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Handhelds Hardware

Future Pocket P2P - Discreet Data Sharing? 301

Posted by jamie from the EM-town-square dept.
zilym writes "Think about a class of portable devices that include storage space, wireless networking (ala 802.11b), and user loadable Software. For these devices, why not implement a protocol for adhoc, wireless data sharing (Pocket P2P)? This is what I'm imagining... Lots of people carry around Pocket P2P devices hidden in their car, backpack, purse, pocket, handglider, whatever. Normally these devices stay half dormant, listening to see if another Pocket P2P device is in range. When one or more Pocket P2P's get within range of each other, they automatically trade their data store with each other." This is a keen glance at the future with enormous consequences -- unless copyright law is drastically extended, a clever hardware hack a decade from now could be the Model A to Napster's Model T. Are we living in the ten-year bubble before the collapse of entertainment media copy prevention?

"IMHO this vehicle for data sharing would be very discreet, anonymous, and unstoppable. Your ISP would not be involved, so they can't block your traffic. In a sufficiently crowded area of people, it would be difficult to pick out someone transmitting data and nearly impossible to locate person(s) storing a copy of said data. Pocket P2P transfers would be local and spontaneous in nature, so an organization trying to stamp it out would essentially need enforcement spying everywhere, equipped with RF detection and triangulation tools.

The devices for doing this already exist, albeit in slightly suboptimal forms (laptops, palmtops, and PDAs). However, it should not be impossible for enterprising engineers to eventually build more specialized devices toward this goal."

Technological predictions are fun and easy. Ethernet NICs cost $100 ten years ago and $10 now; 802.11b cards cost about $100 now and might cost $10 in 2012. So by then, will some entrepreneur be able to build an MP3 storage/playback device with wireless capability for $50 or $60? Think "Sony Walkman that trades music with whatever other devices are around."

The hard part is legal predictions. Right now the entertainment industry is trying hard to reduce the power of fair-use exceptions to copyright law, and thereby expand their own power. And they've made their key weapons things like the DMCA and the doctrine of "contributory copyright infringement" -- going after not music's fans, but the corporations that enable music sharing. The corporations that provide your access become the bottleneck that the copyright holders can control.

But suppose someone released a Walkman-sized, cheap MP3 player that had a wireless network card used to download (legitimately acquired) MP3s from your computer? It's not Napsteresque; it's like Apple's doohickey, except it connects wirelessly. That's all.

And then suppose it turned out that a simple command given from that computer could trivially put your player into a promiscuous, music-sharing mode?

The device need not connect to the internet (perhaps it can't) -- it talks to whatever other devices are around. "I like Jimmy Buffett, anyone got any Jimmy Buffett? I'll trade it for some Wayne Newton." A short-range hardware Gnutella. Set some parameters, go for a walk in a public park, come home with some new music. Pass it along.

(Your problem becomes spam -- come home from the park with ad jingles disguised as Jimmy Buffett... better to trade at parties with people who are friends of friends...)

This would surely stretch "fair use" to the breaking point -- but the question becomes, what part of the chain would the copyright holders be able to attack?
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Future Pocket P2P - Discreet Data Sharing? More

Future Pocket P2P - Discreet Data Sharing?

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  • it's going to the point where we all need industry-approved descrambling implants for our eyes and ears to experience any media whatsoever.
    • Nah, don't believe that folks like the RIAA can go around restricting digital media forever...If nothing else, people will eventually recognize how simply uncool it is.

      Being a musician first and a geek second, this issue has been on my mind a lot. I believe that we should get paid for our work, but the fact is that running around fascistly protecting my IP is not what the essential spirit of Rock and Roll is about, in fact its contrary!!!

      I think that as the 21st century gets rolling, we're going to see a more holistic and inclusive approach to making money in the music biz. The archetype of "the band as demigods" and all else as mortals will fade, in exchange for the valuation of a band as a mindset, and a holistic experience. At the consumer level, this will manifest as a diverification of options as to how you can buy into a given bands experience. Bound no more by the extremely limited idea that a band can only make money through CD's and t-shirts, in the coming years you will likely see a rich new set of entertainment experiences involving digital media, visual art, and even smells and foods offered as a part of a bands experience, rather than the bland current offering of a "show", which usually consists of sitting in plastic seats and drooling!

      These offering will be diverse, and a given band will offer several levels of entertainment experience ranging from a normal show up to a complete experience, including food, dancers, and brushing elbows with the performers (for more money). While the nature of these experiences will vary greatly by the band, (belly dancers for Dead can Dance, corporate sponsors, free Pepsi and open dance floors for Britney spears) they will have their roots in a common concept that everybody already knows: an artist isn't somebody you pay money to hear sing, a good artist is someone you identify with, a good artist is a personification of a way of being, a way of thinking, s/he gives gives voice to your tribe, singing the unownable truth that defines a part of who you are, and who everybody who listens is...

      As evidenced by the proliferation of P2P technologies, this idea of "music as community" is already embraced by younger generations, who so lightheartedly "steal" from their music idols..."Of course we can take it...its our tribe...its our music, about our truths." Is the general sentiment, and is in fact THE threat to standard labels, not the p2p technology itself, and will continue to be a threat untill record companies recognize the changing role of music in our society and embrace the ideas of the youth, the financial praxis of which will be the commodification of entertainers as facilitators of global idealogical communities, rather than proprietors of intellectual content.

  • Couple of thoughts (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PhotoGuy ( 189467 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @06:47PM (#2952864) Homepage
    This reminds me of the system (in Japan, think?) where people carry little wireless devices saying what they like in a partner, and they help spot folks which are good matches. Kinda silly, but interesting nonetheless.

    On the distributed P2P system, where stuff is traded as people walk by, it seems like this is a pretty simple system to thwart. Police officers could simply carry a unit themselves, and when they see a system offering up copyrighted or pirated content, they just confiscate the gear. Pretty simple. I don't think you'll ever see it take off because of this (among other reasons).

    -me

    • On the distributed P2P system, where stuff is traded as people walk by, it seems like this is a pretty simple system to thwart. Police officers could simply carry a unit themselves, and when they see a system offering up copyrighted or pirated content, they just confiscate the gear. Pretty simple. I don't think you'll ever see it take off because of this (among other reasons).


      Its quite a bit more involved than that. The police (dirty donut eatin' pig!) would need some means of triangulating your position based on the radio waves from your device. The technology to do this sort of thing certain exists, but making it widespread enough to catch casual copyright violaters walking around is a pretty substainial goal; not one to be taken lightly.


      And of course if lots of people are using instead of just a few (and it would only be interesting/useful if lots of people are using it), what are the police going to do? Stop everyone? The logistics of stopping this are much more difficult than you suggest.

