The Now Economy

After our decentralized filesharing post we discovered this item from ACM News Service, “Is P2P Dying or Just Hiding?“

High-order bits excerpted from the paper itself:

• In our traces, P2P traffic volume has not dropped since 2003. Our datasets are inconsistent with claims of significant P2P traffic decline.
• We present a methodology for identifying P2P traffic originating from several different P2P protocols. Our heuristics exploit common conventions of P2P protocols, such as the packet format.
• We illustrate that over the last few years, P2P applications evolved to use arbitrary ports for communication.
• We claim that accurate measurements are bound to remain difficult since P2P users promptly switch to new more sophisticated protocols, e.g., BitTorrent.

More bits:

CAIDA monitors capture 44 bytes 2 of each packet (see section III), which leaves 4 bytes of TCP packets to be examined (TCP headers are typically 40 bytes for packets that have no options). While our payload heuristics would be capable of effectively identifying all P2P packets if the whole payload was available, this 4-byte payload restriction limits the number of heuristics that can undoubtedly pinpoint P2P flows. For example, BitTorrent string “GET /torrents/” requires 15 bytes of payload for complete matching. Our 4-byte view of “GET ” could potentially indicate a non-P2P web HTTP request.

The ACM News Service summary…

“Is P2P Dying or Just Hiding?” CAIDA.org (10/04); Karagiannis, Thomas; Broido, Andre; Brownlee, Nevil

UC Riverside’s Thomas Karagiannis, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis’ (CAIDA) Andrew Broido, et al. dispute popular media reports that peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing has declined precipitously in the last year, and contend that the reverse is actually the case. The authors attempted to measure P2P traffic at the link level more accurately by gauging traffic of all known popular P2P protocols, reverse engineering the protocols, and labeling distinctive payload strings. The results support the conclusion that 2004 P2P traffic is at least comparable to 2003 levels, while rigid adherence to conventional P2P traffic measurement techniques leads to miscalculations. The percentage of P2P traffic was found to have increased by about 5 percent relative to traffic volume. Furthermore, comparisons between older and current P2P clients revealed that the use of arbitrary port numbers was elective in older clients, while current clients randomize the port number upon installment without the need for user action. Meanwhile, P2P population studies found that the ranks of IPs grew by about 60,000 in the last year, and the number of ASes participating in P2P flows expanded by roughly 70 percent. These findings outline several trends, including evolving tension between P2P users and the entertainment sector; increasing demand for home broadband links; plans to directly induce P2P applications into profitable traffic configurations; and a significant transformation in supply and demand in edge and access networks, provided that P2P traffic maintains its growth and legal entanglements are eliminated. The full article (pdf) is contains many more bits for the interested reader…

CNET refers to an online trend — “the blurring of e-commerce and personal media such as Web logs and social networking sites”:

Amazon.com has quietly introduced a new feature on its Web store that lets customers post photos alongside product reviews–its latest effort to build a sense of community among customers.

The e-tailer introduced the feature, called Customer Images, last month for certain product categories including electronics, apparel, sporting goods and musical instruments. It added kitchen items, tools and hardware on Tuesday. The feature is in beta, meaning the company is still testing and tuning it.

“This feature allows customers to really showcase how they are using the product,” Amazon spokesman Craig Berman said. “It’s a great addition to our customer experience.”

The idea is to let customers highlight specific attributes of a product, such as size, and show the product in action, he said.

The Web and Web-based Services are finally discovering how to personalize their content to their customers, and it’s thrilling to watch this trend unfold.

Today CommerceNet’s Smart Health Portal was launched during the Smart Health Summit. The initiative:

Smart Valley, a non-profit committed to turning Silicon Valley into the leading user of the technologies it invents, and CommerceNet will work with the Smart Health Forum, a community of healthcare provider, insurers, employers and foundations in Silicon Valley. The Forum, which is open to all interested parties, will collaborate on the implementation of network-based tools that will greatly facilitate the sharing of medical records without compromising patient privacy, data security or provider choice.

The network will allow patients and providers to ‘publish’ an entry in a data registry when a healthcare transaction occurs, whether it’s a visit to a provider, filling a prescription or getting a test result. All of the patient’s data remains in the source systems – only a pointer is recorded. The next time there is a visit, whether to a doctor’s office or an emergency room, authorized caregivers will be able to see the transactions and call up x-ray images, test results and other information needed to provide rapid diagnosis and treatment. Similarly, consumers will be able to see and update their personal information and that of their children. Patients and providers will set the policy that determines who can see what data.

These network tools will be piloted in several different environments. Projects being considered include a senior- and chronic care in the emergency room and a ‘Virtual Clinic’ concept that illustrates how physicians and community-based caregivers can share information.

The pilots will be funded through a collection of public and private funds. CommerceNet is applying for state and federal funds, some of which will require matching funds from local organizations. We will work with community-based foundations to help us raise funds.

When proven, Smart Health will be made available to the rest of the Bay Area, California, and the nation.

