p2pnet - rss feed: Delft and Harvard team up for p2p
p2pnet news | P2P:- America’s famous Harvard University is already established as a premier US teaching institution more than willing to stand up for the rights of its students in the face of vicious attacks against them by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG and their RIAA, unlike many similar schools.
Now it’s added another important feather to its cap.
Computer scientists at its School of Engineering and Applied Sciences are working with a Dutch team using unique P2P video sharing technology to explore a next-generation model for electronic commerce.
What makes it unique is the fact they’re using bandwidth as a global currency with Tribler, an application already well-known to Net enthusiasts, as the vehicle.
A project of the Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science faculty of Delft University of Technology’s computer science department, it’s an independent, ad-free way to distribute live and recorded video content and the new version, 4.1,have can be downloaded from a Harvard site.
“Just sit back and relax while Tribler scans The Internet and automatically finds .torrent files,” Delft professor Johan Pouwelse said when Tribler 3.6.0 was released. “No need to visit the various .torrent websites.”
Interestingly, Pouwelse, Tribler’s technical director, has also taken an active role in the corporate music industry’s efforts to gain control of online distribution by suing its own customers.
An invited speaker at the US Federal Trade Commission’s p2p workshop a couple of years ago who also spent several months at Harvard Business School to study the economic impact of movie downloads on Hollywood, he’s an expert witness in a file sharing case in which the RIAA is attacking New York home health aideMarie Lindor, accusing her of being a massive online distributor of copyrighted music.
‘Peer-to-peer systems are incredibly robust’
Meanwhile, “Successful peer-to-peer systems rely on designing rules that promote fair sharing of resources amongst users,” says Harvard on the collaboration between the two teams of scientists.
“Peer-to-peer has received a bad rap, however, because of its frequent association with illegal music or software downloads,” says David Parkes, John L. Loeb associate professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard.
Unlike traditional, centralized systems, P2P applications are incredibly robust because they adjust to the number and behaviour of individual users, meaning they can scale smoothly, say the researchers, emphasising they were inspired to use a version of the Tribler video sharing software as a model for an e-commerce system because of such flexibility, speed, and reliability.
“Our platform will provide fast downloads by ensuring sufficient uploads,” says Pouwelse. “The next generation of peer-to-peer systems will provide an ideal marketplace not just for content, but for bandwidth in general.”
The ‘combination of social network technology with peer-to-peer systems’
Says the Harvard statement:
The researchers envision an e-commerce model that connects users to a single global market, without any controlling company, network, or bank. They see bandwidth as the first true Internet “currency” for such a market. For example, the more a user uploads now (i.e. earns) and the higher the quality of the contributions, the more s/he would be able to download later (i.e. spend) and the faster the download speed. More broadly, this paradigm empowers individuals or groups of users to run their own “marketplace” for any computer resource or service.
Another idea the researchers believe has enormous but untapped potential is the combination of social network technology with peer-to-peer systems. “In the case of sharing and playing video, our network-based system already allows a group of ‘friends’ to pool their collective upload ‘reserve’ to slash download times. For Internet-based television this means a true instant, on-demand video experience,” explains Pouwelse.
The researchers concede that the greatest challenge to any peer-to-peer backed e-commerce system is implementing proper regulation in a decentralized environment. To keep an eye on the virtual economy, Parkes and Pouwelse envision creating a “web of trust,” or a network between friends used to evaluate the trustworthiness of fellow users and aimed at preventing content theft, counterfeiting, and cyber attacks.
To do so they will use a feature already included in the enhanced version of the Tribler software, the ability for users to “gossip” or report on the behavior of other peers. Their eventual goal is to find a way to create accurate personal assessments or trust metrics as a form of internal regulation.
“This idea is not new, but previous implementations have been costly and are dependent on a company and/or website being the enforcer. Addressing the ‘trust issue’ within open peer-to-peer technology could lead to future online economies that are legal, dynamic and scaleable, have very low start-up costs, and minimal downtime,” says Parkes.
By studying user behavior within an operational “Internet currency” system, with a particular focus on understanding how and why attacks, fraud, and abuse occur and how trust can be established and maintained, the researchers imagine future improvements to everything from on-demand television to online auctions to open content encyclopedias.
Stay tuned.
Also See:
rights of its students - RIAA student victimisation campaign, July 21, 2007
expert witness in a file sharing - Pouwelse: witness in RIAA case, May 14, 2007
Harvard - Researchers aim to make Internet bandwidth a global currency, August 29, 2007
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