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Gnutella: Alive, Well, And Changing Fast 62

Posted by michael from the faster-than-a-speeding-subpoena dept.
Benno writes: "Clip2 has put up a nice story about the latest developments on Gnutella: Gnutella: Alive, Well, and Changing Fast." It's good to see that they're solving the scalability problems.
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Gnutella: Alive, Well, and Changing Fast More

Gnutella: Alive, Well, and Changing Fast

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  • Re:Gnutella and Mojo Nation (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I guess in the real world web servers never get slashdotted, nobody ever waits in an interminable queue to download something from a hotline site, nobody ever route bans you for trying to connect to their etree FTP server more than once every two minutes, and you always get the advertised download speed from a Napster user (and you never get disconnected in the middle of a transfer).

    I got a real nice bridge for ya, cheap.

  • These are breasts; this is source code.
    Why do you have a problem with those two things belonging to one person?

    I don't, provided that I can have a look at both.

  • Why Gnutella wins (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    or perhaps, I should say, why gnutella will not always be the winner, if any. Gnutella, not unlike most of the later client-to-client, or peer-to-peer, programs, has only been on the scene for several months, but has already surmounted quite a following.

    Consider these numbers:

    • first time usages: up 10% month over month
    • multi time usage: up 23% year to date
    • napster to gnutella switchover usage: 14% and 22% year to date
    • average age of napster user: 17 years old, median 24
    • average gnutella: 24, median 25
    • reason cited: gnutella offers better end to end signature

    Seems simple, but this is the wave of the future. go gnutella, go.

    - timothy@monkey.org

  • :) Should anyone be allowed to regulate the extent to which ISP's regulate use of their service?

    I'd love to say the same thing you did, but when you think about it, it really is inconsistant. The hope would be that market forces would encourage ISP's to not regulate as strongly.

    Phone companies are a little tricky as they are sometimes partially public services, with the community helping to pay for the infrastructure. In that case, though, the community would have a reason to step in and request them to operate certain ways.

    Otherwise, the ISP equipment is property of that company and so where does anyone else have the right to tell them what they can and can't do with their own property?
  • they got it from the Dada engine. they seem to be using the "postmodernism" generation. pretty funny, actually, if it didn't waste so much bandwidth.

    get it yourself, here:
    http://dev.null.org/dadaengine/dada-1.03.tar.gz
  • But sucks on modem lines.

    The inter-node traffic is ENORMOUS.

    I very intermittently run 'gnut' on a major link, and gnutella is superb.

    On a commercial ISP dialup, it is useless.
  • Check out Gnucleus [sourceforge.net]. It's an open source gnutella client with many features, connection limiting, bandwidth throttling, drops unresponsive connections (ie, flooded modems), file filtering, such as no .exe .vbs .shs or any other dumb files that get returned, configureable of course. And one of the best features, it double checks results against what you searched on, so it filters out bogus garbage. Plus you can specify the file be more than so many kB, so all that 0kB garbage gets left out too.

    One thing you do have to remember when getting porn^H^H^H^Hfiles is that many people do have connection limiting, so it'll may take awhile to find a client with an empty slot to transfer it to you. I believe gnucleus doesn't report any search results if it's connections are full. It's a great client, and it's on sourceforge, so you can report bugs or even peek at the source code/submit diffs if you feel so inclined, plus the author seems to be actively developing it. I'd say it's definitely a must check out for any gnutella frustrated people out there. Version 1.0.2 seems to be rather stable, been running it off an on here and there, pretty nice.

    ---

  • Anyone remember that program for the Apple II called "Babble" that would just generate a ton of intellectual-sounding rubbish on any topic? I should do a search for Babble on Google.

    Man, that last sentence sounded weird.
    W

    -------------------
  • average age of napster user: 17 years old, median 24

    I agree, that stat just has to be bogus.
    Just think about it...
    median=24 implies at least half the users are 24+

    and assuming that no users 24, means the rest are very young)

    i.e. 50% of users are 24 years old!!!