      • Well, as a person walks, they can track the relative position (in distance only) of a signal they are tracking, essintially becoming there own triangulation point(s).

        This is how subs can track objects with a 'ping'... (well, part of it).

        Couple that with the coming 'enhanced vision' of a law enforcement officer wearing glasses that overlay a image over reality, and the system could simply allow a person to walk around, with the system finding the location of transmitters, and the vision system pointing out the person it's probably coming from (enter precision GPS into the equation).

        Not that I'm saying it'll happen this way, but the tech WILL exist.
      • The police (dirty donut eatin' pig!) would need some means of triangulating your position based on the radio waves from your device.

        Sadly enough it would be easier than that, all they would need is your IP address (or future equivalent) to get you. All the cop does is bait you by accepting all incoming downloads and as soon as the "incoming copyright file" alarm goes off he can ask everyone in a 5 meter radius to stop and give their IP. What's that you say? A cop can't solicite, like when trying to arrest prostitutes? Wrong again! He just has his maching set to accept incoming downloads, he never asked you to send him a copyright file.

        Now, if you want to hear of something cooler, imagine everyone at a concert carrying one of these things and sharing not just songs and bootlegs from the band that is playing, but songs from different artists that others around them may enjoy. Since we can assume they all like the band that it is playing, it is quite possible that their likes will be similar when it comes to other music.

        • Re:Couple of thoughts (Score:2, Insightful)

          by dodald ( 195775 )
          I don't think the system would just arbitrarily send data. I imagine each user with list of availible files, and a list of wanted files. Each of which would need to be asked for. At least thats how I would do it.

          So, Does a cop asking for your list and then a file constitute soliciting?

          • (IANAL) (Score:3, Interesting)

            by los furtive ( 232491 )
            So, Does a cop asking for your list and then a file constitute soliciting?

            As long as you don't promote it, I don't see why not. But say that you publish it freely, broadcast it...well then better make sure no copyright stuff on it.

            It all seems to boil down to the same, I guess the only thing that changes in the story is with this device there are digital police walking around sniffing in public places. Any predictions on how long until that comes to pass? Before or after UAVs* become derigeur?

            Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
    • This reminds me of the system (in Japan, think?) where people carry little wireless devices saying what they like in a partner, and they help spot folks which are good matches. Kinda silly, but interesting nonetheless.

      It's called the Love Getty [geocities.com].
    • Except for the biggie - police don't autonomously enforce copyrights like they do with criminal law. If you get pulled over and the cop finds a huge stash of warez in your car, he doesn't haul you into the pokey and contact the BSA! Police do carry out court orders, which can be issued by courts that receive complaints of copyright infringement, but they're not proactive in this arena AT ALL. Now, this might not apply to a couple of the various FBI offices, but they're hardly thick on the ground...

  • P2P conference coming up (Score:4, Informative)

    by Sick Boy ( 5293 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @06:47PM (#2952865) Homepage
    O'Reilly did a conference on this, "Using Two-way Pagers as Peer-to-peer Devices"
    , done by previously reported about "brian d foy". The link is here [oreillynet.com]. I wasn't able to attend, but it sounds like just what this article is talking about. Mayhap brian has notes posted somewhere.
    • Codecon [codecon.org] was [slashdot.org]
      recently announced on Slashdot. It's a conference on P2P and crypto code, taking place Feb 15-17 at the DNA Lounge [dnalounge.com] in San Francisco. Unlike the more commercial/marketing flavor of conference, presenters need to have actual working code.* There's now a Schedule [codecon.org] as well as a Program [codecon.org].
      In addition to the code presentations, there are also several panels on legality, security, and business models by a number of usual suspects.

      So be there or be square!

      * ok, or at least well-rigged demos :-)

  • Why would I want to swap my whatever for your whatever?

    Do you think that many folks would be interested in my collection of big-furry-guy-smut and male chorus recordings?

    P2P works 'cause folks can browse. Without browsing we might as well all burn CDs and send them chain-mail to eachother, then at least there'd be a chance of tastes being somewhat congruent.

  • Are we living in the ten-year bubble before the collapse of entertainment media copy prevention?


    Yea, that or the total ban on any non-government controlled electronic devices.
  • But sadly, I think it needs a bit more work. Otherwise, the first cop you walk past will nail you for illegally supplying copyrighted material to the PDA in his pocket.
    • I'm wondering how entrapment laws would apply to something like this.
    • Plus, the minute the MPAA/RIAA decides this is a problem, they write up a handy little app that shares an unending stream of random data. Since devices pull content without the user actively looking for it, suddenly your PDA is full of garbage.

      Better yet, they could make their little program send itself out over and over again (with different names). Then everyone who gets it and is dumb enough to run it would become a source of the problem. Wow...and we haven't even begun to consider what the script kiddies might do with such a technology.

      • Re:A very exciting idea... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by sethg ( 15187 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @09:28PM (#2953371) Homepage
        Plus, the minute the MPAA/RIAA decides this is a problem, they write up a handy little app that shares an unending stream of random data.
        For a long time, I've wondered: why didn't RIAA use this technique to deal with Napster, rather than suing it into oblivion? For the amount they spent on lawyers, they could have easily set up a few thousand computers on DSL lines running Napster, claiming to have every top-40 song that's been published in the past fifty years, and sending out MP3 files of white noise. If nine out of ten customers who try to download a song end up getting one of the noise recordings instead, what are those customers going to do -- sue? They'd just give up on Napster in a New York minute. Problem solved.

        Then it hit me: if they revealed that Napster is so easy to defeat without resorting to the law, they can't tell Congress and the media about how The Entertainment Industry Will Be Doomed unless stiffer copyright legislation is passed. Bwah-hah-hah!

      • ...they write up a handy little app that shares an unending stream of random data. Since devices pull content without the user actively looking for it, suddenly your PDA is full of garbage.

        Add public key crypto to the system. All participants can have an anonymous handle, with their public key stored on some trusted registry. Now my PDA can tell the difference between joebloe45 and goatpope12, and their current ratings ("klepto-karma"?)

        Maybe I am interested in snarfing Ironman. It just so happens that mrguano's PDA has a copy, but his kleptokarma is only 1.4 No problem, I have spare storage, so my PDA gratefully accepts it. When I get home, I discover that this isn't Ozzy, but a really bad Joe Cocker rendition of Ironman. So I "moderate" mrguano down for that. Or if it's what I want, I moderate him up.

        Suppose my PDA gets a copy from someone with a 1.4, then finds another offer from a node with a higher rating. No problem, just discard the less sure copy in favor of the one from the higher rated unit. I can afford to let my PDA fill up with crap from low-rated peers, knowing that it is likely better than nothing, and that if a "more reputable" offer comes along, my PDA will automatically do the substitution.

