Farhad Manjoo

“Will the Xolox developers please step forward?” asked one developer in the Gnutella Developer Forum (GDF), the discussion site where Gnutella developers discuss the technical aspects of the network. “If they are not present,” he added, “they should be invited to the group and educated on the damage which this feature causes, especially to modem users.”

The Xolox programmers were invited, but they did not come to the GDF. Some developers approached them privately to let them know of the problem, though, and Xolox responded well. “We convinced them that everyone is affected by the overall level of network performance,” says Adam Fisk, a coder at LimeWire, one of the most popular Gnutella clients. “They eventually changed the re-querying algorithms.”

Although the Xolox incident was cleared up, it portended greater troubles with “bad actors” on the network, some of whom aren’t responding as agreeably as Xolox did. Recently, these selfish, damaging clients have so frustrated the developers who run the most successful Gnutella programs — and who, consequently, have a lot of say in what becomes of the network — that they’re now contemplating ways to police behavior on Gnutella. That would be an ironic change for a technology born out of an act of anti-corporate defiance and which has long embraced a standard of anarchy.

This spring, a client called Qtraxmax appeared on Gnutella, and it, too, launched search requests like mad. Developers at Limewire e-mailed programmers at Qtraxmax, and though they seemed receptive to concerns, “I don’t think they quite realize the scope of the problem,” Fisk says. Qtraxmax accounts for only a tiny portion of clients on the Gnutella network — according to CNet Download.com, only about 860,000 people have downloaded the program, a tiny number compared to the other Gnutella programs (LimeWire has been downloaded 13 million times, BearShare 17 million, and Morpheus 98 million).

But Qtraxmax doesn’t need a huge user base to cause big problems. Gnutella is quite vulnerable to being flooded with excessive automated queries, Fisk says. If Gnutella didn’t entirely collapse, he adds, “you would definitely just slow the network down to a crawl.”

Salon’s e-mail requests to Qtraxmax bounced back, and since its developers don’t participate in any of the online discussion boards devoted to Gnutella, it’s unclear if the company — which is apparently based in Hong Kong — is addressing the problem.

But Gnutella developers aren’t waiting around for Qtraxmax to start behaving well. On Gnutella discussion sites, programmers are discussing a number of technical proposals that would make access to the network contingent on good behavior: If you write code that hurts Gnutella, in other words, you don’t get to play. One idea would allow only “clients that you can authenticate” to speak on the network, Fisk says. This would include the five-or-so most popular Gnutella applications, including “Limewire, BearShare, Toadnode, Xolox, Gtk-Gnutella, and Gnucleus.” If new clients want to join the group, they would need to abide by a certain communication specification.

In theory, such a system could both cut down on selfish behavior on the network and go far in preventing malicious attacks from the recording industry, which many Gnutella developers expect. There aren’t yet solid technical plans for these proposals, but “if the situation gets bad enough,” says Fisk, limiting the network to a few well-behaved programs is “definitely a possibility” during the next year. With Gnutella developers worrying about bad clients and the recording industry, people are now rethinking “having this network where you allow just anyone on.”

Such a move might seem out of place in a project that, from the outset, has held itself up as a foe of authority. But Gnutella has outgrown its cowboy days, and some developers, over time and through force of will and coding savvy, have in fact become Gnutella’s leaders. Bearshare’s Vincent Falco, Gtk-Gnutella’s Raphael Manfredi, and the developers at LimeWire are some of the most impassioned, informed, and indeed authoritative voices on the GDF. As designers of the more established Gnutella clients, they also have the most invested in the system, and the most to lose if the network goes down thanks to the pranks of a few upstarts. Their need, now, to bring order to an open system is only natural — but there’s no telling how other Gnutella developers will react to the proposed ideas.

In a way, say people in the open-source movement, Gnutella is in a spot that many open projects have faced before; it’s a strange mix of order and disorder, upstarts and old-timers, proprietary interests and open-source purists, and it needs to find the right balance, or it could founder.

Gnutella has always been more a provocative technical idea than a useful file-trading network. When it was released, it was billed as an improvement over Napster, whose network required central servers and was therefore vulnerable to legal attacks by the recording industry. Gnutella is fully decentralized, and that, people said, rendered it immune to legal action; in late 2000, when Napster’s court-imposed shutdown seemed imminent, it was this promise of Gnutella’s invincibility that seemed to sustain most file traders.

