Let's not kid ourselves, dear readers. P2P's best use cases all revolve around the liberation of data, software, music, movies, and other copyrighted and rather expensive content. You may direct your angry emails to Rep. Edolphus Towns (NY-Dem.), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

At the outset, the bill proposes the banning of P2P software use for government employees and contractors "and for other purposes." The bill mandates the long-term examination of "each open-network peer-to-peer file sharing software program" that might currently be in use by government and law enforcement personnel.

Towns cited the exposure of sensitive information via such networks as the reason for the bill. He cited the following leaks as proof of the need for stricter P2P regulations:

• Schematics for the President's helicopter, Marine One.
• Financial data on Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
• Location of a U.S. Secret Service safe house for the First Family.
• Specifics of a House Ethics Committee document containing a list of ongoing investigations

But let us be realistic: Copyright claims, Creative Commons concerns, and IP violations are the molten core at the center of any legislation on P2P networks. And based on recent internationally agreed-upon efforts to uphold the claims and wishes of copyright holders, the U.S. government seems to be introducing yet more legislation to restrict piracy.

Are P2P networks truly responsible for such serious security breaches? Or are these claims merely politically motivated scapegoats for government to crack down on user behaviors - behaviors that may need more examination than legal discipline?

Most importantly, if this bill is made law, will it act as a precedent for stricter policing and eventual shutdown of P2P networks altogether? Or are we reactionary skeptics who need to calm down and quietly resume our download of our Hello, Dolly torrent files? Choose your own adventure in the comments.

Flash-based P2P Video

For TinyChat, the ability to route these videos around its servers means reduced bandwidth costs. Once this feature becomes part of the default TinyChat setup, only calls with more than 2 participants will have to go through the company's servers and as TinyChat's founder Dan Blake told us earlier today, the experience of switching between the P2P chat and the server-based version should be completely seamless.

Unlike other P2P solutions, TinyChat is able to leverage a plugin that virtually all users already have on their machines and users don't have to download another plugin. All a user needs is a webcam and a microphone. Currently, when you are chatting on the P2P server, your privacy is also protected, as the service simply won't allow a third user to listen in or join the call.

Many of the recent real-time search engines are based on Twitter. They use the URLs enclosed in tweets to discover and rank new and popular pages. In this post, we'll take a look at the quantitative structure of the underlying foundation, to determine the feasibility and limits of this approach. We'll also look at how to overcome these limitations by using the implicit Web.

But it also shows another fact: that those people who contribute publish an even smaller fraction of the information they know.

Both of these factors account for the huge difference in efficiency between implicit and explicit voting. Explicit voting, as the name implies, requires users to actively express interest in a page; for example, by tweeting a link. Implicit voting requires no deliberate action on the part of the user; a simple visit to a Web page would count as a vote.

A Quick Calculation

Twitter now has 44.5 million users and delivers about 20,000 tweets per minute. If every second tweet contained a URL, that would be 10,000 URLs shared per minute.

According to Nielsen, the number of visited Web pages per person per month is 1,591.

Twitter's 44.5 million users visit 1.6 million Web pages per minute and explicitly vote for only 10,000 per minute. That is to say, implicit voting and discovery generates 160 times more attention-getting data than explicit voting.

This means that 280,000 implicit votes could provide as much information as 44.5 million explicit votes. Put another way, as many Web pages are implicitly discovered during one day as there are Web pages explicitly discovered during half a year.

This dramatically shows the limits of Web searches based solely on explicit votes and mentions, searches whose potential could be leveraged by using the implicit Web.

Beyond the Mainstream

This becomes even more important if we look beyond mainstream topics and the English language. Then it becomes simply impossible to achieve the critical mass of explicit votes needed to have statistically significant attention-based ranking or popularity-based discovery.

Time and Votes Are Precious

Time is also a crucial factor, especially with real-time search. We want to be able to discover new pages as soon as possible. And we want to assess almost instantly how popular those new pages are. If we fail to reliably rank a page quickly, it will get buried in the noise. But the goals of speed and votes conflict with the fact that the number of votes a page gets is inversely proportional to the time it took to be viewed.

Again a much higher frequency of implicit votes would help.