    I'd say that someone is either very confused or telling mistruths.
  • It may sound "fair" to block web browser access "cuz they're nothin' but no-good freeloaders", but it's kinda hard to 'give back' when you're already struggling to pull files thru a 28.8 straw. That's not enough bandwidth for casual browsing let alone sharing it with whoever else wants to hog it.

    I find it highly ironic that the Gnutella servers most likely to block browsers are those who boast of having a T3 line.

  • > That's why @Home limits me to 128Kb on the upstream - it prevents me from running a 1,000 user FTP!

    I'm afraid it might be the other way around!
    Cable modem technology has a very much larger bandwidth downstream than upstream. This is not a question of a limit arbitrarily placed by @Home, but aa limit of the technology.

    Both upstream and downstream bandwiths are shared between subscribers.

    Because upstream bandwidth is smaller, it will be exhausted much faster when there are users running servers.

    Therefore, they don't want you to run a server.
  • It's not too coherent, I know, but that says to me that they consider a NetBios share to be a server.

    That's because it is a server. It serves files.

  • Now if only the mac versions were much less buggy. Mactella [cxc.com] is OK, but can't DL or UL without bugs. Some progrm called mp3 Rage can't UL. Ever.
    Maybe there'll be an OS X version, or something command line, right?

    Never trust a man with an IP address tattoed to his arm, especially if it's DHCP.
  • Now you know what a server is, and I know what a server is, but my ISP seems to have a very broad definition of what a server is, and they seem to change it to suit their needs


    Me and you know what servers are but @home sure doesn't have a clue. My chances of sending or receiving mail for the last 2 weeks have been 50/50. Tonite their DNS and mail servers are screwed up again. I can send mail but not receive and I can surf only if I type in the IP address.

    I seem to remember mention of an ISP customers bill of rights some time back but can't find it now. Anyone remember it?

  • I'm not even going to read this article, because Gnutella still sucks because of a shitty userbase. Nobody shares their stuff! That's why I like LimeWire [limewire.com]-- you can set leech controls, so that people who aren't sharing cannot download off of you. It also blocks web users.

    Hopefully ideas like this will get people to SHARE -- and then Gnutella won't suck. You can have the best network in the world, if there's no content, it blows.

    Mike Roberto
    - GAIM: MicroBerto

  • I refuse to give the cable service battle up myself, but @Home's technical ability is absolutely rediculous, and like most tech service companies their customer help is sub-par to well, I can't think of a good example right now. Anyway, I haven't had so much problems with the DNS servers, but their email servers my god, could they mess up anymore? From not being able to deliever, to bouncing lists I am on, to resending the same email I deleted one day for days on end, its crazy! I wish I knew of a class action suit going on, I would be there asap.
  • Java in general is not bad, but the Msc implementation is basically crap. You have to jump through big and complicated hurdles to run Java apps on a Mac. No Java 2, either.

  • err, Mac. I should have previewed.

  • JNap only runs on Java platforms. Sun provides the Java platform (J2SE) only for Microsoft Windows 9x, Microsoft Windows NT/2000, Solaris for x86, Linux for x86, and Solaris for SPARC. A C program can be more cross-platform than a Java program; just look at any application or game written with the Allegro [allegro.cc] library.

    But I may try it out, as the latest official Napster client can no longer connect to OpenNap servers.


    Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them? [pineight.com]
  • The new version definately has its pluses but I still think I"ll wait for the next release on this one. Call me lazy but I'll only upgrade when there is "really" something significant to get all worked up about...

    Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
    Domain Names for $13
  • I think ISPs define a Server as any application with an open listening port. (ie a Server Socket) In the broadest sense, this is what a server IS after all... an application providing a network service. Whether banning all services is too strict is another kettle of fish altogether.
  • The problem of people not sharing is common to ALL filesharing systems.
    People do not share for several reasons mostly because:
    - sharing eats some of your bandwidth which could be better utilized to to download.
    - they are too stupid/too lazy to share
    - they fear getting caught (if I share the RIAA has my IP addr, thus can track me down)
    (or some may think: "When I only download, I risk less and I'm sure that I'm only one of the few not sharing, so it won't make a difference whether I share or not.".
    The problem is that MANY are thinking the above way, thus all want to download but no one is willing to share.
    But they do not realize that downloading is just as "illegal" as sharing files.
    And tracking downloaders is not that hard at all:
    Put up a very fast connection, share the current Top100 songs, and log all the IP-addrs of all downloaders.
    Leave it running for several days/week, and you will collect TONS of IPaddrs.

    LimeWire's "antifreeloader" stuff is almost 100% useless, since if an user does not want to share, he can always fake other users that he is sharing.
    Just share a few useless systemfiles or other stuff. (big files filled with zeroes etc). This will fool others that he is a "good citizen".
    But what LimeWire achieved with this feature is nice marketing, something like
    "We can block freeloaders, thus our client is better than others and an additional reason to use our client over others".

    I've seen this message from users saying "I use LimeWire because it can block freeloaders while others can't" so many times and no one realizes that it will contribute very little to the overall network health.

    Napster doesn't force you to share either but strangely enough there is plenty of content on that networks.

    So I guess the success of a filesharing network depends from other factors rather than from "anti-freeloader" features, which can be easily "circumvented" even by a dummie.

    The key for a successful is better network routing, caching, avoidance of useless traffic/flooding , upload bandwidth limitation, educating people to share and making them aware of the consequences of freeloading, bundling upload bandwidth channels, etc etc.

    cheers,
    Benno
    Gnutella.it [gnutella.it]

  • Where will we all be the day after Napster starts their subscription ($$$) service??
  • These are breasts; this is source code. Why do you have a problem with those two things belonging to one person?

    I have a problem with them "belonging" to you. Slap a GPL on them, and I'll contribute to the code base. I promise. "Free" as in "Free Breasts". (Which, I'm thinking, would go really well with Free Beer.)

  • And what the hell does "end to end signature" refer to?
  • Yes, the rules are purposely vague. You have to remember
    1. this is a brand new industry
    2. this industry is growing at a phenomenal rate, both in customers and in content bandwidth
    The ISP has no idea what the landscape is going to be like 3 months from now, and they'd rather install some vague rules than do a complete revision four times a year.

    A lot of people seem to think the ISP's are making an effort to rip off consumers by limiting their "right" to bandwidth. The ISP's are just trying to make a decent profit, while providing a realistic level of service. Here's a thought experiment for you: start a non-profit broadband ISP, and just see how long you can provide 1.5Mbps peak bandwidth to each home for $40/month.

  • Theres a reason why Napster is run on massive Oracle systems with massive pipes

    Is there a reason they can't hire competent Windows programmers?

  • I think it was called Racteur (short for "Raconteur"). -Gareth
  • I must be one of the last people on this freakin' planet running a 56k modem. Absolutely no joy trying to connect to the gnutella net. I understand the science of bandwidth limitations enough tp know I'm not getting shyte until I get DSL. Bearshare appears to be the best servent yet. I'll keep saving my tuppence
  • Well, one reason ISPs might want to filter NetBIOS is to prevent Windows boxen getting owned and used in the next round of DDoS attacks. On the offchance that you weren't trolling: you should never, NEVER run Windows filesharing across a public network, EVER, unless you're absolutely certain that you know what you're doing. And if you're absolutely certain you know what you're doing, you won't do it anyway.
    --
    If the good lord had meant me to live in Los Angeles
  • Last night I downloaded the new Gnutella client, BearShare and set off looking for a few files. First of all there were several false hits of 23K gif files that I'm sure were phony. And when I finnaly got valid hits I couldn't get anything downloaded. I tried a dozen different users and they all timed out.

    Theres a reason why Napster is run on massive Oracle systems with massive pipes
  • I'm not quite sure, but I think the random characters are text strings from a different font maybe? Have you ever tried seeing some document without the requisite font?

