Altnet and Peer Power

[TankGirl]

Kazaa and Brilliant Digital have been harshly – and rightly - criticized for their sneaky way of setting up a parasitic commercial network (Altnet) on top of the existing FastTrack network. The technical idea behind Altnet is interesting though and has also relevance to community-oriented p2p.

Introducing Altnet

The world is full of unused computing power.

Think about it. Millions of people own extremely powerful computers with fast processors, huge memory capacity, gigantic amounts of disk space and increasingly fast internet connections. You pay for this capacity whether you use it or not. Businesses and organizations meanwhile buy expensive facilities at massive web farms or super computer centers.

Altnet seeks to bring these two groups together. We're pioneering. This is a hugely exciting world where millions of independent computers join together to work on scientific research by way of distributed processing, bandwidth cost reduction, distributed storage, and more. Altnet hopes to reduce serving costs making streaming video and many other new services possible. Of course the distributed processor applications and distributed downloads and distributed storage need to run somewhere - and that's where you get to contribute, and get rewarded.

Altnet is giving you the opportunity to opt in to making certain parts of your computing power, disk space and bandwidth available to Altnet business partners. You will know exactly how a business would use your source at the time of use. You choose what jobs can use your machine and which ones cannot. Altnet will charge its business partners for this service and pass on benefits to you. All this will be conducted with absolute respect for your privacy and your choices.

Here's a scenario: You have a broadband connection and a P4 processor. Generally you leave your PC on all the time and connected to the Internet although you only use it for about 8 hours a day.

You might choose to allow Altnet to use your processing power and bandwidth during the night to render movies for an animation studio. Altnet will install a tiny application on your machine and each night will send you a package or raw data to process into video. While you sleep, your computer renders the video, deletes the raw data and sends the video back to Altnet.
At any time you can enquire into the reward value you have earned and you will be able to redeem according to your agreement with Altnet for this service.

Now if you replace ‘businesses and organizations’ in the above declaration with ‘groups and communities’ a whole different picture emerges. Instead of letting a commercial third-party collect, coordinate and sell our idle computing and bandwidth resources (to anybody with the money) we could collect those resources ourselves and coordinate their use through autonomic groups and communities.

Even relatively small groups would have considerable peer power in storage and bandwidth terms. Say we have a group of 250 peers, each donating on average 1 k/s idle upload bandwidth to the group. Together these 250 modest upload sources would sum up to a hefty 250 k/s ‘transmitter’, enough to send a continuous top quality audio stream or a live video stream to another group. The receiving group could similarly organize itself into a sort of distributed ‘antenna’ collecting the numerous parallel download streams and distributing the results among the group members so that each interested peer could patch a complete stream or object from what has been collectively received.

- tg

[alphabeater]

it's true that modern computers have more capacity than is actually used. peer-to-peer, as i understand it, was designed to go some way towards solving this from the start. instead of everyone downloading a file from a central source, one user downloads it from another who in turn had downloaded it from someone else. this system relies almost entirely on the users of the p2p network to redistribute content.

altnet and other distributed computing networks (freenet is an example) are designed to distribute content to its optimum positions within the network - where it can be accessed by the people who are most likely to want it. this is hidden from the user so that they cannot interfere with it - instead of the users owning the network, the network tries to predict the needs of the users according to their previous behaviour.

'You might choose to allow Altnet to use your processing power and bandwidth during the night to render movies for an animation studio. Altnet will install a tiny application on your machine and each night will send you a package or raw data to process into video. While you sleep, your computer renders the video, deletes the raw data and sends the video back to Altnet.'

this doesn't indicate what i've seen of altnet so far at all. it seems to currently be a system for sending awful drm files around (play this rubbish game for 10 minutes!/listen to this cruddy wma song once and then buy it!). like shareware, only worse. on top of that, the results are given precedence over other results - golden icons, faster return times, placement at the top of the results. they wanted a way to integrate ads into the p2p network itself, and altnet is it.

entirely optional and configurable distributed computing, opposite to altnet's style, could have some place in a community-based p2p network. it would need to be made clear what was being done, how it benefits the network, and the user would have to be allowed to control when it happened and how much hard disk space or other resources this caching of content would be allowed to use.

