Is Bittorrent really just an old tech in new box ?

Google has become a great friend to every one, it's always there when people get so bored that they could not think of anything else to do. Googling sometime points me to unexpected, pleasantly interesting article. Can't remember what brought me to this one, but i remember bookmarking it right away.

That article is from a creator of Limewire, with comments about Bittorrent. Limewire was the most successfull and most widely-used p2p client that implements the Gnutella protocol. Bittorrent refers to both the protocols and the "mainline" client, created by Bram Cohen sometime in 2002. Before 2005, Limewire was still ahead of Bittorrent in the popularity contest (number of users); but Bittorrent had quickly turned things around. It is now believed to be the most popular p2p client, leaving the second-place clients far, far behind.

Coming back to the article, the author claims that Bittorrent uses their innovative swarm-downloading technique and works better just because it "did less" and is better packaged. I agreed that other publications should not have praised Bittorrent because of its innovative swarm downloading. However, Bittorrent's success is made of many different things; mainly its pieces selection and peer selection algorithm. They contribute greatly to the robustness and high performance of the protocol. Only the swarm downloading "idea" is used, the actual deployment is quite different from Limewire. In Limewire, a peer can concurrently swarm-download from many seeds/sources. A peer bittorrent, on the other hand, concurrently downloads block from other downloading-peers who have not yet had a complete copy of the file. Futhermore, free riders (which i belive still remains a headeach for Gnutella as well as Limewire) are discouraged by implementing variation of tit-for-tat startegy for the peer selection algorithm.

After all, these unique features of Bittorrent should not be viewed as "new box". They are much more than that.

The Google and Skype affair - part I

One beautiful day late August 2006, Google and Ebay announced their millions dollar deal which promised to see the convergence of two biggest VoIP providers - Skype and Google Talk. For anyone who has been sleeping in the last year, Ebay had taken over Skype at the cost of 2.6 billions (to 4.1 billions). This Google - Ebay deal certainly had more effect on Skype than on Ebay itself.
The promising prospect of that deal sees a global, generic Click-to-call technology to be employed everywhere. Internet users would be able to Click-and-call sellers on Ebay in the matter of seconds instead of having to wait days for a reply email. In the near future, users selling stuff via Google (advertisement) could also be contacted via VoIP. 3 months on, ones could gradually realize the big picture, as the Google-Skype affair started going public:

* Google pack includes Skype: Google pack is (as the name suggest) a collection of "useful", Google-friendly software that come together. They include: Google Earth, Google Desktop, Toolbar, Picassa ... and Skype. Instead of providing its own product which is GoogleTalk, Google chooses to go for Skype ? Have they admitted GoogleTalk's inferiority compared to Skype ? Or it just came as part of the deal ? The former seems less likely. Moreover, this is still a Beta version, Google could easily add GoogleTalk feature in later.

* Google Map with Skype Click-to-call: After Ebay, now it is GoogleMap's turn to include Click-to-Call feature. This feature was realized recently in this blog in Skype journal.
Apparently, it hasn't been widely employed yet; as i didn't find any Click-to-call link when searching for a Chinese take-away shop near Prittchats Road. But it won't be long until the day where i can call my favourite takeaway in one mouse click.

All of these features above make a clear impression that Google is abandoning its own child GoogleTalk and adopting its preference to its former rival, Skype. Or is Googletalk just napping, preparing for something bigger ?

The pirate of North Sea II - the return of the Bay

It's all about PirateBay, the notrious Bittorrent tracker server originally based in Sweeden. Original design of Bittorrent protocol differentiate index web server with tracker, but in real life, most server incoperate those two, into big Bittorrent trackers server. Supernova.org was one of these first tracker, which then got shut down because of faciliating illegal trading of copyrighted material. There is currently no public bittorrent tracker outside of the US.
PriateBay, as the name, was started by a group of anti-copyright activist/technicals in Sweeden. It is still the world's largest tracker with millions of users. In late May 2006, the sever room which accommodated about 35-100 servers was raided, and the owners was arrested for question. It was believed/rumor that the raid was result of US's pressure on the Swedish goverment; therefore it got negative reaction from the public, especially from students (not suprising) and activist. 3 day laters, the service was back online, as its backup in Holland was working just fine. However, it struggled a while before offering full services again.
6 months on, the entertainment industry keeps finding the way to shut down the site permantly. It was successfull in US, but appears very doubtful within Europe. In the mean time, it is reported that the site has grown 30% of its population, more diverse and of course more illegal copyrighted material. It even publishes more obviously illegal, provocative content, such as this advertisement for TV-shows downloading feature:
"We know you like TV so we added a nice TV-section on the site! You can reach it by clicking here. The first tv-page shows the 50 most popular shows on the site at any moment. If you want to browse through the rest of them, just click 'Show all series.'"
The king has return, the RIAA and MPAA are looking over quitely, from accross the pond.

