Peer to Peer and Spam in the Internet 147
RobertDHaskins writes "A very interesting series of papers from Helsinki University of Technology on the topics of P2P and spam. Written by PhD students they are a little long, but some very good coverage of the state of the art."
Google HTML Link... (Score:5, Informative)
Here [google.com].
Re:Google HTML Link... (Score:3, Interesting)
...for those that don't wanna read the PDF:
Got another link? That HTML version yer pointing to only goes up to page 49 out of well over 100 pages. I guess google's automatic PDF to HTML conversion caps itself at 49 pages.Re:Google HTML Link... (Score:2)
Re:Google HTML Link... (Score:2)
Re:Google HTML Link... (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, for starters, it takes longer to download the file and then to have the viewer application open than it should.
Secondly, the text in Adobe Acrobat is, by default, harder to read than whatever font you have your browser set to, and isn't possible to change the font in Acrobat Reader. This is annoying.
Thirdly, try to use the oh-so-intuitive text-select tool in Acrobat reader to select a paragraph from this document. When you reach the end of the line, the
Re:Google HTML Link... (Score:1)
Re:Google HTML Link... (Score:2)
Re:Google HTML Link... (Score:2)
Re:Google HTML Link... (Score:1)
It's not quite as bad as stealthy goatse links, but damn, it's close.
Re:Google HTML Link... (Score:2)
I get around this by MANUALLY TURNING OFF THE FREAKING STUPID ACROBAT BROWSER PLUGIN INTEGRATION which, unfortunately, actually works for FireFox.
Maybe they'll 'fix' that problem with the next Firefox release - I can't for the life of me figure out why you'd want to look at a PDF in a window rather than download and save it, but that's just my opinion.
Ugh, that PDF link hung my browser... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Ugh, that PDF link hung my browser... (Score:2)
Re:Ugh, that PDF link hung my browser... (Score:5, Informative)
-- former windows guy, just trying to be helpful
Re:Ugh, that PDF link hung my browser... (Score:2, Informative)
Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, every email has a button saying "charge the sender $0.10". It's at the recipient's option whether or not to charge the guy.
For emails from friends I'd never hit the button. For spams I would.
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:1, Insightful)
Some people make their friends pay when they every time they go out to lunch too. Those people end up with fewer friends.
(Oh and if they're poor, I don't mind if I pay for emails or lunches.)
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:2, Funny)
Raise the price to $0.50 / email, I'd actually enjoy it.
If I can get through 5 spams / minute I'd be making and extra $100/hour just for reading email.
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:1)
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:1)
No, this is not the case. The way it would work is this: The sender deposits say $10 in a private (i.e., non-government) escrow account. When the sender sends e-mail, they would get a key from the escrow agency (certifying that the funds are present) and include it in the e-mail.
The recipient's e-mail client on the other hand would look to see if a valid key is present. If it is, then it would let the e-mail through and the user could decide if the e-mail is spam or not and whether to ding the sender s
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:5, Funny)
(Note in all lower cases now in the post-Spam-Boom era)
work from home and make $3000 a day by clicking the charge button
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't see that happening.
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:3, Insightful)
This concern is way overrated. The potential problems created by this "postage" model is much more tractable and minor (on a grand sclae) than those under the non-market based status quo. Once this "postage" technology is in place, ISPs would be free to enhance it to offer various security protections. For instance, only allow, say, 100 ema
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:1)
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, every email has a button saying "charge the sender $0.10". It's at the recipient's option whether or not to charge the guy.
The problem then arises that someone could wage a financial war against any service that sends any sort of e-mail to their users. So, say for instance that someone gets ticked off at slashdot, registers an account, gets a password sent to them and hits the button. Granted, the service could refuse to e-mail anyone that has charged it, but that doesn't stop an army of s
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:4, Funny)
Simple. I do. Hand it over.
Sincerely,
Darl McBride
This idea has significant merit (Score:1)
I've *never* been lured into sending someone else an e-mail. The only way I could imagine someone doing it is either (a) sending me an e-mail first, or (b) setting up a website with a "click here to e-mail me about ..." In case (a), if someone charged me, I would turn around and charge them for the original e-mail, and we would be even. Listservs cou
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:2)
And find some other way of distributing mailing lists, implement it, and migrate all the mailing lists to it.
