P2P Conference – Trip Report Ilya Mironov, Crypto group

The conference The O’Reilly Peer-to-Peer conference Feb , 2001, San Francisco “The first and most important conference on P2P” About 900 attendees, 75 speakers.

Not a research or technical Five talks I liked: –lawyer –liberal profession –patent expert –business consultant –venture capitalist Talks I didn’t like: –CEO –developer –VP of marketing

Clay Shirky Definition of P2P: An application is P2P if it aggregates resources at the network’s edge. P2P applications address the nodes outside the DNS.

Clay Shirky “Because you could not get an IP address for your PC, you could not really host anything. The veil of second-class connectivity created a second class of users.” Balkanization of the address space (ICQ and AIM have created 150 mln cf. to 22 mln in whois)

Clay Shirky One-liners: He overestimated by four. Thomas Watson said in 1943 that “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” We now know that that figure was wrong. PC is the dark matter of the Internet.

Larry Cheng Overview of the P2P landscape 150+ companies $300 mln in VC funding in 2000 associate with Battery Ventures Distributed computations~35% capital Collaboration/knowledge sharing~30% Content distribution (aka Akamai killers)~10% Infrastructure/platform for P2P~10% File sharing~10% Distributed search~5%

Larry Cheng Distributed computing: $2b/year—the total market for supercomputing divided between about 5 companies. On his watch list: –Applied Meta (LEGION) –Entropia –United Devices

Larry Cheng On his radar (in distributed computations): –Popular Powers –eZaro –Porivo –Simulant –Blackstone

Larry Cheng On his watch list in collaboration/knowledge management –Autonomy –Consilent –Groove Networks Watch list for distributed search –Infrasearch –OpenCola

Larry Cheng Best funded companies Groove Networks$60 mln Entropia$29 Consilent$23 Napster$17+ NextPage$20 OpenCola$15 United Devices$13 Xdegrees$8

Bill Joy Unveiled another j-word: JXTA –pipes from one peer to another –ability to group a set of peers together, and create groups of groups –monitoring and metering –security layer. Open source on the Apache license

Patent Expert : about 984 patents that mention P2P, with about 200 in claims. Patents on P2P date back to the early 80s. Probably, most of them are invalid. YearsPatents

Lawrence Lessig Communication Decency Act Supreme Court’s message to lawmakers: you must wait [before stepping in and messing it up] Lawrence Lessig: “We have to wait to see how the things shake out, before we send lawyers in.” Napster case is relevant to all innovators

Lawrence Lessig The copyright we have now is not your dad’s copyright. “What is happening in the digital realm is that fair use is being coded away both through technology and through the licenses…” (“Alice in Wonderland” e-book—you are not allowed to read this book aloud) The copyright law must be changed

Kelly Truelove (Clip2 CEO) R&D company on Gnutella

Bill Joy on security "In the short term, you can do a lot of stuff without security. In the long term, you need to design thinking through security and anonymity up front. We're committed to doing security up front and if it takes us longer, so be it. Success will depend on doing security in a proper way."

David Anderson on security more than 50% of project resources dealing with security problems “It’s a fortunate property of our problem that incorrect computation on a piece of data is not disastrous.” Having about x3 more power than needed, they are able to double-check the work

Folks on Security Security’s our first priority. We use SHA-1 and zero-knowledge. We may use PGP-type certificates or Verisign-type certificates. Entropia: sandbox for binaries

Three most frequent words 1.Peer[-to-peer] 2.Napster 3.Tragedy of the commons

Companies to watch I add to my radar: –OpenCola –Clip2 –XDegrees –Free Haven –P2P working group Watch out! –Mojo Nation

Miscellaneous pics Ian Clarke (Freenet) and Shawn Fanning (Napster) run into each other

Miscellaneous pics Web-programmer, street performer, songlet writer

Miscellaneous pics