Welcome to Napsterites,
alphabeater!
A good post with a good vision of how p2p should evolve.
Quote:
Originally posted by alphabeater
i've thought about this a lot, and central to the problem seems to be the idea of having a verifiable and locatable identity. on msn, you have a hotmail address, problem solved, and on napster you had a username. while you have identities on networks like winmx and kazaa, they are not locatable across the entire network. the number of kazaa users who ask 'how can i find my friends on kazaa?' is amazing, and the answer (which you probably know) is that you can't.
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Precisely. This has been the core problem of public p2p networks. Decentralized networks have lacked reliable peer identities altogether and OpenNap is not much better as it is so easy to spoof identities and you keep revealing your nick/password combinations openly to all servers you try to log in. Without permanent verifiable identities there cannot be real peer-to-peer trust not to talk about wider trust networks.
Quote:
Originally posted by alphabeater
gnutella and kazaa solve this by introducing the idea of a 'servent' - a combined server and client. multiple servents connect up to form a decentralised network. however, on a decentralised network, verifiable identity cannot exist almost by definition - it would require central servers of some type. while kazaa and gnutella allow you to get the files you want, it is only from a swarm of ip addresses or easily-spoofable nicknames - never a proper community.
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It is possible to have verifiable peer identities also on 100 % decentralized networks. This requires that any two peers communicating with each other for the first time establish a protected communication channel between them and exchange dedicated encryption keys that they can use in their future communications to verify each other's identity. Using encrypted 1-to-1 communications all the way they can maintain an elementary trust relationship on which trusted groups and communities can be built.
Quote:
Originally posted by alphabeater
the ideal layout for the servent, i think, would be something like msn messenger - that is, a contact list listing domains. this would be much like the ones you can download for winmx, except that you would compile it yourself, and it would be a list of your friends (or 'contacts') in the network. you would be able to send an im to any of these contacts and have a conversation in instant messenger style, and then choose the ones you like best (or the ones with the best connections, more likely), to use as 'peers', ie. connect to and join the p2p network. the network from there on could work much like gnutella, with search messages being forwarded between servents with a ttl.
this system would be a little more work for users, but would allow them to move from a decentralised, automatically-organised network (kazaa, gnutella) to a decentralised but user-organised network. this would have the effect of introducing the much-hyped concept of a 'web of trust' into a p2p network, as well as testing the 'six degrees of seperation' theory in a new way. it would also be the proper integration of im and p2p, two technologies which i feel are very close but have never been introduced properly.
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The idea of building permanent social networks over the constantly fluctuating 'technical' networks is a very potent one and as you say it hasn't yet really been introduced into decentralized p2p - although the idea is very much in the air. AudioGalaxy made important contributions to the idea of social self-organization but in the centralized environment. I trust that similar ideas will inevitably find their way also to the decentralized p2p, making way for even more exciting applications and networks.
- tg
