Re: [DMCA-Activists] New Scientist: P2P Rewiring May Fight Berman Bill

[Ruben Safir]

This was all covered in the Conference room

Weiner tear through the tech peoples claims to
be able to selectivly flood the software.

Ruben

> 
>  
> A proposed US law permitting attacks on peer-to-peer file
> sharing networks to disrupt illegal copying could be
> undermined by research from two US computer students.
> 
> Peer-to-peer networks let thousands of personal computers
> communicate with each other so that users can search each
> other's hard drives for files.
> 
> Some sections of the US entertainment industry are so
> concerned about copyright infringement on peer-to-peer
> networks that they are pushing for new powers to put a stop
> to the activity themselves. The plans have outraged many
> peer-to-peer network users and civil liberty campaigners.
> 
> A US bill proposed in July 2002 would give copyright holders
> the legal power to attack the computers of file sharers
> suspected of piracy. Experts say it would be relatively easy
> to log on to a network and deliberately overload suspected
> users with fake requests for a file, by misinforming other
> "nodes". This is similar to overloading a web site with fake
> traffic in a "denial of service" attack.
> 
> But Neil Daswani and Hector Garcia-Molina of the Database
> Research Department at Stanford University in the US believe
> it may be possible to redesign peer-to-peer networks to
> protect them against such attacks. Daswani says this may
> also guard these networks against malicious computer
> hackers. He told New Scientist: "We were interested in both
> protecting the network from being shut down and protecting
> individual users."
> 
> 
> Flood gates 
> 
> Daswani and Garcia-Molina mathematically modeled the popular
> open source network Gnutella and experimented with different
> combinations of existing rules for efficiently sharing file
> requests across a network. This network consists of ordinary
> users, or "nodes" and "supernodes", which have higher
> bandwidth. Requests are broadcast between nodes and
> supernodes with little discrimination.
> 
> Daswani points out that anyone can join a peer-to-peer
> network, so it cannot be run on trust. Instead, the
> researchers gave each node a set of simple rules to follow
> when processing requests from other peers. They found that
> when requests from ordinary nodes were treated in a
> different way to requests from supernodes the damage caused
> by a flooding attack was dramatically reduced. 
> 
> The optimum policy was to refuse second requests from a
> specific supernode until all other connected supernodes had
> also made a request - showing the request is more likely to
> be genuine. Favouring requests from local supernodes was
> also beneficial. A good overall arrangement was to have
> peers communicating normally within small groups and
> limiting communication between these groups.
> 
> By applying these rules, Daswani says, "you don't end up
> using up all your bandwidth if there's a malicious node on
> the network."
> 
> 
> Peer review 
> 
> Theodore Hong, an expert in peer-to-peer networks at
> Imperial College in the UK says: "They've developed a good
> model for quantifying the damage caused by a query flood.
> Using these policies, you can cut the damage caused by a
> flood in half."
> 
> But Adam Langley, a UK-based peer-to-peer programmer and
> contributor to Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of
> Disruptive Technologies is not convinced that the system
> would work in the real world. "I wonder about its
> practicality," he told New Scientist, as the model assumes
> an ideal, uniform network.
> 
> Organisations including the Recording Industry Association
> of America  (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of
> America (MPAA) are pushing for  better protection of
> copyrighted music and movies. The P2P Piracy Prevention 
> Act, proposed by Senator Howard Berman, is currently being
> redrafted  following severe criticism and is not likely to
> be introduced in any form  until January 2003 at the
> earliest.
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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