But from the beginning, Gnutella exhibited a frustrating reluctance to “scale” — to perform adequately for large numbers of users — and when Napster did eventually shut down, in 2001, Gnutella wasn’t ready for influx of refugees. Instead, Morpheus, KaZaA and Audiogalaxy — all faster, non-Gnutella clients — became the center of file trading. (Morpheus is now a Gnutella client.)

Gnutella is often called “an open-source application,” but that’s not correct. Although many Gnutella developers embrace the open-source ethos and release their programs under open licenses, Gnutella itself is only a protocol — a predefined language for communication. It’s this protocol that’s open. Any developer can freely create a client to speak the Gnutella language, and any client that speaks the language can talk to all others that do. The common protocol allows for a bigger community of file sharers, and it leads to fewer points of centralization. But because developers are free to implement their own variations on network standards, this open system can also be seen as the cause of some of Gnutella’s performance problems.

The openness has, for example, most likely hindered Gnutella’s ability to scale up. During the last couple of years, Gnutella programmers have developed a number of techniques to deal with the system’s scaling problems, the most important being the introduction of “super nodes.”

The Gnutella network, as initially created, could be thought of as something like a very noisy cocktail party: If there are 10 people in a room, and one person wants a drink from someone way at the other end of the room, the “get me a Perrier” message would spread around the room raucously, getting passed from neighbor to neighbor in no organized manner. The message would, eventually, get passed to the right person, but only after a lot of unnecessary chatter. Super nodes were created to quiet down the system; they act as the network’s traffic cops, directing queries and preventing excessive replication of requests.

But because there are no set-in-stone rules in Gnutella to determine which machines should become super nodes, each developer seems to have a slightly different idea for how to implement them. This would be fine if all developers set relatively high standards for super nodes — but some programmers set the bar too low, allowing any machine that uses its software to have this special status. Not coincidentally, this boosts performance for people who use that program and slows everyone else down.

Qtraxmax, the program that won’t stop sending out automated queries, has also been accused of super node abuse. “Note that clients like Qtrax and Shareaza allow leaves with limitless numbers of [super nodes],” wrote BearShare’s Falco in the GDF. “This incredibly selfish behavior causes a flood of query traffic. Although it maximizes results for the local user, it impacts the network greatly. If every client behaved like Qtrax, Gnutella would surely fall.”

On the GDF, there is constant back-and-forth over proposals to deal with such problems, and ideas are well-vetted before they’re implemented en masse. Though there’s a formal voting mechanism, it’s hardly ever used, but new ideas aren’t often implemented without consensus. There is currently a debate over a proposal to require “digital certificates” for clients to join the Gnutella network. Such certificates would work essentially like passports on the network — passports issued, and, if necessary, revoked, by the group. It’s not clear if this proposal will amount to anything; developers say that if it’s rejected, some other scheme to secure the network will likely take its place.

Alan Cox, a veteran Linux developer, says that he’s seen this sort of debate before, and he’s not against a system that keeps out malicious users using technology. “Years and years ago this came up with a game called Xtrek,” Cox says. People were building clients with unfair capabilities to play the space game — and the solution, says Cox, was to introduce digital signatures. “Unless a client has been signed, it can’t play. You could build any client you wanted, but what you can’t do is build an Xtrek client that let you play better.”

But some developers wince at the thought of using signatures to close off an open network. “There’s something inherently brittle about it,” says Brian Behlendorf, the co-founder of the Apache Web server project. “Especially when you’re talking about an open protocol, from a philosophical perspective, I don’t think it works. That seems to me like it would have inhibited innovation. It’s fundamentally undemocratic. I can’t imagine what HTTP” — the protocol at the heart of the World Wide Web — “would’ve looked like if we required that.” Nodes on a network can certainly take “defensive measures” to protect themselves from bad actors, Behlendorf said, and he said that engineers had built that security into the protocols that govern the Internet.

But Gnutella is a different conceptual beast from the Internet, both in its engineering — its fluid nodes and peer-to-peer architecture — and, more importantly, in its governing ethic. To put it most simply, Gnutella has few rules because it has few leaders, and both Cox and Behlendorf agree that for an open project to work, it needs to have a leader that the other developers trust. In Linux, Cox says, “Linus wins — but Linus [Torvalds, Linux's creator] rarely makes a decision except when consensus simply isn’t going to be reached.” Also, Cox says, “I worked it out one time, and he turns out to be right nine times out of 10.”