        If you want to get a bit fancier, add a feedback system to the registry, like ebay. And throw in a blacklist feature for those that want to make or hear accusations. There are all kinds of things a motivated group could do...
        • Any attempt at cheat-proofing karma requires a central system which is by definition not a peer.

          So while it's a nice try, you'd have to trust people to keep their karmas right. And the minute you put in a system for that, you may as well just rely on a pubkey web of trust. That could work, but only if the web becomes dense enough (and even then you either need keyservers or have to carry around huge chunks of the trust-web's data in your device).

          So that defeats the peer-to-peer nature of the network. Seems to me that we'll need semi-smart clients - "Transfered two files from client X with incorrect MD5 hashes - assuming bad netlink or untrusted peer", "Data transfered is not advertized size", etc. Maybe a given peer could keep a short term "karma-cache" of a couple hosts (user configurable number). Then at a LAN party, say, a misbehaving client could get automagically shut-out of the network while clients that behaved correctly gradually increased their trust. Add in a little button "Trust +1" or "Trust -1" in the client and we're good to go.

          Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass but it sounded cool to me!

          --Knots

  • Ugh (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 04, 2002 @06:53PM (#2952881)
    Yeah right - until you go for your first 'walk in the park' and come back to find your device full of spam, bestiality porn, and suffering it's 43rd DoS attack of the day.

    Keep a door/port/service open and the standard assholes will try to fuck you up. This is no different.

    This is the same argument that makes the me laugh at the bluetooth proponents...."Imagine walking down the street --- pass a pizza parlor and *bing* you get a pizza coupon on your bluetooh device." Ugh. So in this vision of the future every fucking retailer out there that spends $50 on a card will be allowed to spam me incessantly as long as i'm withing their broadcast footprint?

    I'd rather put a bullet in my head now...... it'll be less painful.

    j

  • Already being done... (Score:5, Informative)

    by SpookComix ( 113948 ) <spookcomixNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday February 04, 2002 @06:53PM (#2952883) Homepage Journal
    IMHO this vehicle for data sharing would be very discreet, anonymous, and unstoppable.

    Hate to break it to you, folks, but this is already being done. It's called the Gaydar [usatoday.com].

    No, this is not a troll, and this is not a joke. Check the link.

    --SC

  • What part of the chain.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SteveX ( 5640 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @06:54PM (#2952898) Homepage
    They would attack the manufacturers of the hardware. Make possession of a promiscuous mp3 player an offense the same way possession of a radar detector or certain types of radios is an offense in some places. Go after the supply chain.

    The govt is probably gearing up now for the War on Piracy. :)

    -Steve
    • So use general purpose devices. Another 10 years of PDA evolution and you'll be able to do this all in software, on top of standard PDA hardware. They can declare the software illegal, but how effective has that sort of thing ever been and stopping distribution?

      The effects this sort of thing will have on the media industry really do worry me. Sure, it would be nice to cut the big media companies out of the loop. But will people really pay the artists? And what about movies, where it's not hard to spend $100 filming? Who will pay for that?

  • Bluetooth anyone? (Score:2, Informative)

    by freitasm ( 444970 )
    Good idea... Already implemented as Bluetooth. Some of BT Profiles implement File Sharing, Information Sync, OBEX, PPP over Ethernet.

    The device is a small radio, costs nothing to make, buy stack from a range of different sources, works with PDA, Desktops/Notebooks (PCMCIA or USB), cellphones, headsets, Stereo/Receivers, what else?

    We have this already!
    • the problem with everybody walking around with active bluetooth devices is that iw will jam 802.11 wireless ethernet. They share the same spectrum, but bluetooth checks for new channels 1,600 times per second, then just grabs one it wants and uses it. If this channel is being used by 802.11 devices in close proximity, 802.11 politely waits (it checks for channels far less often) then does it's search. In essence, bluetooth DOS's 802.11. this is why you don't see bluetooth devices made by Apple.
  • Cybikos can share Internet connections between each other within a ceratin range; as long as someone has a Cybiko hooked up to his main computer and its internet connection, other Cybikos can pick up on the signal and use it for wireless internet. Pretty neat, actually-I wonder how hard it would be to hack them up for a complete p2p system as described above?

  • There's already a kids game available that does it (Score:5, Informative)

    by codemonster ( 127493 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @07:00PM (#2952937) Homepage
    http://www.p-o-x.com
    This kids game is played similiar to how the article describes pocket p2p. the game is a hand held that is played by a user to teach its warrior how to fight. As the trainer walks around town,(mall,school,neighborhood), the game can sense other consoles and battle them. The trainer later sees that his warrior has won or lost a number of battles, and in the process gained abililities or weapons.

  • You're Forgetting Something (Score:3, Insightful)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @07:03PM (#2952949) Journal

    Are we living in the 10 year bubble before copy protection breaks down (or something to that effect).

    If you can log onto the free P2P network anytime you want, so can the FBI. That, and a little signal triangulation is all they need for a conviction.

  • Implementation (Score:2, Interesting)

    by leonia ( 246522 )
    See our 7DS [columbia.edu] for an implementation of a closely related concept.
  • Thats what these things will become. Unless you're constantly scanning for whats available, or make a list of what you're looking for, your only other option is to just collect everything. Sometimes this makes sense, but in most cases you don't want to collect but a very small fraction of what's available, and storage will become a rather extreme issue very quickly.

    Still, if only working with small numbers of files at a time, this could work. If, for instance, everyone is currently trading the latest movie, it would be rather simplistic to simply walk around and transfer it to everyone during the course of a day, then by the end of the day, everyone will have it, and this spreading well, well, spread. Isolated to a single office where the first copy gets sent, in a very short period of time, the entire city could have collected the same file as the number of people in possession of it grows exponentially.

    The downside of this is when you start collecting stuff you don't want. I suppose if I'm only collecting mp3's, I won't be picking up some guy's porn collection, but if my collection is more diversified and I'm set in a "collect everything you find" mode, this could get interesting.

    -Restil

  • Nice idea, but a hard problem (Score:4, Insightful)

    by legLess ( 127550 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @07:09PM (#2952980) Journal
    I love this idea. Really, I love it. But there are some real problems:

    First, making and selling these devices will be very hard. Not technologically, but legally and socially. I bet most of the tech work could be done in 6 months and the device could be on the market.

    But this isn't Linux - development and sales of these devices will have to be centralized rather than distributed. This means a large corporation. The devices have to be very popular for Metcalfe's Law [smsu.edu] to make them useful, so they'll have to be marketed. In other words, there'll be one large company for the Feds or RIAA to target and/or intimidate.

