[p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

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Eugen Leitl

9 Mar 2005 9 Mar '05

2:05 a.m.

----- Forwarded message from Zooko O'Whielacronx -----

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Eric Cordian

9 Mar 9 Mar

3:25 p.m.

New subject: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

Zooko writes:

...

I am about to accept an exciting job that will preclude me from contributing to open source projects in the distributed file-system space.

...

I will miss the Mnet project! Good luck without me!

Is there a network currently running? At one time, I had 5 gig of Mnet blockstore, but when months went by with no metatracking, and apparently, no running network, I grew bored and rm'ed it.

...

I'm writing the following as a record of the most advanced design that I have thought of for Mnet.

[Clippage]] Yes, well. My thoughts on this, and other distributed filesystems, are as follows. We have the following useful technologies. Swarmed downloads, erasure coding, distributed filesystem with global namespace, encryption, routing, accounting, and search. We have various systems which have implemented a various subsets of these features, with varying degrees of efficiency. The killer technology amongst all these is obviously swarmed downloading, which, efficiently implemented in Bittorrent, currently accounts for a third of network bandwidth. The two systems which implement the most of the above technologies, Mnet and Freenet, while theoretically lovely, have at most a niche following, and are cumbersome to set up and use, with frequent "issues" in their protocols and codebase. Now, I think we can all agree that it would be lovely to have a distributed filesystem, with a global namespace, that anyone can put stuff in, and take stuff out of, which guarantees anonymity for both producers and consumers of content, swarms downloads, has an redundant distributed encrypted backing store that lasts forever, is easily and quickly searched, can be instantly set up by anyone who wishes to use it, never breaks, and starves users who unreasonably leech large amounts of resources without reciprocating. BUT, given that bittorrent is a wild success, which people ACTUALLY USE, would it not make more sense to create such a system by augmenting bittorrent with the technologies it presently lacks, than by continuing development on other systems, many of them bloated and buggy, which have been around for years without managing to be made to work well, or attracting large numbers of happy and satisfied customers? If you had a thousand hours of genius programmer time, would you spend it embracing and extending Bittorrent, or shoveling through the indecipherable bowels of legacy Mnet and Freenet code? I think Mnet and Freenet were wonderful testbeds, which taught us all a lot about what does and doesn't work in grandiose P2P schemes. But Bittorrent is where the users are, and software without users is like network television programming without viewers. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

Steve Schear

10 Mar 10 Mar

1:05 a.m.

New subject: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

At 12:14 PM 3/9/2005, Eric Cordian wrote:

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If you had a thousand hours of genius programmer time, would you spend it embracing and extending Bittorrent, or shoveling through the indecipherable bowels of legacy Mnet and Freenet code?

I worked with Bram and Zooko at Mojo Nation (where both BT and Mnet got their respective genesis) and was frankly surprised when the MPAA was so easily able to target and put out of commission BT's trackers. The exposure of the trackers was a prominent topic of MN planning discussions and its odd that precautions, like distributing the tracker functions into clients or hiding them inside a TOR-like proxy network weren't taken earlier. Steve

Eugen Leitl

2:34 a.m.

On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 10:06:45PM -0800, Steve Schear wrote:

...

I worked with Bram and Zooko at Mojo Nation (where both BT and Mnet got their respective genesis) and was frankly surprised when the MPAA was so easily able to target and put out of commission BT's trackers. The

Why? BT is designed with zero privacy in mind.

...

exposure of the trackers was a prominent topic of MN planning discussions and its odd that precautions, like distributing the tracker functions into clients or hiding them inside a TOR-like proxy network weren't taken

You can post BT links on a P2P network.

...

earlier.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

Steve Schear

11 Mar 11 Mar

1:06 a.m.

New subject: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

At 12:15 AM 3/10/2005, Eugen Leitl wrote:

...

...
I worked with Bram and Zooko at Mojo Nation (where both BT and Mnet got their respective genesis) and was frankly surprised when the MPAA was so easily able to target and put out of commission BT's trackers. The

Why? BT is designed with zero privacy in mind.

And this was a profound error, IMHO. One of the epiphanies from my work at MN was that a secrecy-oriented proxy network development and successful deployment needed to precede P2P file sharing if such networks were to survive determined technical and legal challenges. End users often care little about what 'under the hood' of their P2P app only that they can get the content conveniently and they are not subjected to annoyances like spy or adware.

...

...
exposure of the trackers was a prominent topic of MN planning discussions and its odd that precautions, like distributing the tracker functions into clients or hiding them inside a TOR-like proxy network weren't taken

You can post BT links on a P2P network.

But trackers must still be widely accessible by the general population of BT users and can you offer the content or obtain it without likely identification? Steve

Eugen Leitl

6:05 a.m.

On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 10:48:12PM -0800, Steve Schear wrote:

...

...
Why? BT is designed with zero privacy in mind.

And this was a profound error, IMHO. One of the epiphanies from my work at

It was a deliberate decision on Bram Cohen's part. BT is a very useful medium to deliver software updates, movies und most for what there are currently broadcast media for. If you want to be invisible to lawyers, you have to use something else. (Or at least run BT on a large zombie cloud, so you have plausible deniability).