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:2)
It is currently not possible to tell who sent the mail. Spammers send mail claiming to be from my domain quite often. Are you planning to charge me when they spam you? Screw that.
Until email has a way to verify who actually sent it, you can't even start talking about billing for it. Once you can verify who sent it, I believe spam gets a lot easier to deal with.
Even without looking at the problems associated with "who does th
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:2, Informative)
The current spam law is absolutely going to move spam out of american internet space and into foreign countries. Then it becomes a political issue. You know how quickly political issues get solved.
Honestly, you sound like a marketing engineer. Stay away from the network mmmmkay ?
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:3, Funny)
I dont know anyone there, yet the security department at Microsoft.ru kept sending me friendly patches attached to their messages.
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:1)
But wait, I don't have my pic online...
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:2)
Having never received legitimate mail from Russia, China, or Korea, I say to hell with all of them. Yeah, I'd block them. They can block me back - won't bother me a bit.
Re:Spam is very simple to fix. (Score:1)
But if a sliding scale of punishments was implemented, say:
days banned from sending mail = 2^number of offences so far
By offence that would be one bulk of spam, not each spam
Way too long (Score:5, Funny)
Could someone post a one line summary? For example,
Linux good; Microsoft bad; SCO evil; RMS god.
John.
Re:Way too long (Score:5, Funny)
See?
Re:Way too long (Score:3, Funny)
See?
I totally disagree with every point you've just made,
will go into great detail about why I think you're
wrong, and as an aside cast inferances on your lineage.
Re:Way too long (Score:4, Funny)
See?
I totally disagree with every point you've just made,
will go into great detail about why I think you're
wrong, and as an aside cast inferances on your lineage.
And I'll point out your grammer and speeling mistakes, while makeing some of my own!
Re:Way too long (Score:4, Funny)
And you can't forget... (Score:3, Funny)
And I'll keep thinking it's funny each time I do it.
Re:And you can't forget... (Score:2)
Re:Way too long (Score:2)
Re:Way too long (Score:2)
Re:Way too long (Score:2)
Then I'll casually include a link [goatse.cx] to goatse.
Re:Way too long (Score:2)
Here you go.
P2P- hot issue, good. Spam- hot issue, bad, no fix.
Bias? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think bundling p2p and spam is either totally missing the point, or attempting to influence the opinions of people who don't know better. The users of p2p want what they get for the most part (maybe not viruses and fakes, but the author seems to be targeting p2p due to the copyrighted content).
Re:Bias? (Score:2, Insightful)
Indeed, while p2p applications may share illegally share content, they are probably not as disruptive as laid out.
Spam is far more disruptive, but is given less coverage in the document.
I would expect more from PhD's, I hope that these were written post-PhD, and not for a doctoral thesis, they seem to be very ill-informed.
Re:Bias? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bias? (Score:2)
If studentA download file X of 700 megs, and tells 5 of his friends who download that same file, that would save a lot of bandwidth if they could just pull that file of the cache server automatically.
Re:Bias? (Score:2)
Re:Bias? (Score:2)
They ARE, however, in the business of trying to conserve resources(to an extent, atleast)... So using a web cache server may benefit p2p apps, it will benefit all web use... Downloading a trendy 1meg flash game or the latest linux distro or the.... etc, etc, etc.
Re:Bias? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bias? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, those poor ISP's having to endure their customers actually using the product they're selling them.
Re:Bias? (Score:2)
I wasn't passing judgement, I was merely pointing out that the parent was inco
Re:Bias? (Score:2, Insightful)
What is "sold" is not what is delivered.
Re:Bias? (Score:2)
Baloney. Prices are only partially based on the costs. Prices are more directly linked with demand and unbiased competition. Who decided that ISPs should make a certain percentage profits while other business work on much larger and smaller margins? The reason we p
Re:Bias? (Score:2)
Re:Bias? (Score:2)
Ah, but that's where your ignorance of supply and demand shines through. As long as people are willing to pay a premium for a product, no matter how low it costs, the providers will continue to charge that regardless of the competition. Unless you believe that prices eventually stabilize in the marketplace to be the bare minimum that every company
Re:Bias? (Score:2)
This would be much less of an issue if network bandwidth providers would simply charge for actual amount of this limited resource that each user actually uses. Yes, its a bit more work for the provider to monitor actual usage, but it would more firmly link supply to demand.