By design, Gnutella lacks authority, and that could account for its problems. Fisk, of Limewire, makes clear that he and the other veteran developers have no intention of “taking over” Gnutella, but it’s also obvious, he says, that stable clients make for a better network. When Gnutella developers think of their network, they don’t think of it as a mere MP3 trader, Fisk says. They see it as a revolutionary new protocol for the Internet, one that could be especially important for the sort of huge file transfers that are promised for our impending broadband age. That was the vision that Gene Kan, the developer who did much to popularize Gnutella — and who committed suicide in July — used to have for the system. And in order for that vision to come to pass, programmers say, Gnutella needs to be more stable. And for that, Gnutella needs firmer rules.

But will the project splinter if the big guys make their rules? “It could,” says Cox. “The project could fork” — meaning that developers who don’t like the rules would split and start their own version of Gnutella. “If you’ve got people who make bad decisions, the nice thing about open source is, you can always do what you want. And in the end, it only depends on which system is better. There will be a natural selection.”

He uses the chocolate to plug up the leaking tank of acid — sulfuric acid reacts with sugar to form a kind of glue. The sodium, scraped into the shell of the cold capsule and splashed into a sealed bottle of water, makes for a handy time-delay bomb, which proves useful for blowing through a wall that blocks the group’s escape. The smoke from the cigarettes illuminates the bunker’s laser-beam security system that he has to get through to move through the bunker (no secret underground research lab is complete without lasers); MacGyver uses the binocular lens to aim the laser at its own control unit, shutting down the security system.

But how does he get out of the bunker? Oh, that’s the easy part: MacGyver finds a switch that controls the lights in an above-ground control tower. He flashes the lights on and off to send an SOS message in Morse code. The guys in the tower, realizing Mac’s in the bunker, alive, call off the missile — and for the first of 139 times during the show’s seven-year run from 1985 to 1992, MacGyver saves the day.

This first episode is nearly perfect. It neatly telegraphs MacGyver’s soul: A laid-back fellow oozing can-do heartland ingenuity, MacGyver is handsome but dorky, charming but self-effacing, a friend to orphans and children with disabilities, tolerant of people from foreign lands, and though he has every opportunity for indiscretion, he’s always a gentleman around women. MacGyver, played by the affable Richard Dean Anderson, works as a secret agent for a vaguely defined defense contractor whose intentions are always of the best sort. His gigs are of the usual action-hero variety — find stolen missiles, escape assassins, rescue civilians, humiliate dictators. But his near chastity, along with his staunch opposition to guns and capacity to solve every problem through the judicious application of chemistry and physics, sets him apart from other action stars. MacGyver is the thinking man’s hero.

Though, actually, when you go back to watch his adventures two decades after they first aired, you discover Mac’s target audience probably consisted mainly of boys, not men. I started watching the 139-episode DVD boxed set a few weeks ago, shortly after gadget blogs gleefully reported that Lee David Zlotoff, the series’ creator, said he was thinking of making a “MacGyver” movie. This jogged in me memories of boyhood, especially of how, after watching each MacGyver trick, I’d feel a bit invincible: I was small, but I was clever. Like MacGyver, I could take them.

But to adult eyes “MacGyver” is often too goofy by half. It’s not just that his tricks are improbable. At times — like when he interprets a deaf friend’s dreams to find clues to an impending missile theft — they seem to violate the show’s premise, that science beats brawn. In these instances, MacGyver doesn’t use science; he uses magic.

Then there are the children he befriends and the liberal orthodoxies he defends — tendencies that bump the show’s preachiness dial. Mac’s always popping up in foreign countries — Afghanistan, Myanmar — and running into kids and peasants who are oppressed by unsmiling overlords. In just about every second episode, he’s teaching kids about the dangers of guns, a position that, we learn in one episode, he came to as a boy, when a friend of his was killed by a gun. The antigun thing is a little specious, though: MacGyver’s got nothing but nothing but love for explosives, painful booby traps, fire extinguishers rigged up as projectiles, and enormous boulders that he sets up to fall on villains. The real reason he doesn’t use guns is obvious — he’d be able to shoot his way out of most traps, and that would be too easy.

I don’t mean to get down on “MacGyver.” There’s something in its flaws worthy of re-viewing, a particular moment in America preserved on TV. MacGyver is meant to exemplify a certain noble strain of American power. He doesn’t take the easy way out, and when in a jam, he uses what he finds around him to ingenious effect. If you strain you see a greater American story here too — that his ingenuity is frequently too good to be true, and leads to pat, uncomplicated endings that call for no greater reflection.

There’s also something striking about “MacGyver’s” moment in TV. Watch this show as a yardstick to measure how far we’ve come. Even the simplest dramas today — I’m looking at you, “CSI” — are complex and multilayered next to “MacGyver,” which underlines and explains everything, gums up all dialogue with exposition and introduces new, throwaway characters in each episode. There’s much hand-holding here: Even in foreign countries, everyone speaks English, every villain is one-dimensionally evil, and every tender moment is helped along by a swelling score.

