P2P campus trends

11 Dec 2002

I’ve noticed that Peer-to-Peer File Sharing continues to be an essential of UCLA college life. It’s essential because kids here are big time culture freaks. File sharing is just something that happens. The official school policy is that file sharing is cool on campus just reduce the amount of serving. The serving is what scares the school. There are legal issues to serving. Why? Legally it shows that you made a conscious effort to piracy if you are serving movies and music. What’s the big deal? Well, UCLA doesn’t want a law suit. I can understand that.

However, their bigger issue is bandwidth. Sharing sucks up the bandwidth like crazy because the UCLA network lines are set asymetrically so that uploads will consume more bandwidth than downloads. This improves campus download speeds but only if people aren’t uploading a lot of files. This ideal model breaks down when you have to deal with clever students.

The current trend is the use of KaZaA Lite, a free program that is anti-KaZaA because KaZaA includes spyware in the installer. It can be found on a number of mirror sites, including kazaalite.com, the most popular one. Watch out for pop-up spamming on the web site link though. That is their site not mine. Pretty much all of the KaZaA Lite site mirrors do that. If you have a better one, just post a comment.

Why is this bad? Well, spyware applications tend to send data to server(s) on the Internet without your knowledge. In short, you don’t know what they’re doing with your computer data so you should be scared.

The funny thing about the shift to KaZaA Lite from KaZaA is that people are fed up with bad software. KaZaA is simply terrible. The program is bulky, full of evil things like pop-up programs, etc. KaZaA Lite is bad but at least it’s free from a corporate identity. This is the trend of P2P. People have gotten hooked on it and there will always be somebody out there writing a new program.

This is something that cannot be controlled and should not be controlled. It is a new wave form of free speech. The problem is not P2P but how people use P2P. Just ask Phil Agre, who is a master on this subject. He posted a nice link to a cool P2P convention at UC Berkeley in his latest dispatch of Red Rock Eater.

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