3 ms·

Demonoid, while great, is last gen file sharing technology. The convenience and community is what made it great, but that same convenience of having a central s

Demonoid, while great, is last gen file sharing technology. The convenience and community is what made it great, but that same convenience of having a central server is what allowed it to be targetted in this way. There are other next generation file sharing and discovery tools available, and the only question is which ones will take hold and be embraced by the community? (Please reply with your favorite next-gen suggestion…) P2P will never go away, and there will always be a counterculture movement pushing it forward. You can't simultaneously have a free and open Internet and lock it down to file sharing. At this stage the only reason we are having this battle is because the copyright industry believes they can still quash these services at a sufficient rate compared to the rate at which new services are created and embraced. That may or may not be true today - but it certainly won't be true forever. Encryption and anonymization protocols are well established, and the end game is in sight for a file sharing service that is both anonymous, decentralized, fast, and resistant to junk-flood attacks. Five years from now, take downs like this won't even be newsworthy - and the industry will have adapted their business models accordingly. Five years from now, producers will be marketing their content direct-to-consumers over Apple TV, Netflix, Hulu, whatever.

aw3c2 14y ago
Name one next-gen p2p solution.
- kenthorvath 14y ago
  https://torrentfreak.com/anonymous-decentralized-and-uncensored-file-sharing-is-booming-120302/ https://torrentfreak.com/anonymous-decentralized-and-uncenso...
  - rektide 14y ago
    Tribler is the only item mentioned that has P2P discovery, is the only one that is pushing decentralization to the last holdout preventing decentralized filesharing: trackers. The other options mentioned here, RetroShare and VPN's, are about saying, fuck it, we give up, doing public p2p filesharing is impossible, we'll do it oldschool warez IRC channel style and build darknets for those that care to and know how to chase this stuff down into the deeper webs we're tunneling. There's -absolutely nothing- little new or progressive or decentralized or P2P about these solutions: they were done adequately when in 2003 Justin Frankel/AOL release WASTE (which itself was not supremely novel, just well done & usable), and before that IRC and FTP. In other words, we still have no replacement for trackers (in the loose sense, given magnets), they make our p2p networks possible right now.
rektide 14y ago
I'd like you to offer your own suggestions for in-use next gen technology, in return for having read all the above. Whatever you have your world stage set with, your assumed knowledge about the state of play that you use to project forwards, is not commonly held. Get off the fucking soapbox and present a damned case, man. Tribler, http://www.tribler.org/ http://www.tribler.org/ is, to my knowledge, nearly the only assemblage advancing p2p & which is in use at the current moment. It's half academic stomping ground, one quarter experiment, and one quarter earnest direct directed software, yet this loose assemblage of different interests is, as far as I know, the only ones doing anything like what you're talking about, making systems where for example even search can be done p2p. They call this 4G P2P: http://www.tribler.org/trac/wiki/4thGenerationP2P http://www.tribler.org/trac/wiki/4thGenerationP2P .
- kenthorvath 14y ago
  Tribler was one of the services I had in mind, though I couldn't remember its name and I have limited access to search for such things where I work. But, yes, thanks for the share and the response. I also remember reading about something called CryptoSphere on HN a week back. While it's also still in development and not currently useable, my point is that the technologies for strong crypto and decentralization have already been established (e.g. FreeNet, TOR, etc). Now it's a matter of finding creative ways to use these technologies to serve P2P's purposes. It's not that far off, and with takedowns like these becoming more common I think it will only serve to catalyze next-gen development. Five years is an eternity in technology. The iPhone just turned 5, for instance. I can barely remember how I lived before I had a smart phone.
  - rektide 14y ago
    > my point is that the technologies for strong crypto and decentralization have already been established My point is that the technologies of your point are useless and irrelevant without means to create connections between people. Existing P2P and cryptoware hides stuff for all but the participating parties, but creating those groups of participation has, thusfar, always been the domain of centralized easy-to-take down services. The mold you set, of speaking of this oncoming future, waving your hand about "next gen," is a massive dis-service and harmful uninformed PR against the work that needs to be done. The change you hope is in the wind isn't going to be a part of the technical evolution and flow of progress, it's a deliberate technological revolution, making the fickle changing mesh of us all self assemble in a behaved fashion to permit us to shoot content queries to everyone on the planet in search of a copy of XYZ audiobook, and find the two people who have it. That requires huge amounts of caching of the libraries available content out there (so we don't actually have to go ask everyone), or what Tribler calls their megacaches, which at this stage are far more local than global. So we have steps. BuddyCast3, the social overlay that underpins much of Tribler, gets some of the way there, but it's far far from a global search, and most of it's content is populated by existing trackers. Magnets, DHT, PEX, these were all invaluable core decentralization tools, but finding what it is you want, searching through whatever content is out there, is a huge problem which, unlike better lithography technology, no one has a roadmap for achieving, and saying otherwise builds a false sense of comfort that betrays the cause.