if the engine for working out which content to cache was good enough, however - 'the user has downloaded some of this album, get the rest of it too for the cache', for example, or a recommendation engine similar to kazaa's current one which downloaded its listed files to the cache - and then the download was 'trickled' in the background at times when the bandwidth wasn't being used, then users could start to find instant downloads, or at least very fast ones if only part-files had been cached.

imagine if you downloaded the first two songs from an album, left the computer idle, and then came back later and decided to look for the rest - only to find that they'd already been cached for you, and were almost instantly within your reach. or if you had five songs by an artist, and they released a new single, which was found, put into the program's recommendations list, and trickle-downloaded for you when you were idle, using your spare bandwidth and hard disk space, just in case you decide you want it later.

this kind of p2p artificial intelligence (if you like), with emphasis once again that it would be completely optional whether you enabled it or not, as well as removable at any time (in case you needed that disk space back), could allow for faster downloads from p2p networks than currently exist.

while i thoroughly despise altnet, i agree that the idea of distributed computing via p2p has some interesting implications for a non-commercial community.

[butterfly_kisses]

imagine if you downloaded the first two songs from an album, left the computer idle, and then came back later and decided to look for the rest - only to find that they'd already been cached for you, and were almost instantly within your reach. or if you had five songs by an artist, and they released a new single, which was found, put into the program's recommendations list, and trickle-downloaded for you when you were idle, using your spare bandwidth and hard disk space, just in case you decide you want it later.

the thought of this happening is very disconcerting to me alphabeater...i do however see what you are suggesting or implying with this being a potentially useful and 'benevolent' feature to some....it also reminds me a lot of other caching software for webbrowsers which try to speed up your webbrowsing and surfing habits for you by downloading related links in the background as you are reading a current webpage.

Here looks like you've applied a similiar concept p2p and file-sharing only in this instance or case with songs...and while it does seem like a good idea....i just don't like it. I mean unless you have a low bandwidth connection I really don't see much advantage in having this caching mechanism employed. I just really, really like to KNOW what my computer is doing at ALL TIMES and I don't like the idea of it 'thinking for its self' no matter how intelligent or well programmed the intent...also disturbing is the fact that if it can do this...why would it also not be possible for it to other unwanted activity behind 'our backs'?

I think that having the ability to do that would be too much of a temptation for whomever makes the p2p application with that feature to abuse that feature...as it would appear or seem that most of the truly great P2P programs are going to be the ones that stand to make a profit from the development of the software.

A very good idea you had earlier...and one that I LIKED very much...was the idea of incoporating a p2p program with an application like MSN messenger. Let me first explain briefly how MSN messenger works (in a broader and more 'general context') Here goes:

Whenever someone logs into MSN messenger they are connected to a central server...their friends also connect to this central server...all instant messaging conversations are done through this server...so if you were chatting with your friend and you decided to do a Netstat -an in a dos box to see if you could find their ip address all you would see is the ip address for the central MSN server that you are currently connected to as well as your friends and all other users of the chat application.

The Msn server acts like a 'proxy-server' (a kind of a 'go-between' between your computer and your friends computer) so you send a message from your pc to the MSN server which then forwards your sent message to your friends pc and the same happens for all messages (they get passed through the proxy-server so that your ip address is never revealed to your friend or anyone else.)

Okay with that said...the way that the file transfer mechanism currently works in MSN messenger (I am using this for an example because its a very common p2p application and most likely many people have it on their pc's right now) is that when you decide to 'share a file' with a friend over the internet....a Direct link or connection is made between your pc and that of your friends...thereby Bypassing entirely the 'go between' or 'proxy-server' aka 'the msn server'. So now if netstat -an were to be applied you could get your friends ip address that way by sharing files.