  • I actually heard that Microsoft.com put a link to /. They got MSed. :-D --Joey
  • You sick sone of a bitch! How dare you deface ***MY*** weblog with your profanity!!! Out, out!!!

    /ME starts to cry...

  • Have you tried a side-by-side comparison of Mojo Nation and Gnutella? I haven't, but I would love to see the results. Mojo Nation is really pretty good.

    Regards,

    Zooko, who is off to run "apt-cache search gnutella"

    P.S. Don't forget to read Evil Overlord Jim McCoy's response [openp2p.com] to the Shirky article. Judging by Shirky's later article [openp2p.com], I would say that Jim scored some serious points and got Shirky to think again. (Not that Shirky blessed the Mojo Nation concept of integrated micropayments -- oh no... But he did start thinking more deeply about how different resources have different scarcity characteristics, which was one of our points in our response.)

  • You should check out this recent slashdot story [slashdot.org] to suggest why you might have had problems. Basically, if both users are behind firewalls that reject externally initiated conversations, they can't talk.
  • If Gnutella takes off, ISPs won't be able to prohibit their customers from using it. Cutting off Napster is a good way for an ISP to lose a lot of customers right now. If a sizable chunk of their customers want to use Gnutella, Napster, or something else, they'll serve thier customers if they can make money. If necessary, they'll implement bandwidth restrictions or raise the rates.
  • What problem does Gnutella have that Mojo Nation solves? I have a problem, I want to download free music and share my music with others. Gnutella and Napster may not be perfect, but they solve the problem.

    Mojo Nation dwells on solving the free rider problem. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't have that problem. When I'm not using my computer and my bandwidth, both of which I've already paid for, why not share them. They don't really cost me anything more. O'Reilly [oreilly.com]'s OpenP2P [openp2p.com] site has the article " In Praise of Freeloaders [openp2p.com]." It clearly explains why Mojo Nation is solving a problem that doesn't really exist.

  • Closing the NetBios port will probably save many windows users from burning themselves.

    Also, I don't know what a server is. It seems to have fuzzy boundaries with every definition that I've tried. The problem is that they don't know what it is either, all they know is that they can use the term, and most people will accept it as reasonable. And that some things definitely count as servers, and others definitely don't.

    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
  • Try FURI [jps.net], it's Java-based and works very well. Has a nice GUI, too.

    For anyone with prejudices against Java, please try the program, don't just whine about how bad / slow / whatever Java is. Having a newer Java Runtime Environment helps, too.
  • I think they did this to keep people from running servers as well as to keep the overall QOS from dropping through the floor. Cable is a shared (on the local loop) connection and anything that puts lots of traffic there will constrict it. For most people having much smaller upload bandwidth is hardly noticeable, however it does put a hamper on P2P tech.
    --
  • the new version of Bearshare [bearshare.com] (2.0.4) seems to be working rather splendidly. My copy has been up (they fixed some major memory leaks) for about three days now, has transferred over 5 gigs of data and pulled down nearly a gig. This includes some resumes (check "auto retry failed") that have finally been able to complete.

    Quick hint: when looking for movies files search "*.asf" or "*.divx", asf's (and mpegs) are a bit better since you can watch partial downloads, DivX ;-) doesn't seem to support that although they are generally better quality in less space (note: I'm not really into hardcore descriptions of codecs, just how they work in the real world). It's not perfect (by any means), but is moving in the right direction. Now let's just try and keep it legal.
    --
  • Even if we get Gnutella to a point where even those folks on dial up modems can participate in the grand link-up, I'm a bit worried about what the broadband ISP monopolies (@home anyone?) will do to dissuade their customers from using such a product.

    Good point. Especially given the tie-ins between the content providers and the ISPs. (AOL/Time Warner for example.)

    Another thing that I expect to see is deliberate sabotage from the likes of RIAA, in the form of both DOS attacks and attempts to corrupt the database or take advantage of any weakness they find in the protocol to attack the "evil pirates".

