8 ms·

Peer-to-peer file sharing. There was a time when Napster, Kazaa, eMule were king. The content industry fought against it, but developers came up with decentral

Peer-to-peer file sharing. There was a time when Napster, Kazaa, eMule were king. The content industry fought against it, but developers came up with decentralized solutions like DHTs or supernodes. I was convinced the next step would be friend-of-a-friend sharing. You only share files with your direct friends. But they can pass on these files automatically, so their friends can get the files, too. The friends of your friend don't know that the file is originally coming from you, it is completely transparent. The goal is to not let anybody you don't trust know what you are down- or uploading. I would piggyback on the social graph of existing networks to get started. I actually had a prototype of the friend discovery code, based on XMPP (using custom stanzas). You login with your credentials, and it shows you all your friends that are using the same app. It worked with GTalk, Facebook Messenger, and Skype (via Skype API). One nice feature was that this worked without getting an API key from Facebook etc., or having a central server. I was so pissed when they all changed their APIs to make this impossible. It felt like a conspiracy to stop this use case. I still think if somebody pulled this off, it might work, and it would be pretty distruptive (in the good and the bad sense of the word). It would be the last word in the debate between "data wants to be free, change society to enable what technology promises" and "data has to be a commodity, restrict technology because in capitalism we can't feed artists otherwise".