Relevance vs. Equality

We could also improve on explicit votes. But we should not treat them as being equal because they are not. We trust some of them more than others, and our interests overlap with some more than others, for the very same reason that we follow some people and not others. This helps us get more value and meaning out of that very first vote.

FAROO is moving in this direction by combining real-time search with a peer-to-peer infrastructure.

A Holistic Approach

Discovering topical, fresh, and novel information has always been an important aspect of search. But the perception of what "recent" is has changed dramatically with the popularity of services such as Twitter, and it has led to the emergence of real-time search engines.

Real-time search shouldn't be a silo, but rather should be part of a unified and distributed approach to Web search.

The era of purely document-centered search is over. The equally important roles of user and conversation, both as targets of search and as contributors to discovery and ranking, should be reflected in the infrastructure.

A Distributed Infrastructure

As long as both source and recipient of information are distributed, then the natural design of search is distributed, too. P2P offers an efficient alternative to the ubiquitous concentration and centralization of search we find today.

A peer-to-peer client allows every visited Web page to be implicitly discovered and ranked according to attention received. This is important, because the majority of pages in a real-time search are in the long tail. They appear once or not at all in the Twitter stream and can't be discovered or ranked through explicit votes.

With real-time search, the amount of indexed data is limited, because only recent documents (those that have gained a lot of attention and a high reputation) are accounted for in the index. This allows for a centralized infrastructure at a moderate cost. But as soon as search moves beyond the short head of real-time search and aims to fully index the long tail of the entire Web, then a distributed peer-to-peer architecture provides a huge cost advantage.

Who Pays, Who Doesn't

The European Commission's Digital Competitiveness Report (PDF) is a comprehensive annual resource which looks at everything from broadband penetration to use of social networks and more. One of the chapters in the latest report, published earlier this month, deals specifically with online entertainment.

In this chapter, the EU study reports on the state of the online entertainment industry, revealing factoids like "less than 5% of Europeans have paid for online content in the last three months."

The most interesting results from the report, though, are not the details about who pays, but about who doesn't. Among the non-payers, factors like lower prices would convince about 30% to pay while things like better quality, wider choice, better availability, and others would convince between 15-20%. Yet one figure stands out: only around 20% of online users would pay for online content if all the other free options suddenly disappeared.

Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Not to Blame, Says EU

The impact of this finding didn't escape the notice of the EU researchers, who go on to point out that this seems to mean, contrary to what industry execs say, illegal copying is not to blame:

"...the low percentage of individuals that consider the possible lack of freely available online content as a reason for paying, calls into question the argument put forward by representatives of the content industry that European consumers will in the long term suffer from a lack of commercial availability of high quality content if the current model of audiovisual content distribution, based on illegal copying, is not curved."

Instead, what seems to be happening is that people pay for their internet connection and then gorge themselves on the abundant free content that's available online. Because there's so much out there which costs nothing at all - from web news to streaming video to software applications - internet users tend to balk at the idea of actually having to pull out their wallets to make a purchase. It's the internet itself that has led us down this path to a place where old monetization models simply no longer apply.

What's the Answer?

The report goes on to look at the business models of all sorts of content sites in detail including online news/newspapers, video, movies, music, and online games. While the ways consumers access these different types of content may vary (RSS for reading news, streaming videos, downloading music), the findings are relatively consistent across the board. With only a few exceptions (Apple's iTunes Store, music-based games like Guitar Hero, etc.), many of the current business models are not sustainable.

So what's the answer? There isn't really a good one just yet. Many businesses try "freemium" models which convert power users to paying users. Other sites try sustaining themselves on online ads (which is difficult to do in a down economy). But the best ideas for new business models may very well be the ones that haven't even been thought up yet. The only question is whether or not they'll be discovered in time before more content-producing industries fail.

Image credits - used freely thanks to the Internet and Creative Commons: downloading, flickr user Arenamontanus; I love P2P, flickr user Brocco Lee; p2p logo, flickr user jatop

Trend: Illegal File Sharing Sites Go Legit

The interesting trend, here, though, is that a lot of companies and services that were previously known for being 'illegal' hubs for file sharing are now trying to go legit. Napster, the grandfather for Kazaa and most of its brethren, is now a respectable paid service, and the Pirate Bay may offer a legal version of its service soon.

