The future of "file sharing"...?

xist

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Beware...train of thought meanderings...

With Filehosts dropping like flies over the last couple of days it really begs the question what the future of this service provision is going to be. Megaupload was being chased down for countless things, amongst which the apparent fact that they never deleted flagged content, but instead just stored it all away and deactivated reported links. Alongside the claims of laundering, suspicious emails and a super duper search engine the wolf is at the door of the MU offices. However, at this point does it make sense for the extreme measures that these other companies have taken if they are generally doing what they say they're doing....merely storing files and taking down all reported content? The case against Kim Dotcom and co looks like it's going to drag on which would imply Megaupload will be offline for a while, but does that mean the other companies will be cowering for that long? If so how can they cope with the sudden loss of revenue? Surely any extended closure spells the end for these various file hosting companies.

The other issue is that if MU is by some means saved from the guilty charges and gets off scot free, would people feel comfortable going back to it after the FBI seizure? Are what about using all the other providers? Assuming that MU goes down and this triggers the end of the cyberlocker sharing phenomenon, it seems beyond belief that all those people accustomed to downloading whatever the want will just stop without looking for an alternative....so i'd assume that a great number of people will turn to torrents and the associate risk involved.

However, many of those people will never have used any form of bittorrent before...with this sudden crack down on piracy isn't the consequence of this a lot more of the "3 strikes" letters being sent out, scaring more people into submission? Personally speaking, whilst i understand how to use something like MU or RS, i've never used any form of peer to peer software...no Limewire, no Kazaa, No Utorrent, Nothing...and i can't be the only one given how long Filehosts have been around.However, the scare stories about public trackers seems to indicate that unless you have experience in Torrents and are part of a private group you're screwed unless you have some kind of ultra tuition on how to torrent correctly. Additionally, many people don't feel happy with the idea of uploading content in peer to peer transactions...something i can sympathise with and part of the reason i'd never want to use torrents...

But that's not going to stop all those people accustomed to "free stuff"...so assuming they switch to the next best option for them, are we to assume the future of file sharing is hundreds of ISP letters and groups of people with access to private resources. If so what's the future for those people not already within those groups? If Cyberlockers are gone for good does that spell the steady decline of salty "digital sea" dogs?



*Usenet ignored for the simple reason it's not free and many people have no idea about it...hell i have virtually no clue about it beyond vague details...
 

Blood Fetish

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Before I can give my answer to this I'll need a little more clarification. What do you mean by "file sharing"? Are you talking about people pirating so they don't have to pay, or are you talking about more legitimate things such as patch distribution, source code repositories, etc?
 

xist

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Everything.....primarily dodgy because that's what this furore is about, but also legit too....let's say i was a guitarist and you were a drummer, and neither of us were that tech savvy, how would you send me your drum tracks?
 

Hells Malice

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Torrenting is incredibly simple, and if you have an anal ISP, the tutorials to avoid getting caught are also very simple to follow, and pretty easy to find via google.

Torrenting is way more efficient and very easy, people just seem to be intimidated by them for no reason.
 
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xist

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Torrenting is incredibly simple, and if you have an anal ISP, the tutorials to avoid getting caught are also very simple to follow, and pretty easy to find via google.

Torrenting is way more efficient and very easy, people just seem to be intimidated by them for no reason.

It just seems funny that we've had so many people with ISP letters post here on GBAtemp....i'd assume that they had a lot more sense that your regular casual torrent users. I'd naturally assume if cyberlockers vanish many more people will start getting fines and internet bans, causing an overall decrease in online sharing.
 

RedJiggly

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You do realize that, if we want to have a bit good sound quality, such a sound file would easily become more than 'just a few' MegaByte? Most email clients have some maximum allowed filesize. Also, I guess webmail-sites could get hit for distributing as well.



I guess what scares people of torrents is:
-It is often compared to piracy and BAD, even tough that is not always the case
-It is an easy way to get computer viruses on your computer,if you do not know what you are doing, by downloading infected files, or by visiting scam-websites while searching for torrents.
 

FAST6191

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In no order

Free hosting- split into university/corporate style (here servers are hacked- this gave rise to the add "intitle:index of" searching- http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/ although that is nowhere near as useful as it once was as it became a kind of SEO term*) and ISP/free50/free.fr and such (you register several of these with a throwaway account- not so popular since things got huge relative to sites).