fsloth 9y ago
I think the biggest motivation for peer-to-peer networks was the lack of legal options for digitally accessing movies and music. The current streaming services and online stores have reduced this ache.
- rodolphoarruda 9y ago
  I agree. In fact, I started to realize I've been using sites like The Pirate Bay just to get a sense of what people are watching, new releases etc. Ratings would tend to be very low, of course, it's their culture to say that any movie sucks; but at least I can get a list of titles and then search for them in paid service providers.
  - CreepGin 9y ago
    I use Rottentomatoes
    - kazagistar 9y ago
      It's a very different measure, because the sort of people who rate media have certain characteristics to their taste that are more likely.
      - foobarchu 9y ago
        Very true for certain genres. If you want schlocky horror movies, for example, RT isn't going to do you any good because reviewers hate all the things that make those films good.
datenwolf 9y ago
> was convinced the next step would be friend-of-a-friend sharing. You only share files with your direct friends. But they can pass on these files automatically, so their friends can get the files, too. The friends of your friend don't know that the file is originally coming from you, it is completely transparent. The goal is to not let anybody you don't trust know what you are down- or uploading. This very thing exists and readily available for use in form of Freenet https://freenetproject.org/ https://freenetproject.org/
- captainmuon 9y ago
  I think freenet is very different. I know freenet from back in the 2000s. It is a platform to decentrally, anonymously store data. At some point, they did add a friend-to-friend option I think (which is what used to be called "darknet" - now that refers to sites like silk road, but back then it meant closed P2P like WASTE). The closest analogue would be Tor hidden services. What I envision is more like a modern version of Kazaa. The experience would be like iTunes or Spotify. Select your media folder, give it access to your contact list, and voila, "Pirate iTunes". The closest current analogue would be RetroShare.
saas_co_de 9y ago
Bittorrent is good enough and there aren't really any law enforcement concerns any more. Pre 9/11 FBI and other agencies were actually doing prosecutions against people for unlicensed content distribution but after 9/11 they decided to focus on higher priorities so nobody really cares about security any more. A warning letter from the ISP is not quite the same threat as a few years in a fed pen.
- captainmuon 9y ago
  In Germany, it is currently quite dangerous to use Bittorrent illegally. There is a high chance of getting an "Abmahnung", which costs around 600-900 euros. Using sharehosters with for-pay premium accounts is popular, as is using VPNs with bittorrent. The alternative is low-quality streaming. I think the content industry isn't pushing for eradicating illegal downloads, they just want it to be at least as expensive, or more inconvenient than the legal options. (Which are quite good by now, if the shows you want to watch are available from your provider.)
  - Tepix 9y ago
    That's why the OP suggested that everyone only connects to friends.
  - saas_co_de 9y ago
    Interesting. Wasn't aware of that. VPN is good option. This brings up a good point though. Bittorrent is not free. People who use Bittorrent do pay to use it (bandwidth, setup costs, etc), and pay more to get good quality stuff, but Bittorrent offers better quality and better selection than any licensed service.
- darksim905 9y ago
  This just isn't true. I see these all the time. It's all automatically generated these days.
PeterisP 9y ago
I believe that DC++ file sharing had a model like that, but the torrents outcompeted it for most purposes; most people don't want friend-of-a-friend filesharing, they either want the most effective way to get the latest goods from whoever has it, or the ability to upload stuff while remaining mostly anonymous.
- astura 9y ago
  Minor nitpick, Direct Connect (DC) was the protocol, DC++ was merely a popular client but by no means the only client. It wasn't even the official client. Direct Connect really excelled at college campuses. All the traffic was internal so it was blazingly fast plus the hub had a chat feature which is incredibly useful (pre-reddit) and sometimes people would share old tests and stuff.
  - tmerr 9y ago
    I'll add that DC is alive and well on my college campus. Beyond speed, it's less likely to get you in trouble with the college + ISP than torrenting, and has some textbooks and other locally relevant content.
    - jd3 9y ago
      Are you serious? Most people on my college campus did not even realize that they could drop their files in the public_html folder to share them online, let alone setup an ADC file sharing program as esoteric as DC++
      - wadkar 9y ago
        Well, depends on the campus ;-) We had a BulletinBoard based community with FTP sharing, and someone built a crawler to index the servers. So everyone just knew this staic IP which was out campus version of Google. We then slowly transitioned into DC++ by constantly educating and sharing content on both FTP and DC++ The real shame was that move to DC++ actually caused the BulletinBoard community to die slowly. No more announcement posts, no more requests, no more SuperStar uploaders who “magically” found the latest TV shows aired in the US.
scoggs 9y ago
I, personally, felt that Audiogalaxy was the hallmark program from this era. It was the most surefire way to get the songs you were looking for and discover plenty more in the process. You'd set the music folder you wanted to share (there was no opting out) and so long as you had the program open your files were available for download by other users. The program operated like an always on satellite torrent program with very low impact. You'd find a file to download and the file would come in many chunks from any available user who had the file on their client side. Downloads were fast and in the event you lost connection or closed Audiogalaxy the download would resume immediately on reload. From my POV Audiogalaxy was extremely threatening to Copyright holders in a way that prior p2p programs weren't. Your comment about software being especially 'disruptive' and ruffling all of the right feathers is what reminded me of Audiogalaxy. There was no indication of who you were receiving files from. There were no usernames or features outside of download and upload. In terms of creating a piece of software that picked a mission and executed it I'll always look at Audiogalaxy and think it achieved precisely what it set out to do, entirely.
- sotojuan 9y ago
  Soulseek is still alive with the same system. The program does not make you share anything but users can disable sharing files with users who don't share files. At least in 2012-14 Soulseek was very popular with extremely niche and obscure music fans (stuff not even on What.cd!). Not sure how it is now.
  - twelvechairs 9y ago
    Yes strange that soulseek seems to have been the one that has lasted longest. Probably its just flown under the radar and hence not been targeted legally or otherwise like Napster Kazaa Limewire Edonkey etc . I dont think its in any particular way more technologically advanced. In any case today YouTube is now surely the biggest repository of illegally shared music by some distance yet seems accepted in general by the recording industry.
    - dabockster 9y ago
baldfat 9y ago
I can get all the music I can listen to for $15 a month (Google Play Family which comes with YouTube Red) and share it with my wife and 4 kids. I think that people can get music on SoundCloud, Pandora or YouTube made the illegal less necessary. I personally prefer to just pay the money and get my music on all my devices and upload the music I have that isn't available. I also LOVE YouTube Red and it helps the content creators multiple of times more then my little ad revenue. How is it that people flaged YouTube Red as anti-content creators and were going after Google with pitch forks and now content creators keep saying that Red Members give them so much more per person. One creator says 1/4 of his income is from YouTube Red (He makes a living on YouTube).
- ZirconiumX 9y ago
  From a revenue point of view, streaming is not a very good way to support an artist[1][2]. The Verge article I linked to states that artists are paid "somewhere between $0.006 and $0.0084" per stream. If we are very pessimistic about the royalties of a CD sale - let's call it 20%, and say a single CD costs $10, that's ($10 x 20%) / 0.0084 = 238 streams to cover the cost of a single CD. If you take audiophile-level paranoia like buying vinyls, SA-CDs or FLAC masters, I think there's an argument to be made that an artist could make more money from people buying high-quality editions of their work to pirate than from people streaming their music. It's food for thought. Disclaimer: I am a music student. [1]: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online-2015-remix/ http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/how-muc... [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/7/9861372/spotify-year-in-review-artist-payment-royalties https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/7/9861372/spotify-year-in-r...
  - mehwoot 9y ago
    238 streams to cover the cost of a single CD Justin Bieber has very roughly 5 billion plays on spotify. Using your math, that would equate to 17 million CDs sold. Seems pretty reasonable. I'm sure he would have been better off before the internet, but it still seems doable. Besides which I think youtube celebrities and twitch gamers have shown it is clearly possible to make a decent (if not quite profitable) living off creating content to be streamed. It's just music doesn't have the pre-eminent spot and advantages over other media it used to.
sli 9y ago
I'm impressed that Direct Connect is still kicking while all those services slowly died off.
madenine 9y ago
Unforunately, the rise of streaming content services has kinda killed off the need for file sharing for most people. Back in the day of mytunes on a school network, I had HDs full of mp3s. I actively browsed friends (and complete strangers) libraries to find new things, complete an artists discography... etc. Now? Spotify Premium is probably the best value/$ of any purchase I make in a month. Even if I wanted to go back to my old ways... its just not there any more. I believe iTunes patched out the features that made mytunes possible, and people don't have computers full of mp3s discoverable on a network anymore.
- geophile 9y ago
  > the rise of streaming content services has kinda killed off the need for file sharing for most people. The history is a bit different. Napster was sued out of existence. As I recall, this was done by the record labels, but the argument was that file sharing was unfair to artists. Which it was. But that was obviously not the real point. Streaming services are notoriously stingy when it comes to paying artists for their work. So access to music is still easy, and the net change is that new middlemen are profiting wildly. (Streaming vs. file sharing is a different issue. I want to own the music I listen to. I don't want to be dependent on an internet connection, a server, a revokable license, etc. )
dehrmann 9y ago
I used to work for an on-demand content streaming company, so I'm biased, but the cataloging, searching, and quality of content are big scaling issues for the average user.
starsinspace 9y ago
Peer-to-peer was killed by the advent of home routers doing NAT, making arbitrary inbound connections impossible. Configuring port forwarding was generally too difficult for "normal users", the web-UIs offered by typical home routers didn't make it easy enough. NAT traversal methods exist, but from my experience they are generally unreliable and/or slow. I still remember the days when P2P connections over the internet "just worked, always" (the early Napster/Kazaa days), and then it went to "it works sometimes", and finally to "almost never works (except if the service offers some kind of middle-man datacenter to bounce the connections between the two NAT'd peers)". Try to do a IRC DCC file transfer with anyone these days and see what I mean... long ago, it "just worked". I blame today's unfortunate centralization of internet services largely on NAT breaking P2P connectivity. Who knows, maybe spread of IPv6 will fix this mess... some day...
- dabockster 9y ago
  IIRC, consumer wifi routers supposedly support a protocol that allows a computer to request a temporary port forward and release it when its finished using it. Anyone remember what that protocol is called?
  - thrown_produce 9y ago
    UPnP, Universal Plug and Play.
    - dabockster 9y ago
      Yep, that's it. How useful is it in practice? I haven't ventured into those settings ever since I got my Airport Extreme.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - lenkite 9y ago
        Pretty much every torrent software supports UPnP/NAT-PMP today. The problem was UPnP came a bit late - the spec was published only in 2008, and by that time everything was fire-walled off and required more-than-idiot-capability to expose.

