Quantum theory + NURBS curves + P2P.

I was hallucinating while sitting there on the bed and a few thoughts crossed my mind in a flash. And luckily, I was able to remember them quite vivdly too. Actually, these were the questions I was toying with for quite some time.

So on with the questions:
1. We know that the data from a wave file can be represented in the form of waves, which in turn can be represented mathematically. The mathematical expression can be quite smaller than the sampled version in the wave file.
In 3D softwares, there's an equivalent version of mathematically efficient method of representing a 3D model, NURBS. Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines, are mathematical representations of 3-D geometry that can accurately describe any shape from a simple 2-D line, circle, arc, or curve to the most complex 3-D organic free-form surface or solid.
So the question is,
"So why not a mathematically efficient form for defining an arbitrary data file?"
Ofcourse, I understand that wave files and 3D models have certain parameters and a basic structure to it which is lacking in our arbitrary data file. But I want to try and see for myself why and how it WON'T work.

2. If you thought the first thought was crazy, wait till you hear this. I was thinking of the parallel universe as explained by quantum theory. The theory in its basic form tells us that, if the is a probablity of one event happenning is 1 in 100 then, there will be 100 parallel universes where each unique outcome exist in each universe. Mind bogling it may seem, the whole concept of quantum cryptography relies on parallel universes' existence, and it seems to work too. So no questions there.
So, following this theory, if we look into our past, it looks like we have had a pre-determined path down the time line. So I thought,
'Is this what people mean by fate/detiny? And can we predict in which branch we will be in the future? And if so, it is as if there was no probablity in the first place.'
Whatever.
But my real musings were to trace the tree back to its root and find out what the odds of our current universe being created looked like. This looks like the famous 'Sum over Histories' theory by the inimitable doctor Richard C Feynman, though I don't know much of it to conclude if it is the same.

3. Now the third question combines both the quantum theory and mathematical curves with Peer-to-Peer communication. No, it's not encrypting a wave file with quantum cryptography and P2P ing it.
I was involved, along with my friend Balakrishnan, in a project that aimed to create a P2P architecture that eliminated discovery servers in the form of central, napster-like one or a distributed, gnutella-like one. We chose to experiment with pinging the IP addresses of clients returned by a deterministic formula sequentially throughout the ISP's IP space and hope that there is a client running a P2P protocol in the IP pinged. As expected, this is very inefficient and unreliable, since the client is assigned a dynamic IP from a pool of IP addresses by the ISP. There is no pattern for predicting where in the IP address space of the ISP an online client exists.
Quantum theory suggests that electrons in an atom are not exactly locatable due to Heisenberg's uncertainity principle. So they are represented as Electron clouds rather than individual particles. If we consider the ISP as an atom, its IP address space as the volume of the electron cloud and each position in that volume as an unique IP address, then each electron is a client. And at any instance, the position(IP address) of the electron (client) cannot be found out, ever. I know that I am omitting the 'momentum' factor here, but I can't find a relevant equivalent anywhere in this picture. So, I wanted to know,
'Can quantum theory be applied in P2P models (if not ours)?'
Wait...where's the mathematical curve idea in the third question? It's just that, I wanted to use the mathematically compressed files in P2P to reduce traffic, that's all.

So there ya go. The awesome ponderings of the idle mind.
(Warning: The above were from my own mind. Some of the information maybe correct and if so, I hold the IP right ;) )

All your cable modems combined, I am Captain Pirate!

I read this interesting article and this one on music during one of my quests into the world wide web. That article reflects what I had already thought could be the case with P2P and file sharing but which I dismissed as too radical a view on the issue. Besides, being on the other side of the law, I thought maybe I am a little too biased for the topic. But now I can rest easier knowing this view was actually proved right.