Okay here is something else that interests me. proxy-servers for those that don't know a proxy-server is designed for a couple of things...one it can act as a go-between between your computer and the internet...meaning that it can protect the identity of your true ip address (that is if the proxy is an 'anonymous' proxy and does not pass that information along to other websites that you connect to through tcp packets and 'headers')

Secondly a proxy server can SPEED UP your webbrowsing and or surfing. Example say you are using a proxy for the first time and you download and mp3 file using the proxy...well let's say that its the first time you've used this proxy and its also the first time that anyone's downloaded this particuliar mp3 file while using the proxy...now let's say that the webserver that is hosting the mp3 file is VERY slow...so your download piddles along at an 3.5 kilobytes per second...taking you approximately 20minutes to download a 5mb mp3 file....okay say 'joe blow' logs on next to the proxy server and wants the very same song that you just got....well because a proxy server caches the content of what is downloaded (meaning it archives things) 'joeblow' doesn't have to wait as long as you do to download the mp3 song..it zips along at a blazing 5.6kbs (this is just an example people using a dialup modem for reference...cable speeds and dsl would vary greatly but would still see significant and improved results).

So you see there are two main advantages to a proxy-server:

a)relative anonymity (not always completely unknown...depends on the proxy-server being used)

and

b)faster downloading due to cached content.

Okay so here is where my idea takes shape....and also something I don't understand so I hope that anyone who does understand this will please take the time to explain it to me and to 'us' as well. I have heard that most Internet Service Providers have or provide a service called 'Newsgroups' many of them have what they refer to as binary newsgroups which to me means that you can upload and download appz and music and movies to these servers....now the thing that I don't understand is WHY and HOW is this LEGAL?

How do the big ISP's avoid the wrath of the RIAA and MPAA by allowing the distribution of 'illegal' and in many cases 'pirated' materials own THEIR OWN SERVERS? where is the accountability?

Okay with that said...and that is assuming that someone can give me a reasonable and good definition or explanation of how ISP's are able to 'skirt' drawing the wraith of digital millenium copyright protection act upon its self...why then can't some site like MSN messenger which already employs the use of a proxy-server to act as a go between between your computer and the internet..why can't they also set up a proxy-server type setting that would allow for the caching of music files and movies and appz that you download off the internet?

It seems to me this would be the PERFECT and ideal solution...that way with all the TON's of thousands of users that use their program we could have a HUGE mofo pool of good choices to choose from and with all our favourite appz/movies/music being cached on a FAST proxy server...we can or should be able to get 'our files' much more quickly.

SPRINGER AFTERTHOUGHT:

why doesn't someone come up with something like this? (or have they and i just didn't know about it?) That would allow you to basically what I have suggested above:

a)chat
b)cache downloaded files to a central server and protected under the same rules/regulations that govern the Isp's newsgroups servers.

One last added touch...needing to have an legitamit email address to log in to the service per MSN's .NET architecture can provide for you that VERIFIABLE peer 2 peer identity that you were seeking TankGirl as you would then know that if you were downloading from ted@msn.com that there could not be another 'ted@msn.com' it is 'your ted@msn'.com that you are downloading from (if the file isn't already cached on the proxy server...which most likely it will be....and will probably eliminate the need for direct connectivity....which is what I like as you are never in contact with any other website or p2p client anywhere DIRECTLY as all the communication is taking place through the centralised server.

HILARY ROSEN note:

Put a generalised 'broadband' or filesharing tax on ISP's nationally (in all countries wherever our laws have reach) maybe $10.00 a month higher internet charge for Broadband users with UNlimited filesharing and bandwidth upload and download...this will be a form of a 'sin tax' on a vice (filesharing) from which the 'artists' and or 'their labels' can be compensated for any perceived losses due to filesharing affecting record sales.

Seems like most ISP's know that filesharing is the driving force behind the desire for broadband...why not make it profitable for everyone and solve this mess once and for all.

-butterfly_kisses

[alphabeater]

I mean unless you have a low bandwidth connection I really don't see much advantage in having this caching mechanism employed. I just really, really like to KNOW what my computer is doing at ALL TIMES and I don't like the idea of it 'thinking for its self' no matter how intelligent or well programmed the intent...also disturbing is the fact that if it can do this...why would it also not be possible for it to other unwanted activity behind 'our backs'?

actually, i found it slightly disconcerting when i thought of it.. that's why i made sure to say that it'd be completely optional whether the program did this for you or not - i don't want anything happening behind my back either.

