Salon: Information just wants to be Freenet

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http://salon.com/tech/view/2000/08/28/uprizer/index.html
http://salon.com/tech/view/2000/08/28/uprizer/index1.html

> Information just wants to be Freenet
>
> Rob Kramer and Ian Clarke's new venture, Uprizer,
> wants to be the Red Hat of peer-to-peer networks.
> What's behind their wall of secrecy?
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - -
> By Damien Cave
>
> August 28, 2000 | About a year ago, Rob Kramer read about Freenet
> and wanted to get involved. The recording industry hadn't yet
> sued Napster, "peer-to-peer" was still not a buzzword and Ian
> Clarke, the creator of this Napster-like network called Freenet,
> was still an unknown Irish programmer. But Kramer -- who had only
> recently sold his stake in Moving Pixels, an animation company --
> saw value in Freenet's decentralized file-sharing network, and
> contacted Clarke just days after finding the Freenet Web site.
>
> Now the fruits of that correspondence can be seen. Or rather,
> they can almost be seen. Uprizer, the company that Kramer and
> Clarke have formed, remains mysterious.  There is no Web site,
> and when I talked to Kramer, who is the CEO, he refused to say
> when the Los Angeles company would release its first product. He
> also refused to talk about funding except to say, "We have some."
> Even the number of employees remains a secret.
>
> Is Uprizer trying to be the Transmeta of P2P? Kramer, 40, says
> that he is reticent to talk because the details are still being
> worked out. "Ian [Clarke] is only now on his way here to
> California," he says.
>
> Still, some things at Uprizer are set in place -- like what the
> company is not, and what peer-to-peer will eventually be. Kramer
> was more than happy to discuss these subjects.
>
> What exactly is Uprizer?
>
> Uprizer is a technology infrastructure company, which will
> leverage the Freenet platform.
>
> Leverage it into what areas?
>
> I can't tell you that.
>
> Well, are you taking the same tack as Scour.net, making deals
> with the record and movie industry?
>
> That's always been Scour's main focus, but let's just say a
> majority of our business model is not focused on content
> distribution. We are not the next Napster. Everyone thinks that
> Ian is starting this company for file-sharing; that because Ian
> is a stalwart for the freedom of information, that's all he wants
> to focus on. We applaud him in that, but that's not what
> Uprizer's all about.  Uprizer is about leveraging a technology
> that has powerful functions.
>
> And there is a wireless play involved.
>
> Wireless?
>
> I can't tell you about that either.
>
> Well then maybe you can tell me why you think the record labels
> won't come after you just like they've gone after Scour.net and
> MP3Board.com?
>
> We're not a consumer play. Freenet is Freenet. We won't control
> and can't control Freenet -- even if you put a gun to Ian's head,
> as he's said. Freenet is out and it will do what it does the same
> way that people will use videotape for legal or illegal purposes.
> We are not the next Napster, therefore we are not trying to aid
> and abet a Napster-like environment. We will support content
> consumer plays but we will support them as a technology
> infrastructure company.
>
> So you're hoping to let the consumer plays take the fall or at
> least test the waters ...
>
> We have no intention of breaking laws. We have no desire to do
> that. We're not 19-year-olds; that is not our mission in life.
> Our mission is to efficiently flow information through Internet,
> intranet, extranet and closed-network environments.
>
> Technology infrastructure is a broad term, though.  Are you
> focusing solely on selling to businesses, like Digital Island?
>
> Uprizer is focused on both enterprise software and consumer
> applications; it's both for business and the consumer. But I just
> want to reiterate that Freenet is Freenet and Uprizer is Uprizer;
> Uprizer is not the next Napster. Scour wants to be the next
> Napster; AppleSoup wants to be the next Napster. That's not our
> goal in any way, shape or form. We have a much different business
> plan.
>
> We believe this could be an alternative, better, synergistic
> Akamai [which minimizes Web congestion to sites like Yahoo and
> CNN by regulating traffic through its servers].  It's a
> multi-level network. Akamai has 4,000 servers; we could have
> millions of servers, servers being a euphemism for computers.
>
> And what would happen to Freenet if Uprizer becomes commercial?
> Will additions and improvements to it remain open-sourced?
>
> Freenet will stay open-sourced. We support that in the same way
> that Red Hat supports Linux.
>
>
> What advantage does Freenet have over Gnutella?
>
> Freenet and Gnutella share only two things: They're both
> peer-to-peer, and they're both decentralized. That's where the
> similarities stop. Freenet is a very powerful peer-to-peer
> platform. The reason it's so powerful is that it takes data onto
> the network, it migrates the data toward demand and it mirrors
> that data so that it enables high-bandwidth data to move
> efficiently through the system. Here's the picture: With
> Gnutella, if someone wants something they go out into the middle
> of the street and they say, "Does anyone have Britney Spears," or
> "Does anyone have X document?" And if 1,000 people have it, 1,000
> people are going to shout back and it's going to get really
> noisy. And when 1,000 people send it to you, they'll clog the
> network.
>
> With Freenet, someone says, "Hey, does anybody have it?" and the
> information is sent to that person once. So, for instance, let's
> say there is a request for information "A" in London -- a music
> file or a piece of financial information -- and that info
> currently exists around nodes in Chicago. When enough people
> request it around London, the information will be sent once under
> the Atlantic. It will then mirror itself and spread itself among
> multiple nodes so that when you request in London it will be on a
> node that's closest to you. In other words, if there are 1,000
> people in London that request that data, it's right there;
> whereas with the Internet or Gnutella, 1,000 requests translates
> to 1,000 messages that are sent under the Atlantic. That's what
> makes today's World Wide Web so inefficient. Freenet, you see,
> operates on the Internet, but outside the Web.

