[kento]

no apologies necessary SA_Dave that was a well thought out and intelligent post...much greatly appreciated i am sure.

okay I hope no one will take offense at me resposting this here but it really seems it should be resposted here as it helps to "bring together" the thoughts and ideas of TG a little more clearly for me and its obvious now that her ideas are full of merit (a worthy one of praise fer sure.

okay here it is

from the thread

yes, leeches are still a problem on WinMX, especially on WPN (OpenNap servers are much better in this respect). They are not a fatal problem as the network is well alive and kicking but they contribute to the long queues by stealing bandwidth from the sharing users. In a multisourced environment leeching means also less sources for movies and music and thereby lower download speeds for everybody. Some sort of leech control mechanism - or rather a mechanism to favour sharers - would therefore be very welcome to WinMX but it will not be easy to implement.

Leech control needs to be intelligent and reliable, otherwise it will easily harm the network instead of benefiting it. A simple blocking mechanism based on the number of shared files or the amount of shared material in megabytes is not good as it will make it difficult for the newcomers to enter the network and easy for the leeches to fool the system by sharing trash files with filenames that are guaranteed to produce no search hits. This kind of system would also totally mistreat the users that share generously from e.g. their workplaces but can't do the same from their homes or vice versa.

Here's my quick sketch for an intelligent leech control system:

A person that you download succesfully from is clearly not a leech from your point of view. The more you download from somebody the more your p2p program should classify this person as a sharer and favour him/her with good bandwitdh and fast queuing should he/she want to get something from you. This would be a good first step that would encourage sharing even if it does not yet take into account the wider social dynamics of a p2p network.

The next step would be to share your sharer/leech information with the peers you trust. For example, an unknown person (say B) might download a lot from you (A) but as you would not find anything interesting in B's library you would lack first-hand experience of his/her sharing. However, a trusted contact of yours (say C) might have downloaded plenty from B and could 'testify' to you that B is a true sharer. You can easily imagine more complex scenarios where none of your direct contacts would have experience of a particular user but some of their second hand contacts would. In such a trust network you would naturally put most weight to your own experience, then to your directly trusted contacts etc. The exchange of evaluation information could be handled fully automatically by your p2p client and even a modest version of the sketched system would be a strong leech control tool when applied to bandwidth allocation and queue management. Leeches and newbies would still be able to enter the network and the control system would allow them to download even at good speeds when there were no merited sharers competing for the bandwidth. But especially with the most popular downloads the leeches would know that their non-sharing would cost them longer wait times and thinner bandwidth. Similarly the newbies would be encouraged to start sharing as quickly as possible as this would only enhance their access to the network and its content.

However - and here come the bad news - WinMX lacks a critical element that makes it impossible to build any trust networks or peer evaluation mechanisms on it. This missing element is permanent and verifiable peer identities. On WPN (and OpenNap for that matter) you cannot really know that a person with a specific nick is the same one you talked with a day or an hour ago. Your client should be able to do this kind of identity verification for all your trusted contacts automatically and peer-to-peer without any possibility of supernode tampering even if a supernode would act as a message broker between you two. As this would require rather deep architectural changes in WinMX and is probably not too relevant to their business plans we may have to wait for the next generation p2p programs to see something like this implemented in the public filesharing networks. It is certainly possible and has already been done in e.g. Groove which - being an enterprise-oriented p2p application - would not work without reliable peer identification.

Basing the treatment of peers in a p2p network on their identity and sharing history would also solve the dilemma for people accessing the network from several places with different sharing facilities. Should your workplace firewall block uploads from your office computer you could still prove your identity and benefit from the sharing you have done from your home computer. The benefits and prospects of permanent and verifiable peer identities are by no means limited to leech control but as this was just a brief sketch I will address the other issues on another occasion.

- tg

that was Magnificient TG but please if you would clarify one word for me...what is meant by WPN? (hehe sounds like a tv channel acronym or sumthin :P)