As Eric Pfanner pointed out in the New York Times, we are now getting to the point where using legal services like Spotify or Lala are actually so much more convenient than illegally downloading music. Given this trend, it makes sense for centralized services like Kazaa to slowly drift to a legal model. At the same time, decentralized file sharing options like BitTorrent, which don't depend on a single company to work, will still continue to be popular. Chances are, though, that users will probably share less music through torrents over the next year or so, as more cheap and free options allow users to legally access music more conveniently.

That claim is probably meant to fight back against some people's initial concerns that hosting files on their own PC will leave them open to attack. However, simply addressing security issues is somewhat missing the point about the real trouble with Unite: it's not solving a problem we actually have.

According to the interview, Tetzchner addresses the concerns of those in the security community who fear this technology that aims to put a web server on every PC. He says, "when you're hacking a single system, if you have everything that belongs to everyone in one location, you only need to break in once. If you have it in different computers it's a little more complicated. If you get into one Web server and everyone's data is in there, that's easier than getting into a million computers."

While Opera and the tech community continue to debate the technology's security or lack thereof, the rest of the tech early adopters have simply moved on. Outside of the Opera fanatics (we know who you are!), most of us either skimmed the news briefly or, at the most, may have downloaded the alpha and played with it for a bit. But did the lot of us switch browsers and start sharing files? No.

Why is that? Shouldn't this be just the sort of thing that has techies all a'twitter? What's going on?

Where's the Geek Love?

When Opera revealed the mysterious (and perhaps overly-hyped) Unite, they probably didn't get the response they expected. After numerous emails and teases about a new technology that was going to "reinvent the web," for the most part, the community response was "huh?"

Oh sure, Opera fanboys and girls got it right away as did web developers and other geekier-than-thou folks, but even within the tech community itself, there was confusion...and a bit of "bah humbug" too.

We remember reading through various blog comments where users dismissed Unite as nothing more special than a browser with P2P plugins - a statement that's only true to a point. While the technology enables P2P between browsers, it does so via a proxy server in the middle at operaunite.com. That middle service could easily be a single point of failure for the Unite infrastructure. Opera Unite's proxy goes down, you go down. Sure, that might not be any different than the cloud services we rely on now: Gmail, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, etc. However, even if one of those was to crash-and-burn, it wouldn't take our whole web of services down with it.

But Unite wants to replace just about every cloud app you use today with its own apps for file sharing, social note-posting, chat, photo sharing, and media playing...and that's not to mention how Unite wants to let you host your own web server, too. In other words, Opera wants to (partially) move the cloud back off the the web to your PC.

They even go so far as to claim that their single point of failure is an improvement on what we do today: "We place our trust in these third parties, and we hope for the best, but as long as our own computers are not first class citizens on the Web, we are merely tenants, and hosting companies are the landlords of the Internet," writes product analyst Lawrence Eng.

Thanks, but we'll take our numerous cloud apps over the Unite+PC combo any day.

What Problem Does Unite Solve?

When we started moving from desktop to web, initially testing the waters with email services, later moving to photo and video sharing services, and finally to social networking sites like Facebook that let us communicate and share media, the solutions being implemented were solving real challenges. Setting up desktop email was hard for non-techies (what's my email server's address? what's SMTP?). There were mailbox storage limits and attachment size limits. Letting grandma and grandpa see our digital photos wasn't easy. Getting in touch and staying in touch with our wide network of friends was downright impossible. But then these web applications came along and made it possible for everyone to use technology. They were simple, straightforward, and fun. And soon a Web revolution was underway. A real one, that is.

What problem does Opera Unite solve that could kick off the next revolution of the web? Are we having trouble with cloud services? Are we concerned that they're so insecure that moving everything via P2P through Opera is somehow better? Is Unite easier than Facebook? Than flickr? Heck, than email? No.

It's not easier for us techies by any means (especially since its tied to one browser) and it's not even close to being easy for the "regular folks" of the online world...you know, the ones who don't even know what a browser is

So security concerns aside, what is Unite doing for us that we can't get elsewhere? Anyone?

If you think we're missing the point, chime in below.

After the verdict, Thomas-Rasset told the Associated Press that the penalty was "kind of ridiculous," but also pointed out that she simply can't pay $2 million, so she is "not going to worry about it now."