I used to think that the software and the media industries are not losing money at all because of P2P file sharing or even pirated CDs. I have even read many interviews in DIGIT on how various people are moving to original version software instead of the bootlegged one in order to avoid the headache of missing features, files, etc. So people who want to buy an original version and have the money to buy it still buys it. Those who want the software but don't/can't pay for it, swaps it with the peers on the Internet. So essentially, there should be no effect of Peer-to-Peer pirating on the sales of such products. But the company quarterly postings report severe losses, mainly attributed to P2P. What's going on? Which figure is lying?

I don't know much about this, but my two cents thought says that I believe that the music and software just lost the new buyers of their products who would have liked the product, had the resource to do so but would have preferred to have the copy while idling in their chair.


There can be no doubt that P2P has started receiving all the lime-light. New P2P architectures and applications are aiding more faster, comprehensive, up-to-date and anonymous file sharing. In such a scenario, existing copyright technologies fail to prevent illegal copies to be made. The media and software industries are boiling over watching their products being swapped between countless users without paying royalty. Sure, there were a few arrests and cease-and-desists but that's not going to stop another P2P technique from providing more anonymity to the bootlegger. The cat-and-mouse chase can go on forever, with the media cops catching up with the bootleggers somehow, but can't this be avoided? Why is it happenning?

A long time ago, when men were men, women were women, small furry creatures from alpha-centauri were small furry creatures from alpha-centauri and Objects were real, physical objects, the concept of object ownership was simple: Anything that you created, grew, planted or staked was yours. Period. Everyone was happy. The birds chirped. Leaves rustled and Life was beautiful. That is, until someone came up with mangled-looking scrawls called "Programs" that would inevitably crash big boxes called "Computers". If the ancient law of ownership, that made people's life oh-so-happy, were to be applied to them programs, no company could have made a single dollar. This was the time when security people can get away saying things like floppies and "Dongles" without getting wierd looks from other people. This was a time when the Internet was an obscure science-fiction rumored to be mentioned at some big university. This was a time when file sharing involved two environmentalists writing on a single sheet of paper.

Times definetly changed and here we are with the same old copyright protection laws offering a paper-thin resistance against copying when multi-megabytes can be downloaded and uploaded for million others to download and upload. P2P and other disruptive technologies may have made many illegal software owners.

In a recent article I read, the cops in United States were having a problem: Illegal aliens (foreigners, incase you let your imagination wander) are at large and their huge number makes for a large suspect pool for the cops to investigate everytime a crime occurred. The security advisors came up with an utterly surprising and clever plan: Instead of ignoring the presence of illegal aliens among us, let us recognise them and provide them with alien driving licences. Now this may come as a shock to a lot, but the idea has a clever base to it. Since the aliens can obtain a licence, the good people of the lot will come forward and let themselves be testified as good citizens. The remaining of the lot will contain the bad eggs. This will atleast reduce the number of fake driving licences and other documents and at the same time give the good guys a chance to prove themselves.

Applying the same logic to our case, instead of trying to ignore the fact that illegal software owners will be around always, why not come up with copyright laws that acknowledge such users' presence and invent some kind of compromise-plan to keep their numbers at bay? I am not sure if such a scheme would be the best, but it sure seems a good change of perspective to me. I think Microsoft has come up with something like that in distributing future software updates to its Operating Systems.


PS: Okay, the title of this post doesn't have anything to do with the content, but it seemed cool :)

BitTorrent, the slayer.

The first time I heard of bittorrent, some unthinkable months ago, I was grinning so broadly my grinning muscles hurt. It was as if some mythical demon that was unslayable, was slain magically by the words that I was reading. How rude of me! Let me introduce that demon to you.
Meet Dm.Redundant Packets (Dm = Demon ;))
Mr. Redundant Packets was a mythical kind since he was a demon only in my head. I saw him whenever a server has to send the same data packets to multiple hosts, even if the hosts were requesting the packets simulataneously. The demon became really stank when a server buckled trying to send the same file to too many hosts. It was quite horrifying to watch all this, but since I could think of no solutions, I was but a mute spectator.