    I can imagine them discovering a hole that lets them damage a server and exploiting it to trash a lot of people's personal machines, ala the DSS "Black Sunday" incident.

    After which I can imagine a BIG lawsuit. B-) Unlike the DSS pirate takedown, THIS would be king-hell illegal.

    Wouldn't it be pleasant if the RIAA was finally taken down, permanently, by legal action under the new anti-cracking laws? B-)

  • I don't mind them limiting what I can do. My issue is that they won't tell me what I can and can't do. If they tell me I can't run a web server, ftp server, half life server, or whatever, then that's fine. Those are the rules and I might abide by them. In this situation they are telling me that I can run some servers, but they won't tell me whichs ones I cant run. That is needlessly vague in my opinion.

    I doubt I could provide that bandwidth for the price. But that isnt the point. If they want to keep normal usage down, they can. They can do what they did and put in the vague you wont use enough to disrupt others usage. They can also do what some ISP's do and disallow all servers. The point is that they can tell users the rules straight. And not hide the rules.
    treke

  • I am not so sure The Man(TM) is going to have a choice with Gnutella and other P2P projects. I'd like to see figures on what percentage of useage for Napster and Gnutella is originating from US universities. Universities look the other way as students use their ethernet connections to download tons of warez and pr0n as well as MP3's because they are extremely adverse to trying to regulate useage, as they should be.
  • You can't really split the network up, it has a pretty much random design.

    Amber Yuan 2k A.D
  • Does anyone know anything about the random text strings that show up in clients' search monitors? If you haven't noticed, alongside 'britnie', 'xxx', and 'quake', there are many long strings of random letters, numbers, and other characters.

    They may be searches in double-byte code (for example, Japanese, Chinese encodings, or Unicode) which would look like garbage unless you have the fonts, the locale and other things set up to view those codes.

  • This is a very good point, and it touches on a much larger issue. Should ISP's be allowed to regulate how we use our connection? IMHO we are just _leasing_ the connection, and as long as we don't participate in illegal activities (sorry, Gnutella != illegal), which should go without saying. If I wanna run a server, fine. That's why @Home limits me to 128Kb on the upstream - it prevents me from running a 1,000 user FTP!

    This is like the phone company making sure you don't use your phone to read someone a copyrighted poem (assuming a bad fair use law). Even though reading literature in and of itself is perfectly legal, the phone company bans it "just incase" - plus it takes up too much phone time on their systems ($). People would be outraged if our leased phonelines would be treated the way some ISP's treat our internet connections.
  • Closing the NetBios port will probably save many windows users from burning themselves.
    Note that I never said I had a problem with them closing the port. I agree with that decision. I do have a problem with the way the Acceptable Use Policy is worded. Your contract binds you to the terms of the AUP, but the AUP is quite vague. The only reason I can see them counting NetBIOS as a server is so that they can catch people out. No one is seriously going to use NetBIOS to serve files over the Net. But the ISP could, AFAICS, claim that anyone running Windows with NetBIOS installed is in breach due to the hidden shares NetBIOS sets up by default.
  • Does anyone know anything about the random text strings that show up in clients' search monitors? If you haven't noticed, alongside 'britnie', 'xxx', and 'quake', there are many long strings of random letters, numbers, and other characters.

    I seem to recall someone on Slashdot a while back theorizing that this is a vast attempt by MegaCorp to sabotage the Gnutella network. Anyone have any comments/info on this?

  • Needs an overhaul (Score:3)

    by Joe Rumsey ( 2194 ) on Friday January 26, 2001 @10:26PM (#478264)
    The progress made by BearShare and others is commendable, but it's all incremental. Nothing that's actually up and running today implements any long-term scalability solutions, and as far as I can see, nothing that attempts to connect to existing gnutella clients ever will. There were a number of good proposals for new protocols from the (apprently dead) next generation group, but none of them have yet amounted to anything. (As of a few weeks ago at least, I have not checked today.)