As we pointed out in our earlier stories about this trial, the evidence clearly incriminated Thomas-Rasset, and the jury found that her conduct was willful. According to the Copyright Act, the jury could have awarded the music companies between $750 and $150,000 per song, but the jury, which clearly wasn't convinced by Thomas-Rasset's defense, came down in the middle at $80,000.

Could They Still Settle?

Ars Technica's Nate Anderson points out that RIAA spokesperson, Cara Duckworth, told reporters that the recording industry would still be willing to settle with Thomas-Rasset.

It seems like the RIAA is mostly interested in setting a precedent here, and if the two parties do eventually settle on a much smaller number (typically these cases ended in $5000 settlements), it surely wouldn't get the attention this current verdict received, leaving most of the public under the impression that a $80,000 fine per shared song is a real possibility.

At the moment, the UI is a bit clunky and the file sizes are capped at 20MB, but the service presents an exciting opportunity nevertheless. Once mobile capabilities are introduced, FileTwt would allow more freedom for the 9-to-5ers among us. And it already allows for mass sharing (either via public streams or multiple-recipient DMs) of files, which is awesome news for self-marketing musicians, who desperately need better online promotional tools.

Here's an initial test DM:

Here's the FileTwt page for the download:

Redirect! The adventure continues at RapidShare's site:

But RapidShare wants you to consider a paid account for a few seconds:

Finally: The download.

Filetwt is now uploading files only to RapidShare. They plan to add more hosts, namely DepositFiles, FileFactory, and MegaUpload, in about one week.

The 20MB file size limit has been instated to allow the startup to remain profitable, since any significant volume of traffic will mean more server bandwidth. Premium accounts for larger file shares will be introduced in the event that a significant number of users demonstrate a demand for increased bandwidth usage, according to company representative Ankit Sakhuja.

"We see Filetwt as more of a document sharing tool," he wrote in an email Sunday afternoon. "The private share option was introduced specifically for that purpose."

He noted that site developers are also working on a better user interface, a progress bar for uploads, and a virus scan, among other features.

As with any peer-to-peer file-sharing service, copyright infringement and piracy are immediately raised as primary concerns. The site states, "It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act," no other information is given. Particularly for direct messages, how would FileTwt receive notice of illegally distributed files? Unlike the downloads that occur on larger P2P or torrent-sharing sites, these transactions are primarily going to be one-to-one or one-to-a-select few.

However, RapidShare has been successfully sued in a German court in 2007 over copyright infringement, specifically for MP3s. Although the DMCA Safe Harbor clause might prevent RapidShare and similar file-hosting companies from prosecution in the U.S., it certainly makes no exception for end users. Ultimately, users are given the standard "enter at your own risk" caveats with little available information on exactly how illegal one-to-one MP3 sharing is or what the consequences (or likelihood of getting caught and being prosecuted) are.

Finally, we've concluded through our own testing of the service that smartphones and other mobile devices do not handle FileTwt well. But of course, FileTwt is working on mobile apps, which Sakhuja promises will be "one-of-a-kind."

BayTSP, a Los Gatos, CA-based company, is best known for putting the cease-and-desist smackdown on peer-to-peer copyright violators. The site serves infringement information forms to offending parties on behalf of the copyright holders. Think of them as the online debt collectors of the BitTorrent universe, with all the information security risk that implies.

If the information were secure, this might be fine. However, in some monumental lapse of judgement, the entire site was left open to search spiders and accordingly indexed by Google, allowing anyone with hackerish leanings ample opportunity to create all kinds of mischief.

A Google search for "'infringement information' site:baytsp.com" yields distressing results. Some of the pages have been removed, but you can still have a look at the cached versions:

Whoops!

Not only have the forms been online for Google and the waiting world to view; the forms could also be completed and submitted online by just about anyone.

More technically savvy tricksters could send infringement notices of their own. "And, on top of that," the TechDirt blogger writes, "some have discovered that BayTSP's site has some scripting vulnerabilities such that you could create a fake complaint and get people to, say, download malware or enter credit card data."

Although this recent debacle is simply one more PR disaster for the media industries themselves, my first thoughts were echoed by TechDirt commenter Mechwarrior: "Once this hits 4chan, it's over."

