*ster (file sharing) and the Borg
From SusoSight
(Redirected from Thoughts/*ster (file sharing) and the Borg)| Number: | 16 |
| Date created: | 2001-09-25 19:17:35 |
| Previous Thought: | Why so quickly blame someone else? |
| Next Thought: | Communication, Open Source Software and human evolution. |
| Voting results: | Yes: 10 |
For those of you out there that are not up on your Star Trek culture. The Borg was an advanced alien race.... well, nevermind. If you don't know about Star Trek then just hit the back button on your browser a few times. ;-)
Anyways, when Riker and Worf found out that their phases soon didn't work because the Borg would adapt to the frequency of the beam, Geordi or Data (sorry, can't remember which) came up with the bright idea of creating a phaser that would also adapt by modulating their beam frequency.
Right now in the world of filesharing we seem to be enduring the same senario as our futuristic friends did (er, will). Where I work I saw a request come in from someone at Sony where they had sent out what seemed to be an automatted mailing indicating that someone on our network was serving a song by Michael Jackson that they owned the rights too. What was purculiar about the email is that it laid out a table showing the time, filename, IP and also the protocol on which the file was found. It was as if Sony had created an automated program that scours through all the known file sharing protocols looking for key words and then firing off a message to whoever owns that IP block asking for the user to be assimilated into the collective corporate word were stealing music is wrong.
So why not learn from the idealism of Data and Geordi by creating a protocol that changes with every request that is made. For all of these protocols like Napster, OpenNap, Aimster, iMesh, etc. all have static protocols that can be learned so that any average joe at <insert music corporation here> can write a script to exploit the file sharing system into a database of criminals. So let's create client/server programs that are intelligent and can change their protocols randomly, using directive words in the protocol that may or may or may not be used by protocols now. This will at least make things moderately more difficult for the big boys to decipher.
Think I've gone off my rocker yet?