p2pnet.net News:- It’s a foregone conclusion that entertainment industry efforts to trammel p2p file sharing and p2p file sharers are completely wasted.

Now meet TinyP2P, billed as the World’s Smallest P2P Application and written in a mere fifteen lines of the Python code by professor Ed Felten, “with help from Alex Halderman”.

“I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications,” says Felten on his Freedom to Tinker TP2P site.

“Peer-to-peer apps can be very simple, and any moderately skilled programmer can write one, so attempts to ban their creation would be fruitless.”

# tinyp2p.py 1.0 (documentation at http://freedom-to-tinker.com/tinyp2p.html)
import sys, os, SimpleXMLRPCServer, xmlrpclib, re, hmac # (C) 2004, E.W. Felten
ar,pw,res = (sys.argv,lambda u:hmac.new(sys.argv[1],u).hexdigest(),re.search)
pxy,xs = (xmlrpclib.ServerProxy,SimpleXMLRPCServer.SimpleXMLRPCServer)
def ls(p=""):return filter(lambda n:(p=="")or res(p,n),os.listdir(os.getcwd()))
if ar[2]!="client": # license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0
  myU,prs,srv = ("http://"+ar[3]+":"+ar[4], ar[5:],lambda x:x.serve_forever())
  def pr(x=[]): return ([(y in prs) or prs.append(y) for y in x] or 1) and prs
  def c(n): return ((lambda f: (f.read(), f.close()))(file(n)))[0]
  f=lambda p,n,a:(p==pw(myU))and(((n==0)and pr(a))or((n==1)and [ls(a)])or c(a))
  def aug(u): return ((u==myU) and pr()) or pr(pxy(u).f(pw(u),0,pr([myU])))
  pr() and [aug(s) for s in aug(pr()[0])]
  (lambda sv:sv.register_function(f,"f") or srv(sv))(xs((ar[3],int(ar[4]))))
for url in pxy(ar[3]).f(pw(ar[3]),0,[]):
  for fn in filter(lambda n:not n in ls(), (pxy(url).f(pw(url),1,ar[4]))[0]):
    (lambda fi:fi.write(pxy(url).f(pw(url),2,fn)) or fi.close())(file(fn,"wc"))

Felten, you’ll recall, reverse-engineered and defeated four "audio watermarking technologies" and "studied and analyzed" two non-watermarking technologies and were on the verge of publicly presenting details of what they’d done, and how they’d done it – to the RIAA’s very great chagrine.

And Halderman showed just how effective SunnComm DRM is.

Back to TinyP2P, the first line is a label and is ignored by the computer, says Felten, emphasizing:

"My goal in creating this program is not to facilitate copyright infringement. I do not condone copyright infringement. Nothing about the program’s design is optimized for the sharing of infringing files. The program is useful mainly as a proof of concept. A more practical program would be faster, more secure, and more resilient against failure.

"But that would require a few more lines of code!"

Read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

How TinyP2P Works
By Ed Felten

The program creates a small-world network, which might be used by a group of friends or business associates to share files. The program does not work well for very large networks; instead, many small networks can coexist. Each network is protected by a password; a network can be accessed only by people who know its password. (But networks are not secure against attackers who can eavesdrop on their traffic.)

The program uses standard communication protocols: HTTP and XML-RPC. HTTP is the same protocol used by web browsers to fetch pages, and XML-RPC is widely used to provide web services.

The program can be run in one of two modes, server or client. When run as a server, the program connects to a network of other servers, and makes all of the files in the current directory available for downloading by users of the network. (Files deposited into that directory while the server is running will become available immediately to other users.) To run the program as a server, you type this command:

python tinyp2p.py password server hostname portnum [otherurl]

Here password is the password for the network, hostname and portnum will be used to construct the URL on which the server will listen (http://hostname:portnum), and otherurl (which is optional) is the URL of another server that is already running as part of the network. (Otherurl will be used to hook up your server to the network. If you don’t provide an otherurl, the program will assume that your server is starting a new network.)

To run the program as a client, you type this command:

python tinyp2p.py password client serverurl pattern

Here password is the network’s password, serverurl is the URL of a server that belongs to the network, and pattern is a character string. This command looks at every file being shared by every server on the network. A file is downloaded, and stored in the current directory, if two things are true: (a) the file’s name contains the substring pattern, and (b) there is not already a file of the same name in the current directory. (Note for ubergeeks: pattern can actually be a Python regular expression, which is matched against filenames using Python’s re.search library call.)

Note that if you run a client in the same directory where you’re running a server, then files downloaded by the client will automatically be redistributed by the server. Depending on your circumstances, this may or may not be what you want. Also note that you can run multiple servers, belonging to different networks, in the same directory.

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TP2P site – The World’s Smallest P2P Application, Freedom to Tinker, December, 2004
great chagrine – RIAA – up to its neck in …, December 6, 2001
how effective – Sunncomm won’t sue Halderman after all, p2pnet, October, 2003

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 15th, 2004 at 5:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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