The entertainment industry, as Mike Masnick points out on Techdirt, will celebrate this as a major victory in the fight against piracy, but in reality, shutting down the Pirate Bay will do little to deter filesharers and won't help the entertainment industry regain any lost market share or find a new business model.

It is also important to note that even though the Pirate Bay may be the most visible torrent-sharing site right now, others like Mininova host almost as many torrents.

The first demonstration of the OpenKnowlege system is aimed to enhance the abilities of those seeking health-related information on the web. Instead of solely relying on a doctor to prescribe a course of treatment, people today tend to seek out medical information on their own using the web. Unfortunately, that data is often inaccurate and misleading. What OpenKnowledge intends to do is provide patients with structured information that has been checked for accuracy. To test this system, OpenKnowledge is working with Cancer Research UK on a project related to treatment methods.

2) Emergency Response

When there's an emergency situation, there is often a centralized point that disseminates critical information to people in need. But if that system itself breaks down, people are out of luck. OpenKnowledge aims to decentralize those systems so that a "backup" decentralized network of peers could be put into place. There, people could help each other out when the centralized system failed. This is currently being testing with emergency response authorities in Trentino, Italy.

3) Protemoics Research

Protemoics research (the study of the structure and function of proteins) can also benefit from the OpenKnowledge framework. In this area of science, many researchers worldwide rely on a small number of databases, creating a bottleneck of sorts which stresses the infrastructure of the databases themselves as well as those that maintain them. Researchers also find it hard to share data and results directly with other groups. In addition, the quality of the information in those databases is very mixed.

OpenKnowledge aims to solve all three problems by letting the researchers share data with each other directly, peer-to-peer style. This relieves the burden on the databases while the feedback will continually improve the quality of the data shared. This is currently being tested in an existing proteomics network in Spain called ProteoRed.

So...What Is It Exactly?

Understanding how a system like this works is difficult and the Open Knowledge web site doesn't make the process of comprehension any easier. Even despite the cute, Harry Potter-themed slideshow meant to describe the process, the actual details are hard to grasp. Obviously written by brainy researchers, they can't even call the slideshow a "slideshow," instead referring to it as a "simple pictorial introduction."

Still, if you can wade through the academic speech on the site, what you may find is a creative idea for sharing information. Basically, through open source downloadable code, OpenKnowledge sets up a peer-to-peer network where users can trade in information and data similar to how BitTorrent users trade mp3s and video files.

In the OpenKnowledge system, anyone can easily become a peer or even create their own peer by sharing existing code or writing their own. In order to become an OpenKnowledge user, you simply need to download the OpenKnowledge kernel from here together with some additional components that you might want to use. In addition to users, services, such as WSDL services, can also be made into peers on the OpenKnowledge network.

OpenKnowledge is more of a framework for decentralizing the systems on the web. It's not so much of a consumer-friendly web app than it is a model for information sharing that can help advance areas of science and research. You may not ever use OpenKnowledge yourself on your home computer, but your life may very well be impacted one day by the innovations it made possible.

P2P Innovation in Startups

This week we also saw the launch of Wuala, a P2P Cloud Storage solution (our review here).

Earlier, we reviewed a P2P approach to search (Faroo) and a P2P approach to video sharing (Metaaso).

With the exception of Skype, these are all tiny little start-ups. Interestingly, they have all originated outside America:

Skype - telephony - Estonia
Wuala - storage - Switzerland
Faroo - search - Germany
Metaaso - video - India.

This geographic origin may not be coincidental.

You need $ gazillions to be a Cloud Computing Platform. Those server farms cost a lot. Skimping, or misjudging demand, leads to outages, slow response and other confidence-killers. This is a game for the big boys - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, AT&T, Sun. These are all American firms, with access to plenty of capital. Disruptive innovation usually comes from start-ups that are starved for capital. You replace capital with technical innovation. That was true for Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, AT&T, Sun as well when they started.

That is why I have believed for some time that P2P is the next big disruptive technology at the infrastructure level.

P2P and Bigcos

Disruptive technology sometimes needs support from big companies as well. Fortunately for P2P, 3 very big companies would benefit greatly from more use of P2P as infrastructure - Microsoft, Apple and Intel. It's a great way to mop up those underutilized desktop CPU cycles. And attack the cloud computing incumbents.