    Second, this is the farthest thing from unstoppable. How hard would it be for the Feds to setup a listening station in Central Park and flat-out arrest everyone carrying on of these? Just because they're in your pocket doesn't mean they're hidden - they'd have to announce themselves to as much of the world as possible to be of any use. Shit, the RIAA could setup a hidden station in Central Park to perform a DOS (or format) on each one as it wanders by.

    Technological solutions are notoriously hard to apply to social problems, and copyright is a social problem. No magical P2P device will sound the death-knell for copyright. It's going to take a sea-change in the way people relate to and value information.
    • You do not have to have a manufacturer who implements this as hardware. If you have a sufficient hardware platform, the software will be made to use it (KaZaA f.i.). So all you need is a bluetoothed PDA with some kind of "wake on ad-hoc LAN" and someone who has no moral objection to this kind of filesharing and is able to code the application. The "wake" could also be used for other, legal applications and could therefore be a feature on newer PDA's
    • True, this will never happen on a large scale using devices dedicated to file swapping, as whoever made them would be lawyered into a smoking crater. But don't forget that cell phones and PDAs are converging and acquiring media capabilities. The industry hasn't. [slashdot.org]

      Suppose in five years the rage is a PDA/phone device that can download media streams from licensed providers, and can do P2P messaging. How hard would it be to write an app to turn one of these into a P2P media sharing platform? Answer: depends strongly on how the device is designed, but not necessarily difficult. Writing said app would likely be illegal for one reason or another, but once it's out it out. And surprise, surprise, devices like this are already showing up in Japan.

  • Everything can be controlled (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Eloquence ( 144160 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @07:09PM (#2952983)
    It's nice to fantasize about a world where all existing barriers to content distribution are broken. But as long as the law is practically controlled by large corporations, these fantasies will remain just that: fantasies. In the given example case, it would be simple to impose restrictions on the manufacturers of such devices not to include distribution mechanisms without built-in DRM. (Black market is not an issue here since these devices are only relevant when you reach a certain critical mass, as some manufacturers such as Cybiko have already learned.)

    Furthermore, this kind of thinking is still rather primitive: "The content industry controls everything, but ha!, we, the great hackers & crackers, will break everything they come up with, and then we will distribute it for free! But if they ask nicely, we will still send the artists a check, or something." What is currently happening in the software industry -- the slow substitution of proprietary software with copylefted software developed collaboratively by volunteers and supported by sympathetic individuals and corporations -- must repeat in all other areas of information production. If that is the case, we can use all the existing infrastructure to distribute the content in question, be it Bluetooth or be it UMTS, without any limitations. Or has anyone ever sent you a nasty letter for downloading a Linux kernel?

    So we need to develop revenue and marketing models that can compete with the existing oligarchy. And in order to take the laws into our own hands, we need to reform (or rather, reinvent) democracy itself. The tools that are needed to accomplish these goals are essentially similar and closely related:

    • Rating mechanisms that allow people to find high-quality content, as well as reputation mechanisms, that make it possible to select ratings according to the people who have expressed them. This makes traditional mass marketing obsolete if widely deployed. Think Slashdot (or rather Kuro5hin) effect, but on a p2p network.
    • Easy and secure user-to-user payment standards. Don't think "micropayments" (the basic micropayment idea is to have incredibly tiny payments running transparently in the background all the time), think mini-payments that are clearly associated with specific transactions. Support a website, request a feature for an open-source-product, support an especially good artist, support the production of a movie or book by a renowned creator Street Performer Protocol style etc. etc. -- but much easier and more wide-spread than possible with Paypal. Probably best implemented with prepaid digital coins.
    • Distributed, secure voting systems. Currently even open source projects have not yet agreed on such a standard. Optimally, the voting process should be combined with the information gathering process, so that people who vote will also be able to discuss and rate comments on the same page.

    These are all key technologies, all implemented in software, that are much more important than any file-sharing solution alone. For all of them, user interfaces are of utmost importance: One click too many, one second too much latency and people will not use them. Nevertheless, little progress has been made to wide deployment of these technologies. These technologies will not only make it possible to make money with any kind of content, they will also allow more direct participation of people in the lawmaking process -- if only on the level of newly formed political parties at first.

    It's all nice and good to complain about the stranglehold that the content industry has on content distribution and on lawmakers. And I'm the first to support the kid who is locked up for copying an MP3 or DivX movie. But if there's not a serious counter-culture, the industry will win. There will be licenses required for cryptography. There will be DRM in every major operating system (even in Linux, in the form of binary only drivers), because otherwise hardware will simply not run. There will be laws like the SSSCA to enforce this. This will be done on an international level using organizations such as WIPO and WTO, which are fundamentally undemocratic. There will be protests and cracks, but think "war on drugs" here: You will find few people on this site who think locking drug consumers up en masse is a good idea -- yet that's exactly what's been happening for the last decades. Don't complain about your government but then naively assume that they are actually still kind of good misled guys who just need to be sent a few nice letters. Not with the money involved in this game, now and in the future.

    Create counter-culture, not cracks. That's what the revolution is all about, baby.

    • In the effort to defeat things sich as the DCMA and the SSSCA, one argument seems to be constantly negletted (though well known): when the entetainment media is controlled by a relatively few, they have the power to push out whatever message they want. If pop-culture continues to remain in the hands of the media elite, we risk the media elite slowly, but carefully redirecting the average Americans thoughts in the direction that they (the pop media) want them to go. They have been doing it for some time now, and the message is clear (if you stand back): "Look at the shiny thing! Indulge yourself! Do not concern yourelf with the man behind the curtain..."

      This danger is well known to those who read Slashdot...I constantly see the benifits of P2P to independent artists being championed here, but rarely do I hear of the stakes (i.e., why it is so important for independent arrtists to have a voice).

      It is important to inform others of the loss of personal freedom brought on by poor laws, but do not forget to inform others of the loss of societal freedom that comes with the loss of independent and uncorrupted voices.

      • You're right, of course: The benefits of open culture are easily overlooked. This is also true for operating systems. On technical merits alone, we might have gone with OS/2 -- but it was still a proprietary system owned by a large corporation that would have been used in the same way by elites to exercise control as Windows currently is. Unfortunately, the main spokesperson for freedom in software, RMS, whose arguments are usually fairly sound, is too dogmatic and abrasive to carry these ideas. Oftentimes we see benchmarks about Linux, Windows and MacOS, and forget what the competition is really all about: freedom or no freedom.

