Is client server p2p torrent infrastructure failing

Published Date 3/29/16 1:22 PM

There are lots of sites down, lots of fake files etc.

A colleague Richard Hering has posted a number of music videos to YouTube. As these contain a synchronised score of complex music, they have unique educational value. Sony recently blocked a number of these in no less than 244 countries. “Sony have bought up a 50 year old recording they never made and now take it down wherever it is shared”.

He also uploads to torrent sites, where such very old culture (for instance the music of Johann Sebastian Bach) is popular, and should surely be treated as a common heritage.“People need to share, it’s a basic need I think”. He used to upload such videos to Piratebay, but this has not accepted registrations for a while now. He uploaded it to Kickass and and some people still find it there, but the Piratebay has not indexed it and and you cannot even find it on google. The crackdown on piracy has lead to the proxy universe being full of poorly indexed and fake sites. The proxy “copies” are not mirrors….

This is looking to me like we have a crisis in the client server side of P2P, which might be about morale and the burn out of the open generation. ISP blocking is probably driving down ad revenue… Google is now pushing down real torrents, which means it’s pushing up fake torrents. It’s a shadow or a corpse of a P2P network.

[Richard Hering adds a note here: it’s very important not to underestimate the problems which google is now causing. I searched my popular torrent on a number of search engines, just using its title plus the word “torrent”. The results:

1. Duckduckgo.com – first on page one.

2. Yahoo – first on page one

3. Bing – 4th on page one

4. Google – page 7! Despite tracking my activity and selecting what I see on that basis, which ought to push the result up.

So Google is suppressing torrents. In future I think I will use duckduckgo, as it does no tracking. I already use it on the phone, as it blocks ads.]

Without tech activism, I think this p2p world is ending. It will continue “submerged” inside the #dotcons. But another part of the open web fades. That was what true p2p applications such as RetroShare were about. Escaping from the silos of torrent sites. True p2p might still be an option but would need activism to push it into mainstream view. It’s a little harder to setup, but it’s not rocket science, use it or lose it is the mantra and we have lost lots. “I remember Peter Sunde from tpb saying that it wouldn’t be a bad thing if torrents got killed off – it would force innovation” But the question we beg “only if we innovate”.

RetroShare would solve these issues and it “innovates” human networks as a useful “side effect”. But a German court has tried to ban it. However RetroShare is just p2p encryption, which is basic to the web, so can’t be banned, with out huge clateral damage to the #dotcoms, especially if used for something legal.

https://torrentfreak.com/anonymous-file-sharing-ruled-illegal-by-german-court-121123

“A court in Hamburg, Germany, has granted an injunction against a user of the anonymous and encrypted file-sharing network RetroShare . RetroShare users exchange data through encrypted transfers and the network setup ensures that the true sender of the file is always obfuscated.”

The issue here is human error: he added the promedia as a direct friend. To quote TorrentFreak “Promedia posed as a “friend” of the respondent. The decision of LG Hamburg is not compelling.”

We live in a world now where the younger people (early 20s) are possibly part of the post-P2P generation for whom the internet is facebook etc

What a thought.

A OMN post for geeks

Published Date 3/17/16 6:05 PM

Climate change and our basic environment are running away with our future. The technology network that could help to save us is splintering. We are fucked, the open web, the thing all progressive geeks build on has plateaued and is visible fading.

A project to play a small role.

It’s about stupidly simple and naively open it’s an original open Internet Project.

Lest we forget the original Internet was people creating pages linking to people created pages this is what the world wide web is. Networking human beings creating communities using technology.

If you make this too complex to start with you miss the point it’s about people and communities facilitated by technology it’s not about technology facilitating people and communities.

The difference might seem small but it’s important as it’s the difference between the original Internet and the intranets that grew up and dominated before the open human powered web swept them away.

Geeks not knowing what they have been doing have been destroying this web of humanity and replacing it with a web of machines clever but inhuman.

If you want to reboot a human Internet it needs to be human first rather than machine first. There is a real challenge for geeks to understand this as it flows against their mindset. CP Snows two cultures is still dominant a strong but invisible flow.

If we are to reboot the open web, we need to put human beings activity, community and empowerment at the root. The counter intuitive is to get humans to do more, not less, as we find the basic satisfaction in life by actively creating the world we live in.

The wiki, the blog, the link, the website.

Don’t look down on simple

Put people to work doing something they find meaningful, algorithms can stand in the way as much as they can help here.

All community is based on “open standards” that are widely shared. It’s the sharing that makes a standard.

Care for the soil as everything to do with the life world comes from it. To move this forward we need to nurture and create the soil of the open internet. All the high tech seeds you are in love with are falling on barren soil.

To nurture this, one stream would be a human powered semantic web that is based on already widely shared “standards”.

Many streams, nature loves diversity and simplistic often pushes over complex.

The OMN is a spring, a stream, a river.

The Base idea works with media items (posts) , sites (community’s), people (identity).

It digs history and memory deeply into the network without extra work or much thought (through widely distributed redundant data)

At each stage it empowers the individual, the community and fundamentally horizontalists this empowerment.

Geeks can of course build streams of complex from this common soil.

Just as the original web did it is a stream to expand the commons. From its flow life can grow, such a simple project could help save us all.

And build a world based on linked semantic data.

Build simple, build trust, the is power in open.

OMN link

The spring OMN The river of news project

Published Date 3/15/16 4:29 PM

Am not going to say anything you probably do not know in this application so will keep it short.