Historically, P2P start-ups have tended to focus on music sharing and have been hurt by legal issues, but they have been fine technically. Skype makes P2P respectable and proves that scalability does not have to be an issue. Skype is taking on one the biggest and most entrenched industries in the world and millions of people increasingly rely on Skype as a mission critical alternative to landlines or cellphones.

P2P: Next Big Thing for Infrastructure

P2P infrastructure could play very well behind the enterprise firewall. It reduces CIO security fears about too many cloud based apps outside the firewall. This is important for P2P start-ups. They would need a lot of capital to go to market entirely with a consumer/SOHO offering. If they can get enterprise adoption at the same time, then they can accelerate cash flow and reduce need for funding.

Watch the P2P space. It's the next big wave of innovation at the infrastructure level.

While Wuala will happily sell you additional storage space (from $25 a year for 10GB to $1000 for 1TB), you can also trade your own local disk space for cloud storage space. If you share 5GB of space on your local drive, you will get an additional 5GB of online storage. Given how cheap hard disks have become, this seems like a fair trade-off. Users who share their local hard disk space can also turn off advertising on Wuala.

Wuala's client basically looks like a local folder and you can decide if you want to share any of your files stored on Wuala with either your friends or a group of users.

Encryption: The Good and the Bad

Even with the strong encryption Wuala uses, though, the fact that some information is going to be stored on machines outside of even Wuala's control is not going to sit well with a lot of people. While most private users can probably live with these risks (which are inherent in any cloud storage solution), businesses will probably stay very far away from Wuala.

There is also the question of how people will use Wuala - after all, the service provides almost unlimited and strongly encrypted storage. As Wuala has little control over what is shared on the network, Wuala might turn out to be a haven for rather unsavory activities. But then, the same can probably be said for most other cloud storage services as well.

Where's the Money?

The cloud storage market is highly competitive, but so far, no clear front-runner has emerged. Wuala's competitors include Box.net, Dropbox, Mozy, as well as Apple's Mobile Me and Microsoft's various online storage services, including SkyDrive and Mesh. There are also various software solutions to make backing up to Amazon's S3 more consumer friendly. All of these have different business models and feature sets, but Wuala's simplicity and P2P sharing approach will make it very competitive.

But the competition here is not Microsoft. For the business user, the competition is Blackberry; and Blackberry is not Microsoft. I am a long time Blackberry user and it is seldom annoying. It just gets the job done. So unlike when I switched back from Windows to Mac, which I did with a big sigh of relief, I am in no hurry to switch based on anything wrong with what I have.

And a few reviews are making me think that iPhone could be a high maintenance date. Sure, high maintenance dates can be fun, but I am judging this on boring utility criteria. For example:

1. Keyboard. I am ready to be convinced by touch-screen keyboards. But I am not sure I want to spend the time adjusting. Outside the USA, where SMS is the major use of a mobile phone, I think this is a big deal. Flipping to horizontal is neat, but does this work for email?

2. Battery. Any mobile device that cannot do a full day's work and play without re-charge is a pain. You don't want to be in "don't leave home without it" mode regarding your charger unless you are going for more than a day. On a normal day, it's plug it in before you go to sleep and pick it up in the morning.

3. It's a bit big as a phone. OK, so is the Blackberry. But, as they say, size matters when you are holding it to your ear. Some people express almost comical amusement at the idea of using the iPhone as a phone - "you still call people, how quaint". Then don't call it a Phone, because it does set that expectation.

I know that resistance is futile. I will get an iPhone eventually. Or Blackberry will give me a better browser, which is really what I love about iPhone.

The killer app for me? Skype to Skype calls over WiFi. I believe that requires an unlocked iPhone. It would dramatically change the economics of mobile phones. Which AT&T certainly knows and will be resisting for as long as possible.

Plus a really slim but full function collapsible keyboard, so I can write full length stuff as easily as on my laptop. And then a simple way to plug into any screen that's around, so I can edit docs stored in the cloud. So that I can stop lugging around my laptop; that's a big win for people who spend a lot of time away from their desk.

My guess is that the iPhone ecosystem will bring all these things to market fairly soon. The iPhone is the first real new platform since Windows (sorry, Facebook).

Image: After the iPhone Keynote, Jan 2007; pic by mac steve