        On a site like MP3.com (which itself is run by Vivendi) you will find lots of subversive music: Music critical of the war, or of religion, or of any social or political policy. In other words, exactly the kind of stuff that can hardly be found in our "clean" world of pop culture. This is important because it is a powerful counter-force to the many forces that tell us to be "adjusted" and to not question social norms and mores (some of these forces live in ourselves and are evolutionary in nature -- "herd behavior"). Music nowadays is often completely devoid of meaning. Taking back culture is necessary to create a new society.

    • While the medium of software lends itself to long-term open source development, many of the things commonly shared via P2P are not. Music, movies, and television shows are often items used only once, or used sporadically over the course of several years. My copy of "Home Alone!" on VHS doesn't get nearly as much use as say, my operating system or word processor. Perhaps because of their inherent linearity, most entertainment products do not need to be updated over time. It's simply more entertaining to experience new episodes of The Simpsons, rather than watch updated versions of the old ones.

      An open source counterculture has developed because the need for quality software is not fulfilled (and perhaps cannot be fulfilled) by large corporations with lots of funding. The public's desire for music, movies, and television, however, is pretty much satisfied. It also costs lots of money to obtain the equipment to create commercial quality entertainment products. While a lot of popular music seems to be really amazingly bad, the people still like it, and they still spend money on it, and more of it gets made. A counterculture dedicated to creating what they consider to be high quality free music product may develop a large cult following, but would have extreme difficulty becoming as popular as products with heavy monetary backing. If this hypothetical subculture did eventually reach widespread popularity, it would probably be purchased by a larger media producer sooner rather than later.

      In order to try and change the way entertainment products are distributed (exorbitant prices on CDs, etc.), a counterculture needs to focus not on the creation of the entertainment products, but on creating an effective method of distribution. Because the industry is so money driven, for a truly effective new paradigm to catch on, there would have to be some way to get at least some money to the people who want it.

      Also, the public at large doesn't really know what's going on. Many people are perfectly happy to wander into Tower Records and blow $20 on the latest offering from N'Sync. Perhaps with some education they could see the light.

  • ...spoiled by warez kiddies?

    Crackers break shrink-wrapped software? Industry moves to sucky subscription-based model and/or "product activation".

    People rip CDs and post them online? Copy-protected CDs that won't play on my box.

    Warez kiddies use P2P wireless to circumvent copyright? Maybe they will go after P2P wireless.

    Hey y'all, if we end up having to pay some kind of onerous tax on these devices and/or having lengthy debates about whether or not they should be legal and/or having more FCC regulations and/or having violence in the streets involving stupid ugly paper-mache puppets, will you do me a favor? Find the nearest warez kiddie and piss on him.

  • Pocket P2P - Multihop Wireless Networks (Score:4, Informative)

    by hakker ( 11892 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @07:16PM (#2953011) Homepage
    This will happen, it's just a matter of time. All the research in the networking industry is in wireless. The logic end for that research is fast, functional, multihop wireless networks that trade data via P2P type operations. Not just Palm pilots, but everything. The reason that this is not possible right now is that it is NOWHERE AS EASY AS IT SOUNDS.

    There is a major problem with wireless networks in a multihop Ad-hoc setting and it is called Hidden Terminals. Essentially, due to the medium and the hardware, you can't (cheaply) implement Collision Detection or more specifically Carrier Sensing like CSMA/CD protocols such as Ethernet. A terminal between two other terminals can hear both of them, but the terminals on the edges don't know what each other is doing and they may both try to send data to the center node at the same time, resulting in interference and a collision. Here are some research papers if you're really interested but be warned, they are heavy on the math.

    CCRG Research at UCSC Publications [ucsc.edu]

    And more specifically,
    C. L. Fullmer and J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves, "Solutions to Hidden Terminal Problems in Wireless Networks", Proc. ACM SIGCOMM 97, Cannes, France, September 14-18, 1997. [ucsc.edu] - There is also a pdf version on the CCRG page.

    Enjoy!
  • I'm looking forward to the day when entertainment media is no longer shackled by ridiculous anti-copyright-infringement measures and the consumer can do whatever he wants to with such content as long as it stays within the law. When laws are broken, it's time for various branches of law enforcement to arrest and prosecute. Sooner we get there, the less I have to worry about losing my ability to legitimately share MY data with others.
  • Sounds great, but what happens when someone writes a virus for these things and you repeatedly get infected when you pass through a croweded public area?

    Even UNIX servers aren't immune to worms.... Chances are good that Your Favorite Software Company (MS) would write an OS for these, and virii would be spreading even worse than they do now...

  • I don't see this happening as mass produced hardware, mostly because of the DMCA. Any company that puts this sort of thing out would be liable for contributory infringement. I could, however, see it happening as an open source hardware project. Maybe you could go to a web site hosted somewhere safe by someone who has no desire to visit the US and download the schematics, board layout, and firmware and build the thing yourself. There are companies out there that will make prototype PCBs relatively cheap, and components can also be found without too much difficulty. Probably there would be folks who would offer prebuilt kits or something, but they'd have to be careful.

  • ... is "Pocket Switching".
  • Why couldn't Joe "The Donut *Machine*" Police Officer just carry one of these around? He might even add a little beeper to go off when his device detects you aren't using ?

    You could encrypt things, or password protect them, but then you lose the "everyone shares, everyone gains" core of the thing.

  • Tracable? Yes that's part of the beauty (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sker ( 467551 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @07:33PM (#2953079) Homepage Journal
    I have seen a number of comments regarding how it would be easy for Law Enforcement to nab you - yes this is precisely true.

    The point is that the powers that be will then be forced to go after "regular" people, which up 'til now they have not wanted to do for fear of alienating their customers to a point even greater than they do now. This plan would leave fewer intermediaries for the RIAA & co. to bully before they have to come down on their own potential sales market directly.

    Additionally, when Jane Musiqlover actually becomes criminalized, that's when this "class war" will come to a head. The first time a senator's teenaged offspring get's hauled in for file-sharing in the park, we'd see some serious talk about what makes someone a criminal. At that point, I'd hope "we, the people" would finally be ready to stand up for our rights.

    To use a popular paraphrasing of Gandhi:

    First they ignore you,
    Then they laugh at you,
    Then they fight you,
    Then you win.

    When the RIAA actually fights their consumers directly is when they've actually lost.

    I hope.
    • Yeah, you'd hope it would work this way. But then you think about Jeb Bush's daughter, and where she would be if she was black and her first name was Charmaine.


      When the Senator's daughter gets nailed for filesharing, it will be a "private family matter". When Jimmy down the street gets hauled in, it'll be time to string up the hacker.


      Still, I really hope you are right. A law that everyone breaks invalidates itself and creates disrespect for every other law.

    • I would say that this argument is very similar to the issue of Marijuana.

