Brilliant Digital's CEO Kevin Bermeister has given an interesting
interview to ZDNet news, providing more details of how Altnet, Brilliant Digital's piggybag network, was conceived and how it is linked to the 'public' FastTrack network:
Quote:
from the story:
Did you bring the idea, or was it the programmers from FastTrack?
I actually brought the idea. But obviously, it was just an idea. Niklas Zennstrom and Janis Friis had access to the technologies that would enable the idea to come to fruition.
So Brilliant decided to create a business that would utilize the technologies and create a secure peer-to-peer network. User-propagated peer-to-peer networks have some significant issues associated with them, primarily related to security issues, but more importantly, related to the progressive improvement of content that is being offered. Unless there are some centralized controls, content owners cannot really put their best content forward and at least maintain some semblance of control over the end-user experience.
So Altnet, as conceived now, is primarily a way to distribute secure content.
One hundred percent secure. Users cannot propagate their own content through Altnet.
How does it work with Kazaa? What is its relationship to Kazaa?
The protocols of the technology, which are essentially based on the same technology that Kazaa is using from FastTrack, are essentially the same. The technology is different, the stacks are different, the functionality is somewhat different, but the protocols are the same. So Altnet can listen for Kazaa search requests and can even decide whether to respond to them or not. If it responds to them, then Altnet can propagate search results into the Kazaa (program).
But not the other direction?
But not the other direction.
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Bermeister is clearly trying to repair the PR damages that Brilliant Digital suffered after sneaking their software into FastTrack users' computers. But this late 'openness' does not convince me at all. Brilliant's business partners would mostly be from the same content industries that have been fighting against the p2p revolution from the beginning, including the harassment of individual p2p users. Giving these guys such an uncontrolled access to the computers of millions of p2p users is a chilling idea. Hollywood would not need any hardware spy/control chips with this arrangement - they would just need to buy Brilliant Digital to suddenly have a direct view and access to everything that you have on your hard disk. No thanks.
- tg
