LittleShoot — distributing digital media
p2pnet news Freedom | P2P | Open Source:- What got me online in the first place was sharing. What else could peer-to-peer (or people to people) mean?
I’ve been getting a little jaundiced, lately, writing about the unrestrained greed and total contempt for their customers which are the hallmarks the entertainment cartels and the likes of Facebook, MySpace and the other social engineering networks.
You can’t have sharing without trust but in the corporate lexicon, where users are concerned, it’s spelled ‘trussed’. Like in ‘turkey’.
But it doesn’t matter how much the suits try to nail down the Net and everyone in it, it won’t work. There are too many smart people out there who believe in freedom of thought and freedom of speech.
Among those of true, untrammelled vision is Adam Fisk, one of the people who made LimeWire what it is —- or, rather, what it used to be before it ran afoul of the corporate entertainment cartels.
He left after four years to turn his own dream of bringing P2P to everyone, everywhere, into reality.
He calls it LittleShoot.
At the moment, it’s in private beta but I’ll tell you this: it’s radical —- revolutionary and evolutionary, offering a more flexible and efficient way of distributing digital media online, in the process forcing a fundamental change on the way things are going to work in the World of Peer-to-Peer.
And the corporations don’t have to be afraid of it because it’s built around the concept of independence: new music from new people who understand P2P openess is the way for this era: new films, new everything, not lies and lawsuits, not the cookie-cutter copyrighted ‘product’ that’s causing so much online grief to so many people, users and artists alike.
Fisk says his app is a P2P YouTube for every type of file, going on >>>
There’s a storm forming in the P2P space. The new Flash 10 beta integrates P2P, CDNs are gobbling up P2P companies to enhance their infrastructure, and now there’s a new player on the scene in private beta: LittleShoot which works directly from the browser and seeks to bring P2P to the masses on a new scale.
Because it works through a simple web site, LittleShoot is easier to use than most P2P applications. You just go to http://www.littleshoot.org and start searching, and downloads stream right to your browser.
Behind the scenes LittleShoot downloads different parts of files from different users on the network, merging the efficiency of BitTorrent with the simplicity of Google.
So what can you use LittleShoot for?
Well, first, you can publish any file you own the copyright to. While YouTube restricts the size of your videos and distributes them at low quality, LittleShoot lets you publish videos of any length and resolution you want.
You can also publish any other type of file, such as photos and documents. And because your computer is serving files directly, you don’t have to wait for files to upload anywhere.
Publishing is instantaneous.
LittleShoot as “an open media platform; an engine for free speech.”
Indeed, it’s open source and based on open standards.
The major downside to the P2P in Flash 10, for example, is that it uses closed source, proprietary protocols all under the control of a single company.
Only Adobe understands its flavor of P2P, preventing other programs from interoperating with it. To use Flash P2P, you also have to pay Adobe thousands of dollars for Flash Media Server. LittleShoot could not be more different. It’s open source, allowing anyone to set up their own LittleShoot servers. The underlying protocols, like SIP, STUN, TURN, ICE, and Amazon’s OpenSearch, are all openly specified, allowing anyone to write their own software that works with LittleShoot. Then there’s the best part: it’s free.
LittleShoot relies on the ‘usability of free speech’.
We may have freedom of speech in democratic societies, but how easy is it to exercise that freedom? You can see this with voting systems now. While everyone legally has the right to vote, the poor usability of voting – the hassles of registering, locating your voting booth, and fitting it in to your busy schedule – combine to effectively disenfranchise the majority of Americans.
Making things easy is just as important as making them possible.
LittleShoot seeks to remove every possible barrier, from cost to ease-of-use, to publishing your digital media and to exercising your voice on the Internet. marking a major shift in emphasis with P2P as a central component of freedom of speech on the Internet.
The LittleShoot advisory board also includes such luminaries of the open source world as Ian Clarke (FreeNet, Revver, SenseArray, etc) and Chris Holmes (GeoServer, Open Planning Project).
LittleShoot adheres to the DMCA which gives copyright owners the power to issue “takedown notices” whenever they find their material on LittleShoot.
This makes it much more likely LittleShoot will remain free of the legal troubles that’ve plagued so many P2P companies.
What are LittleShoot’s downsides?
Well, first, you have to install a separate program. Once you’ve done that (and it’s pretty painless), you do everything through the LittleShoot web site.
Unlike sites such as YouTube, however, this means you always have a separate program running on your computer that’s helping to power the P2P network.
While it doesn’t take up excessive resources, some users prefer not to have extra programs running on their machines.
Also, while LittleShoot has an extensive security framework to keep you safe, there’s always the possibility of a glitch similar to the bugs seen recently in Flash.
What about content?
LittleShoot is a brand new network, so comparatively few people have published anything on LittleShoot yet. That’s likely one of the reasons LittleShoot incorporates content from other sources such as YouTube, Flickr, and LimeWire.
A search for “Obama speech” will give you videos from YouTube, images from Flickr, and audio recordings and documents from LimeWire and LittleShoot. Pretty cool.
With P2P in Flash 10, CDNs incorporating P2P, and programs such as LittleShoot using P2P in new ways, it appears P2P has moved beyond the post-Napster legal horror show.
While P2P has taken a backseat in the headlines in recent years, a new P2P storm appears imminent.
Keep your umbrellas handy.
p2pnet hopes ultimately publish all of its content on LittleShoot, as well as through p2pnet.net.
Stay tuned.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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June 4th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
“While everyone legally has the right to vote, the poor usability of voting – the hassles of registering, locating your voting booth, and fitting it in to your busy schedule”
If you think that is bad, try to be a candidate. It’s almos impossible because there is only one slot per party, an artificial limitation.