A lecture that introduced me to "Multi-casting", a form of "Broadcasting" but within a predefined set of exclusive hosts. These are exclusive hosts since in order to be included in a multicast group, you need to pay some money and register your "group" under a multicast IP address. This is because, as opposed to broadcasting where every Jack connected to the sender should be sent a copy of the same packet, in multicast only one copy of the data is sent to the multicast group. The multicast IP address (Class D : 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255) is needed to identify the group since the multicast happens at the router level. Thoug my level of knowledge stops here with multicast servers and MBones, I knew enough to belive that the demon wasn't dead, yet.

Joining multicast groups is costly and this is something which can't be done every time a server wants to send data to multiple temporary hosts.

Enter BitTorrent.

I was reading about bittorrent some months back and realized its potential as a new distribution system. Though I always feel this way with every new P2P system, mainly because P2P architectures excite me, it was different this time. That is because bittorrent smoothes one major inevitablity in P2P systems: freeloaders. Simply put, FreeLoaders are those who downloads but not shares. P2P systems adapted to eliminate this problem. Kazaa implemented a "Participation Level" counter which says to other hosts of the number of files being shared by the user. It worked somewhat, but was not enough.

BitTorrent follows the "Give And Ye Shall Receive" mantra. What BT does is, it splits files into samll equal sized pieces and lets people download the pieces from other people who have already downloaded it. This way, the original "Swarm" doesn't have to upload more than that file's size worth of it. To ensure that the pieces were legitemate, BT uses SHA1 hashing to hash each piece into a 160 bit (20Byte) hash string. This and other meta information are present in the Torrent file which is made available in the public domain. The actual file itself is spread over the world, literally. If anyone is downloading the file in question, you are sure to get it because by downloading, you ensure that future prospectors of the file will get it. But he will get it as long as someone is seeding it and/or downloading it.

Unfortuantely, this property of BitTorrent means that, only popular content remain downloadable via BitTorrent. If the original source of the file exists, it has to be found and downloaded in a client-server like manner.

But fortunately, there are many applications that follow this eccicentric business model. Television shows, blog posts, podcasts, CVS or bleeding edge codes to name some off the top of my mind. Content distribution via BitTorrent is not only fast and cheap but also far reaching. Let me quote one article in Wired that I read recently:

Evidence that Burnham's prediction is coming true came a few weeks before the US presidential election in November, when Jon Stewart - host of Comedy Central's irreverent The Daily Show - made a now-famous appearance on CNN's Crossfire. Stewart attacked the hosts, Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, calling them political puppets. "What you do is partisan hackery," he said, just before he called Carlson "a dick." Amusing enough, but what happened next was more remarkable. Delighted fans immediately ripped the segment and posted it online as a torrent. Word of Stewart's smackdown spread rapidly through the blogs, and within a day at least 4,000 servers were hosting the clip. One host reported having, at any given time, more than a hundred peers swapping and downloading the file. No one knows exactly how many people got the clip through BitTorrent, but this kind of traffic on the very first day suggests a number in the hundreds of thousands - and probably much higher. Another 2.3 million people streamed it from iFilm.com over the next few weeks. By contrast, CNN's audience for Crossfire was only 867,000. Three times as many people saw Stewart's appearance online as on CNN itself.

This method of broadcasting a content via BitTorrent, called PeerCasting, is being regarded as a nemesis by the distribution companies. Why? Imagine television with advertisements ripped-off, unnecessary scenes and credits cut-off and nil cost of distributing via huge TV antennas and satellite dishes. That is the nightmare distribution companies have when they want to dream about their future. But what does that mean for the movie/Television industry of the future? More self-produced shows, techie science shows that were super-ceded by fashion pageantries and such shows may increase and be sustained by blogs and emails who patronize them. These will, ofcourse, exist side-by-side oridinary sequential television for some time atleast. Maybe some other technique will take the throne?