But that’s why I hope someone makes a “MacGyver” movie. Mac needs a makeover. Lift him up to big-budget action standards — give him a story line that can span a couple of hours; give him a girl to love, but who may also cross him; give him a more complex mission (maybe to find out who’s putting all the salmonella in our salads?); and give the whole package fast, Paul Greengrass-style editing. Also, make sure one of his crazy solutions involves Mentos — people online go crazy for tricks with Mentos. Do all that and we might yet have a lasting American hero.

* * * * *

Read more of Salon’s Re-Viewed, offering a fresh look at great TV shows available on DVD.

I joined Salon in 2002, and since then I’ve written about, among other things, Smart Cars, robotic vacuum cleaners, muffin toasters, voting machines, architecture and 9/11, Tower Seven, Bill Clinton, Terri Schiavo, Florida’s elections, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” Malcolm Gladwell, Linux, Daniel Levitin, the copyright industries, Lawrence Lessig, The New York Times, Martha Stewart, a mnemonic to remember the Solar System’s planets, Google, garlic, stem cells, Comcast, Apple, Speedo, taxes, Social Security, Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, the robots’ plan to take over the Earth, Howard Stern, Stringer Bell, Current TV, campaign finance reform, MoveOn, Howard Dean, Nintendo, Total Information Awareness, Java, Alice Waters, “The West Wing,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Washington Post, Judy Miller, and Hurricane Katrina.

I’m pretty sure there’s no other news outlet on the planet which would have given me such latitude, and I thank everyone here at Salon for that. I also want to thank all the readers who’ve read my work, not to mention praised me, hounded me, kept me up late at night swearing at the screen. Don’t ever change.

– Farhad Manjoo

It was thrilling not only for the splendor of the place — even their commodes are computerized — and the welcoming attitude of my hosts at the Authors@ program (the company buys your books and hands them out to employees for free), but also because Googlers seemed to intuitively grasp my argument and posed many penetrating questions.

Google records these things and posts them up on YouTube, so if you’re looking for something to watch while eating a sandwich at your desk, have at it:

Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 17.

If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and spin in the digital age, do stop by.

They were all fans of the first model, and they’re pretty happy about the new model’s new features. The reviewers say the phone’s 3G network access leads to a much zippier Internet experience, that its audio quality has been dramatically improved, and that it cozies up to Microsoft’s corporate e-mail system.

But there are some drawbacks, too: Mossberg finds the battery life lacking, and Pogue says that that the phone’s GPS antenna is too puny to be of much use.

Here’s Mossberg on the battery life:

More important, in daily use, I found the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping below 20 percent by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it entirely ran out of juice on one day. I overcame this problem by learning to use Wi-Fi instead of 3G whenever possible, turning down the screen brightness and even turning off 3G altogether, which the phone permits.

The iPhone 3G’s battery life is comparable to, or better than, that of some other 3G competitors. But they have replaceable batteries. The iPhone doesn’t.

And Pogue on GPS:

Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone’s G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example.

Instead, all it can do at this point is track your position as you drive along, representing you as a blue dot sliding along the roads of the map. Even then, the metal of a car or the buildings of Manhattan are often enough to block the iPhone’s view of the sky, leaving it just as confused as you are.

None of the reviewers were provided with applications that third-party developers are creating for the iPhone (these will go on sale at Apple’s online App Store). Mossberg, though, writes that he tried out some of these apps on an older phone, and was pleased with the results:

I tested a game that used the phone’s motion sensors to control the action, and I tested several programs from America Online (TWX), including AOL Instant Messenger; AOL Radio, which streams music from the Internet; and AOL’s Truveo video search engine. All worked very well.

These apps will also work on old iPhones as well as on the iPod Touch.

The iPhone 3G goes on sale Friday at 8 a.m. But some enterprising folks have gotten a hold of them already — check out the Boy Genius Report blog’s unboxing photos.

I talked about how to get an iPhone in my video for Current TV this week:

It wasn’t hard work. Dolan popped into Potomac Video one afternoon and asked if he could look at Bork’s movie file. “There sure are a lot of them,” the assistant manager replied. “Is it OK if I make a Xerox copy?”

That was OK with Dolan; weeks later, he published Bork’s rental history in the D.C. alt-weekly the Washington City Paper.

