Charlie's Thoughts

As the technology and the internet (and the regulations governing it) continue to evolve, so too do the means by which people abuse it. Where there is an easy way to get something for free, people will do it. Such is the nature of file-sharing. I got on the internet relatively early (which is to say in the 90's), and in the past decade, there's have been hundreds of preferred or *best* ways to illegally access files. As some died, others arose, this is their tale.

The Golden Age
Right around the turn of the millennium was the high point in digital file-sharing. The technology was ripe: computers were just gaining the storage space necessary to accommodate large amounts of digital media, people were writing programs which showed the vast potential of the internet, and connection speeds were finally rising from 56k dialup modems.

For reference, I used to have dialup. When I tried to download a song, I basically just queued up a couple and left. Downloading a game was a multi-day endeavor. Based on the 3MB, low-quality song size that was typical back then, it took me about 12 minutes to download a single song over dial-up.

You downloaded songs!? Yeah, I did, but I was a clever little 10-year-old. I stayed away from the hard-drugs (Napster), cause my mom would have been mad. Instead, I simple used AltaVista Music Search. Yup, I literally used a search engine to download music.

At this point in time there were dozens of option for downloading files. As I mentioned, search engines were a great starting point. Of course, there were also the numerous file-sharing programs and networks which all popped up right around 1999. Napster, Kazaa, E-Mule, Gnutella, Morpheous, and Azureus were the mainstream programs. Now while those were the main programs, they operated on a smaller number of networks (which still exist) such as Ed2K, mp2p, and Gnutella. In addition, there were tons of off-brand programs which interacted with the others. It's fun to note that nearly every single program on that list has been sued and now tries to operate as a legitimate music program.

The Dark Ages
As more and more programs started coming under fire from the RIAA, however, it became more risky to use those programs, or at least it seemed that way. A relatively small number of people were actually sued of the millions of people who inhabited those networks.

In any case, simply making all your files available to peers (or the government) was no longer a good idea. Luckily, for the consumer level file-sharer, there was an alternative. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) has been around since the early 80's and is what most people are talking about when they mention a chat-room. When I played video games, my group of friends had a chat room we hung out in, when I worked on an open-source software project, we offered support through a chat room, and of course, people with common interests often found their way to a chat room.

But IRC wasn't just for talk. If you knew where to look, you could find a special search engine which monitored all these rooms and compiled a list of (ro)bots. These bots would sit in specific channels/rooms and broadcast a message every 5 minutes or so listing the files which they hosted. These were typically big-ticket files like albums, games and movies. You then had to open a personal chat to the bot, and type specific commands which informed it which file you wanted. The good ones only transmitted to a handful of people at a time (to increase speeds), so you'd have to wait for quite some time before you actually got the file.

Of course, with the rise of DSL and cable internet, these were an important stepping stone to modern file sharing. They provided relatively high transfer rates on a variety of files. This also provided a high amount of safety from detection. For instance, in Canada it's only illegal to upload illegal content, not to download it. The US law is different, but in any case, it's usually the uploading part that causes trouble.

The Renaissance
What's better than downloading from one server? Downloading from a million! Enter torrents. So far the transfers have all been peer-to-peer or server-to-peer, but now it's going to get a bit more complicated. Torrents are peers-to-peers. There's actually no server involved (other than a coordinating server).

It works like this. Someone creates a very small torrent file (which is a listing of files it contains and servers and some other special stuff). They then announce this torrent on a server. People search on that server, see the torrent file and load it.

Anyone who has a full copy of ALL the data is considered a seed, while anyone with a partial copy is a peer. Seeds will send peers a portion of the file, then peers can send each other parts of the files at the same time. So a seed could send 4 people a quarter of a file apiece, and at the same time, the peers can transfer their respective parts to each of the other 3. Thus in the amount of time the server would have transferred one file, four copies have been distributed.

That was a terrible explanation, so you should probably just go stare at the wikipedia page and animation for a bit.

In any case, it should be apparent that there is no true server in this model. At the same time, every downloader is also a server. This leads to potentially very fast transfer speeds with the caveat that if everyone with a full copy of the file logs off, the torrent could potentially die.

Torrents are actually an incredibly powerful tool for large, legal file transfers (although you internet service provider hates them). For instance when I downloaded Linux, I used a torrent. It saves the host servers bandwidth and provides high upload speeds to everyone else.

Unfortunately, this method also draws considerable scrutiny from your ISP. They actually inspect what you're transferring and sometimes can detect illegal files. See Net Neutrality on Wikipedia for more on that topic.

The Modern Age (and future!)
Today, people use a variety of the above methods. If you know what you're doing, you can even download from Google. With cloud-storage and file-transfer sites (think YouSendIt!) becoming more popular, those are the natural progression of file sharing. They provide the perfect cover of anonymity and distribution potential. There's literally hundreds of services like that. Simply upload your file and send random people the link.

Honestly, I have no idea where file-sharing will go in the future. If ISPs ever loosen their strangle-hold on upload bandwidths, I really do think BitTorrent is an ideal model. It embodies cloud-computing with its distributed-server model. I almost used it the other day for a project I'm working on this summer, BlueFusion (You'll get some blog posts about that later). We needed to download a huge amount of data (~15G, and it was available as a torrent.

You can always share files across local networks (college dorm rooms) or by sharing external hard drives. So no matter what, friendly file-swaps will always exist. The future of internet sharing depends a lot more on how the FCC Net Neutrality story unfolds. Lemmie know if you have any other methods I forgot to mention!