I along with Sriram krishnan and Balakrishnan, who are my class-mates and close-friends, are currently working on integrating BitTorrent distribution model into blogging websites. By observing how blog servers were buckling under the current text blog load, we felt that the bandwidth required to serve hundreds of podcasts and video casts, in the future, will drive the blog servers out of money and out of the picture. We wanted to try fitting BitTorrent like tracker server transparently without modifying the existing blogging platform. Kinda like what Coral did. Seems like not many attempted this but rather have been successful in replacing servers with BitTorrent trackers. The trouble we thought we would face if we attampted that was that nobody will replace their servers just because a few undergrads asked them to. BTW, the project is called "Smoke" and since a better and in-depth description of it is available at Sriram Krishnan's website, I shall refrain from repeating it.


PS: During the project proposal phase of our smoke project, I spent a full five minutes writing one sentence to my fellow mates on, as it turned out, a varied topics. Check it out:

Don't bother printing, even if you have already done so, as I have changed the definition of "slashdotting" and changed the constant values and have printed it out, which is because of my lateness in answering to your late response to my earlier request to type out this project proposal as an adaptation of sriram's description of our supposedly finalized final year project involving two of my favourite topics: BitTorrent and the web, which I suggest are my favourite topics because of their simplicity and effectiveness and, last but not in anyway the least, their inherent beauty of which I am captivated the most, I should say, as will be expressed in my next blog post titled"BitTorrent, the Slayer", named because it (bittorrent) hath slain the demon of a problem namely "redundant packets" that any server running the currently old Client-Server architecture can experience due to its inherent nature of not using the client's cache and the originally small files for which the client-server architecture was developed forand which it served well and, hopefully, will serve well for quite some time into the future, that is, until our or rather a BitTorrent like architecture, supercedes it - an event I sure wish I was around to spectate - an event I am sure will happen never minding what people might tell you just because there are softwares that only support client-server models around and because companies know how to compute Cost-Benefit which will show that the company will be better off adopting the BT distribution model and eliminate nasty bandwidth requirements and slashdotting effects than wastefully serving the same file simultaneously to multiple clients, while that bandwidth could have been used, say, to launch multiple new servers all running the BT-like distribution model, which excites me so much since we are too developing one such solution which might get popular if it is really revolutionary in such a way as this seemingly endless, and not to mention surprisingly techie, post that started out as a simple acknowledgement post and ended(not quite) as a "dotless" , some what techy and hence not just a non-sensical rant usually just created for the sake of typing out such a monstrosity of a sentence which no one in their right minds would try to follow after the first few lines which indicate the shameful intent of the author.

So long (and thanks for all the files)!

Think you know about bootlegging?

Hell, even I thought bootlegging (pirating) was just buying a cd and sharing its rip. But this article from Wired blew my mind. Here are a few excerpts:

"In reality, the number of files on the Net ripped from store-bought CDs, DVDs, and videogames is statistically negligible. People don't share what they buy; they share what is already being shared - the countless descendants of a single "Adam and Eve" file"

"Whoever transfers the most files to the most sites in the least amount of time wins. There are elaborate rules, with prizes in the offing and reputations at stake. Topsites like Anathema are at the apex. Once a file is posted to a topsite, it starts a rapid descent through wider and wider levels of an invisible network, multiplying exponentially along the way. At each step, more and more pirates pitch in to keep the avalanche tumbling downward. Finally, thousands, perhaps millions, of copies - all the progeny of that original file - spill into the public peer-to-peer networks: Kazaa, LimeWire, Morpheus. Without this duplication and distribution structure providing content, the P2P networks would run dry."

"The sites use a "bounce" to hide their IP address, and members can log in only from trusted IP addresses already on file. Most transmissions between sites use heavy-duty encryption. Finally, they continually change the usernames and passwords required to log in. Estimates say this media darknet distributes more than half a million movies every day"

Dig deeper and read more about Frank, the hacker who distributed HalfLife2 beta an year before its release.

Real speeds and download caps.

In my previous post comment,

Sushubh said...
unfortunately sify broadband. the only other option i have in my area is dialup or gprs (max 40kbps). as for limits i believe airtel is giving 128kbps unlimited for 900-1000 bucks... isn't it true?

