before my download actually starts.

    This makes me wonder if all the traffic in edonkey belongs to the 1/140 = 0.71% lucky guys who got to be the first ones in the queues.

    Gnutella, on the other hand, is my preferred source for downloads. I always get to download stuff.

    So... my question is... has any slashdotter in here been able to ACTUALLY download ANYTHING from edonkey? How long it takes before a download actually starts? Does the p2p client change your probability of success?

    Answers would be appreciated.

    • Re:Can somebody enlighten me? (Score:5, Informative)

      by suitepotato (863945) on Thursday September 15 2005, @02:57PM (#13569640)
      I run eMule on Windows and aMule on Linux (Fedora Core 3). I've downloaded over 100GB from that network so far of various things..

      • Always make sure to share some of your files with people. Don't move them out of a shared folder the instant you finish getting them. Don't squelch all uploading to others. That's considered "leeching".
      • Always make sure to check the file availibility. If the numbers are close to 1-5 you're not going to be getting it quick. If they are 0 showing online, you may wait forever.
      • Always check for the same file being listed under another name with larger availibility. Many files will be out there in different incarnations and the correct version will usually be the one with the most people sharing it.
      • Always make sure not to set everything to High priority, only those things which truly are and always make sure to swap all A4AF to an important file every so often. The clients tend to forget to recheck every so often for hosts popping online since the original download was entered.
      • Always make sure on broadband connections to carefully control upstream usage as unfettered upstream usage is a good way to get choked by your provider. I keep mine to 25% of my upstream maximum.

      eMule/aMule work fine for me. Way better than bittorrent ever has.
    • I download things (usually full albums in .rar and .zip format, but also some 'adult' material) using amule all the time. I usually start downloading before I go to bed, and when I wake up I'll typically have about 50% of the downloads complete. I find that it's a good idea to have 7-10 going at any given time.
    • I've had the same experience. I've never managed to download anything from eDonkey, ever, in spite of opening firewall ports and leaving it running for days. People seem to be able to download from me just fine, though.

      So I gave up on it.
    • Well, since I'm on OS X, I use mLmac [mlmac.org] which taps into many different networks including edonkey. There is also Poisoned [gottsilla.net] that taps Gnutella, OpenFT and Fasttrack. There are a bunch of different Mac clients can be found here [mac-p2p.com].

  • Did anyone see the products they offer? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MemeRot (80975) on Thursday September 15 2005, @02:42PM (#13569496) Homepage Journal
    On http://www.cachelogic.com/products/cachepliance.ph p/ [cachelogic.com] they sell several configurations of a P2P file caching server, saying it will save the ISP money in bandwidth. But wouldn't it also remove their protection as a common provider? I mean the ISP would actually be hosting the files going around on P2P, which would mostly be copyrighted works.

    It sounds fine to me personally, the ISP saves bandwidth and I get sent the file from a server hosted right at my ISP, but it seems like an insanely risky thing for an ISP to do. A general purpose caching machine would be fine -HTTP, FTP, Bittorrent, etc. indiscriminately stored, but picking just p2p traffic.... what do you think?

  • Hardware for P2P User Identification (Score:4, Informative)

    by airherbe (638417) on Thursday September 15 2005, @02:46PM (#13569542)

    CacheLogic, the company which did this "comprehensive analysis" of P2P also happens to sell network hardware which does "Deep Packet Inspection" [securityfocus.com] (read the specs on the device here [cachelogic.com]).

    Innoculously, the technology can efficiently route packets to ensure better QoS, elimination of network congestion, and even provide cached streaming.

    But, one has to wonder if this technology, when used by the likes of the RIAA/MPAA would allow massive consolidation of data on P2P users. The above device specifically analyzes the content of the packet -- it's not a far cry that a company would create software for a device like this, which could automatically detect "flagged" files/hashes, and report them to "copyright owners" who have subscribed to the service.
  • are these statistics true i mean i dont use gnutella, edonkey, fastrack only bittorrent which tend to go slower and slower lately and the superior dc network which in my opinion is lightyears ahead of those gnutella edonkey fastrack i find everything on dc even the very rare things like dutch shows, swedish films, ... mame roms and i dld really fast if i put myself into the job of searching alternatives by the way i use this client http://dcgui.berlios.de/ [berlios.de] Why doesnt someone even mention these p2p netw
  • Man, with easynews [easynews.com] I have practically quit using P2P for ANYTHING.

    Anything I want is on their fast server.. and with their global search that takes like ~2 seconds, zip manager, and autounrar (useful for streaming tv shows, movies, xvids et cetera) i can't ever see using p2p again :P

    But then again, it isn't 'free', but the $10 a month is well worth it in my eyes
  • Ok, so as far as I see this the entire internet is made up of P2P connections. Heck, I made a point-to-point connection to pull down the slashdot page. Distributed P2P networks (where files from multiple systems are put into a list as available from my location) like Kazaa, Limewire, etc... are pretty much just fancy extensions of what I do at home when I'm on my laptop and want to pull a file from my server or workstation. So unless I'm missunderstanding all the buzz, I've been using P2P since way before K
    • You're right. Some people never learn. Continued abuse of those protocols will simply give the industry the hammer they need to outlaw their use.

      No matter how many times you encrypt a packet and sneak it around the net, at some point in time you, the recipient, have to actually receive it at your IP address. Request that 6GB Lost episode mentioned above, and you have to receive 6GB of data. That's a detectable pattern, especially large amounts of encrypted data hopping in from various unknown sources.

      Us

      • Continued abuse of those protocols will simply give the industry the hammer they need to outlaw their use.

        So you're saying they're gonna outlaw the internet huh?

        No matter how many times you encrypt a packet and sneak it around the net, at some point in time you, the recipient, have to actually receive it at your IP address

        you don't understand much about how the internet works. Let't say I am the evil hacker downloading the 'constitution' because you know it's been modified and i'm distributing the unmodifi
    • You must learn patience. If you choose not to pay for content in cash, then you must pay for it in time. As for bittorrent, the age of the torrent is important in my experience. The older it is, the fewer peers and seeds there are.

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