World's Shortest P2P App: 15 Lines 443
soren.harward writes "The New Scientist has an article about TinyP2P, the world's smallest P2P app. It's 15 lines of Python code brought to us by Edward Felten, CS Professor at Princeton and outspoken supporter of the digital rights the Slashdot community holds so dear. He wrote the program as a proof-of-concept that P2P apps are really easy to write, don't have to be complicated, and thus banning them (a la the INDUCE Act) is pointless and silly."
Easier = should be legal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, if I publish a recipe for crack that uses 2 less ingredients than the normal recipe and takes only half the time to make, why would that be a valid argument for making crack legal? Don't get me wrong I think the act is idiotic, but I don't follow Mr. Felton's reasoning here.
Libraries (Score:2, Insightful)
15 lines of code, but linking to libraries that do much of the hard work.
P2P (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Easier = should be legal? (Score:4, Insightful)
How does this prove anything? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Easier = should be legal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its the illegal use of your recipe, or the improper use of the p2p that should be dealt with, not the technology ( or information, in your example )..
Re:Easier = should be legal? (Score:2, Insightful)
Eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Easy to write therefore ridiculous to ban? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Libraries (Score:5, Insightful)
Regards,
Steve
Re:Easier = should be legal? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Libraries (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite. But the implication of the article is that the code is trivial because it takes so few lines to write. I could easily write a fast fourier transform program in just a few lines by linking to FFTW, but that doesn't mean that FFT is trivial.
# lines isn't important.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How does this prove anything? (Score:4, Insightful)
The nearest analogy I can think of is Prohibition. You can make alcohol illegal and you can punish people for making it or selling it or drinking it, but there are a lot of people who want to drink and alcohol is VERY easy to make. So every time you close down one source another pops up. There is a demand and you can't control the supply because anyone with enough time can create a new supply.
Now feel free to argue the inappropriate nature of my analogy. Have fun!
Re:Reported last month (Score:2, Insightful)
No, I don't believe this is the "death of slashdot or anything silly like that." But it is conceivable that in that that glorious mound of slashdot web code there could be a way to check the relevant links in the current article against the laready existing articles within the past yada yada yada, such that the "TinyP2P" link would be automatically flagged since it was referenced a short while ago. That way, editors can double check for dupes. I bet you could even do it in 15 lines (har har, hardy har har, har).
Or mebbe use teh "search feature."
keke.
Re:Easier = should be legal? (Score:1, Insightful)
By that logic owning a gun should also be illegal, you have it because you want to kill someone, shoot someone...
Let's make actually doing something a crime, not doing something or making something that could be used for bad purposes. It's all tactics to supress the populace anyway... keep the militia down and exert power.
Re:Python? (Score:3, Insightful)
My guess is that most of the functionality of the code is in the standard libraries imported at the begining: SimpleXMLRPCServer, xmlrpclib
They could have just as well imported "p2p_lib" if such a thing existed.
Re:Easier = should be legal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Once something becomes that easy society needs to change its focus to how to integrate it in the least harmful way. In that world crack would become a fact of life. In this world p2p programs are.
Re:Easier = should be legal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably not. Then again, if you published a simple to follow recipe for making crack using nothing but commonly available household items one would have to question the point of banning crack - giving the difficulty in enforcing such a ban. Which is the point.
Jedidiah.
Re:Easier = should be legal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, yes, if the simplification of the method makes the law significantly less enforcable.
Unenforcable laws should be removed from the books and moved from the province of laws to the province of morals. If you can't stop them when they do it, or have a good chance to catch them when they do, it's time to stop policing and start preaching voluntary behavior change.
Leaving such laws on the books leads to selective enforcement (down the slippery slopes toward a police state and/or discrimination), massive civil disobedience, disrespect for laws in general (by both the population and the law enforcement perdonnel), more violation of IMPORTANT laws, and more strain on enforcement resources.
The government should stick to trying to control only those things that meet three criteria:
They CAN be controlled in a fair manner,
the general population agrees they SHOULD be controlled, and
the Constitution gives government the POWER to control them.
Re:Easy to write therefore ridiculous to ban? (Score:3, Insightful)
Further, you might note that it's not a crime to teach someone how to write a virus, or even a crime to give people virus code, it is only criminal when the recipients of the virus are unwilling to receive it.
What-U-Ban (Score:4, Insightful)
Perl and python are both interpreted HLLs ... so your "466 bytes" of source code is no more intrinsically meaningful a measure than the number of lines in either program
The existence of MoleSter proves that Perl is 466 bytes away from being a P2P program, that in order to ban decentralized search (the key point of P2P file sharing), you'd almost have to ban Perl itself.
Re:Reported last month (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Molesting... over-18 consenting Asian girls.
2. Molesting... over-18 consenting Asian girls in schoolgirl outfits.
3. Molesting... over-18 consenting Asian girls dressed as Sailor Mars.
See, now there's something EVERYONE can enjoy.