Brian Dear has an intriguing idea:

Imagine WikiHealth or WikiMed, an open, collaborative health database written by everyone in the world? If millions of people could contribute articles on health and well-being, diseases, treatments, symptoms, remedies, and personal experience with what worked and what didn’t with prescriptions, would the world be better off? Are you currently happy with the state of medical knowledge on the web? If you or someone you know is suffering from some condition, and you type the name of the condition into Google, are you satisfied you’re getting good results? In an age where, at least in the U.S., doctors are less and less likely to give you the time of day let alone spend time with you going into detail about everything there is to know about a condition, wouldn’t it be useful if there were an online resource with a strict NPOV (neutral point of view) containing in-depth encyclopedia information about health-related subjects?

WikiHealth. WikiMed. (Don’t bother, the domains are taken — maybe there’s hope!) But you get the idea: a worldwide open collaborative compendium of practical health and medical knowledge. Isn’t it time such a service existed?

Yes. Yes it is. For another example, there’s a related idea floating around CommerceNet’s healthcare team that it would be interesting to drop the NPOV and offer parametrized search — imagine if, for more controversial complementary-medicine theories, patients/advocates could just submit their anecdotal stories, but then you could ask for stories “similar” to your own to see what’s out there. In any case, WikiMed could be quite personalized to your medical “ideology” and idiopathy…

[Kind of like how the CreativeCommons search engine is only a slight, but suggestive, parametric constraint on ordinary Nutch searches]

RFID cell phones take shape at Nokia

For instance, retailers could put RFID-embedded “touch phone here” signs on store shelves to send a coupon to the phone, or put the same signs at checkout stands to instantly transfer personal information stored on the phone in order to complete a warranty, Nokia Director Gerhard Romen said.

At the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment trade show here, Nokia was demonstrating an early prototype built in collaboration with VeriSign, which is proposing a central repository for RFID data that companies can use to relay information about inventory and deliveries to customers and suppliers. The prototype was based on Nokia’s 5140 model, with an RFID reader contained in a shell attached to the phone.

“It’s still very early yet,” Romen said Sunday when asked when RFID phones may become commercially available.

Science News: Best guess: economists explore betting markets as prediction tools

The research that led to future-predicting markets stems from the 1960s and 1970s, when Vernon Smith and Charles Plott, now of George Mason University and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, respectively, began using laboratory experiments to study different market designs. In the early 1980s, Plott and Shyam Sunder, now of Yale University, tested how well markets aggregate information by designing a set of virtual markets in which they carefully controlled what information each trader had.

In one experiment, Plott and Sunder permitted about a dozen study participants to trade a security, telling them only that it was worth one of three possible amounts–say, $1, $3, or $8–depending on which number was picked by chance. Plott and Sunder then gave two of the participants inside information by telling them which amount had been selected. Traders couldn’t communicate with each other; they could only buy and sell on the market.

“The question was, Would the market as a whole learn what the informed people knew?” Plott says. “It turned out that it would happen lightning fast and very accurately. Everyone would watch the movements of the market price, and within seconds, everyone was acting as if they were insiders.”

In another experiment, Plott and Sunder gave the inside traders less-complete information. For instance, if the outcome of the random pick were $3, they would tell some traders that it was not $1, and others that it was not $8. In these cases, the market sometimes failed to figure out the true value of the security.

However, if Plott and Sunder created separate securities for each of the three possible outcomes of the random pick instead of using one security worth three possible amounts, the market in which some traders had incomplete tips succeeded in aggregating the information.

The studies established that, at least in these simple cases, markets indeed can pull together strands of information and that different setups affect how well they do so.

This type of experiment gave researchers a “wind tunnel” in which to test different market designs, says John Ledyard, a Cal-tech economist who chairs the board of Net Exchange. “With experiments, we’re starting to zero in on what really works,” he says.

InformationWeek > Future Of Transactions > Peer-To-Peer Payoff > October 18, 2004

Some people, including myself, believe the next step is for some of those bits to have value. That is to say, consider a string of bits to be like a virtual cow or shell. In order to distinguish these bits (like telling the difference between a beautiful seashell and a piece of coal), they would need an agreed identity. To avoid forgery, they would need a unique and secure ID. And to stop multiple spending of the same bits, there would need to be a clearing process or a means to reveal the identity of anybody who tries to double-spend. All of these requirements are easily achieved in both traceable and anonymous systems of E-cash. In these cases, the money does move. The bits are money. The more you have, the richer you are. This is the future, though maybe only in part.

A parallel and more intriguing form of trade in the future will be barter. Swapping is a very attractive form of exchange because each party uses a devalued currency, in some cases one that would otherwise be wasted. Many of us are too embarrassed to run yard sales or too lazy to suffer the inconvenience and indignity of eBay. But imagine if you weren’t. The unused things in your basement can be converted into something you need or want. Likewise, the person with whom you’re swapping is giving something of value to you which is less so to them. With minimal computation, three-way, four-way, and n-way swaps can emerge, thereby removing the need for any common currency.