Of the evils choose the least, eh? Yes, touchtel's (airtel) does offer unlimited 128kbps for Rs.900, but the problem with airtel's is that its 128kbps comes only to around 13.5kBytes/sec rather than the expected 16KBytes/sec (128 divided by 8). On inquiring, they responded that the ATM backbone's header combined with the IP and TCP's headers take up almost 10% of the total bandwidth. And infact, they said I was lucky enough to get 13.5KBytes/sec.

[For knowing my bandwidth, I used download accelerator's read-out, DslReports.com (excellent) and a lot of other sources (streaming servers, ftp, etc)]

What's the loss? Well, some streaming sites detect my connection as 128kbps and send data AT 128kbps. The result? No streaming songs/movies appear continously for more than some 5 seconds. And the next best bandwidth available to me is at 56kbps, which is totally horrific to see or hear.

Though some sites with wmv optimised videos (msdn blog videos) stream at 103kbps "intelligently", which is fine with my connection, I still see stuttering sometimes. So, the decision is made. I am opting for Reliance Broadband, if available in my area, or BSNL's DataOne.

Download caps suck. I really hate DataOne. And all services that are like DataOne too. I mean, what's the use in providing broadband and setting a download cap of 250MBytes? Clearly, people are not paying for broadband just to check their mails faster, or are they?


"Fabulous offer! 1GBytes/second* Internet access for Rs.1000/month!"

Anyone interested?

*maximum 250MBytes/month. Rs.500 for every extra Megabyte

Reliance Broadband too has a download cap, but at a reasonable 10GBytes. I am still unable to get any information from their customer service on whether I will be behind a NAT based network or a DHCP based one. The type of network is not that critical with current P2P networks able to operate transparently in both the environments, but my friend sriram krishnan has problems accessing the Shareaza network from his Net4India network.

I was concerned that with the high data rate that I am about to get, my download habits may change and the 10GByes/month download cap will seem unrealistic too soon. But a distant memory of a economic model (or something) which said something in the lines of "After a few months of the introduction of a hike, the initial interest will subside and become a uniform line below the hike", comforted me. (Don't stone me for such a badly formed statement, but the statement was in the one page that I saw in a library book.)

Oh, and I appologize for confusing Reliance Netway with Reliance Broadband service. Both are different. My bad.

BB hunting

This is December. The time of the year when the semester exams get over and serious gaming days begin. It's also the time of the year when offers from Internet providers are coming! So to the BroadBand providers, "Let the competitions begin!"

Since I am changing residence, I figured this would be the best time to change my internet connection as well (yea, not the best logic in the world).

I am currrently hooked up with TouchTel which is now AirTel after being acquired by AirCel. I am with the Rs.995 per month for 128Kbits/sec for 25hours plan. Though the price is too much and the hours offered is too low, I think this is the most consistent and reliable BB provider in India.

Since my family is moving residence to the next street, we get to keep the same phone number. So I don't have to change the Telecom provider (which is Touch Tel, ofcourse), but I can withdraw from their DSL offer and choose some other BB provider.

I used to be the run-of-the-mill dial-up (l)user before I switched to my 128kbps line. I've been receiving bills in the range of Rs.3500 to Rs.5000 per month. Ofcourse this includes the phone charge, but we use the phones for receving calls more than making them ourselves. That makes our phone charges around Rs.100 to Rs.300 per month.

[Heh, I recall the last month when a TouchTel customer support lady ringed me up to tell me, "make more phone calls". No kidding! :)]. At that time when I bought this plan, this was the best out there (with a phone atleast) in my area. It introduce me to the incredible world of Gigabytes: warez sites, gnutella, kazaa and recently BitTorrent. After having tasted the speed, I naturally want more...