    As a Gnutella developer [sourceforge.net] of sorts, I'd love to see an alternative emerge and add support for it. Of course, I'm not actually taking that initiative myself, so I can't point the finger at anyone here. But if I have some time to spare when and if someone does something truly new, I'll do what I can to add support to Gumshoe. In the meantime, I'm doing what I can to catch up with the improvements made by others.

  • My Gnutella network audit (Score:3)

    by Mongoose ( 8480 ) on Saturday January 27, 2001 @10:30AM (#478265) Homepage
    Since I started work on making a Gnutella client/server; I've noticed lots of bad protocol usage. ( I'm going to focus on using my server as a gnutella 'proxy' to my apche server to serve files. )

    Here's a breif listing of little things that are easy to fix:

    1. I've see
    n TTLs set up to 256! We shouldn't forward these packets at all or at least reset the TTL to like 4.

    2. New packet types should be rejected. Here's a few examples my client logged one night:

    UNKNOWN FUNCTION 0x69
    UNKNOWN FUNCTION 0xdb
    UNKNOWN FUNCTION 0xfa

    And here is an example with it's data field:

    UNKNOWN FUNCTION 0x97
    '^@^@^@)^Xt^Q^QH^@^@^Oj@^A^F^Z^@
    ^@^@R{.!^?-C"?^B22^@^@)^X'

    3. Reject unsupported unicode queries until we have a standard! I know I don't serve files in japanese, so I shouldn't forward it to other clients that don't either. These queries are often 256bytes!

    We might need to start a gnutella steering committee and just rethink some issues. Just fixing these 3 minor things frees up a lot of bandwidth. Also we need to use Pongs for finding new hosts more than pinging the fuck out of ppl like me that are on dail-up 50% of the time. =)

  • Re:Gnutella and Mojo Nation (Score:3)

    by mbyte ( 65875 ) on Saturday January 27, 2001 @03:15AM (#478266) Homepage
    .. because Mojo Nation is horrible to use. I spend > 3 hours trying to get it work and failed.
    (because of weired proxy configurations ...)

    BeShare is only a matter of "click install".


    Samba Information HQ

  • Re:Random search strings? (Score:3)

    by big.ears ( 136789 ) on Friday January 26, 2001 @08:38PM (#478267) Homepage
    I think it is a strategy to identify ad-serving clients. Specifically, there are fake clients that return "yoursearch.html" or somesuch. A way to avoid this is to search for random text and block everyone who returns hits to you.

  • History about Gnutella.it and its Websearcher (Score:3)

    by sbenno ( 171856 ) on Saturday January 27, 2001 @07:02AM (#478268)
    Some clarifications on the websearcher hosted on Gnutella.it [gnutella.it]

    : A few folks accused me of promoting freeloading and giving back nothing to the gnutella community.

    First gnutella.it was born for the following reasons :I'm italian and when I discovered that the gnutella.it domain was still available, (In June 2000 I believe), I registered it and put up infos related to the Gnutella technology in italian. (before some jerk would have used it for something different)
    A bit later I wrote a nice MySQL + PHP + C++ engine which acts as a gnutella web search engine ad that permits you to download directly from a browser. Just as the zillions out there, but with a few special features (cached+realtime search,sorting,timelimiting etc).

    It became quite good and the most read italian newspaper "Il Corriere della Sera" interviewed me , writing an article about it. see here [gnutella.it] (hehe nice publicity for free :-) )

    Eventually downloading from gnutella via a webbrowser became so popular and easy (thanks to gnute.com , mp3board.com and others), that the network began to feel the load of these browser-freeloaders.

    I want to point out that the goal of this searcher was not to permit the folks to leech off the gnutella network without giving back anything.

    Some have me put in the same league as gnute.com and mp3board.com.

    That's just plain wrong !

    The LimeWire folks worte such a notice on their pages too, but after a clarification they corrected the stuff.

    On my site I've placed notices (even on each search result page) that you should contribute to the Gnutella network using a servent and share files, otherwise there would be no files.

