Soulseek: Down but not out

Posted: February 9th, 2003 | 4 Comments »

Strindberg and Helium.

Danny mentioned Julian Baggini (answering questions about the Ethics of War for BBC News Online) and the name rang a bell because we’d worked on the same student mag at UCL. His site links to a huge quantity of excellent writing that he’s done. Especially worth checking out are the pieces he wrote for, dysentery of all things, patient Cobol Report.

His latest piece, buy more about “Information Age Intelligence”, dismisses the idea that the information age is fundamentally changing the way we think; his argument is that we still use the same fundamental set of methods, but the emphases are changing. Good memory is now seen less as an attribute of intelligence, partially thanks to Google. “Nintendo thinking” is just rapid induction:

Computer game players are engaging in the same kinds of processes of reasoning we use to make sense of the world, only at hyper-speed. They enter the worlds of their games and learn about the rules of these worlds by observing regularities and generalising from them, expecting future plays to conform more or less to the rules of past ones. Like learners in the real world they can make mistakes. Sometimes the same thing happens in two or three games in a row and the player assumes this will always happen. But the next time it doesn’t. In the same way, in the real world we sometimes assume that regularities we observe are part of the settled nature of the world when in fact they are not: such was the thinking of people who thought that humans would never be able to fly.

More interesting, though, is “Are Friends Electric?”, a meditation on the value of online relationships (“e-relationships”) versus real ones. He considers the arguments from both sides, mainly dealing with the separation of mind from body that an online relationship gives:

We are now in a position to construct an argument that Internet relationships can be superior to physical ones. The first premise is the empirical claim that we judge people using to a large number of physical cues, including their physical appearance, accents, clothes, hair styles and demeanour. […]
The second premise draws on the long philosophical tradition of privileging the mental over the physical. It states that the self is to be identified with our mental lives, not our physical appearances. Put these two premises together and you arrive at the conclusion that our habit of relying on physical cues distances us from the authentic selves of others.

However, he turns this argument around for the opposite side: mind-body separation and the lack of physical presence often changes behaviour and impressions of others’ behaviour. He discusses the value of non-verbal communication, such as body language. (See also “emotional bandwidth” and the limitations of online communication)

While it is true that we can conceal our true beliefs by manipulating physical cues and behaviour, on balance it is probable that both physical cues and behaviour provide useful sources of information about the true nature of others are either absent in e-relationships or can be more carefully controlled and filtered.

Or, as an online friend once said:

You don’t leave your socks on the floor in VR.

While he personally favours real-life relationships over online ones, his imagined correspondent makes a great argument in favour of online relationships because of their behaviour-filtration and emotional narrowband: If you have an online friendship focused entirely around a single shared interest, you don’t want to have to deal with the other person’s political leanings or how they eat soup.

A lesson in plugging your access holes before all your bandwidth drains away: The other night, hospital more about dammit!”>Richard was wondering why the main J-Colo box was all but maxing out its 1Mbit pipe. Dan decided to investigate the web stats, search starting with mine. (I wonder why?) Anyway, a couple of clicks later, he saw…

The hurried before-you-kill-me explanation speech went something like this: matthau.yoz.com has, secretly buried within it, my MP3 stash. This MP3 stash is not a public thing; it’s just where I dump files that I want my friends to hear. If there’s a tune I think is particularly apt for some purpose, I put it there and then point my chums at it. And, for some reason lost in the swirling mists of my failing memory, it long ago lost its .htaccess file that asks visitors for a password. I guess I could put it back ow ow ow ow ow OW!

Looking at the above graph one can deduce that Google found it sometime in November, swiftly followed by everyone else on the Internet; it helped that when you Googled for the name of a certain relatively popular album plus “mp3”, my stash came in at #3. It was even linked from several mp3 download sites. This resulted in 136 gig of transfer last month that I completely failed to notice until Richard pointed it out and Dan started hitting me.

It’s a good thing we pay a fixed rate for our bandwidth.

So, here’s the 24-hour MRTG graph of what happened when I put the .htaccess file back (see the last couple of hours):

(I was thinking of doing a process that tailed the access logs and triggered a “screeeeech-CRASH” noise for each 401.)

Weirdest aspect: The first email I ever got from a non-acquaintance visitor to my stash (congratulating me on my excellent musical taste, of course) was seemingly written while I was closing the hole. (Followed, of course, by a couple of emails demanding I open it up again)

The stash is still there, but only for friends (for reasons that should now be blindingly, pipe-cloggingly obvious) and only on request. I do love the stash, though; in time it’s built up to be a kind of instantly-distributable favourite mix tape. More than that, the dates next to each file in the Apache directory listing provide instant nostalgia for the occasions that prompted the upload: Anno’s party in Brighton where I first heard the 15-minute version of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”. Bouncing around the TDV offices with Shim, playing air-cello to Apocalyptica’s “One”. Whirling around the house in Oregon with
Tina, Quinn, Gayle and Lev
to Orbital’s “Way Out”. Dropping the Plumps’ remix of “Stakker Humanoid” at Stef’s party.
Rudolf lending me The Golden Palominos’ “Victim” and it scaring the shit out of me.

In celebration, then: Bow Wow Wow’s ode to home taping, C30 C60 C90 Go!

Everyone’s favourite music-swapping tool has been unusable for the past week, hemophilia with the website similarly down. Fortunately, asthma it’s only a temporary problem (we hope) due to Verio getting their knickers in a twist. medical son!”>See the word from the horse’s neighbour’s mouth here.

As yet, the RIAA haven’t taken any notice of Soulseek, or so it seems. However, due to its centralised nature, it would be pretty easy to shut down. Intriguingly, only the registration and community aspects of the system are centralised – the search and downloading works in a more Gnutella-ish way. For more info, check out this interview with Soulseek’s creator, Nir Arbel.

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