by: Zen

Private P2Ps that incorporate social networks are on the rise

“The darknet will never die. Adversaries will send out their digital agents to hunt down its disciples. But the darknet will go further underground, finding new ways to escape the reach of these electronic attackers. The faithful will find safety by banding together in small groups, beyond the reach of the oppressors… the darknet is already here: it is the unofficial side of the internet. And its resilience guarantees that it will remain a thorn in the side of the music and movie industries…” — Richard Waters, “No respite from the forces of darknet”, Financial Times, July 29, 2003

Darknet, also known as the “shadow internet”, refers to the collection of networks and other technologies that enable people to illegally share copyrighted digital files with little or no fear of detection. While Pakistanis are so used to witnessing rampant piracy that this probably doesn’t even raise an eyebrow locally, elsewhere in the world, darknets are a major cause for concern.

The whole process starts with one stolen released or pre-released copy of a movie or music, which within minutes, gets put up on darknets such as Anathema, and snowballs all over the World Wide Web. Anathema, true to its name, is just one of the sites for over 30 “underground” servers sharing pirated digital media. On the local front we have DC++ hubs sharing gigabytes of data, and the ISPs and cable internet providers have quite a substantial amount of data available for download on their in-house FTP servers. Like gangs and other underground groups, darknets are, for the most part, resilient to anti-piracy crackdowns. While darknets are predicted to continue operating undeterred, we are witnessing the evolution of more mainstream P2P applications.

Instead of large public networks and hubs with terabytes of data, P2P applications are now shifting towards smaller, more focused “socially networked” groups. Orkut, Friendster, Wallop and 43 Things, and even services such as MSN, AOL, ICQ and Yahoo! Messenger come under the realm of social networking groups. The next generation of file sharing networks should see a hybridisation of P2P clients and such social networking services. There are already many applications that enable peers to message each other as well as share files but the focus now is on mimicking people’s real world social networking traits.

Conventional P2P applications these days employ a brute-search approach by flooding every peer with search requests, or inventorying the contents of the peers at a centralised location. The main problem with “discovery-based” P2P applications (discussed in “Six Degrees of Separation” Spider, January, 2005) is that all the shared media is broadcast in the discovery server listing. The same problem hampers the dissemination of BitTorrent files, as the torrents have to be listed and thus vulnerable to anti-piracy police. On the other hand, systems based on the Gnutella protocol send their search queries to unconcerned nodes.

The real-world situation is quite different. We don’t share everything with everyone, the way most P2P applications assume. There are some files, such as family photos or a class assignment, which you’d rather not share with the rest of the world. At the same time, you may know the demographics of the peers who have the files you are looking for, so you can optimise your search by making it more focused. In the real world, the most practical way of searching for something is to ask friends, or people whom we believe might possibly have it. If that fails, we ask them to spread the word. When users reach out, they definitely prefer reaching out to friends of friends, rather than to random people. Since they know where the data is coming from, they have an idea as to whether the content is trustworthy. You can think of social networking P2P or private P2Ps as hybrids between P2P applications, instant messengers (IMs) and e-groups/social networks. The basic concept of private P2P is essentially the same as that of programs such as Hello, which allows P2P sharing of photographs with your friends, family or anyone else that you choose. Social networking P2P applications such as Groove cater to the file sharing needs of small and medium-sized businesses and charge a fee for their services. A major advantage for such services is that if the peer with the requested file is offline, the program can still retrieve the replicated file from other group members. Other social network P2P applications such as Qnext, Grouper and ShareDirect remain at a disadvantage, as they don’t offer the ability to retrieve files from users that are offline.

Currently, a community-based website by Microsoft called Wallop allows pictures and MP3s to be uploaded but searching and downloading options are unavailable. Who knows, if social networking P2P applications catch on, we just may find Google morphing Orkut from a social networking site to a P2P client. Users would then be able to share and search for files, chat, use calendars, whiteboards and utilise discussion forums. Sounds like Big Brother’s dream come true.

//This article appeared in Spider’s March 2005 issue