fsloth 9y ago

I think the biggest motivation for peer-to-peer networks was the lack of legal options for digitally accessing movies and music. The current streaming services and online stores have reduced this ache.

rodolphoarruda 9y ago
I agree. In fact, I started to realize I've been using sites like The Pirate Bay just to get a sense of what people are watching, new releases etc. Ratings would tend to be very low, of course, it's their culture to say that any movie sucks; but at least I can get a list of titles and then search for them in paid service providers.
- CreepGin 9y ago
  I use Rottentomatoes
  - kazagistar 9y ago
    It's a very different measure, because the sort of people who rate media have certain characteristics to their taste that are more likely.
    - foobarchu 9y ago
      Very true for certain genres. If you want schlocky horror movies, for example, RT isn't going to do you any good because reviewers hate all the things that make those films good.

datenwolf 9y ago

> was convinced the next step would be friend-of-a-friend sharing. You only share files with your direct friends. But they can pass on these files automatically, so their friends can get the files, too. The friends of your friend don't know that the file is originally coming from you, it is completely transparent. The goal is to not let anybody you don't trust know what you are down- or uploading. This very thing exists and readily available for use in form of Freenet https://freenetproject.org/ https://freenetproject.org/

captainmuon 9y ago
I think freenet is very different. I know freenet from back in the 2000s. It is a platform to decentrally, anonymously store data. At some point, they did add a friend-to-friend option I think (which is what used to be called "darknet" - now that refers to sites like silk road, but back then it meant closed P2P like WASTE). The closest analogue would be Tor hidden services. What I envision is more like a modern version of Kazaa. The experience would be like iTunes or Spotify. Select your media folder, give it access to your contact list, and voila, "Pirate iTunes". The closest current analogue would be RetroShare.

