Easing the network pressure caused by P2P file-sharing

From an interesting Tech Review article: “As the music downloading frenzy continues unabated, Internet service providers (ISPs) are finding their infrastructure and business models imperiled.  The main threat comes from the popularity of peer-to-peer programs such as Kazaa, which connect users without using a server. ‘Peer-to-peer activity corresponds to at least one fifth of Internet traffic and is likely to continue to grow relentlessly in the future’ says University of California, Riverside researcher Thomas Karagiannis,  who works with the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis on measuring peer-to-peer traffic.”

The article also has a lovely, informative side-bar explaining the P2P protocol issue:

“One reason that peer-to-peer traffic is clogging the  Internet is that the protocols used are not designed to minimize the number of bytes. On the contrary, since sending data through the Net is essentially free, programmers optimize other parameters, such as speed.

Skype, Grokster, and Kazaa use a protocol called FastTrack. Other peer-to-peer systems, including BearShare, Morpheus, and LimeWire, use another one, called Gnutella. These protocols use different ways to send queries and retrieve information[~]and these differences have a distinct effect on how much traffic is needed to transmit a song or movie from one network user to another.

Per Brand, leader at the Distributed Systems Laboratory at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science in Stockholm, says peer-to-peer file sharing traffic in Sweden can consume as much as 85 percent of a typical ISP’s capacity. Brand, who is involved with the largest European-based research effort on distributed storage, says that inadequate protocol design carries much of the blame. [base “]Gnutella is both brilliant and completely brain dead,[per thou] he says. Its peer-to-peer protocol is smart in the way information is spread out, but stupid in the way it uses up bandwidth with sending questions asking where the information is located.

Improved protocols would spread out both the information and the traffic so that the both the network and its computers are used more efficiently. The goal, in effect, is to design a system that has the best properties of peer-to-peer without its drawbacks. It is like combining Kazaa and Peercache in one. If the research succeeds, Joltid and its competitors will have one less product to sell.”

What card-carrying Republicans carry

Source.

The best article about Google — ever (well, to date)

Wade Roush has written a fantastically informative and useful article in MIT’s Technology Review about Google, Microsoft and the race for the next big search engine. Also includes, as an aside, the gist of the story about the new relational file-system at the heart of the next Windows system — Longhorn. Useful as an antidote to Google IPO-fever also.

Blair of Arabia

This neat piece of photoshopping in Salon caught my eye…

Image (c) Salon, 2004

The picture heads an acute review by Andrew O’Hehir of Robin Cook’s memoirs and Philip Stephens’s biography of Blair. Excerpt:

“Yet Blair’s former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, who resigned from his Cabinet position to protest the Iraq war decision, suggests that the prime minister is not being honest about his own beliefs. In the most damaging passage of his extraordinary memoir “The Point of Departure” (a book that should be read by anyone interested in the global fortunes of the electoral left), Cook writes that he told Blair, on March 5, 2003, that “Saddam did not have real weapons of mass destruction that were designed for strategic use.” Blair made no effort to contradict him. “What was clear from this conversation,” Cook writes, “was that he did not believe it himself.”

What is clear from Cook’s book, and from Philip Stephens’ fascinating new Blair biography aimed at American readers, is that Blair has compelled himself to believe he did the right thing in Iraq, and did it for the right reasons. If he is misleading the world, and perhaps even himself, about what he knew and when he knew it, it’s because he needs to think of himself as an independent-minded liberal interventionist driven by “a melding of strategic calculation and moral fervor,” in Stephens’ phrase, rather than, say, a spineless transatlantic toady who got steamrollered by the neocons in Washington…”

How to check whether a Pepsi bottle will give you a free iTune — without having to buy the drink first!

Detailed instructions here! O how I love the Net.

Creative Class War

Richard Florida wrote a fascinating book — The Rise of the Creative Class — about the importance of creative elites in modern economies. Now he’s written an interesting, combative piece on the Bush regime’s hostility to the new economy, and the potentially dire consequences this might have for the US economy. I particularly liked this bit:

“While Clinton and the Democrats increasingly drew their support from the high-tech parts of the country, the Republicans increasingly came to represent the low-tech areas. Republican leaders like Tom DeLay and Dick Armey were beginning, during the early 1990s, to articulate the cultural and political antagonism Red America felt towards the emerging creative-class culture. But the politician who most skillfully spoke to these grievances was George W. Bush.

Clinton’s whole life is a testimony to the power of education to change class. Bush prides himself on the idea that his Yale education had no effect on how he sees things. Clinton was a famous world traveler, appreciative of foreign cultures and ideas. Bush, throughout his life, has been indifferent if not hostile to all of that. Clinton, especially in the early years of his administration, had the loose, unstructured management style of an academic department or a dot-com–manic work hours, meetings that went on forever, lots of diffuse power centers, young people running around in casual clothing, and a constant reappraising of plans and strategies. The Bush management style embodies the pre-creative corporate era–formal, hierarchal, with decision-making concentrated in the hands of only the most senior executives. Clinton was happy in Hollywood and vacationed in Martha’s Vineyard. Bush can’t wait to get back to Crawford. Clinton reveled in the company of writers, artists, scientists, and members of the intellectual elite. Bush has little tolerance for them. Clinton, in his rhetoric and policies, wanted to bring the gifts of the creative class–high technology, a tolerant culture–to the hinterlands. Bush aimed to bring the values and economic priorities of the hinterlands to that ultimate creative center, Washington, D.C.