      The fact is that this is a very common drug, yet it's still criminilized for little to no real reason since it doesn't seem to be any more dangerous than alcohol. We can debate this, but the fact is that smoking weed is probably as common as fileswapping (Maybe more so, or probably at the same time!). According to your logic, maryjane should be legal by now.

      E.g. "The first time a senator's teenaged offspring get's hauled in for smoking a joint in the park, we'd see some serious talk about what makes someone a criminal."

      So I would say that if Jane Budlover is still being prosecuted for blazing up now and then, she's going to still have problems downloading copyrighted files for a very long time.

      -Russ
  • Either way, they'll never truely stop us from sharing. If they lock down code, we'll move to the ever-denser disposable media format of the moment.

  • Deep Eddy (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @07:40PM (#2953104) Homepage Journal
    It's criminal that so many people have posted to this story without mention Bruce Sterling's highly relevent (and extremely enjoyable) story, "Deep Eddy" [sfsite.com].

  • Two problems (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Salamander ( 33735 ) <`jeff' `at' `pl.atyp.us'> on Monday February 04, 2002 @08:00PM (#2953156) Homepage Journal

    First is that routing in an ad-hoc network of that scale can be very difficult. People are working on it (see books by Charles Perkins or C-K Toh) but it's sorta not there yet.

    The second problem, which exacerbates the first, is that battery power will likely continue to be an issue. The reason this matters is that it can make routing even more of a challenge, especially when nodes keep dropping out to conserve battery power. There are also issues with trying to run expensive algorithms - e.g. crypto - on slow power-constrained devices.

    If you allow at least some of the devices in your system to be stationary (and therefore mains-powered) things become a lot more interesting. They key is not so much the wired/wireless nature of the network, but rather the number of nodes - more nodes generally means more opportunities to obscure who's sending and who's receiving what - and how the high-level protocols they're using above TCP/IP.

    • Why run crypto? If the system is going to be localized anonymous hardware-based, crypto is a non-issue, because there aren't going to be any usernames/passwords/credit card information/SSN/etc. passed on the air waves. So what if a cop is listening in with a device...it'd be just shy of impossible to catch you. And they problably wouldn't care anyways-the average traffic or guard-duty cop wouldn't know Napster from Morpheus from Gnutella anyways.
    • ...battery power will likely continue to be an issue...
      Who needs a battery? This is a gadget you'd only use when you're moving around. And when you're moving around, you have an obvious source of power [computer.org].
  • Okay, okay. I'm as much for sticking it to the man as the next guy, but really, are there any uses for peer-to-peer other than for evading copyright?

    Put another way, if we ignore the copyright issue for now, what situation wouldn't be better handled with some centralization?

    For example, consider the various music trading protocols out there. All of the peer-to-peer systems suffer to some degree or another scalability issues. We could expect much better if we had a centralized search engine and dedicated servers, a la Google and the WWW. Naptster performed pretty well, although I think that one could argue successfully that it would have performed better if the songs themselves had been centralized.

    The situation put forth by the submitter don't quite fit the same mold: we do not have world reachability. Instead we only talk to those that are near to us, which limits the possibilities considerably. Unlike the current situation in which we would like to find any matching resource if it is available, we can only hope to find them if they are available and close to us. This could be done now on the internet, and makes scalability much less of an issue. Nobody seems to want to do it, however.

    I don't really see this as a reasonable situation: in 10 years we could expect to have devices that are always connected to the internet, and we would want that world-reachability. In this situation, dedicated servers are still possible and more desireable in many, if not most, cases.

    Unless, of course, our motivation is simply to avoid intellectual property laws.

    So, what are the advantages other than that?

  • Don't limit your ideas to devices for P2P filesharing via wireless. Instead, think of some technology that every student in the US will want or need. (Sorta like graphing calculators in high school). But imagine this device is a 'tablet PC' that replaces all textbooks, notes, etc. and allows various interaction during class with the same automated ad-hoc P2P networking that would be handy for filesharing. But this device must be general purpose, just like an ordinary desktop PC. And of course most everyone else will have such a device in various form factors, simply because there are so many useful applications that will develop. Once enough people are using these devices, it will become possible to not only share files P2P, but establish community networks that automatically route out to other larger networks and Internet backbones. Combine this with wide-band technologies and both the communications and content industries could be in for some real change. As long as the SSSCA doesn't go through.. *shudder*

  • The users are far from sharing mp3's (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @08:54PM (#2953280) Homepage
    such technology could be easily used as spyware.. Why risk meeting or handing off a cd rom? the 2 couriers could easily "swap" their state secrets wihout getting any closer than 100 feet. Granted I'm sure the CIa is looking for such swapping already but being able to do it without having a laptop open...

    the evil uses scare me more than the joy of seeing entertainment crime families destroyed...
  • If the technology came 60-80 years ago, we might see a big chance of the "media giant" collapse. The only media giants that really existed back then were the newspapers, and the "what's good for big business is good for everyone" doctrine hadn't become quite so popular as it is today. And it's the meme that needs to be fought (into a more balanced and tempered form, at the very least) if this sort of thing is going to happen.

    Most slashdot readers realize this; what I don't think many know is that is has to be fought diplomatically and carefully. The status quo is powerful and has the mic; simply creating the technology and declaring the days of profit from media over will only create a harsh backlash. This is shaping up to be a battle precisely because it was framed as a revolution. Middle ground technology, serious activism, smart compromises, and thoroughly polite and ethical behavior might get us the result we're looking for.

    Just my $.02.

  • Any device that would be "broadcasting" music (or whatever) across some sort of medium would then fall under the jurisdiction of the FCC. The laws would be changed which regulate the ability of small devices to communicate with each other (i.e. wireless phones with their bases, remote controles, etc.) and would then include any communication between two devices not purchased simultaneously (for example). Failing that, the RIAA would make it illegal to allow any music playing device to collect said music without the expressed concent of the user, inserting "annoyance" into the equation, which negates the entire process. Not to mention all other types of "community" communication devices have failed (all those cute little beepers which go off if anyone else in the area has one), and this would only work if EVERYONE did it, which they wouldn't.

    Face it, you can't fight city hall. If you play their game, you will lose. Music is (and IMO, should be) a product which people can charge money for. Yes, the system is old and should change, but a free-for-all is not the answer.

    -d

  • The Content-Addressable Web [onionnetworks.com] provides HTTP extensions that solve many of the problems associated with distributing content across ad hoc networks. This is because the addressing of the system is location-independant and content-centric. This makes it perfect for unreliable and transient wireless networks.

