3 ms·

Sorry, typo. BitTorrent, obviously. And why would the centralised or decentralised nature of the search affect user behaviour?

capableweb 5y ago
Why do you think decentralized technologies still help people pirate software to this day while centralized services eventually gets shut down? The amount of trackers that has disappeared over the years is huge, and some of them quite sad as well. What.CD would be a famous example where we basically had a enormous backup of long lost music in the world. What.CD disappeared when French authorities managed to figure out where the servers were and got permission to raid them. Same thing happened with TPB a couple of times, but amazingly it's still standing. We can only hope it remains so, but in the future we might not be as lucky. Not to say that plenty countries block access to TPB via having the ISPs block DNS/IP to known addresses. All of these things wouldn't have been a problem if the search index was also decentralized.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  But that isn't something that would drive user behaviour until the search is actually taken down.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Let's go back. The initial claim is "the crappy results of EMule/GNUtella and friends as a proof "decentralized X" does not really work" Then you claim that since BitTorrent is more popular than eMule, that means "decentralized X" doesn't work. How is it relevant what would drive the user behavior?
josefx 5y ago
You had a gigantic list of servers and didn't have to care if law enforcement managed to ban a few dozen? You could also search for anything shared by your peers. Major downside was that it wasn't curated and files tended to be shared under a dozen different names, so just because you think you were downloading Debian.iso didn't mean that it wasn't xXx_AnalCompilation5_xXx.avi, you had to check which name was the most frequent to be sure.

capableweb 5y ago

Why do you think decentralized technologies still help people pirate software to this day while centralized services eventually gets shut down? The amount of trackers that has disappeared over the years is huge, and some of them quite sad as well. What.CD would be a famous example where we basically had a enormous backup of long lost music in the world. What.CD disappeared when French authorities managed to figure out where the servers were and got permission to raid them. Same thing happened with TPB a couple of times, but amazingly it's still standing. We can only hope it remains so, but in the future we might not be as lucky. Not to say that plenty countries block access to TPB via having the ISPs block DNS/IP to known addresses. All of these things wouldn't have been a problem if the search index was also decentralized.

user-the-name 5y ago
But that isn't something that would drive user behaviour until the search is actually taken down.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Let's go back. The initial claim is "the crappy results of EMule/GNUtella and friends as a proof "decentralized X" does not really work" Then you claim that since BitTorrent is more popular than eMule, that means "decentralized X" doesn't work. How is it relevant what would drive the user behavior?

josefx 5y ago

You had a gigantic list of servers and didn't have to care if law enforcement managed to ban a few dozen? You could also search for anything shared by your peers. Major downside was that it wasn't curated and files tended to be shared under a dozen different names, so just because you think you were downloading Debian.iso didn't mean that it wasn't xXx_AnalCompilation5_xXx.avi, you had to check which name was the most frequent to be sure.