aw3c2 14y ago

Name one next-gen p2p solution.

kenthorvath 14y ago
https://torrentfreak.com/anonymous-decentralized-and-uncensored-file-sharing-is-booming-120302/ https://torrentfreak.com/anonymous-decentralized-and-uncenso...
- rektide 14y ago
  Tribler is the only item mentioned that has P2P discovery, is the only one that is pushing decentralization to the last holdout preventing decentralized filesharing: trackers. The other options mentioned here, RetroShare and VPN's, are about saying, fuck it, we give up, doing public p2p filesharing is impossible, we'll do it oldschool warez IRC channel style and build darknets for those that care to and know how to chase this stuff down into the deeper webs we're tunneling. There's -absolutely nothing- little new or progressive or decentralized or P2P about these solutions: they were done adequately when in 2003 Justin Frankel/AOL release WASTE (which itself was not supremely novel, just well done & usable), and before that IRC and FTP. In other words, we still have no replacement for trackers (in the loose sense, given magnets), they make our p2p networks possible right now.

rektide 14y ago

I'd like you to offer your own suggestions for in-use next gen technology, in return for having read all the above. Whatever you have your world stage set with, your assumed knowledge about the state of play that you use to project forwards, is not commonly held. Get off the fucking soapbox and present a damned case, man. Tribler, http://www.tribler.org/ http://www.tribler.org/ is, to my knowledge, nearly the only assemblage advancing p2p & which is in use at the current moment. It's half academic stomping ground, one quarter experiment, and one quarter earnest direct directed software, yet this loose assemblage of different interests is, as far as I know, the only ones doing anything like what you're talking about, making systems where for example even search can be done p2p. They call this 4G P2P: http://www.tribler.org/trac/wiki/4thGenerationP2P http://www.tribler.org/trac/wiki/4thGenerationP2P .

kenthorvath 14y ago
Tribler was one of the services I had in mind, though I couldn't remember its name and I have limited access to search for such things where I work. But, yes, thanks for the share and the response. I also remember reading about something called CryptoSphere on HN a week back. While it's also still in development and not currently useable, my point is that the technologies for strong crypto and decentralization have already been established (e.g. FreeNet, TOR, etc). Now it's a matter of finding creative ways to use these technologies to serve P2P's purposes. It's not that far off, and with takedowns like these becoming more common I think it will only serve to catalyze next-gen development. Five years is an eternity in technology. The iPhone just turned 5, for instance. I can barely remember how I lived before I had a smart phone.
- rektide 14y ago
  > my point is that the technologies for strong crypto and decentralization have already been established My point is that the technologies of your point are useless and irrelevant without means to create connections between people. Existing P2P and cryptoware hides stuff for all but the participating parties, but creating those groups of participation has, thusfar, always been the domain of centralized easy-to-take down services. The mold you set, of speaking of this oncoming future, waving your hand about "next gen," is a massive dis-service and harmful uninformed PR against the work that needs to be done. The change you hope is in the wind isn't going to be a part of the technical evolution and flow of progress, it's a deliberate technological revolution, making the fickle changing mesh of us all self assemble in a behaved fashion to permit us to shoot content queries to everyone on the planet in search of a copy of XYZ audiobook, and find the two people who have it. That requires huge amounts of caching of the libraries available content out there (so we don't actually have to go ask everyone), or what Tribler calls their megacaches, which at this stage are far more local than global. So we have steps. BuddyCast3, the social overlay that underpins much of Tribler, gets some of the way there, but it's far far from a global search, and most of it's content is populated by existing trackers. Magnets, DHT, PEX, these were all invaluable core decentralization tools, but finding what it is you want, searching through whatever content is out there, is a huge problem which, unlike better lithography technology, no one has a roadmap for achieving, and saying otherwise builds a false sense of comfort that betrays the cause.