Gizmodo: peer-to-peer

Almost Half of Net Traffic Is Not-So-Legal P2P (And It'll Really Take Off Soon)

Wilson Rothman — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 03:30:00 EDT

A market research firm called MultiMedia Intelligence—who I admittedly had never heard of—offers up some astounding numbers on ~~porn swapping~~ P2P traffic: 33.6% of North American net activity is P2P, almost all of it illegal. Huge, right? But worldwide, the number is even higher, at 44%. So almost half of the world's net activity is the illegal swapping of movies and music? Mercifully for studios and record labels, the report holds some good-ish news about the future, but it's still a bag o' trouble for the ISPs.

The amount of P2P activity is going to grow by 400% in the next five years. In 2012, 8 petabytes will be swapped worldwide every month, as opposed to the piddly 1.6 petabytes of net traffic today. Accounting for much of this explosion will be legal P2P, which MultiMedia says will grow 10 times faster than the pornier, copyright-infringier variety. This doesn't mean the legal stuff will necessarily eclipse the illegal stuff, but it will become a more noticeable sharer of the bandwidth.

Re: those poor long-suffering ISPs, let's not forget that just because it's "legal" doesn't mean your cable or phone co. is gonna let you bring it on. [MultiMedia Intelligence]

Cucku Social Backup Stores Your Data With Your Friend, Your Friend's Data With You

Jason Chen — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:20:00 EDT

Remember the concept of "porn buddy" as introduced on the UK show Coupling? You exchange keys with your most trusted friend, so in the event that you die an unexpected death, he (or she) would come over and take away all your porn so your family won't find it when going through your stuff. This backup service Cucku is similar to that, except instead of taking away your porn when you die, your porn buddy keeps it safe for you while you're still alive. Which is probably even better.

Cucku calls it "social backup", but it's just a program that transfers your data onto your friend's computer for safe keeping, and vice versa. Peer to peer backup would be as appropriate. Your backup is encrypted, so your partner can't go poking around your stuff, but still offers the reliability and safety of offsite storage.

We can see a few problems with this setup. Their estimate is that 500MB takes 4 hours to back up on a normal ADSL connection. This is fine if you only have 500MB, but if you want to image your entire drive—500GB or so—that'll take 4000 hours. That's 166 DAYS, or about five and a half MONTHS. This is why online backup solutions need an initial sneakernet transfer of hard drives loaded up with your data (which Cucku does not offer in its current implementation). Everything is fine when you're just doing incremental backups after the fact. Also, you're limited to how much storage space your friend has, so you'll probably need to buy him a new hard drive as well.

Is it a good idea? Sure, but only for your most valuable files, and only if they're not more than a few gigabytes in size. [Cucku]

Verizon Actually Helping Speed Up P2P File Sharing? Wha?

Jason Chen — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:01:45 EDT

We had to read this twice to be certain, but Verizon is teaming up with researchers at Yale and a P4P Working group in order to speed up peer to peer file sharing. How is this beneficial to Verizon, who has the burden of carrying P2P traffic, which measures at about 1/3 of the internet's throughput already? Because when you're sharing files with others, only about 6.3% of the traffic comes from users in the same city as you, which is cheap traffic for Verizon to deliver. In a new optimized scheme, up to 58% of the traffic can come from nearby users, which speeds up your downloads and makes it much more cost effective for the ISP.

AT&T has also participated in tests like this one, but is trying to find a way to block pirated content and only allow "legal" content such as NBC's officially delivered shows to make it through the network. Verizon, on the other hand, says they do "not accept the role of network police agency," which means filtering for pirated content is unlikely. Time to sign up for Verizon! [Yahoo]

Viacom Jilted YouTube for Joost, Google Crying Itself to Sleep

Charlie White — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 08:18:16 EST

Why did Viacom abruptly demand 100,000 of its videos be removed from YouTube? Turns out Viacom had other plans for its videos and films: tons of its content was on its way to another Internet video service: the hi-buzz peer-to-peer service called Joost. Suspicions arose when beta testers noticed a plethora of Viacom clips on the nascent Joost, the beta project with more clips than users thus far.

The Wall Street Journal says a licensing deal between Viacom Inc. and Joost is in the offing, where thousands of hours of Viacom content will be licensed, including programming from Viacom cable networks such as MTV and Comedy Central, and movies from Viacom's Paramount as well. This sets the stage for a battle royale between Internet titans, all fighting for nothing short of world domination of the next generation of home entertainment.

Niklas Zennstrm and Janus Friis, the two founders of Joost, also started up two peer-to-peer networks: file-sharing service Kazaa and slam-dunk Internet phone company Skype, and have done well for themselves. Awash in $2.69 billion in cash from their sale of Skype to eBay, the two are having no trouble financing their new Joost venture, which originally was called the Venice Project. Joost can now flourish even further with this new shot in the arm, adding Viacom to the Warner Music Corp. already on board. – Charlie White

Viacom to license content to Joost [Reuters]

TVUPlayer Reviewed: Next Headache for TV Nets?

Charlie White — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 10:55:08 EDT

Imagine a system that could potentially bring you any television channel in the world, live. That's TVUPlayer, peer-to-peer software from TVU Networks in Shanghai, China that lets anyone place a live broadcast signal on the Internet for anyone else to view. The guys at WebTV Hub tried it out, and found it simple to use and powerful enough to shake up the broadcast world on a scale comparable to BitTorrent.

The reviewers found some channels such as CBS, Hollywood Movies and Fox playing back well in full screen, while others were jittery with extremely low quality and couldn't be viewed full screen. Thus far, this beta software has no pausing, rewinding or recording features, and its legality is still in question as well.

If TVUPlayer gets too popular, which seems inevitable, expect Hollywood greedmeisters to descend upon the common man once again, with all that entails—including unseemly court battles with huge corporations suing grandmas and children. – Charlie White

TVUPlayer Review | Get potentially any TV Channel over the internet for free [WebTVHub]
Product Page [TVU Networks]

AHT P2POD HDTV Media Player

Charlie White — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 14:08:31 EST

AHT International introduced the P2POD HDTV media player, a device that uses peer-to-peer technology to download and stream HDTV programs from the Internet. This nicely-designed unit reportedly has a user-friendly interface intended to make it easy to manage the thousands of channels now available. It could get much better, too, because when more of these proprietary P2PODs are in use, all of the other P2PODs benefit. More peers, more speed.

In addition to video, the P2POD is also able to receive and transmit over 6000 Internet radio broadcasts directly to a home entertainment system. If you can't find what you want on the Internet, you can also transfer media files to it via USB 2.0.

Expected to be rolled out in the third quarter of this year, the most astonishing fact is its price, under $150. We're just wondering how we might hack this sucker so it can be used with BitTorrent. Yes, we know, BitTorrent transfers its files differently, but still....

AHT unveils P2POD HDTV media player [MobileMag]

P2POD: A P2P Media Streaming Box

tgrumet — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 13:55:50 EST

Though not the first of its kind, the P2POD box is a neat idea from Holland-based AHT International. The Delft University of Technology developed the software and will show the box at this year's CeBIT. The box allows content distribution as well as love video streaming over peer-to-peer networks.

So, every time you add a P2POD to a P2POD software client, the quality and speed of the services gets better. So you can obviously get A/V content from all kinds of sources, but send it out as well to other P2POD users. The maximum video resolution is 1920x1080 (full HDTV), supports Microsoft Windows Media DRM and comes with a HDMI port. Should be out by 3rd quarter of this year for about $150.

P2POD - P2P HDTV Media Player [i4u]