dsandler.org

(With apologies to the Fireball.)

Mac OS Rumors: BitTorrent in 10.5.

Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” will include a system-level “BitTorrent” filesharing client that can be user-customized to ‘donate’ upstream Internet bandwidth for things like pushing Software Update packages to Leopard users, delivering iTunes Store content, and just about any purpose to which Apple puts its bandwidth.

A somewhat similar p2p-based banwidth-sharing option was brought up during the 10.4 Tiger development cycle and dismissed out-of-hand because there were no good incentives for users to enter the shadowy world of peer-to-peer networking just to save Apple a few dollars. Now a group of developers at Apple think they have solved the most fundamental issues and want to bring the rest of the company on board.

I really want to know if this is true, and if so, what technologies are involved. Actually BitTorrent, or some other p2p system (unstructured or structured)? NAT hole-punching (presumably the iChat AV guys have some experience with this very thorny problem)? Possible impact on overall system performance (and ISP traffic-shaping effects)? [Friends at Apple: I will keep your whispers in closest confidence.]

You know a technology is a big deal when the Supreme Court writes about it. The first two pages of the MGM v Grokster decision read like “What is Peer-to-Peer?” as written by Justice Souter:

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously against Grokster, finding the company’s actions to be illegal. (Reported by SCOTUSblog.) We’ll know the Court’s reasoning once the opinion is released; I’ll post a link here as soon as it is available.

“We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by the clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties,” Justice David H. Souter wrote for the court.

what The Supremes said is that “One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright … is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device’s lawful uses.” The promotion is the key part of that statement.

[Full text of opinions will eventually show up at the SCOTUS 2004 term opinions page. Here’s an Atom feed of updates to that page.]

From Slashdot, an eWeek article describing how spyware-infested files are showing up on BitTorrent. The Slashdot article is, for once, a more signalicious source of information on the topic, since the eWeek writup is full of half-researched nonsense like the following:

Because BitTorrent strips digital files into tiny shreds and reassembles them locally once a user completes a download, it has emerged as the perfect place to bundle adware programs among the bits, without the end user ever knowing.

Just to clarify: this is not how the spyware vector works. The spyware/adware companies are infecting individual movie files and illegal software packages, and then seeding those through BitTorrent. Your BitTorrent client is perfectly happy to let you download the Trojan at your leisure; BT doesn’t care what’s inside a file, it just cares about getting it to you quickly and accurately. The BT protocol is not susceptible to “sneaking bits in” alongside legitimate chunks of your download, because to do so would invalidate the known cryptographic hash (taken from the benign version of the file), tipping your BT client off that the data can’t be trusted.

Wow, search engine also-ran Ask Jeeves is suddenly relevant again, now that it’s buying Bloglines.

Aside: By grepping dsandler.org for bloglines you can see how my affection for Mark Fletcher’s brainchild has waxed and waned over the last year.

The ePOST p2p email system, a project of my research group at Rice, is entering an open beta phase. Anyone can sign up; you’ll get a new email address and some software to run on your own computer, which becomes your own personal email server. Messages between ePOST users are encrypted and secure; messages between an ePOST user and the general Internet are just like any other email.

From the ePOST website:

ePOST is based on the Pastry peer-to-peer overlay, which allows ePOST to scale to large numbers of users. Since ePOST uses a peer-to-peer substrate, there are no dedicated email servers - the function of the email server is distributed over all of the machines in the network. However, the same security and reliability guarantees as existing server-based systems are preserved when using ePOST.

ePOST is designed to be backwards-compatible with existing SMTP-based email systems. In fact, ePOST users can even use their normal email clients to send and receive email, as well as send and receive email from non-ePOST users. Each user is given an email address of userid@location.epostmail.org, which can be used in parallel with or in place of their normal email account.

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