So, I am hunting for new "BroadBand" service. If you had noticed the quotes, then you know that there is a catch: In India, there is no real broadband. Only during the middle of this year the TRAI fellas 'upgraded' thier definition of BB to 256kbps (from 64kbps?). I don't know the official definitions but they seem to be around 11 or 12 mbps. Sure, a lot of fellas seem to offer that kinda service nowadays, but they are experimental and after more customers are drawn into their network, there WILL be a permenant bandwidth/download cap.

So far I have considered SIFY, Reliance's Netway and BSNL's Data One and DIAS, in that order. I am yet to decide on whom to give my (father's) bank. These are big players with B.I.G big plans for BB in India, mind you.

First off, Reliance:

Reliance is a big company ruled by an awesome man who said "India is a land of billion oppurtunities", when asked about his plans for NetWay in India. Netway is gonna be simple: Provide a 100MBytes/second per household in India by the end of 2005. This is carried by Reliance's optic fiber backbone running through the country's streets (motorists will remember this one). This may look puny to those who have read the 1GigaByte/second plan in Japan, but it will work for me. But then again, I don't want to wait till then.

Currently, Netway charges Rs.1200 for 256kbps with a download cap of 10GByte (Rs.1.40/MByte afterwards). Nice. Will have to think about it though because there's one more plan for 512 kbps with the same download cap, but for Rs.3000 ;) BSNL's Data One: Reliance was good, but to further reduce costs, I went onto look at the newly advertised Data One service, named after their Cell One cell phone account. BSNL says that they would affer 256kbps to 8Mbits/sec on ordinary copper cable (DSL) from Rs.500 onwards. That is pretty cheap. But a lot has been left unanswered, like download/bandwidth caps, distance from exchanges, etc. But this service won't be available untill after December of this year. Also, since this is DSL, I will have to pay for a new phone line as well. But if the final costs come to something cheaper than it is now, I will happily keep a second phone (prolly in my closet). BSNL's DIAS:

I don't have much info on this one than that it stands for Direct Internet AccesS. But it seems that depending upon your distance to the nearest digital exchange, you will get speeds ranging from 128kbps to 2Mbps on an existing telephone line. Rate range from Rs.485 to Rs.3000 for corresponding download caps from 200MByte to unlimited. (I am going to find out if I am lucky enough and there's a BSNL exchange near my house.)
This is all I can gather from their home page. What it doesn't say is, whether the price is the same for both 128kbps and 2Mbps connection. What, should a company be lucky enough to get a hi speed connection?

SIFY:

This is a really bad egg. Do a google on it and you'll be surprised at how a single ISP can influence so many hate clubs for itself. I guess SIFY broke the record for that one. One of the most active clubs for this I have seen is Sushubh's. And recently my friend Balakrishnan was a victim of their adverisement fallacy. Since I don't feel like starting a YASHC (Yet Another Sify Hate Club), I think I will stay away from it.


I am sure there's more so called Broadband providers around redefining Broadband as 115kbps (Reliance infocomm and Tata Indicom), but no thanks. It seems, "If enough people use the term wrongly, it would be correct". Well, to those people, think again if you want to get (and make) India faster.

One provider that I forgot to mention was Net4India, a Brit company that has launched broadband internet for homes and businesses. My friend sriram krishnan, has this connection since he was lucky enough to live in the test area (the lucky pig) and he seems to get speeds ranging from 2Mbits/sec to 15Mbits/sec. But recently, due to increase in customer base, that has come down to less than 1MBits/sec. There is a franchise of Net4India in my area, but since I live outside of his cable limits, I can't have it. And he is still in experimental phase of launching. Such is fate :(

[Quick facts:
As of May'05, countries like canada, usa, japan, etc had more than 75% BB users. In India, there were about 0.02%]

In the end, my requirements (low cost, non-NAT, Broadband (the indian kind: atleast 256kbps), no or very high download cap) are met by TouchTel, Reliance Netway and BSNL DataOne (also DIAS). I am sure my current provider and all the others will come up with massively attractive bandwidths and other offers. So I guess I will let the companies fight themselves in the market and jump in when things simmer down.