I'm guessing that with the move to DHT and the take-down of the Pirate Bay, 
the next step is going to be to decentralize or at least plausibly deny-ify 
the actual searching. I.e., you won't be able to tell what's in a torrent 
until you download the torrent.

An easy way to do this would be to have data streams have descriptions of 
their contents at the start, and have the searchable torrents contain just a 
bloom filter full of bits.

In other words, the .torrent file would have a name that's the hash of the 
.torrent file, and a section that has the bloom filter bits for the first 
file in the torrent data stream. The first file in the torrent data stream 
would contain the information that you'd be able to search on, like the 
names of files (i.e., the manifest), the descriptions of the content, the 
lyrics (for music), and so on. Then, to do a search, you plug in what you're 
searching for, find the .torrent files with bloom filter bitmaps that match 
your search terms, then connect to the appropriate sharers to fetch the 
first few blocks of each matching torrent-data-stream to see what is in the 
torrent.

This would eliminate the ability to rationally accuse some site like The 
Pirate Bay of knowing what's in the torrents they're serving. The site would 
have to actively go and try to download some of every data stream and then 
check it to find out what's in the torrent.

Not that I'm judging the morality of such a setup. It just seems like a 
logical progression to me. If you start slamming search engines for 
copyright violations, make sure search engines don't know what you're 
searching for.

I thought about this before back when Freenet was all in the news, as I was 
trying to come up with something that actually had a pre-hoc design to it, 
but it never occurred to me to use bloom filters. I was doing multiple 
rounds of hashing of keywords, which obviously doesn't work nearly as well.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message 
news:4a04c791$1@news.povray.org...
| I'm guessing that with the move to DHT and the take-down of the Pirate 
Bay,

What makes you guess that http://thepiratebay.org/ has been taken down?

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pan wrote:
> What makes you guess that http://thepiratebay.org/ has been taken down?

The owners have been taken down. You don't need to actually shut down 
servers to put a crimp in things.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> I'm guessing that with the move to DHT and the take-down of the Pirate Bay, 
> the next step is going to be to decentralize or at least plausibly deny-ify 
> the actual searching.

  Since when bittorrent == the pirate bay?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:

>   Since when bittorrent == the pirate bay?

Since as soon as the media noticed BitTorrent.

As you know, any technology which *can* be used for illegal purposes is 
*only* used for illegal purposes.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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From: "Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom>
Newsgroups: povray.off-topic
Sent: Saturday, May 09, 2009 2:00 AM
Subject: The next evolution in P2P


> This would eliminate the ability to rationally accuse some site like The 
> Pirate Bay of knowing what's in the torrents they're serving. The site 
> would have to actively go and try to download some of every data stream 
> and then check it to find out what's in the torrent.

I'm not sure that would change anything. Either the site can point to 
torrents in a usable way (providing content descriptions, rating etc.) or it 
can't. It it can then the site can be accused to assist in copyright 
infringement and no amount of obfuscation or "king kong defense" will 
matter. If it cannot then the site is useless and whatever business model it 
has falls apart.
BTW, there's an idea floating around, that consists in encrypting content 
without giving the key, but still making it not too hard to crack, so people 
wanting the content can easily get it (by using a cracking tool and waiting 
a couple of minutes). However, people wanting to prove an infringement would 
also have to crack the key, which could be illegal in some legal systems and 
make the proof null in court, a little like B&E someone's house to prove 
that he stole your things. I don't think it's workable in practice either 
(law enforcement agencies could bypass it of course) , but it's cute.

G.

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Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Warp wrote:

> >   Since when bittorrent == the pirate bay?

> Since as soon as the media noticed BitTorrent.

> As you know, any technology which *can* be used for illegal purposes is 
> *only* used for illegal purposes.

  I didn't ask "since when bittorrent == piracy"?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 9-5-2009 9:59, Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> I'm guessing that with the move to DHT and the take-down of the Pirate Bay, 
>> the next step is going to be to decentralize or at least plausibly deny-ify 
>> the actual searching.
> 
>   Since when bittorrent == the pirate bay?
> 
One way to prove equality is proving mutual implication

the pirate bay => bittorrent

What Darren said and presumably true (I have never visited the Pirate 
Bay nor have I any intention to do that)

bittorrent => the pirate bay

That is the direction you are probably objecting to, wasn't implied by 
Darren, and indeed is not true.

Conclusion: you can not prove: bittorrent == the pirate bay

luckily nobody said or even implied that, so your question is based on a 
logical fallacy. ;)

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andrel <a_l### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> luckily nobody said or even implied that

  I disagree. The original point seemed to be "now that the pirate bay is
down, the bittorrent idea might need to be changed", as if bittorrent somehow
depended on the pirate bay.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 9-5-2009 12:56, Warp wrote:
> andrel <a_l### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
>> luckily nobody said or even implied that
> 
>   I disagree. The original point seemed to be "now that the pirate bay is
> down, the bittorrent idea might need to be changed", as if bittorrent somehow
> depended on the pirate bay.
> 
An interpretation that is just possible if you
1) do not read beyond the lines you quoted
2) disregard of the quoted part after the comma
3) don't know what the Pirate Bay is
4) assume that Darren is a 16 yo scriptkiddie

If you do take the context it is clear that Darren is using Pirate Bay 
to signal that now persons can be held responsible for things on their 
server if they can know that it may be violating copyrights. Basically 
forcing every owner of a public accessible server to open every 
directory and file and check the contents against a list of known 
copyrighted material.
Then follows a not explicit assumption that whatever the copyright 
'owners' will do, their will be a new way to share songs and movies. 
 From that it follows that to circumvent this new hurdle the knowledge 
on what is in a file can no longer be on a single server and he gives 
scheme to do just that.

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