It would also encourage people to demand better security f
It's actually kind of funny (Score:5, Interesting)
But the students' papers are all about how effective and efficient the various P2P architectures out there are and how they might be improved. Heh. Bless you, students.
P2P is in its infancy (Score:5, Interesting)
If you have 6 computers transfering information to each of them, you can create almost the same environment that 6 computers feeding off a server is.
If you place the anti-cheat code on every computer, you form a community to check against cheats.
If you also store every character's information on every computer, then you can watch for hacks there too.
Given its extrodinarily complicated, and fails to mob rule(conspiracy of hackers to overwhelm the system)... Its something that could be done.
I'm sure theres even more complicated things you can do with P2P, such as organizing nodes for filesharing and so on.
Re:P2P is in its infancy (Score:5, Funny)
P2P filesharing, what a great idea! I wonder when somebody's going to try to do that...
Re:P2P is in its infancy (Score:5, Interesting)
Communism depends on every person contributing (essentially) equally and taking equally, and the system falls apart if one (or worse, several) individuals decide to take advantage of the community.
This is why Blizzard had to instigate centralized servers where all the games are run, and all Diablo characters were stored. People were hacking and HexEditing their characters too much to be trusted.
The trust ring would help, but, like you say, a mob of cheaters can bring the whole thing down by sufficiently fooling the community into believing the hack over the truth.
I mean, just look at P2P (or filesharing) today. When grabbing something off of Kazaa, music you're downloading could be pr0n, or a different song, or a 30 second sample that the RIAA put on to prevent the real one from being grabbed. However, from a centralized, controlled server (iTunes) you know what you're getting beforehand (essentially) cheat-free.
Of course, with true P2P everybody gets access to the product mostly free, whereas in the capitalistic model of iTunes, one entity has all the power and control, and hence will be profiting from all of this.
Re:P2P is in its infancy (Score:3, Funny)
You mean like a poster/moderator/meta-mod system such as implemented right here on
Re:P2P is in its infancy (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean like a poster/moderator/meta-mod system such as implemented right here on /.? Yeah, that's worked wonders for quality assurance on these message boards!
In my opinion, it works quite well. Try reading /. at -1 for a while and see how much fun that is.
JP
Re:P2P is in its infancy (Score:2)
Except since the user doesn't provide the files, but only verify them, then it'd be like saying that Dukael moderated this +1, so I'll trust his judgment and give it more (additional) weight.
I'll definitely check it out, but I wonder if it actually improves the selection, or if it just saves you time from sifting through
Helsinki? Finland? Why in english then? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Helsinki? Finland? Why in english then? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Helsinki? Finland? Why in english then? (Score:1)
Finns do a lot of things in funny languages (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Finns do a lot of things in funny languages (Score:2)
They want more people to understand, so they go to Latin, a dead language? That's so very sad.
Re:Helsinki? Finland? Why in english then? (Score:5, Funny)
Did I say that ?
I meant to say that they are a bunch of liberal left-wing socialist radicals who get their english training in order to become terrorists.
Am I American again ?
Phew!
Re:Helsinki? Finland? Why in english then? (Score:2)
The stereotyp
Re:Helsinki? Finland? Why in english then? (Score:5, Insightful)
100 years ago, scientific papers were commonly written in German.
200 years ago, they were commonly written in Latin.
Times change.
Re:Helsinki? Finland? Why in english then? (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Helsinki? Finland? Why in english then? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Helsinki? Finland? Why in english then? (Score:2)
Not all Americans speak English. Trust me on this - I live in Texas. :^)
Re:Helsinki? Finland? Why in english then? (Score:1)
1) A good comp. sci paper written in Finnish would have zero circulation; the number of people that could read it is way too small (read: zero references, can't publish in any decent conference/journal).
2) The Finnish language lacks the necessary terminology in the not-so-well established fields. For example, I've published a couple of computer graphics papers in conferences and journals -- I couldn't have ever written those papers in Finni
Re:Helsinki? Finland? Why in english then? (Score:1)
Re:Helsinki? Finland? Why in english then? (Score:2)
Unfortunately, at the same time it probably lacked proper support for other charsets than ASCII...
Re:Helsinki? Finland? Why in english then? (Score:1, Insightful)
Because of the large foreign population, most lectures in the ICT programmes are also given in English.
