|
| Peer-to-Peer. The very term was unheard of in the mainstream circle a few years ago, yet now we have a multitude of applications that do nothing but enable people to exchange data with other like-minded users. This might have been a good idea in the beginning, some people finding it more fun to use something more user-friendly than a FTP command line. But its popularity is causing the destruction of p2p.
As mentioned on Slashdot, (or more specifically, some loosely non-corroborated information about accusations of port blocking of Kazaa), it seems the RIAA/MPAA/Pick your acronym-AA is cluing in to the fact that the unwashed masses are using some applications that aren't named "Napster". Fascinating how it took this long for them to figure it out. The whole point is, that once something like this becomes so easy that joe-AOL/Gateway/HPaq can use it, the inevitable consequence is the increased scrutiny and enforcement of certain zaibatsu-conglomerates about the fast-and-furious trade of their intellectual "property". (I'd love to get into that definition right now, but I'll hit that in another article later..) To the future developers of other file sharing programs, all I can offer is the following advice: One - Shut the fuck up about your project. You people with development pages on freshmeat and other places are just asking to be tracked and then shut down when the monkey lawyer tag-teams find you a viable threat. Two - Use the "trusted cell" method of distributing the program. You establish a trusted network of close friends, work out the bugs, then when you're ready have your friends locate other people who can be trusted not to spread it to every AOL moron on the net. If there is a "leak" and things start to get out of control, reset the auth keys in the app and start again with the trusted cluster of people, potentially isolating the cell that caused the problem in the first place. This would require one or two "superusers" that could see the cell topology from the main trusted nodes and work out where there were problems from some system of unique tags or other identifiers tacked onto the data being exchanged. Hell, work it out - I'm sure you are smart enough to think of a viable solution to keeping the hordes out. Three - Get your users to agree not to discuss the success or distribution of said application. You really think the media congloms aren't surfing sites just like you? That they aren't in IRC channels? You really have to adopt a different mentality than the "free-and-easy" mindset that the internet started out with. If anything, it is turning into a corporate wasteland, with reservations of "netizens" carefully watched and agressively marketed to online. AOL/TimeWarner was just the beginning. But I digress. Four - Protect your upstream. What this means is - don't allow your application to saturate a given data pipe just because it can. There are Internet Service Providers out there who can't take a majority of their user base spiking the bandwidth limitations of what they pre-allocate every month. Seriously. You would be smart to include a "pre-test" in every new installation that specs out the pipe to the nearest node, and then allows you to set a slider from "min" to "max", but the maximum would never be the full capacity of the upstream/downstream connection. This will ensure the longevity of your application, I guarantee it. Five - Shut the fuck up about your application. Really. Every time I see some kind of announcement of a new peer-to-peer application, I just chuckle to myself. I know that the congloms are making note of it too, and when the time is right they'll either strike it directly with lawsuits, or just step behind the curtain and try to get the ISPs to filter it. Either way, think of a mantra along the lines of "Publicity Equals Death" to your application. I can't stress this enough. Of course, I don't expect any of this to really be taken into account when designing new p2p projects, but I can only hope that some of them will be used, regardless of me writing about them. I just think in a few years we're going to see that most of the "free" activity on the net in years past is going to go back uderground from where it started. It will if we don't start learning some lessons, and quickly. desiato_hotblack @ hotmail.com |
||||
| © D3 Design, 2002 | ||||