Er... sounds like something a caching HTTP proxy server could fix.

cf. http://www.vancouver-webpages.com/CacheNow/
   http://wwwcache.ja.net/
   et al.

> But when you make multiple copies, don't you run into another
> kind of redundancy? Instead of clogging the network aren't you
> just filling up hard drives?  For example, how long does that
> piece of information from Chicago stay on the computer in
> Piccadilly Square?
>
> It will stay there on the basis of demand. The specifics can
> vary, but popular data thrives on the network and unpopular data
> does not thrive. It's very Darwinian. It's a very intelligent and
> adaptive system; as Freenet learns the behavior of the flow of
> that information, it will respond accordingly. For Gnutella to
> achieve any of those things, as Ian would say, "They would
> literally have to start from scratch."
>
> OK, if Freenet is indeed better than Gnutella, how do you plan to
> differentiate yourselves from other Uprizers, other Freenet-based
> businesses?
>
> We have not only the creative architect and founder of Freenet,
> we also have a lot of the development team who are familiar with
> the environment. We can't stop anyone from building on top of
> Freenet. You can do it today. But I think we have a little more
> insight into what the possibilities are based on the nuance of
> the architecture.
>
> Ultimately, where do you think all of this is going?  You've made
> Freenet out to be the Internet's savior -- do you really think it
> can re-architect the Net?
>
> Well, the original Internet is peer-to-peer, but when the
> Internet became commercialized it became centralized.  The
> implications from a bandwidth standpoint are less than
> spectacular because it's not an efficient means of distribution.
> It doesn't handle high-bandwidth data efficiently.
>
> But whether we could re-architect the Net is a bigger
> conversation. It's like the conversation about decentralized
> eBays, which sounds like a good idea but there probably needs to
> be some central place where the exchange is based, and that's
> eBay.
>
> Really, the point is that the whole peer-to-peer story has been
> focused so far on Napster, Gnutella, Freenet and how artists and
> copyright-holders get ripped off. That's not the conversation
> that Uprizer is having. Uprizer is having a technology
> conversation. We believe peer-to-peer computing, distribution and
> infrastructure is the wave of the future. Everyone's focused on
> music, on movies; I think it's going to be 5 percent of the story
> relative to peer-to-peer. We really believe there is a serious
> paradigm shift occurring as we speak.
>
>
> salon.com | Aug. 28, 2000
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - -
>
> About the writer
> Damien Cave is a staff writer for
> Salon Technology.

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Gerald Oskoboiny <[email protected]>
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