File lockers- probably should include these with the ones above. I am not sure they will go away but when any methods gets that little bit too big it gets a bit of a smack and then carries on. Equally I have no idea what will happen in Russia and China (I have used a couple of Chinese file lockers and they are not bad) and the counters to it will happen (many countries have blocking capabilities of various quality).

FTP- same logic as free hosting, you find a throwaway FTP and pump stuff onto that. Used by some of the steam bypass crowd.

FTP proper- you have the straight up scene stuff as well as the similarly modelled stuff. This can get very elaborate needing passwords and more so FTP is probably an inaccurate term.

XDCC- IRC bots, you join a chatroom, send a message and wait your turn to download. Once a favourite among anime and games crowds and IRC is a still the protocol used for a lot of the background stuff.

Torrents and similar P2P- I will probably get a slap for this (especially in light of my distinctions up above) but I am going to lump torrents, gnutella and such into one. A fair bit of effort has been made to go trackerless and whatever else after edonkey and a lot of the torrent issues cropped up. "ultra tuition on how to torrent correctly"- I do not think such a thing exists short of set up your own tracker and share with your trusted mates to the exclusion of all others.

Usenet- there are some things happening here both on the index sites/NZB sites (mainly the Dutch Brein people) and servers proper (see the games and HBO shows for the likes of giganews). As you said vague idea- you register with a provider who then gives you a username and password, you type said username and password into a program along with the server location, ports and how many connections you want to use/have (not really relevant for the better providers) go to an indexer and search for what you want to either have it generate a file or grab one someone else made. It is kind of like what would happen if every file locker got together, mirrored each other's servers every couple of minutes (maybe hours) keeping it all for years and years (I think we are well over 1200 days now), made an index of all that was in there and then sold access to it (and likely your ISP too- BT as in the UK ISP have a slightly cut down version on the higher end packages).

Probably supposed to be lumped in with FTP proper you have VPN networks and such. I have seen seedboxes and cloud drives used for such things.

You still have a few doing email based stuff but nothing much will happen there as email rules are too established and likewise a fair bit of sharing does happen in person over regular IM/similar.

Still there was the adage "free, fast, secure- pick two" which I still hold applies (the scene stuff can take a lot of time and effort to get the most out of).

*rather nicely the last one of these I tangled with left the location of the file it was trying to sell (it tried to hide it in flash/allow a sample) in the page source.

If I knew which would rise next well you would be reading the same story in two or three years time but with "also known on the internet as FAST6191 among other names" in there instead (well I hope I would make "retirement money" and vanish but in reality I do not think I am that good).

The underlying theme I guess to all this is the centralised vs distributed argument but that has been raging pretty much since the first network appeared and not much will change that. The high end people will carry on pretty much as usual, those that trade in real life or with those they know in real life/"personally" will carry on pretty much as usual, usenet will probably carry on pretty much as usual and the names of the protocols may change but there will still be a distributed method and a centralised method.
 
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Blood Fetish

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So this is not about one person sharing a file with another person, this is about one person sharing a file with multiple people? There have been solutions for that in place for many years in the form of FTP, HTTP, BitTorrent, usenet, etc. If you are looking for a "foolproof" system like MegaUpload, where you just click a button, those days are mostly gone. The solution isn't a technical one, rather a political one.
 

arogance1

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Everything.....primarily dodgy because that's what this furore is about, but also legit too....let's say i was a guitarist and you were a drummer, and neither of us were that tech savvy, how would you send me your drum tracks?
I'd drop it onto a USB Memory stick and give it to you
 

Hells Malice

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-It is an easy way to get computer viruses on your computer,if you do not know what you are doing, by downloading infected files, or by visiting scam-websites while searching for torrents.

No it really isn't easy. These days you pretty much have to actively seek out a fake virus filled torrent to find one. It's nearly impossible to stumble upon one unless the person in question truly is the biggest moron on the internet.
 

Blood Fetish

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I'd drop it onto a USB Memory stick and give it to you
Yeah, that scenario seems obvious, but I realize he isn't talking about things like that really. He wants a way for one person to upload a file to some service easily and have hundreds or thousands of people download it.