saas_co_de 9y ago

Bittorrent is good enough and there aren't really any law enforcement concerns any more. Pre 9/11 FBI and other agencies were actually doing prosecutions against people for unlicensed content distribution but after 9/11 they decided to focus on higher priorities so nobody really cares about security any more. A warning letter from the ISP is not quite the same threat as a few years in a fed pen.

captainmuon 9y ago
In Germany, it is currently quite dangerous to use Bittorrent illegally. There is a high chance of getting an "Abmahnung", which costs around 600-900 euros. Using sharehosters with for-pay premium accounts is popular, as is using VPNs with bittorrent. The alternative is low-quality streaming. I think the content industry isn't pushing for eradicating illegal downloads, they just want it to be at least as expensive, or more inconvenient than the legal options. (Which are quite good by now, if the shows you want to watch are available from your provider.)
- Tepix 9y ago
  That's why the OP suggested that everyone only connects to friends.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  Interesting. Wasn't aware of that. VPN is good option. This brings up a good point though. Bittorrent is not free. People who use Bittorrent do pay to use it (bandwidth, setup costs, etc), and pay more to get good quality stuff, but Bittorrent offers better quality and better selection than any licensed service.
darksim905 9y ago
This just isn't true. I see these all the time. It's all automatically generated these days.

PeterisP 9y ago

I believe that DC++ file sharing had a model like that, but the torrents outcompeted it for most purposes; most people don't want friend-of-a-friend filesharing, they either want the most effective way to get the latest goods from whoever has it, or the ability to upload stuff while remaining mostly anonymous.

astura 9y ago
Minor nitpick, Direct Connect (DC) was the protocol, DC++ was merely a popular client but by no means the only client. It wasn't even the official client. Direct Connect really excelled at college campuses. All the traffic was internal so it was blazingly fast plus the hub had a chat feature which is incredibly useful (pre-reddit) and sometimes people would share old tests and stuff.
- tmerr 9y ago
  I'll add that DC is alive and well on my college campus. Beyond speed, it's less likely to get you in trouble with the college + ISP than torrenting, and has some textbooks and other locally relevant content.
  - jd3 9y ago
    Are you serious? Most people on my college campus did not even realize that they could drop their files in the public_html folder to share them online, let alone setup an ADC file sharing program as esoteric as DC++
    - wadkar 9y ago
      Well, depends on the campus ;-) We had a BulletinBoard based community with FTP sharing, and someone built a crawler to index the servers. So everyone just knew this staic IP which was out campus version of Google. We then slowly transitioned into DC++ by constantly educating and sharing content on both FTP and DC++ The real shame was that move to DC++ actually caused the BulletinBoard community to die slowly. No more announcement posts, no more requests, no more SuperStar uploaders who “magically” found the latest TV shows aired in the US.

scoggs 9y ago

I, personally, felt that Audiogalaxy was the hallmark program from this era. It was the most surefire way to get the songs you were looking for and discover plenty more in the process. You'd set the music folder you wanted to share (there was no opting out) and so long as you had the program open your files were available for download by other users. The program operated like an always on satellite torrent program with very low impact. You'd find a file to download and the file would come in many chunks from any available user who had the file on their client side. Downloads were fast and in the event you lost connection or closed Audiogalaxy the download would resume immediately on reload. From my POV Audiogalaxy was extremely threatening to Copyright holders in a way that prior p2p programs weren't. Your comment about software being especially 'disruptive' and ruffling all of the right feathers is what reminded me of Audiogalaxy. There was no indication of who you were receiving files from. There were no usernames or features outside of download and upload. In terms of creating a piece of software that picked a mission and executed it I'll always look at Audiogalaxy and think it achieved precisely what it set out to do, entirely.

sotojuan 9y ago
Soulseek is still alive with the same system. The program does not make you share anything but users can disable sharing files with users who don't share files. At least in 2012-14 Soulseek was very popular with extremely niche and obscure music fans (stuff not even on What.cd!). Not sure how it is now.
- twelvechairs 9y ago
  Yes strange that soulseek seems to have been the one that has lasted longest. Probably its just flown under the radar and hence not been targeted legally or otherwise like Napster Kazaa Limewire Edonkey etc . I dont think its in any particular way more technologically advanced. In any case today YouTube is now surely the biggest repository of illegally shared music by some distance yet seems accepted in general by the recording industry.
  - dabockster 9y ago

baldfat 9y ago

I can get all the music I can listen to for $15 a month (Google Play Family which comes with YouTube Red) and share it with my wife and 4 kids. I think that people can get music on SoundCloud, Pandora or YouTube made the illegal less necessary. I personally prefer to just pay the money and get my music on all my devices and upload the music I have that isn't available. I also LOVE YouTube Red and it helps the content creators multiple of times more then my little ad revenue. How is it that people flaged YouTube Red as anti-content creators and were going after Google with pitch forks and now content creators keep saying that Red Members give them so much more per person. One creator says 1/4 of his income is from YouTube Red (He makes a living on YouTube).

