[ NNSquad ] Re: New P2P Privacy System from Univ. of Washington

[Richard Bennett <richard@bennett.com>]

I think there's a big difference between technologies that can be "abused by evil people" and those that are *meant to be used by criminals in the commission of crime*. There's no legitimate reason to mask the identities of the members of a P2P swarm in any free and democratic country, and no chance of doing so anywhere else. This research, which is funded by taxpayer dollars, is  not even interesting as an academic exercise as the straight-up piracy community has already moved beyond it. So "One Swarm" represents the worst of two worlds: a purely derivative research activity with no legitimate purpose.

There is a lot of legitimate and interesting research taking place around P2P and content delivery networks generally: the Van Jacobson interview in this month's ACM Queue describes some of it ( http://mags.acm.org/queue/200901/?pg=3D8 ). This Washington U. stuff is just garbage.

Jacobson raises one of the interesting challenges for neutralists, to wit: if you insist that protocols remain blissfully unaware of payload, how, pray tell, do you deal with the challenge of popular and repetitive content? In the not-too-distant future, TV delivery will shift almost entirely to the Internet. Are we doomed to transmitting a unique copy of the entire packet stream of each episode of "American Idol" to each of its 50 million viewers, or can we relax the layering dogma enough to cache copies of the stream close to the end user?

Solving this problem will require some awareness of the content by the delivery system, and that's not a bad thing, is it? According to neutralist dogma, it's the Original Sin. So the choice appears to be this: efficient networks or neutral networks, pick only one.

RB

Paul Forbes wrote:

I guess pedophiles can use ftp - better ban that. How about MSN? ICQ? AOLIM?
HTTP? Yep - better ban all of those. Let's ban memory sticks. OH! All of
these rely on computers. Let's ban them. AND the internet! Ban that too!
Digital cameras! Polaroids! Public transportation! Shoes! Hell, let's just
ban the wheel and lop off everyone's legs just in case everyone are
pedophiles!

OK, if the above didn't make my point - if we banned every technology
because it could be abused in some way by evil people we'd still be eating
raw meat in caves.

Paul

   [ I've had a number of press calls very recently relating to the
     "Do we need a whole new Internet?" debate that's started up
     again.  One of the most frequent question sets I've gotten
     related to this is variations on "Shouldn't the Internet allow
     authorities to track every single byte and exactly who is using
     it for everything?  Shouldn't you have to be identified before
     using the Net for anything?"  And so on.  Which goes to show how
     well those who would use sometimes laudible motives to turn the
     Internet into a global tool for political oppression and the
     obliteration of civil rights, have been playing the public
     discourse and the politics of this topic quite successfully.

       -- Lauren Weinstein
          NNSquad Moderator ]



     
     

     

   
      


-----Original Message-----
From: nnsquad-bounces+paul.w.forbes=gmail.com@nnsquad.org
[mailto:nnsquad-bounces+paul.w.forbes=gmail.com@nnsquad.org] On Behalf Of
Brett Glass
Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 10:48 PM
To: Lauren Weinstein; nnsquad@nnsquad.org
Cc: lauren@vortex.com
Subject: [ NNSquad ] Re: New P2P Privacy System from Univ. of Washington

Great. Now pedophiles can share kiddie porn only with other pedophiles
whom they trust not to turn them in. That's "friend to friend" sharing,
alright!

--Brett

At 08:47 PM 2/23/2009, Lauren Weinstein wrote:


  

New P2P Privacy System from Univ. of Washington

http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu/

--Lauren--
NNSquad Moderator
    

-- 
Richard Bennett