    --
    Justin Chapweske, Onion Networks [onionnetworks.com]
  • I guess. In exactly the same way that a sheet of glass "stretches" when it falls twenty feet onto concrete.
  • as far as an end user is concerned, it's all free downloads from the web.
    nothing on current p2p systems labels music as 'freely distributable' or 'copy protected'
    therefore, how could an end user get busted? they never agreed to any copy restrictions, they just picked a song that sounded good and listened to it.
    the current range of 802.11 is a limiting factor, how many people in my neighborhood have a thrashmetal collection for my listening pleasure?
    UWB ultra wide band radio technology, however, promises much more bandwidth and range, but it'd still need an uplink to the web somewhere on the network to come close to what I can find on gnutella now.

  • I keep saying, and I'll say again. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tcc ( 140386 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @09:57PM (#2953453) Homepage Journal
    Stop putting restrictions to obsolete stuff,

    innovate new technologies that will want the user to migrate to your new system, NEEDING THE HARDWARE to play it back because it will bring ADDED value/features.

    This is like seeing a good movie at the theatre, would you have enjoyed a ripped screener on your x inch monitor at home or did you get a good experience watching it at the theatre with the big screen the big sound and all? yes you can reproduce that at home, but at a price, a price most people pirating the movies cannot afford. Think lord of the rings for example. Did they go bankrupt? No... far from that!

    It's not my job to bring new ideas and tell these companies about the future, there are people paid 10x what I am doing right now to market new ideas and so on, if they can't deliver, they aren't worth the price they are paid, and the industry deserves to die like any buisness doing wrong decisions, if tomorrow my CEO would do something stupid, the gov wouldn't jump in at 100MPH to save us, I don't see why this should be any different for anyone else...

    To get back to my point, if they would innovate on new ideas that would make the experience so much better than pirating it, they wouldn't lose. They can't blame their content being more and more crappy and more of the same to pirates, that's only a lame excuse. I still see movies making tons of money, big success, and I still go to the theatre when there's good stuff out.

    HDTV is starting to appear mainstream (took a while) see? copy that to a DIVX file, its going to be huge and cumberstone to move around at a decent quality and no loss in resolution, copy it to a VHS or SVHS? you lose the initial quality, this is just an example.

    Put new technologies with good content, I'm sure people will gladly pay for it. The fact that a lot of movies are being pirated and it's "hurting sales' is simply because they suck too much to go see in the theatre in the first place.

    It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that EVERY protection scheme got broken, it pisses me off to see that the profit I am paying big corporation goes in barriers instead of innovating to bring me, the customer, a better experience for every $ invested.

    They are at the service of the customers (customer by definition: someone that PAID to get a good), not the other way around, some people there seems to forget that very basic rule.

  • Already here (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Zerth ( 26112 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @10:05PM (#2953465)
    Not that anyone will see this, but the old Cybiko would almost be perfect for this. The wireless link isn't all that fast and only has a range of 150 ft or so, but can already hold 64megs of card ram and has a C devkit. The new cybiko might be even better, I've heard it has a 500 ft range.

    The real kicker is that the old cybiko is only 30-60 dollars, depending on where you get it.(which is really nifty, cause if you buy two, you can leave one hooked up to your computer, giving you a short range network that let's you use a WAP browser)
    • If cybiko made one that looked a little more professional, and bumped the maximum range up (maybe use the FRS radio band? those have like 2-5 *mile* ranges), they would sell a boatload. Add handwriting recognition and ditch the keyboard, and it would beat the wireless palms hands-down. Add cell capability, so that individual units could bridge traffic (without being wired to a PC) to the internet for long-haul p2p if nobody's in range, and you've got a handheld that always has wireless access, with no fees other than your cell phone bill, and is as cheap as a palm pilot.

      I'm dying for p2p wireless-- but everybody wants to make money on the service, so don't expect a lot of help from the major vendors. Go get 'em, Cybiko!
  • Right now the entertainment industry is trying hard to reduce the power of fair-use exceptions to copyright law, and thereby expand their own power.


    Rant mode on.

    Right, and it's quite convenient for them to be able to point to the large number of technologies developed specifically to allow greedy technophiles to cheat the artists out of even the pittance they receive from the sale of their albums.

    Crowing about "fair use" in an article devoted to figuring out an even more succesful scheme for copyright infringement is insulting to people who really care about fair use. It's openly dishonest -- "Well, fair use, nyah nyah nyah." Garbage like this tells the record mafia -- and the government -- that we're a bunch of irresponsible children who can't be trusted to use technology legally. It tells them that the only way to ensure that copyright (without which I'd be out of a job, and the GPL would be useless) can continue to be enforceable at all is with digital rights management mandatory in all hardware for which it is meaningful.

    "DRM will never work blah blah Turing machine blah blah compilers would be protected technology blah freenet blah." Infeasibility doesn't stop the War on Drugs from ruining thousands of lives a year. It doesn't stop China's murderous war on Falun Gong, either. Laws are not subject to regression testing or quality control -- they're just passed, and enforced. Usually with a ruthlessness that is proportional to their futility.

    Don't like the record mafia? Quit playing into their hands. Look here [free-music.com]. Plenty of free-as-in-speech mp3s for your legal downloading pleasure. Most of them are shitty; the same problem exists, I hear, on Sourceforge... I found Sparky and the Wipers [free-music.com] and Blues Motel [free-music.com] to be fairly good, but that's just me. Hell, even mp3.com [mp3.com] has some stuff that's not half bad. But advocating the sane-ification of copyright law by illegally copying music is about like supporting free software by pirating Windows.

    "I like Jimmy Buffett, anyone got any Jimmy Buffett? I'll trade it for some Wayne Newton."


    Fair use. Fantastic. There are artists out there who fucking agree with your ideas about copyright, Jamie -- and you're not listening to them, because you're busy advertising for the ones that don't.

  • Military Uses (Score:2, Interesting)

    by atathert ( 127489 )
    Not sure where I read this, but the US military is looking at using this type of technology for its next generation soldier equipment to provide networking between grunts, as well as planes, tanks, etc. (I can just see the jokes about Beowulf clusters.)
    Would be real useful for distributing tactical information, commands, and battlefield conditions.
  • Just check out jxta.org [jxta.org] to see exactly this sort of protcol. It lets you find peers, establish peer groups, share data in flexible ways, etc... It's also open source (Apache license), by the way.
  • Compaq's Western Research Lab has a project called Factoid which already implements what you describe. This project has been around the block a few times by now. Sorry to burst the bubble -- someone already thought of that -- but on the bright side, it was a really smart person, and the idea is still really really good. Check out Factoid here [compaq.com].

  • Oh come on. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by markaa ( 311298 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @11:08PM (#2953601) Homepage
    Think "Sony Walkman that trades music with whatever other devices are around."