ZirconiumX 9y ago
From a revenue point of view, streaming is not a very good way to support an artist[1][2]. The Verge article I linked to states that artists are paid "somewhere between $0.006 and $0.0084" per stream. If we are very pessimistic about the royalties of a CD sale - let's call it 20%, and say a single CD costs $10, that's ($10 x 20%) / 0.0084 = 238 streams to cover the cost of a single CD. If you take audiophile-level paranoia like buying vinyls, SA-CDs or FLAC masters, I think there's an argument to be made that an artist could make more money from people buying high-quality editions of their work to pirate than from people streaming their music. It's food for thought. Disclaimer: I am a music student. [1]: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online-2015-remix/ http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/how-muc... [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/7/9861372/spotify-year-in-review-artist-payment-royalties https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/7/9861372/spotify-year-in-r...
- mehwoot 9y ago
  238 streams to cover the cost of a single CD Justin Bieber has very roughly 5 billion plays on spotify. Using your math, that would equate to 17 million CDs sold. Seems pretty reasonable. I'm sure he would have been better off before the internet, but it still seems doable. Besides which I think youtube celebrities and twitch gamers have shown it is clearly possible to make a decent (if not quite profitable) living off creating content to be streamed. It's just music doesn't have the pre-eminent spot and advantages over other media it used to.

sli 9y ago

I'm impressed that Direct Connect is still kicking while all those services slowly died off.

madenine 9y ago

Unforunately, the rise of streaming content services has kinda killed off the need for file sharing for most people. Back in the day of mytunes on a school network, I had HDs full of mp3s. I actively browsed friends (and complete strangers) libraries to find new things, complete an artists discography... etc. Now? Spotify Premium is probably the best value/$ of any purchase I make in a month. Even if I wanted to go back to my old ways... its just not there any more. I believe iTunes patched out the features that made mytunes possible, and people don't have computers full of mp3s discoverable on a network anymore.

geophile 9y ago
> the rise of streaming content services has kinda killed off the need for file sharing for most people. The history is a bit different. Napster was sued out of existence. As I recall, this was done by the record labels, but the argument was that file sharing was unfair to artists. Which it was. But that was obviously not the real point. Streaming services are notoriously stingy when it comes to paying artists for their work. So access to music is still easy, and the net change is that new middlemen are profiting wildly. (Streaming vs. file sharing is a different issue. I want to own the music I listen to. I don't want to be dependent on an internet connection, a server, a revokable license, etc. )

dehrmann 9y ago

I used to work for an on-demand content streaming company, so I'm biased, but the cataloging, searching, and quality of content are big scaling issues for the average user.

starsinspace 9y ago

Peer-to-peer was killed by the advent of home routers doing NAT, making arbitrary inbound connections impossible. Configuring port forwarding was generally too difficult for "normal users", the web-UIs offered by typical home routers didn't make it easy enough. NAT traversal methods exist, but from my experience they are generally unreliable and/or slow. I still remember the days when P2P connections over the internet "just worked, always" (the early Napster/Kazaa days), and then it went to "it works sometimes", and finally to "almost never works (except if the service offers some kind of middle-man datacenter to bounce the connections between the two NAT'd peers)". Try to do a IRC DCC file transfer with anyone these days and see what I mean... long ago, it "just worked". I blame today's unfortunate centralization of internet services largely on NAT breaking P2P connectivity. Who knows, maybe spread of IPv6 will fix this mess... some day...

dabockster 9y ago
IIRC, consumer wifi routers supposedly support a protocol that allows a computer to request a temporary port forward and release it when its finished using it. Anyone remember what that protocol is called?
- thrown_produce 9y ago
  UPnP, Universal Plug and Play.
  - dabockster 9y ago
    Yep, that's it. How useful is it in practice? I haven't ventured into those settings ever since I got my Airport Extreme.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - lenkite 9y ago
      Pretty much every torrent software supports UPnP/NAT-PMP today. The problem was UPnP came a bit late - the spec was published only in 2008, and by that time everything was fire-walled off and required more-than-idiot-capability to expose.