As president, Bush chose a group of senior advisors whose economic backgrounds have a century-old flavor. His vice president is an oil man. His treasury secretary, John Snow, is a railroad man. The White House’s economic and fiscal policies have been similarly designed to provide life support for these aging red-state industries: $190 billion in subsidies for farmers; tariffs for steel; subsidies, tax breaks, and regulatory relief for logging, mining, coal, and natural gas. Even Bush’s tax policy shows the same old-economy preference. His dividend tax cut was supported by mainstream, blue-chip companies, which stood to gain, but opposed by high-tech executives, whose company stocks seldom pay dividends.”

The real problem with Blair

The reason many of us are so enraged about Tony Blair’s dissembling over Iraq is that it threatens to destroy confidence in what is otherwise — in an imperfect world — quite a good government (and certainly the best likely to be available to the UK electorate for quite a while). If you look across the policy spectrum — on education, health, the environment, for example — what you see is a government doing good stuff and trying to tackle the legacy of three decades’ of Tory neglect and incompetence. (Security and civil liberties are a different matter, alas.) And yet many of us who think like this are so angry about Blair’s dishonesty over Iraq that we are contemplating voting against Labour in the next election. The Guardian‘s Madelaine Bunting got it right in an excellent column yesterday: the right solution is for Blair to stand down (and pay the price for his Iraq adventure), leaving Gordon Brown (who is relatively untainted over the war) to lead the party into the next election.

Don’t look at escaped Microsoft code — smart legal advice

Linux Journal has some good advice for anyone involved with Open Source software development.

As a reminder to our readers, we are repeating the same advice we published in 2000, the last time Microsoft’s source code was compromised. Don’t look at it or you could contaminate yourself legally.

The Wall Street Journal reported today [October 27, 2000 — Ed.] that Microsoft and the FBI are investigating an intrusion in which unknown attackers had access to Microsoft source code for three months. Although nothing purporting to be Microsoft source code copied in the intrusion has surfaced yet, any such code poses a legal risk to people who read it and to any free software project that accepts contributions from those people.

“Anybody who wishes to be involved in free software should have nothing to do with anything claiming to be Microsoft source code released without license or in any informal way,” said Eben Moglen, general counsel of the Free Software Foundation and professor of law and legal history at Columbia University. Microsoft, he said, would be in a position to seek damages from anyone trafficking in misappropriated trade secrets, which can include merely reading the Microsoft code and then contributing to a free project.

If offered any code that implements Microsoft-like APIs, or uses Microsoft’s file formats or protocols, the FSF will go beyond its normal legal paperwork to make sure that the contributor has not had contact with Microsoft’s proprietary information. “We would certainly take additional measures to prove the absence of any relationship between developers and Microsoft’s trade secrets,” Moglen said.

Free software developers are already careful to keep themselves insulated from any contact with proprietary information. Jeremy Allison, one of the lead developers on the Samba project, said that his response to one anonymous offer of Windows NT source code was, “You’re offering to end my career. Thanks but no thanks.” And the Samba team, he said, will refuse to work with anyone who has seen Microsoft’s proprietary code. “Anything we do has to be completely legal,” he said. “There are plenty of people who can work on it who haven’t seen Microsoft source code.” His advice to anyone planning to write free software in the future is, “Stay away from [proprietary Microsoft source code] at all costs.”

“Microsoft Tries to Settle European Union Case”

Thus the headline on a NYT report. On further investigation, it turns out that all Microsoft are offering to do is to include rival software (e.g. RealPlayer) on a CD, while leaving all their stuff pre-installed on the hard drive. This, apparently, is their idea of an attempt to settle with the European Commission!

The Microsoft code leak — a legal perspective

Groklaw asked a well-known US academic lawyer (Dennis S. Karjala, Jack E. Brown Professor of Law, College of Law, ASU) to comment on the legal implications of the Wincode leak. Here’s what he wrote:

“Media reports say that portions of Microsoft’s source code for Windows have leaked and found their way onto the internet. Is this now an opportunity for would-be cloners of Windows to find out how it really works and make their own, let us assume noninfringing, operating systems that are Windows compatible? Or would any such attempt be a violation of Microsoft’s copyright or trade secret rights, subjecting such a competitor to suffer the legal wrath of Microsoft’s litigation teams?

Without knowing more of the facts, the answer could be, “Both.” To the extent that source code is now being widely distributed over the internet, horn book trade secret law would say that Microsoft has lost its trade secret rights (although it may have a claim for damages against the leaker). The code is simply not a secret any longer, notwithstanding Microsoft’s best efforts (let us assume) to keep it so.

Copyright, however, poses a different problem. Every transfer of the code on the internet, and indeed every use of a computer to look at the code, involves making a technical “copy.” Courts have fairly uniformly held that such technical copying – made necessary by digital technology – infringes Microsoft’s exclusive right to reproduce the work in question (here, the Windows source code, a literary work). Absent fair use, anyone who causes his or her computer to put the code onto the screen (or to print out the whole version) is subject to all of the draconian remedies of copyright.

On the other hand, it is still not yet an infringement of copyright simply to read an infringing copy of a work (unless perhaps you break through a technological measure designed to control access to it, which would invoke the DMCA). If someone, without any involvement by you, prints out a copy of the source code and sends it to you, or if you just happen to find such a copy lying around somewhere, reading that copy does not infringe any Microsoft copyrights. (Conceivably, if someone has independently called the document to the computer screen and you happen by and read it after it has been stored in RAM, you are equally in the clear.)

Depending on how far the distribution goes, it seems to me likely that both of these scenarios will take place. Whether Microsoft will go after the infringing ones, especially after infringing hard copies become widely available for noninfringing study, is difficult to predict. But this is in any event unlikely to stop development by others working from illegally made copies that they had no part in making. If that is the case, this event may actually lead to a lessening of Microsoft’s strong grip on the PC operating system market.”