The project has been inspired by the technical work and ideas of Dave Winer (http://scripting.com) and the practical media work and open web projects of Hamish Campbell (http://visionon.tv and http://hamishcampbell.com)

The aim of the project is to play a small part in overcoming the mind space gap that is highlighted on the side of my blog:

“A river that needs crossing political and tech blogs – On the political side, the is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side the is naivety and over- complexity”

Its a no-brainer to say that the open web is failing as more of our mind share is taken up by closed networks such as #failbook and propitiatory “eco systems” such as apple, google, Amazon, Microsoft etc.

If we are to play a meaningful role is saving the commons we all build on we need a raft of projects and more impotently basic infrastructure to help re-boot the open web to push these encloses back. We need to cross the river talked about above, this is much harder than it looks, if you haven’t tried it you probably wont appreciate the difficulty involved.

Rivers, streams and springs and useful metaphors for understanding how we look at “news”.

* The springs are our blogs, our company pages etc.

* The streams are aggregaters based on subjects, our twitter streams and #failbook walls badly for-fill this role

* The rivers are currently our old mainstream media and increasingly the enclosing areas of #failbook and #dotcons.

I have a open standards based project to play a role in building up “news” outside of the #silos and will still work inside the silos so the is little to lose.

The OMN

Todo Europa boat trip

Published Date 3/11/16 7:20 PM

Before:

* Finish kitchen

– crow bar

– make wood structure (Y)

– find table top

– test fridge

– sink waste connection

– put in window

– insulation

– hooks for cups and pans, drying rack

– sheet of hardboard for wall

– stool

* Electrics

– socket kitchen, wood stove, toilet

– look at underfloor, think about moving

– roof power, light

* wind mill email

* floor

– look at ballast and storage

* sought clothes

* look at servicing engine + buy parts.

– deal with fuel leak

* look at new ropes?

* Fire place lower (complex)

* For the trip

– Facebook page for Thames, Medway, Coast, Crossing, North France

– Paul about the convoy

* Life Raft and Flare?

* Ask to buy 2 life jacket

* Tidy

– clear the seats and back

* Thames

Book lock

Tell CRT I left their waters

Look at tides and time

Fill up with fuel

Program radio with more resets

Redundant Navigation on black laptop.

* Medway

– the mud or the party

– tender?

* Coast

– talk to coast guard

– look for ports

* Crossing

– talk to coast guard

– bit of research

* French port

– what papers?

– Wallets of ships papers

– inshoreces

– licence river

– Vat paid, VAT fuel

To escape our silo thinking

Published Date 3/10/16 12:01 PM

“A river that needs crossing political and tech culture – On the political side, the is arrogance and ignorance, on the Geek side the is naivety and over-complexity”

Right now, there’s a widening gap between political organising culture and technical development culture, and neither side is entirely wrong, but both are incomplete.

On the political side, there can be a strong understanding of power, institutions, and social dynamics – but sometimes limited understanding of the underlying technical structures that shape digital reality.

On the technical side, there is deep expertise in systems and architecture – but often a tendency to treat social problems as purely technical challenges, leading to over-complex solutions that struggle to survive real-world communities.

Both cultures end up building silos. Not because they intend to fragment the ecosystem, but because silos offer clarity, autonomy, and a sense of control. Unfortunately, isolated projects – whether political or technical – cannot compete with the continental-scale infrastructures built by the #dotcons.

The deeper issue is that we are collectively neglecting the shared infrastructure beneath all of this: the #openweb itself. Returning to simple shared ground, if we want to rebuild cooperation, we need to start from principles both sides can recognise. The web is fundamentally made of relationships:

Articles are data objects.

Data moves through flows.

Feeds are living links that carry those flows across networks.

Links – not platforms – are where long-term value accumulates.

Synchronisation and redundancy are what create resilience, memory, and continuity.

This isn’t a political claim or a technical ideology, it’s simply how the web works when it is healthy. For political organisers, this means understanding that content alone isn’t enough; influence comes from shaping flows and networks. For engineers, this means recognising that technical architecture always encodes social assumptions – and usability, trust, and governance cannot be abstracted away.

Why silos fail. Many alternative media and grassroots tech projects emerge with strong intentions, but remain isolated. Without shared protocols, interoperability, and common infrastructure, each becomes another temporary island. Meanwhile, legislation and platform enclosure continue shrinking the open internet, reinforcing dependency on centralised systems.

The question is not whether we build alternatives, we already are. The question is whether those alternatives connect into a living ecosystem or remain fragmented experiments. The bridge is federation as social and technical practice. Projects rooted in federation – like ActivityPub and related #openweb work – offer a path, because they align technical architecture with social values: decentralised but connected, autonomous but interoperable and “native” diverse without fragmentation.

The #OMN approach tries to extend this principle beyond software into social organisation with shared commons instead of platform ownership, collaboration instead of central coordination and replication instead of scaling hierarchies. This isn’t anti-engineering or anti-politics. It’s an attempt to integrate both.

Crossing the river together, political organisers bring understanding of power, context, and collective action. Engineers bring understanding of systems, resilience, and infrastructure, neither alone is enough.

The challenge is to move away from siloed thinking toward shared stewardship of the #openweb – treating it not as a product or ideology, but as a living ecosystem that requires ongoing care.

We don’t need perfect agreement to start building bridges. We just need enough shared understanding to reconnect the flows. Because ultimately, the goal isn’t to build another island, it’s to rebuild the river.