New advice when buying a new laptop

A new laptop would normally come with a pre-installed version of Window XP, be it Home or Professional edition; unless you are buying a very old laptop. The manufacture (Dell for example) should have paid the license and that amount of money already included in your several hundred pounds payable to them.
I had a pleasant surprise when reading this article, which telling story of a Sheffield man who successfully claimed back his money for not using this Microsoft product. So according to his experience, if you choose not to use Window XP, simply by clicking on Decline in the Term and Condition window; then you are eligible up to £60 of refund. The following steps work with Dell andassumee that user can live without Window and would install Linux/Unix, and may notnecessarilyy work with other manufactures:
1. Turn on the laptop.
2. Read and take the picture of the License/Term agreement window.
3. Click Decline.
4. Install Linux/Unix. Recommend Fedora Core 5 - wicked.
5. Call the manufacture/vendorresellerr and claim your money back. Should ask the PC World people first before paying, even though they might not know what the heck you are talking about.
6. Don't be tempted to install this Window version again.

Beside the good feeling of having an extra £60 for cokes/coffee/chocolate..., it will be a very satisfactory experience for anyone who dislikes Microsoft. If one day everyone turns to prefer Linux, Microsoft will have a significant loss. Or they just rewrite their License/Term agreement ? We'll see about that.

DRM invaded television industry

Haven't written any thing for the last 10 days, but this can not be passed. So, according to the BBC website, Channel 4 will be offering their shows for as cheap as 99p per episode. From being amazed turns disappointed is just a matter of seconds.
* After 30 days service: have to admit that Channel 4 news with Johnny is the best show, even better than BBC News. Even if offered by this service, who would want to catch up with the news which is at least 30 days old. The war in Irag would probably be over within this 30 days.
* 2 day life-time: the fact that "each programme will "disappear" from user's computer 48 hours afte rthey start to watch it" really strike me. It really sounds scary, as you don't have any control, and right over the content that you technically paid for. In the technical point of view, these contents must come in a multimedia-with-digital-right-management(DRM) format, which can allegedly make the content self-destructed. Having thought that this technology still on paper, i was suprised that they have spanned to the television industry already, which normally is second user after the movies and music industry. However, it won't be long until some Chinese find a way to crack it. Unless supported by Trusted Computing infrastucture, it's still doubtful that this new technology is for a long-term goal. Anyway, all this craps urge me to look at that technology and find out how they do it. Will get back in this issue later.

* Cheap price for cheap content: Ramsay and Hollyoak are two of many things that i would never want to watch. Not to mention Big brother. My god, how could one pay 99p for an episode of Big brother, to watch people acting stupid, gossiping and sleeping for half of their day ? 99p can get 2 cans of coke and enjoy it with a real friend.

After all, this is still a good idea. I would definitely pay 99p for an episode of Lost, as long as it not 30-day late (at least 4 episodes behind).

File-sharing legal in Spain ? not quite

The news in 5th November told a story about how Spanish court ruled against the music industry, finding a man trading his music not guilty. According to that article, the man had downloaded music using a P2P application, then burnt to CDs and give them to his friends (via email or chatroom). The judge's argument for her decision is that any "practiced behavior" that does not aim to gain wealth or profit can not be considered illegal. With current actions of IFPI against file-sharers and music piracy, it could be considered as a complete blow-out for them.
However, just 2 days later, the IFPI commented that this case is not at all related to its ongoing battle against P2P, but is about piracing CD. He insisted that P2P sharing of coyprighted music remains illegal everywhere. That maybe true, in fact the IFPI would not have sued the man for his use of P2P, as he was just a downloader, all the case against individual file-sharers so far are about heavy uploaders. On the other hand, perhaps the IFPI has put way to much money and effort to the fights against P2P, but seems to ignored other more tangible, simpler ways to trade music (such as piracing and distributing CD).