 

xist

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Thanks for that detailed response FAST6191. However, unless i'm being massively unfair none of those are simple for the random user who has been reliant on a site like Megaupload. I remember using Xbins for the original Xbox and FTP, but i honestly feel that there's a barrier in many of these alternatives that wasn't there before, and whilst i assume torrenting is easy, it also seems easy to end up in a bad situation. Surely the implication is that piracy will surely decrease if nothing changes?

And as for posting a USB stick...if you're in the US and i'm over here in the UK, that means i have to wait days/weeks for you to get your data. I'm not specifically talking about mass downloading but certainly am stressing the point of flexibility and speed, along with ease of use.
 

Hells Malice

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No it really isn't easy. These days you pretty much have to actively seek out a fake virus filled torrent to find one. It's nearly impossible to stumble upon one unless the person in question truly is the biggest moron on the internet.
Vulnerabilities are discovered constantly. Browsers, things like JavaScript and Java, ActiveX, Acrobat. Many of these vulnerabilities can be exploited by simply visiting a site. To say that everyone is safe from system compromise unless they download and run an executable is not accurate.



What is this, 1963? How the fuck do you go to a virus'd up website. Firefox, Chrome, Opera and i'm PRETTY SURE my IE browser will absolutely not let me go to dangerous websites, ever.
I run a virus scan every week, and for the past 4 years i've never gotten a virus. It's not hard AT ALL to avoid them, not even a little bit.
Even if your browser doesn't catch bad websites, it's pretty fucking obvious by just reading the URL, what isn't safe.
 

Blood Fetish

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When I used IM clients such as ICQ over a decade ago they allowed file transfer. Have IM services removed this ability? That is as simple as you get.


 

xist

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Funnily enough i just remembered people using image hosts to share compressed files by merging rar's with images wich isn't very hard to do. I suppose there's also File to Text software as well, which although MASSIVELY unwieldy is a potential option.
 

RedJiggly

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I wonder...


What would happen if we would split a file into two pieces? And not in two 'halves', but rather separate it in such a way that you have two files(equally big) files that can be reassembled to one?

To explain it for who isn't so technically:
Let's say somebody has created a video(or a picture, or a sound clip, or any multimedia file for that matter) and has copyrighted is. You could compare that to somebody creating a very special kind of color tint, say a very special kind of green. He would have the right to sell this color green to everybody, and nobody else would have the right to distribute it.


However, this green tint can be separated into a blue color and a yellow color(we're assuming colors in painting here, not colors as in light). When you have just the right amount of blue and yellow, you can recreate this exact kind of green.
So, by sharing these blue and yellow colors, the reciever can then re-create the green tint and have it without somebody actually sharing this green tint with him.

Now, is sharing of this blue tint and this yellow tint a crime?


The interesting thing is that you could easily make the same color green by using a slightly darker blue color, combined with a slightly brighter yellow. or vice versa.

This essentially means that I can recreate this special tint of green by using ANY tint of blue(as long as I then combine it with the correct yellow) or, ANY tint of yellow(as long as I then combine it with the correct blue).

So, does there being a copyright on this special tint of green mean that people wouldn't allowed to share ANY blue and ANY yellow anymore?


__

To go back to the technical part:
You can easily split a file into two files by using some algorithm, for instance by using XOR with a random string as key. When then passing the result file and the key around separately and letting the reciever re-assemble the files by using this algorithm on the result-file and the key, they will get the original file back.


I believe I might have explained it a bit confusingly. Please feel free to ask questions ^^'


~RJ
 

xist

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Splitting things into component parts is changing the issue into evasion. Ultimately how would you send those two parts to your brother overseas, who's a tech noob?

Whichever way i look at it, i just see that this episode of history has been an amazing leap towards stopping piracy committed by the casual user, or at least significantly lessening it.
 

RedJiggly

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You just described the BitTorrent protocol almost exactly. Instead of two parts it uses hundreds or thousands.

That's not what I meant. What I mean is splitting it into component parts, i.e. create two files that all have the full amount of data, but only half of the time.
I do not mean to split up a file into multiple chunks like ''Begin, Middle, End''

In BitTorrent the green color would be cut into two pieces, and two packets of green, but both only halve the size, would be sent.

In my system, you send a blue and a yellow color, wich can then be assembled back to a green color.
 

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