    Now that's just stealing. I'm all for fair use with music that I buy, but this is absurd.

    The device need not connect to the internet (perhaps it can't) -- it talks to whatever other devices are around. "I like Jimmy Buffett, anyone got any Jimmy Buffett? I'll trade it for some Wayne Newton." A short-range hardware Gnutella. Set some parameters, go for a walk in a public park, come home with some new music. Pass it along.

    Still stealing! You can't transfer ownership of the music you've bought without tranferring the CD itself.

    Why are so many people obsessed with stealing music?

    -Mark
  • Once upon a time there was a way-cool research lab called DECWRL [compaq.com], though they're now known as "Compaq Western Research Laboratory". They did a number of cool projects, including little things like AltaVista [altavista.com] and the Linux-based Itsy PDA [compaq.com].


    One toy they built was the Factoid [compaq.com], a Peer-to-Peer information exchanging keychain dongle. It's about the size of a stick of gum, runs for a long time on watch-batteries, uses a short-range radio link, and trades things it knows with other Factoids, typically with data objects up to about 200 bytes long - business cards and that sort of thing.


    The Research Paper [compaq.com] ;

  • I don't see why people always point to the next technology on the horizon and say "That's it, that is going to change the world". The fact is, if we all wanted to share our files, we could run a public webserver and anyone that opened port 80 on our current IP address would be able to download our files. If you want a more static way, you could distribute the dyndns.org domain name, and have a search engine based on it... But guess what.., No one is doing it. No one will do it because no one wants to do it.

    Everyone wants to download files without sharing their own. It was a bain to Gnutella when it hit popularity, and it was a problem with Napster before it shared all your files behind your back.

    If you want to impliment the wave of the future, take a good look at today's technology first.
  • The usual Peer-to-Peer tools (ICQ/IM/etc, Napster/Gnutella/etc.) achieve much of their usefulness by using presence servers or index servers to keep track of who has what information, so you can find something you want, across a fairly wide part of the network, and then download it directly from somebody who has it, preferably nearby. That way the indexing system carries a relatively light load, while the heavy lifting is done peer-to-peer.

    This walkabout version wouldn't have the same advantages:

    • You can only exchange files with people near you, so it's only useful if you like what they've got.
    • There's no persistent communication, so if you keep an index of what somebody else has, it doesn't do much good after they walk away, unless you bump into them later.
    • You can only exchange indexes with people near you, and indexes about other people's data aren't very useful, unless the people near you run into the same people you run into. This is most likely to happen if you know each other, in which case you could trade your files directly :-)
    • Since indexes aren't very useful without persistent communications, you could just pass all your files along, using a flood-routing sort of system; in that case the indexes just prevent copying duplicates.
    • At that point, the system becomes a slow-moving parody of Usenet. But Usenet is already a slow-moving parody of itself [google.com]
  • Well, if the SSSCA passes, this is what I see as the future of these types of schemes. The RIAA/MPAA/AAP want to use prohibition to not have swapping on this scale take place, and this is what we'll get as a result.

    It will be illegal to make or sell these things in the US, but not in the 3rd world. So there will be a need to set up manufacturing overseas and smuggle them over the border. Then some outlaws will have to sell them here.

    The infrastructure is set up for this already. Street gangs in san diego and LA have ties to rebels and paramilitaries deep in south america. Usually these are temporary strategic alliances. The technology for these things would be of interest for operational coordination for the paramilitaries. So the gangs get them the technology in return for manufacturing a surplus.

    The surplus devices then become part of the drug/arms/people underground trade finding their way in with those products. It's a lot easier to get past dogs who can't sniff the difference between a walkman and a wireless portable music player.

    Once across the border, the street gangs and other players in underground marketing will take on the distribution. Likely the same people who sell cloned cell phones.

    There will also be a group of people who will modify hardware and software for a fee or with kits. This is like car ignition mod chips and cable descramblers.

    This is the system we will have for general purpose consumer electronics post SSSCA. It's a world where only outlaws can publish, and you can get shot during a tape recorder deal gone bad.
  • Fuck the MPAA, fuck CD's.

    Next time you go to a gig, wire up with all your fellow fans and *BUY THE RECORDING OF THE ACT RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF YOU*, carry it away in your pocket, thanks to shit like this.

    iPod v2 will have WiFi, I'm so sure. And if it doesn't, I'll eat my shorts. Promise.
  • (cracks knuckles)

    Here's why. It might work if you are sitting in a coffeeshop with one or two other people and you can sit there for a few minutes while your devices trade off, but what about walking past someone in the street, where there was only time to grab part of a file? What about if you were in a room with hundreds of similar devices, how would you keep the bitrate up and use channels efficiently? With present tech, that partial file could never be recieved fully, as the "same" file with a different length or checksum couldn't be integrated within the filesystem. Channel congestion and crosstalk would reduce concentrations of devices of nine or above to substandard bitrates. Eavesdropping concerns are rampant. Lastly, you could never make it cheap enough for the system to be adopted.

    Distributed services of this type require entirely new network service layers, not the least of which are:

    Seamless encryption. I do not want people to lock in on file transfers between me and a trusted client. Period. In addition, one might implement a 'friend' list that would only lock in on people that were known clients, or friends of a known client.

    Robust file transfer services that support successive and iterative media interleaving. As in, devices that query, "Hey, I have half of G. Love's Kick Drum, anyone got the other half? What about a different bitrate, or a slightly different checksum? I don't care, just give it to me and I'll integrate it with the half that I have on the fly."

    Semi-intelligent cooperation methods between groups of devices to relay content to distant users, and power and channel scheduling to prevent congestion in high-density concentrations of these devices. As in, "Anyone know anyone that knows anyone that has any 216? Think you can get it for me?"

    What about providing live recordings in realtime to people at a concert as part of their ticket price? You'd need broadcast data methods that have almost no upstream information, not even error correction, coming back to the reciever, as it would be wasteful of available channels. Instead, you'd need to be able to broadcast redundant media streams that could reconstruct themselves at the reciever, with minimal loss. You'd need an entirely new data transport service to realize this.

    But that's just me thinking. Nope, I'm not thinking about starting a company that does this with off-the-shelf hardware. No, I haven't put together simulations that indicate that concentrations of these devices in 'recieve from broadcast node' mode can work at 943KBps, in groups of 1500 on a group of three channels 24MHz wide. No, I don't think I can get it in a form factor the size of a cell phone, with cost projections indicating that this device could cost under $70 in two years with the prices of 2.4GHz radio transcievers and storage media dropping as they are.

    Nope, nothing at all. I have nothing. Nothing that could possibly worry the RIAA.

    But I do need funding.

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