Review of the battle between the recording industry and file-sharing

In this blog, i'll do a review over the ongoing battle between the recording industry and "file-sharing", including both file-sharing clients/networks and file-sharers. File-sharing, since the birth of Napster has been great example of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) success. Clients such as LimeWire, Kazaa, Bittorrent and many other variations allow users to join the corresponding networks and freely share their files to and downloads files from other users. From an user's perspective, that's great. But the recording industry doesn't think so.
Who are they ?
1. Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) inclues Sony BMG, EMI, Universal Music and Waner, and often refered to as the Big-Four. They are in charge of administrating music recording, distribution and god-know-what stuff relating to music. In this context, we are only concerned about their battles against music piracy, in which P2P file-sharing is the scapegoat.
2. British Phonographic Industry (BPI) UK counterpart of the RIAA, with similar tasks of administrating the music industry; and unsuprisingly the same battles agains P2P file-sharing (with the same tatics).
3. International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) Organization similar to BPI and RIAA, but operates in international scale with at least 45 participants countries. Based in UK.

Making enemies with file-sharing networks
Here are the two main milestones:
* 1999 - Napster sued by RIAA, who who accused Napster of facilitating illegal trading of copyrighted music. Napster argued that it only provided indexing service, but not actually stored any copyrighted materials in the servers. However, RIAA said they were suing over its control, not damage. In 2002, Napster was shutdown, then taken over by another company that now provide legal music downloading service.
* Kazaa has been brought to court over copyright infringement since 2001. And if you read the newspaper in 1-11-2006, Kazaa had agree to pay the IFPI over $100m settlement for the lawsuit. The music industry was thrilled, many file-sharers felt disgusted.

RIAA vs the People (in favor of the people)
1. Who get sued? Any American who is classified as "heavy uploader", i.e.: sharing thousands of copyrighted in the network (of course without permission of the copyright owner), allowing millions of users to get a copy of them within minutes of downloading.
2. How do they find out? RIAA people would use the same P2P clients as a normal user would, then perform searches for copyrighted music (with song title or keywork searching). For each search, they will have a list of IP addresses that upload the song. By doing quite many searches like that, they can find out which IP address is the "heavy uploader".
RIAA can now file lawsuits against these users, and ask the judge for an "immediate discovery" warrant, and use that to send subpoena to ISP, asking to reveal user's account information based on the IP address. In theory, any ISP can fight back and resist from giving out this information, but in practice none of them would, due to time and budget needed to pursue.
3. How much do they ask for? $750 per song (compared to 99p for a song from iTunes, that is really a rip off). Consider the fact the most people who get sued are heavy uploader (must be several hunderds songs), they may have to pay hunderds of thousands dollars.
4. Second chance? Yes, they are "nice" enough to offer settlement deals. Give me several thousands dollar and i make everything goes away. Given that the only evidence that the RIAA had at the time were screenshots of results from searching for the files, and the list of files that you allegedly uploaded; anyone who could hire a good lawyer can file a countersuit against RIAA. However, almost all choose to pay the settlement, because of legal fee for pursuing the case would be much higher, and RIAA has enough money (funded by the Big Four) to hire the best lawyer around, which makes the chance to win against them even lower.

From above, we can see how RIAA abuse/exploit the court system to push their own customers over edge. It forces ISP to reveal user's account information and users to pay settlement, all because they don't have the time and the money to countersue. Furthermore, the settlement money is then used to file even more lawsuits.

5. RIAA's shames
There have been people who stand up, and in most cases bring shames to the RIAA, as they are exposed to the public. These cases have shown the RIAA's tactic, which is "to sue everyone".
* Kids - 12 year-old girl Briana Lahana, an hornour student was accused of sharing copyrighted music with Kazaa. Because of her "naive" though that she could download at will, her mother had to pay the settlement for thousands of dollar. The register made fun of RIAA here. The more famous case is the one against Brittany Chan. Her parents were originally sued by the RIAA, but they resisted as RIAA could not give any convincing evidence. It then turned to sue Brittany (13 year-old girl), but subsequently withdrew, because the judge asked it to pay legal fee and guardian for the girl.
* Parents - so many cases that parents (who are internet illiterate) have to pay settlement for their children. The most recent case involved Patricia Santangelo paying upto $7,500.
* Grandmother and elderly people - a 66 year-old woman sued for trading Rap and hiphop music with Kazaa. Beside the fact that none of the old people i know listens to that kind of music, RIAA later dropped the case, because (a) she never did such thing, (b) she owns a Mac at that time, which can not install and run Kazaa.
* Student - RIAA seems to aim at students a lot, firstly because they are more likely to share music over P2P network than anyone else. And secondly, they always pay the settlement. Students never have enough money to pay for all the legal fee to pursue the case against them. In April 2006, however, a paper in MIT publish an outrageous article from Cassi Hunt, who claimed that RIAA stated that it "has been known to suggest students to drop out of college or go to community college in order to afford their settlement".
* Dead people - RIAA decided to sue a 83-year-old woman of sharing copyrighted music online. However, she had no interest in computer and insisted in not having any computer at home. Plus, she had passed away months ago.
* Computer-less people - the oddest case was the one against a computer-less home owners, who were all at awe, saying "I don't understand this, How can they sue us when we don't even have a computer"