So you see there are two main advantages to a proxy-server:

a)relative anonymity (not always completely unknown...depends on the proxy-server being used)

and

b)faster downloading due to cached content.

this is a great idea, which kazaa already does with search results but not the files themselves as far as i know. essentially, supernodes with lots of bandwidth could be designated as the proxy supernodes, which would act as download proxies for other peers who desired anonymity while caching content to speed up downloads.

i'll let someone else answer about newsgroup servers as i'm not really familiar with them, but regarding an msn-messenger style app this could work well. each user could have an identity (i prefer dns to email address, just because it's easier to authenticate), and then a msn-style, decentralised im program could be set up using these identities where each peer has the capability to be a normal im node, a p2p filesharing node or a p2p caching proxy supernode. this would have huge benefits for the community on the network, as long as enough people with fast connections were willing to run proxy supernodes downloads could be sped up considerably. although i realise that this approach sacrificies most of the gains in full-time anonymity, there could still be a 'download anonymously via supernode proxies' option which would hide your dns to the uploader (replacing it with 'anon via <proxy's dns>'), for when anonymity is desirable.

Seems like most ISP's know that filesharing is the driving force behind the desire for broadband...why not make it profitable for everyone and solve this mess once and for all.

i totally agree, but you just know the media would report any measure like this as 'pirates forcing up the cost of broadband internet connection' (or something), and that it'd be a thoroughly unpopular move with the riaa/mpaa. if they were sensible, they'd have embraced p2p as a way of not needing to pay radio stations to promote their songs any more, but instead they went the way of litigation. the only reason i can think of is that they're attached to their current business model and desperately want to keep it alive.

until content providers and isps do work together to find a way that p2p distribution can be profitable for everyone, 'underground' p2p networks are just going to get stronger and stronger.

[ssj4_android]

Personally, I participate in United Device's Ligandfit cure for cancer program. It's for a good cause, why not help?

[TankGirl]

Here’s another scenario of how groups could use their collective resources.

Think of an AudioGalaxy-type genre-specific group whose members would be interested in sharing their new rips with each other. The members could announce their new offerings on a community bulletin board with introductory notes. As an individual member you could subscribe to all new albums, or just to albums from particular members (whose taste and rip quality you trust) or you could simply hand pick from the list the ones you would like to receive. A coordinator peer would keep track of all the subscriptions and when enough members would have expressed interest to a particular item the coordinator would launch a ‘group send’ for that album. This would quickly lead to several identical copies of the album (or rather its constituent data blocks) becoming temporarily available to the group members - a decentralized counterpart to centralized caching. The group could then utilize multisourcing from partially completed files to effectively cascade the material to all interested parties.

- tg

[butterfly_kisses]

Originally posted by alphabeater


the only reason i can think of is that they're attached to their current business model and desperately want to keep it alive.

well said..and as always a pleasure talking with you alphabeater (love your thought processes )

and p.s.

hello to the tanked one as well.

tankgirl=mahbaby

[pod]

I think this whole Altnet thing is a pipedream. It won't work for any but the most specialized applications.

Lets take a look at the two examples given.

Movie render farm. I know it sounds very nice and reasonable, but there are several showstopping problems with it. First, this is not a tiny program we're talking about. Animated movies are rendered with heavy duty, complex industrial 3d rendering applications, designed to run on multi-processor xeon systems with 1gb of RAM at the very minumum, and gigs of available disk space. How many of Altnet's nodes will have such capacity? Second, how exactly will this huge rendering software get to the nodes? How will the gigabytes of models and textures get to the nodes? Third, who's gonna license their software so it can legally be used in such a manner and how much will it cost?

The second example is even worse. Distributed streaming? Even more unlikely, LIVE distributed streaming? If you have a source feeding 200+ nodes a combined 200kb/s, and those nodes have a combined bandwidth of 200kb/s (lets keep things simple and ignore the tremendous overhead of each node), then you must have a target capable of receiving the said 200kb/s. Duh, why not skip the middle-man and feed the signal straight through? I realize this is a trivial example, but come on. If you want to excite people about this, there surely must be better ways. Shoutcast already does something like this, where you have a single source, and a bunch of high-speed repeaters everyone connects to. That's why the likes of Digitally Imported can have live DJ shows because the DJ can feed 1000s of people from a single DSL line in his house. A P2P network is useless for streaming. How do you deal with the hugely variable latency? There are already problems with this as it is, with regular single streams, where packets routinely get dropped or arrive out of sequence, and you just hear a bunch of digital glitches. What will you do when a bunch of your nodes suddenly start checking their email or automatically downloading SP2 for XP?

