Massachusetts Institute of Technology
6.805/6.806/STS085 Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier
Spring Semester, 2001
April 26
Group topic:
Peer-to-peer privacy: Technology/Policy Assessment
Oral report from all teams due today
Each team today should present an oral progress report, as described
on the Term paper and
progress report schedule page.
One person on each team should give a two or three minute oral
progress report, saying briefly what your project is, and how you are
coming on the four or five major tasks (above). The P2P team should
not give a separate report, but include this in your presentation.
In your report (which should be brief), you should simply list the
four or five tasks, give a very brief summary of how you are coming on
each task, and give a due date for when this task will be
done. Think through these due dates carefully, and remember that your
draft paper is due on May 10. Next week, we'll be asking you for
another project update, and (hopefully) you'll report that a couple of
your tasks will be done by then.
For the report, each team should prepare one (and only one) slide,
listing the tasks and the due dates. Use a transparency, so we don't
have to spend time plugging and unplugging computers from the
projector.
Topic for today
In this week's presentation we will be looking at the issues surrounding
privacy in peer-to-peer networks. We all use P2P networks everyday.
When you download your favorite MP3's from Napster, or when you chat
with your friends on AOL Instant Messenger you are using (possibly a
hybrid) P2P application.
But along with their usefulness, P2P applications bring up many
questions. Who is accountable for the copyright violations with the
MP3's you download from Napster? What about downloading MP3's using
Gnutella, where there is no centralized party to be held accountable?
Are you really anonymous on AIM? Should you be? Are you responsible for
files shared from your computer? What if they're not yours? Or if you
don't even know what they are? What about equity?
We will hopefully start to answer these questions, and present
recommendations that address the issues involved.
To get a background on the subject, please read the following:
- Who
is spying on your downloads?, Salon, March 27, 2001. This
article gives an overview of the ways in which your activities can be
monitored on common P2P services like Napster.
- Gnutella and the
Transient Web this article focuses on Gnutella as it defines the
space of systems currently referred to as "peer-to-peer" and discusses
how this "revolution" brings the Internet back to its original intent of
a network of equals
- Remaking the
Peer-to-Peer Meme, an excerpt from O'Reilly's Peer-to-Peer
book. This excerpt explains the major players in the P2P space as well
as its history and future.
- Check out some of these popular P2P applications. We will be
discussing them in detail, so it may be worthwhile to get a feel for
some of them:
- Napster if you don't know what
this is, you may want to consider dropping out of MIT
- Gnutella
a completely distributed Napster-like file sharing protocol
- Groove a powerful,
decentralized collaboration tool
- Jabber an instant messaging
client compatible with AIM, ICQ, MSN, etc.
You might also want to browse the project
resource page
for this topic.