    But why worry about webbased-freeloaders ?

    BearShare and LimeWire block now browser downloads, rendering all gnutella web search sites basically useless, since as soon as you try to click on a download link, you get redirected to a HTML page which informs you not to freeload and use a standalone client instead.

    So basically all these sites, suddenly promote gnutella, which is a good thing.

    And in fact this has caused a boost in terms of # of gnutella users , the download success rate (less "Busy" signals) has increased and compared to a few months ago, you find now much more stuff on gnutella.

    I'm currently working with the authors of BearShare [bearshare.net] to find a way to make gnutella web search working again and reliable. This will require a few things like sending out informations (in the query_hit packets) whether or not the user DESIRES to share his files with browsers. And incorporating some protection from mp3 leeching sites (like gnute.com , mp3board.com etc) since this service can be easily abused.

    Another way to use a gnutella web search like Gnutella.it [gnutella.it] is to use a Gnutella client which supports drag'n drop as BearShare does. That way you can use the web searcher to search for files, and most of times it finds much more stuff than a regular standalone client because it caches a huge amount of links to files. (the drawback is that some liks could be a bit outdated, but you can look at the age of the file to estimate its reliability).
    As soon as you find a link, you can drag it into BearShare which in turn will try to download it. It will not get blocked since the download does not occur via browser.
    And if the download succeeds, then the file will get automatically shared and made available to others.

    For modem users it is perhaps more lightweight in terms of traffic to use the web searcher and drag the links into BearShare, since you will save bandwidth comprising search / searchreply and host connection traffic. If you share files, then ONE single host connection will suffice and you will still be reachable by other gnutella users. That way you will be able to devote almost all of your limited modem bandwidth to downloads/uploads. (although the whole process is a bit messier than using a gnutella client alone)

    I admit that Gnutella has its drawbacks and may be viewed as crappy and unreliable compared to napster.
    But I think the protocol has many possibilities to become a nice and efficient distributed filesharing protocol. (check out the gnutella developer forum: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_gdf )

    Plus I have not seen a truly distributed filesharing protocol yet, which works much better than gnutella and does not depend from a central entity.
    Every centralized filesharing system will sooner or later get attacked (or bought out) by the various RIAA/MPAA etc. So only decentralized system will survive over the long term.

    Yes, freenet may become much nicier and efficient, but they have a long way to go until this becomes reality, plus without searching capabilities, freenet will not be that useful. (if you are searching for files, you need the key first, and there is no way to search for keys on freenet). One combination would be to use Gnutella to store keyfiles (with some fulltext extensions) so that you could search on gNet for filename->key mappings and then download the real content off the freenet network.

    The important thing is IMHO to become indipendent from centralized filesharing systems (ala Napster,Imesh, etc), at this point users will choose the system that works best AND is easy to use. Unfortunately the holy grail has not been found yet. But I think we are not THAT far away from an easy to use, efficient and distributed system which will attract millions of "Joe Average" users.

    We will see ....

    cheers,
    Benno.
    Gnutella.it [gnutella.it]

  • Re:The Man(TM) will never take this lying down... (Score:3)

    by RedWizzard ( 192002 ) on Friday January 26, 2001 @11:18PM (#478269)
    Otherwise, quit yer whining and accept the ISP's rules.
    Yeah but they don't tell you the rules. They say "oh, by the way, you can't run a server off this collection", and you think "fine, I wasn't planning on running a Web server or a Quake server or anything". Then you get an email stating that they've decided to shut down the NetBios port due to virus problems. I quote from the email:
    Closing Port 139 (also known as the NetBios port) will mean that all customers will no longer be able to use certain functions that this port would normally facilitate. In particular, some network sharing services (file and print sharing) through our network will cease operating. Volume based plan customers only use this feature as hosting servers is a breach of the Acceptable Use Policy
    It's not too coherent, I know, but that says to me that they consider a NetBios share to be a server. I'm probably breaching their Acceptable Use Policy right now - I think I forgot to disable the echo service. Am I the only one who finds that overly broad?