BPI vs the people
Accoss the pond, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is doing the same thing as its American counterpart RIAA is. The only difference here is that BPI has full support from the media. We don't see many articles making fun of the BPI or criticising its tatics.
The BPI's individula targets are:
1. Kids - like in the US, many parents have to pay settlement for their children music-trading activities. In August 2005, Sylvia, mother of Emily Price (a 14-year-old girl) paid £2,500 settlement, while accusing the BPI of not having warned them first.
2. Other users - there have been 139 lawsuits against individuals since October 2004 , most of them settle in for up to £6,500. Two men who were accused of uploading more than 8,000 songs (together with other 3 users) refused to pay the settlement and went to court. However, the judge ruled against them; both have to pay an immediate £2,000; plus much more in legal fee to come.

The BPI also targets international file-sharing website. It even urged the goverment to ask the Russia to shut down allofmp3.com website at the G8 summit.
In July 2006, BPI proposed a new tatics against illegal file-sharers, by forcing the ISP to "pull the plug", i.e. freezing accounts of users they thought were heavily involved in sharing copyrighted music. The BPI had requested Tiscalli and Cable & Wireless ISP to suspend 56 accounts. There were resistence from these two ISPs, but they would seem to give in.

DriveTrust technology - first step to the Trusted Computing era

For those who haven't heard, Seagates plans to release new model of hard drive that support full-disk encryption. It would be called Momentus 5000 and should be available on the market next year (maybe at the same time as Window Vista ?)
More details cand be found here, but its essential features are:
1. The encryption/decryption process is done entirely at hardware level, by a built-in chip inside the hard drive
2. Encryption algorithm used is AES (128 bits), aslo support RSA, SHA-1
3. Full-disk encryption, i.e. every single bit, no exception for even OS or any other "sensitive" data
4. Encryption/decryption keys are protected in hardware, and user must be authenticated by password to access the key. Users are required to set password in the first time, and subsequently provide that password at boot time.

This DriveTrust technology is an introductory step toward Trusted Computing platforms. In fact, Seagate is working closely with the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) in standardize the specification for trusted/protected storage. Furthermore, it seems to me that DriveTrust is technically just a simple implementation of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) (whose capabilities also include attestation and integrity measurement). While the TPM chip is attached to the motherboard, this DriveTrust chip resides within the hard disk. Main features provided by a Trusted platform are: Remote attestation, Integrity Measurement and Protected Storage. The first two are essential for the third-part to enforce usage/configuration/DRM on the local users (i.e. bad for *us*). Protected Storage is the only useful feature for home users.

Sounds great ? Yeah, it does. But you must be careful not to disclosure the password; otherwise this new technology won't worth the extra bucks. Worse yet, forgeting the password means that you are completely screwed: every single bit in that drive will be lost.
Once authorized/decrypted, the data/keys will stay unlocked and vulnerable as long as the computer is on. It is therefore believed to cause troubles and confusion when user (inadvertently) choose to goes hibernate instead of completely switch off the PC.
Lastly, i don't see this DriveTrust technology to be useful in a networked, time-sharing environment such as a university/school network.

Fun fact about Skype

I remember telling people in my office about Skype's 3rd birthday, some time at the end of this August (2006). It has been 3 incredible years for Skype.
According to this article, Skype is as just hot as Paris Hilton. The thing is, while she's getting older and more scandalous everyday, Skype's just getting better, with a brighter future ahead. It won't be too long before we see Skype overtakes HarryPoter, Irag... in the popularity contest.

Another 18,000 years for Vista

Ok, so according to Microsoft, the "forever"-waiting Window Vista will be available for business customer on 16th of November (this month). Good news, isn't it ?
For home user like us (even though i can't imagine myself using it in a near future), another 18,000 years. Well, i am NOT joking, check this out. Good at maths ? 20007 - 2006 is 18,001 years to be absolutely correct.

Hello world

Hello world :)