...

MN was that a secrecy-oriented proxy network development and successful deployment needed to precede P2P file sharing if such networks were to survive determined technical and legal challenges. End users often care

If a network has been declared illegal, and you're a part of that network, and somebody receives packets from you which are part of IP-protected binary blob, and your ISP rats on you, your ass is grass with the right kind of IP nazi legislation. Obvously, the only way to prevent that from happening is not be part of that network, not make your ISP rat on you -- or, much better, do not let that legislation happen at all. If it does happen, freedom becomes illegal.

...

little about what 'under the hood' of their P2P app only that they can get the content conveniently and they are not subjected to annoyances like spy or adware.

...
...
exposure of the trackers was a prominent topic of MN planning discussions and its odd that precautions, like distributing the tracker functions into clients or hiding them inside a TOR-like proxy network weren't taken

You can post BT links on a P2P network.

But trackers must still be widely accessible by the general population of BT users and can you offer the content or obtain it without likely identification?

Web pages have static addresses in DNS. Search on P2P in dynamic IP is much more ephemeral, and requires ISPs to keep track of (customer IPv4 time_period) tuples long enough so that their logs can be subpoenaed. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

Morlock Elloi

1:06 p.m.

...

If you want to be invisible to lawyers, you have to use something else.

Whoever wants to design something 'else' should first see Monty Python's "How not to be seen" sketch (or was it "Importance of not being seen" ?) It applies pretty well to all current techniques for moving unpaid copyrighted content. end (of original message) Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows: __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Make Yahoo! your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs

Steve Schear

3:14 p.m.

New subject: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)

At 03:42 AM 3/11/2005, Eugen Leitl wrote:

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*** PGP Signature Status: good *** Signer: Eugen Leitl (makes other keys obsolete) (Invalid) *** Signed: 3/11/2005 3:42:52 AM *** Verified: 3/11/2005 12:49:27 PM *** BEGIN PGP VERIFIED MESSAGE ***

On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 10:48:12PM -0800, Steve Schear wrote:

...
...
Why? BT is designed with zero privacy in mind.

And this was a profound error, IMHO. One of the epiphanies from my work at

It was a deliberate decision on Bram Cohen's part. BT is a very useful medium to deliver software updates, movies und most for what there are currently broadcast media for.

I didn't say that Bram didn't do this on purpose, I just think it was a mistake in judgement.

...

If you want to be invisible to lawyers, you have to use something else.

or run BT-like apps within something else. For BT clients its straightforward to run most (e.g., Azureus) via a proxy that keeps no logs (e.g., Metropipe). For Trackers its more difficult. All I am saying is that Brahm should have paid a bit more attention to tracker protection.

...

(Or at least run BT on a large zombie cloud, so you have plausible deniability).

Like TOR/I2P.

...

...
MN was that a secrecy-oriented proxy network development and successful deployment needed to precede P2P file sharing if such networks were to survive determined technical and legal challenges. End users often care

If a network has been declared illegal, and you're a part of that network, and somebody receives packets from you which are part of IP-protected binary blob, and your ISP rats on you, your ass is grass with the right kind of IP nazi legislation.

Obvously, the only way to prevent that from happening is not be part of that network, not make your ISP rat on you -- or, much better, do not let that legislation happen at all.

Its quite unlikely, at least in the U.S. that networks (e.g., those operated in a truly distributed fashion) will be declared illegal. Its even less likely that such networks will enable ISPs to capture anything significant about your activities.

...

...
But trackers must still be widely accessible by the general population of BT users and can you offer the content or obtain it without likely identification?

Web pages have static addresses in DNS. Search on P2P in dynamic IP is much more ephemeral, and requires ISPs to keep track of (customer IPv4 time_period) tuples long enough so that their logs can be subpoenaed.

Using DNS to resolve the addresses of future trackers is probably a fools errand. Steve

James A. Donald

1:13 a.m.

-- On 9 Mar 2005 at 12:14, Eric Cordian wrote:

...

Now, I think we can all agree that it would be lovely to have a distributed filesystem, with a global namespace, that anyone can put stuff in, and take stuff out of, which guarantees anonymity for both producers and consumers of content, swarms downloads, has an redundant distributed encrypted backing store that lasts forever, is easily and quickly searched, can be instantly set up by anyone who wishes to use it, never breaks, and starves users who unreasonably leech large amounts of resources without reciprocating.

Bittorrent, alone, starves users who leach without reciprocating, but only in certain very limited ways. As a result of that and swarming Bittorrent has far more bandwidth available than any other file sharing network. You can download big files faster. If you want to download big files, use Bittorrent, or hell will freeze over before your files complete. But it does not have more files available, indeed it has fewer, because there is no reward to users for making a wide range of files available. The enormous success of bittorrent, and its limitations, should tell us that the principle of rewarding uploaders and storers, and starving leachers, is pretty much central to the success of a protocol and its software. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG MHH97gJAm7xaefDsVkckpP3M1T3kFYcHHE4T6q6e 4sy0PVrzWWflVPEeAHnZN9+Cf4YNPT7P4feuRNy00

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Eric Cordian
Eugen Leitl
James A. Donald
Morlock Elloi
Steve Schear