Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing restrictions

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Robert Raisch <info () raisch com>
Date: May 31, 2005 9:52:46 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: Ip ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing restrictions


After all we have seen and experienced, have we learned nothing?   
Tell any reasonably sophisticated hacker they cannot do something and  
they will find more ways to get around your restriction then you can 
(not) imagine.

Oh, you allow text messaging traffic on your network, but not P2P?   
How about P2P applications reconfigured to share songs and movies  
over the same ports used by AOL's AIM?  Or the Web's HTTP?  Or  
email's IMAP/POP?
Think you can recognize P2P transmissions by their unique sequence of  
ones and zeros?  How about scrambling those bits using cryptographic  
transformations you would need several super-computers to crack?

Without examining every bit traversing the network and understanding  
its state, within whatever context or conversation it is a part of,  
you cannot hope to control what your users do.  This is the tyranny  
of information complexity turned on its head and reinvented as a  
crushing weight placed on the shoulders of those who would seek to  
control others.

The biggest "problem" here is not P2P or file sharing or DVD ripping  
or podcasting...it's the simple, unalterable fact that we've come to  
a time where any "intellectual property" is easily, trivially taken  
out of the container we've traditionally relied upon to control its  
use.  Books, vinyl records, cds, celluloid film, video tape,  
DVDs....these are archaic prisons of rigid matter, atoms purposefully  
constructed to diminish what we can accomplish, rather than clouds of  
electrons, indeterminately located, impossible to measure, and so,  
impossible to control.
We are beginning to see the affect of the Internet Age's Uncertainty  
Principle:  information wants to be free...and it has little to with  
cost or payments or money, and everything to do with power and control.

These are the birth pains of a new way of thinking; a new  
understanding of creativity, artifice, knowledge and how we interact  
with our fellow creatures and our world.  And like any birth, it will  
be bloody, messy, and there will be much wailing, screaming, and  
gnashing of teeth, but this is how new living things come into being,  
not in the atomic perfection of machine authority but in the raw,  
larval confusion of natural, human creation.

/rr



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