There are some ok applications for P2P, and SETI and distributed.net and that DNA thingy are one example. Another, also already done, is content distribution. You download a small download manager, that's just a special P2P client, and let er rip.

Oh well, we'll see what happens with this one.

[ssj4_android]

Have you listened to P2P streaming before talking about it? I think streaming like that is probebly possible. But then people want to use most of their bandwidth for KaZaA.

[TankGirl]

Originally posted by ssj4_android
Have you listened to P2P streaming before talking about it? I think streaming like that is probebly possible. But then people want to use most of their bandwidth for KaZaA.

I think this is precisely the point.

Whether or not Altnet succeeds with every specific parasitic application it wishes to run on FastTrack users' computers there are remarkable idle bandwidth, computing and storage resources available in p2p communities. Altnet introduced the commercial viewpoint to those resources but as ssj4_android says why would a p2p user want to waste any bandwidth for something else than filesharing itself. We have already paid once for our bandwidth and computing capacity. Instead of letting a commercial party to tax it further we could donate some of it to coordinated p2p group usage and enjoy the benefits of it e.g. in the form of new content traded from other similar groups.

- tg

[LV15]

Hey once you've driven yourself to work...hand the keys into the security guard and if anyone wants to run some errands during the day then they can utiilise your automotive power and your gas as you don't need it while you are working.

fuck right off...i spend enough hours a day removing spyware from peoples machines because they ring up screaming that our broadband service is making their machines and downloads slow "hey have you installed kazaa by any chance?"...."why yes how did you know?"

when i download a program i want it to do what i downloaded it for...i do not want it to decide that as theres 2% free resources on my computer it might as well use them to do something for someone else...and don't give me any shit about "well hey they could just check an option to turn it off"....the audiogalaxy installer had an option where you could stop gator and save now from installing but that never stopped 99% of the worlds computer users from installing it anyway

[alphabeater]

Originally posted by LV15
when i download a program i want it to do what i downloaded it for...i do not want it to decide that as theres 2% free resources on my computer it might as well use them to do something for someone else...and don't give me any shit about "well hey they could just check an option to turn it off"....the audiogalaxy installer had an option where you could stop gator and save now from installing but that never stopped 99% of the worlds computer users from installing it anyway

this is exactly why any community-oriented software using this kind of thing would have to make sure that it was opt-in, not opt-out, and transparent to the user at all times. You can't claim to be community-oriented if you're potentially tricking members of your community into allowing your software to do things with their computer that they may not want it to be doing.

[LV15]

Originally posted by alphabeater

You can't claim to be community-oriented if you're potentially tricking members of your community into allowing your software to do things with their computer that they may not want it to be doing.

yet thats exactly what every p2p program since day 1 has done in one form or another....the only purpose community serves in p2p is free advertising (word of mouth) for the latest developer looking to make a killing...and it will continue to be that way

[assorted]

Originally posted by alphabeater


You can't claim to be community-oriented if you're potentially tricking members of your community into allowing your software to do things with their computer that they may not want it to be doing.

The software that created the 2 best music communities so far (Napster and Audiogalaxy) both tricked the user into sharing 24/7 without the average newbie knowing that they were and, if they did know, not knowing how to turn it off.

WinMX; which gives you a very clear choice, therefore suffers from horrible selection and tons of leeching.

[butterfly_kisses]

Originally posted by assorted


The software that created the 2 best music communities so far (Napster and Audiogalaxy) both tricked the user into sharing 24/7 without the average newbie knowing that they were and, if they did know, not knowing how to turn it off.

WinMX; which gives you a very clear choice, therefore suffers from horrible selection and tons of leeching.

assorted has a valid point here....people can claim anything but claiming to be a community doesn't necessarily make you one.



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