  • Re:The Man(TM) will never take this lying down... (Score:3)

    by micromoog ( 206608 ) on Friday January 26, 2001 @08:58PM (#478270)
    I think that it will be used as a very unsubtle smackdown for anything that threattens to use all the bandwidth I pay for.

    I just have to comment on this remark. Consumer-level connections are not designed to accomodate continuous load at the maximum bandwidth level. They are designed for high peaks with a low average load, because most consumers are interested in pages that load quickly, not sustained performance.

    You're not paying for "all the bandwidth" you can consume; you're paying very low prices for bandwidth, based on the consumer usage profile. If you really want sustained bandwidth at a specific level, bite the bullet and cough up some serious cash for a commercial connection. Otherwise, quit yer whining and accept the ISP's rules.

  • Mojo Nation install difficulties have been fixed. (Score:4)

    by Zooko ( 2210 ) on Saturday January 27, 2001 @04:20AM (#478271) Homepage

    You'll be glad to know that we stopped requiring the weird proxy configurations a couple of versions ago. To run the new version is simply: "tar -xzf ./mojonation-*.tar.gz ; ./mojonation/evil/Broker --no-tail ; netscape ./.mojonation/broker/intropage.html".

    The windows version is apparently even easier to install -- it has some kind of gui point-and-drool installer that untars and executes these things for you, or something. ;-)

    We also recently fixed several really nasty "distributed bugs", which didn't show up at all on any particular broker, but which caused the entire network to degrade. Nowadays Mojo Nation [mojonation.net] is much faster and more robust than it was last time you tried it.

    Regards,

    Zooko

  • Re:The Man(TM) will never take this lying down... (Score:4)

    by treke ( 62626 ) on Saturday January 27, 2001 @12:21AM (#478272)
    >Otherwise, quit yer whining and accept the ISP's rules. Its a great theory to try abiding by the rules, but it doesn't work. My ISP Mediaone/RoadRunner/AT&T/whoever buys em next month) allows servers but has a list of server users aren't allowed to run. I called to get a copy of this list, and guess what? They refused to give me one stating they don't have one available to subscribers. Sure makes it hard to be a good little boy and obey the rules when I'm not even allowed to know what those rules are.
    treke

  • The Man(TM) will never take this lying down... (Score:4)

    by Doomsdaisy ( 90430 ) on Friday January 26, 2001 @08:40PM (#478273)
    Even if we get Gnutella to a point where even those folks on dial up modems can participate in the grand link-up, I'm a bit worried about what the broadband ISP monopolies (@home anyone?) will do to dissuade their customers from using such a product. Most broadband providers prohibit their users from running 'servers'.
    Now you know what a server is, and I know what a server is, but my ISP seems to have a very broad definition of what a server is, and they seem to change it to suit their needs. I think that it will be used as a very unsubtle smackdown for anything that threattens to use all the bandwidth I pay for.
    The media industry will whine about a functional Gnutella, and the media providers will be happy to try a ham-handed solution.
    just my .02$

    These are breasts; this is source code.

  • Re:Gnutella and Mojo Nation (Score:4)

    by Wesley Felter ( 138342 ) <wesley@felter.org> on Saturday January 27, 2001 @01:38PM (#478274) Homepage
    This article calls it the download failure problem. Basically, whenever I try to download something from Napster or Gnutella, it either times out or it comes in at less than 1 K/s and then times out halfway through. These problems don't happen nearly as often with Mojo Nation.

    Even ignoring all the stuff about freeloaders and economics, Mojo Nation solves other problems, too.

  • Gnutella and Mojo Nation (Score:5)

    by Wesley Felter ( 138342 ) <wesley@felter.org> on Friday January 26, 2001 @10:14PM (#478275) Homepage
    The article mentions that Mojo Nation has already solved the largest problem that plagues Gnutella (and Napster in my experience), so why keep Gnutella on life support? Why not just switch to Mojo Nation?

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