Actually, if you look at the name list on the report, only 5 of 12 of those PhD students are native Finnish.
Anyway, it's
Re:Helsinki? Finland? Why in english then? (Score:1)
Simple. (Score:2, Insightful)
In EDonkey it's worth looking at other file names of given share, they often offer some insight. You grab ROTK, check and see 3 other names: FOTR-Extended-Edition, and you may be sure it was some moron who can't tell "1" apart from "3" who renamed it and some more morons download it without checking.
Re:Simple. (Score:2)
One file will be names ROTK-Extended-Edition and another with the same MD5 sum will be some porno name, it's absurdly obvious.
And other times you can tell just because of the file size. I've seen GTA3, in only 12k!
A good tool is ShareReactor Fakecheck for those truly tricky files. Help them out, report fake ed2k links. I know I do all the time, mlnet even has a handy little link that does it automatically for you in the web interface.
P2P. SPAM. (Score:4, Informative)
While it doesn't imply they are somehow related in their functions, the common nature of these two is the bandwidth consumption, which as stated by the author, can be annoying and disruptive.
Re:P2P. SPAM. (Score:3, Insightful)
It is a good point that you make, because much of the stuff that they had written (from a brief I'm-at-work perusal) is stuff that we (at least the slashdot community) already know. It's just compiled into one convenient package that will merit an award of a PhD.
What I feel would have been more interesting (and has been discussed here) would have b
P2P Spamming, eh? (Score:1, Funny)
Very thorough (Score:5, Informative)
Why isn't there a service where you can get full-speed from behind a firewall without portmapping? College students everywhere would rejoice. When I'm home I port forward and get the full pipe, but when I'm at college the firewall keeps my download speeds nice and slow. I know this because every once and a while I'll get lucky and some BT seed will connect and start sending me 80kb/s for about five minutes and stop. They made Supernodes to make the network more scalable and to make it work with firewalls. Can they make it work at full speed with firewalls?
Re:Very thorough (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Very thorough (Score:2)
Don't feel like you're being singled out. Universities have been paying through the nose for bandwidth over the last 2-4 years because of college students who feel that it is their unalienable right to freely download whatever they want. Putting bandwidth limits in place is the least of your concerns... be happy that they didn't shut down your ability to use P2P on their network at all.
You could try talking with your universi
A collection of amateurish papers (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, this is in the introduction to the Freenet section:
Um, many people might disagree with that little gem.Re:A collection of amateurish papers (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, many people might disagree with that little gem.
But most sensible people would not. Of course there have to be limits on freedom of expression. That's why we have laws on libel, incitement to racial hatred, etc. etc.
A reasonable country will choose a good compromise between the freedom of the individual and the needs of society.
Re:A collection of amateurish papers (Score:1)
I hope they've got everyone's best interests in mind.
I'm sure they do. "Abuse of power" is rare. Hardly happens anywhere, historically speaking. (/sarcasm)
Re:A collection of amateurish papers (Score:3, Insightful)
I admit that my original reply may have seemed a bit anti-US, but let's take Finland as an example since the article is finnish and I'm finnish. There isn't really all that much censorship here, so in that respect there is really nothing to give examples of. However, having followed some court cases recently, I can tell you that they are very boring. They are boring because there are no loudmouthed lawyers trying to convince a jury or a judge on why this or that partic
Re:A collection of amateurish papers (Score:1)
Common sense requires common experience. That's a difficult requirement to meet in a geographically large and economically diverse population. Probably easier to achieve in Finland...
I admit that my original reply may have seemed a bit anti-US
Yes. But that's okay, and it's not what I'm responding to.
My point is that law is a tangible entity and "common sense" is decidely intangible. You can't decide legality on "common sense" in a land where there's t
Cloudmark Spamnet? (Score:1)
Re:problems with the internet (Score:1)
It might solve the problem, but the social implications are horrific. I am assuming, despite the lack of an April 1st date, that this is a subtle joke?..
Alternatively, if the poster *is* serious, it is reminiscent of the old joke whose punchline is "you can't get there from here".
Re:problems with the internet (Score:2)
This technique is already used to fool some web browsers (ie IE) into downloading a file as binary instead of getting it as text...
Lock up the current net, and another one will spring up underneath. It'd probably be kind of like freenet, except tha