Swapping is extended easily to baby-sitting for a ride to New York, a mansion for a two-hundred-foot yacht, or leftover food for a good laugh. In some cases, people will swap for monetary or nonmonetary currencies. Without question, we’ll see new forms of market-making and auctions. But the most stunning change will be peer-to-peer, and peer-to-peer-to-peer- … transaction of goods and services. If you fish and want your teeth cleaned, you need to find a dentist who needs fish, which is so unlikely that money works much better. But if a chauffeur wanted fish and the dentist wanted a driver, the loop is closed. While this is nearly impossible to do in the physical world, it’s trivial in cyberspace. Add the fact that some goods and services themselves can be in digital form, and it gets easier and more likely. An interesting side benefit will be the value of one’s reputation for delivering on your promises — thus, identities will have real value and not be something to hide.

The point can be generalized beyond money. Peer-to-peer is a much deeper concept than we understand today. We’re limited by assumptions rooted in and derived from the physical world. Information technology over the next 25 years will change those limits through force of new habits. Let me cite just one: I think nothing of moving millions of bits from one laptop to another (inches away) by using the Internet and transferring those bits through a server 10,000 miles away. Imagine telling that to somebody just 25 years ago.

Nicholas Negroponte is the founding chairman of MIT’s Media Laboratory and the author of the seminal work on the digital revolution, “Being Digital” (Knopf, 1995).

Kevin Hughes wrote a beautiful Color Picker application in about 100k of SVG. The code is Creative Commons-licensed.

More telling are Kev’s notes on SVG, in which he tells the good, the bad, and the ugly. His recommendations:

Looking ahead, there could stand to be efforts for making today’s dynamic languages ready for real GUI application development using SVG. This mostly means adding support for multithreading, Unicode, and internationalization. Once these things are well baked into PHP or other dynamic language, there is no stopping the new application development paradigm. With PHP support you’d convert hordes of developers immediately. Applications could run on the Web and be deployed on the desktop with the same code, and could be created and edited by just about anybody, if you wanted them to. Every application could print in full PDF quality. Sounds a bit like the promise of HyperCard, but with vector graphics…

With SVG we are now at the edge of a new shift in how people think about applications, just as we were when the Web first started. We’ve had a long enough fight trying to get our content out of proprietary data jail formats, and sure, we have a ways to go - but every HTML page I wrote in 1993 still renders the same in modern browsers on modern computers on every major platform; with how many programs can you say that? Let’s try to do the same for applications and help make them more future-proof with SVG.

Nice analysis by Joyce Park on Web Services Commons:

Flickr is a company that has gotten into open web services in exactly the right way. It costs them a lot of money to host all that bandwidth, but feeds of photos are a cool new feature and a value-add to their users — and ultimately it all loops back to their core business model of getting people to host photos on Flickr. Flickr’s API also gives users some confidence that the company isn’t going to try to screw them by making it hard to get their content back out if they want to take it and go elsewhere. It’s a win-win-win situation for everyone, and another example of Flickr’s leadership by clarity.

On the other side of the spectrum are companies that treat RSS feeds and public web services just as free content, without adding any new transformative value or giving anything back to the community. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this if the license allows it, but it’s not interestingly different from screenscrapers who present your content as theirs — who have long been considered sleazy parasites by most of the legitimate web. The whole idea of opening content via web services is that growth for all can be enhanced by sharing — and in the long run people don’t want to share with those who are openly contemptuous of the whole idea.

Opening content via web services used to be the Holy Grail, but slowly the world is rewarding the owners of services that do just that, as the Flickr example illustrates.

ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC’05)

ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC’05) June 5-8, 2005 Vancouver, Canada Vancouver Marriott Pinnacle

Society sponsor: ACM Special Interest Group on E-Commerce (SIGECOM) Conference Web Site: http://www.acm.org/ec05/

Since 1999 the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce (SIGECOM) has sponsored the leading scientific conference on advances in theory, systems, and applications for electronic commerce. The Sixth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC’05) will feature paper presentations, workshops, and tutorials covering all areas of electronic commerce. The natural focus of the conference is on computer science issues, but the conference is interdisciplinary in nature, addressing the following topics:

Algorithmic mechanism design Auction and negotiation technology Automated shopping, trading, and contract management Computational finance Computational game theory and economics Computational markets for information services Databases and online transaction processing Experience with fielded electronic-commerce systems Formation of supply chains, coalitions, and virtual enterprises Information markets Intellectual property and digital rights management Languages for describing goods, services, and contracts Legal, political, and social issues Marketing and advertising technology Payment and exchange protocols Recommendation, reputation, and trust systems Security and privacy issues in electronic commerce Software and systems requirements, architectures, and performance User-interface issues in electronic commerce

This list is meant to be representative but not exhaustive.

The conference will be held from Sunday June 5th through Wednesday June 8th 2005 in beautiful Vancouver, Canada at the Vancouver Marriott Pinnacle.

Tutorials and workshops will be held on Sunday, June 5th. Papers and invited talks will be presented beginning on the morning of Monday, June 6th and running through noon on Wednesday, June 8th. More detailed program and schedule information will be released as it develops.