Bork’s taste in movies was itself unremarkable (“First off, despite what all you pervs were hoping, there’s not an X in the bunch, and hardly an R,” Dolan wrote). But the publication sparked outrage from groups on the right and the left — including the ACLU and People for the American Way, which had vehemently opposed Bork’s nomination.

In 1988, Congress, spurred by the fear that the press might now easily unearth all politicians’ movie habits, passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which remains one of the strongest privacy laws in the nation. The law prohibits stores from disclosing video histories unless ordered to do so by a court — and even then, customers must be given “the opportunity to appear and contest the claim” of any party seeking to learn what you watched.

I tell you all this as a historical wind-up to yesterday’s shocking news: In the ongoing copyright battle between Viacom and Google, a judge ordered Google’s subsidiary YouTube to hand over an enormous trove of data identifying who watched what and when on the video-sharing site.

Viacom’s lawyers argued that they needed this data to prove that “infringing” videos — e.g., clips of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” — were more popular than non-infringing user-generated videos. Presumably, if it proves this, Viacom might prevail in its argument that YouTube’s bread-and-butter was illegal videos, and thus owes some of its success — and billions of dollars — to media companies.

The database in question is astonishingly broad: Viacom asked for 12 terabytes of logs (approximately 12,000 GB) that detail each instance in which someone pressed Play on a YouTube video, plus the YouTube username of the viewer who watched it, the date and time at which the user pressed Play, and the IP address of the viewer’s computer. The database covers videos seen both on YouTube as well as those embedded on other pages: If you’ve never visited YouTube but have clicked on a YouTube video from your daily newspaper’s Web site, you’re in the database.

Google objected to Viacom’s request on the grounds that producing the database would be expensive, time-consuming, and would invade YouTube users’ privacy. The judge — Louis Stanton of the Southern District of New York — Judge Stanton dismissed all Google’s arguments. The company’s “privacy concerns are speculative,” he wrote. (PDF here.)

Such pat reasoning should give you a general sense of the depth of bone-headedness in Stanton’s ruling. As Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the Robert Bork-inspired Video Privacy Protection Act applies not just to video cassettes but to “audio visual material” in general. Clearly it should apply here, and clearly, millions of YouTube users ought to have been given a chance to fight this invasion of our privacy.

But the real villain here isn’t Judge Stanton — it’s Viacom. I’ve previously raked the company over the coals for suing, rather than enjoying the fruits of, YouTube’s success (for instance last year, when it sacrificed potentially millions in ad dollars by pulling down the popular MTV clip of Britney Spears’ poor performance at the Video Music Awards).

But now Viacom’s sinking lower: Not content to fight just Google, the company looks to be manning the deck against us all. Sure, Judge Stanton might call this “speculative,” but think on it a bit: If Viacom’s willing to take on Google, what qualms will it have in suing you or me, recording industry-style, now that it knows what we did on YouTube? (Update: Viacom says it can’t use this data to sue you.)

All’s not lost. Google might manage to reverse this decision on appeal, and Viacom, gauging the outrage, could decide to withdraw or limit its request.

But our real hope here is legislative or regulatory action. Indeed, optimistic sorts might see a silver lining here.

As privacy scholar Jeffrey Rosen has written, “The politics of privacy tends to be largely reactive, fired by heartstring-tugging anecdotes that capture the public imagination.” Just as the airing of Robert Bork’s video history was the kick-start Congress needed to fix a clear privacy hole born out of then-new technology, this ruling might backfire on copyright holders, pushing lawmakers, finally, to curb the privacy-invading reach of copyright fights.

What we watch on YouTube is every bit as personal as what one rents from a store like Potomac Video. Indeed, it might be more private, and more salacious — imagine the fun you’d have if you were looking for unsavory data about a future Supreme Court nominee in 12 terabytes of YouTube logs!

In his floor speech in favor of the Video Privacy Protection Act, Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy argued that new database technologies capable of tracking private behavior called for new privacy regulations. That was two decades ago — and it remains true, still.

——

Update: A representative for Viacom e-mailed me to say that I’m overreacting. “We have no ability (and absolutely no desire) to use this data to sue end-users,” he argued, pointing out that all discovery documents in the case are bound by this confidentiality agreement.

Under this agreement, no one at Viacom will get to see these YouTube logs — only Viacom’s outside lawyers and experts, as well as court personnel, will have access to the data. The agreement also restricts the data to this case alone, which would seem to prevent the company from using the logs to sue users individually.

Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s counsel, told the New York Times, “I can unequivocally state that we will not use any of this information to enforce rights against end users.” He added that the company is looking into ways to “anonymize” the logs “to enhance the security of information that will be produced.”