uServ -- P2P Webserver from IBM

ryantate writes: "Some folks over at IBM have been working on the uServ Project, which provides "high availability web hosting ... using existing web and internet protocols", meaning you can serve a website from your desktop and people can get at it with a standard Web browser and without special software. They claim the system, which works from behind firewalls and when you are offline (provided you can convince other peers to 'replicate' your site), is in active use by about 900 people within IBM. Here's the white paper."

Comments

No fair.

[tcd004]

Only AOL Time Warner Turner, News Corp, Verizon and Oprah should be allowed to make Web pages.

Everyone else doing it will just mess stuff up!

tcd004

Re:No fair.

[Bi()hazard]

This is exactly the purpose of uServ-if you read through the documents written by uServ's designers, you'll see that this is intended to be web publishing for the masses. While many slashdot readers would host a site themselves, the average user can't do that. Hosts such as Geocities are corporate behemoths who have shown themselves ready to trample individual users whenever they find it convenient. IBM's visionaries hope to use the new resources available to home users-namely cable and dsl connections capable of moving around enough data to distribute sites-to implement an unregulated, power to the people version of Geocities.

Isn't this the entire purpose of the internet: a distributed, uncontrollable network allowing anyone to share information with anyone else? Don't be fooled by the scant description offered on the front page or any preconcieved notions about what distributed filesharing systems do. This isn't a client/server program like gnutella; it relies on basic internet protocols to use the dormant resources of clients as servers. Coordinating servers will be set up not only by IBM, but individual power users like the typical slashdotter-someone with a spare computer to use as a dedicated server, and enough knowledge to run it well. The dream of uServ's creators is nothing less than freeing the server side of the internet from the chains of money, nothing less than making web serving as cheap and easy as web browsing. Nothing less than the liberation of content from the hands of the powerful.

See for yourself in the document by the researchers Bayardo, Somani, Gruhl, and Agrawal. Their ultimate vision is a system taken for granted by the end user in the same way DNS is now. A complex solution to a serious problem, but one so easy to use, effective, reliable, and hidden in the background that anything else is unimaginable to the end user. Think of what will be possible when we have a large, community driven, self-sufficient, unregulated section of the internet. Censorship will be impossible, even for restrictive nations such as China. Using its revolutionary peer-to-peer proxying technology uServ will be able to dynamically create tunnels and anonymous proxies as easily as it can create webpages. Today Napster can be shut down, but one million users in a hundred countries with most of their traffic completely legitimate cannot be stopped. Today political dissidents can be tracked by oppressive governments, but a distributed network with built-in anonymity and trail obfuscation created by dozens of cooperating users in different countries can guarantee anonymity. Today the internet can to a large extent be controlled by those with money and power-but a mature uServ would bring us close to realization of the internet's original vision, where everyone is equal.

Hmm, that's gonna be interesting !

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

"uServ -- P2P Webserver from IBM"

I can't wait to see the RIAA try to sue IBM. God I love this industry ...

Sounds like a ripoff of Freenet

[Astral Traveller]

Freenet already does all this, and in addition, provides for complete anonymity and encryption. It can also be tunneled over just about any other protocol (instead of being limited to HTTP like uServ). It is still under heavy development, but already contains a wealth of information. This is one of the few truly great open-source projects in development today.

Re:Sounds like a ripoff of Freenet

[whiteben]

I agree that uServ doesn't represent any stunning advances in collaboration technologies. It makes use of proxy servers, peering, and HTTP: not exactly bleeding edge tech.

On the other hand, it's not Freenet, either. Freenet is a platform which guarrantees that data is survivable (lawyer-proof) and secure. uServ doesn't seem to be concerned with either. It's primarily a way for users who aren't very technologically savvy to publish content. That's it. Useful in its own way.

BEN

pretty old...

[glwtta]

... but relevant

Kind of stupid.

[DarkZero]

The white paper talks about letting people use this program for a fee... but isn't the point of P2P, at least in 90% of cases, to be a way for people that don't have the money for big web servers and T1 lines to serve files and content? It talks about how this is a good alternative to free web hosting services, yet it isn't free, which does not make it a viable option for people that are looking for a FREE web hosting service. If people were willing to pay to serve content, why would they choose this over uploading their files to the server of a web hosting service they would pay for? The biggest and most important difference between those two, it seems, are that this way of hosting content will take up a lot more of your computer's speed and its internet connection than simply uploading your files to a hosting service would.

If this were a freeware/shareware/open source P2P web hosting program, I'd be thrilled. In fact, I would already have a web page up on it, because I've been looking for just such a solution. But a closed source program that I have to pay a subscription fee for, with a larger fee if I want its fullest abilities? Compared to a hosting service that wants a subscription fee but doesn't take up my internet connection or bog down my computer with continuous server processes, this "P2P Web Hosting (Subscription) Service" is just reinventing the wheel by making it a triangle.

The whole thing just seems... kind of stupid.

Similar to my Reptile project.

[burtonator]

This is slightly similar to my Reptile project which was covered a while back on slashdot

The major difference is that we are reusing existing P2P protocols and will provide bindings for JXTA, Freenet, Jabber, etc.

Content is syndicated in between nodes as XML (RSS, etc). An index is kept of all the content so you can run local searches. Actually we use Hypersonic SQL so you have a very FAST in-memory index of all this stuff.

Users publish information into the system by adding a item to their local weblog. Remote users can subscribe to this channel and will receive updates via the P2P layer.

We are also working on a reputation, and distributed public key authentication model. This is obviously very tough and we have been working at it for a while...

Hopefully we will have another release out soon.

Anyway.. check it out!

Not stupid

[Cato]

uServ only needs a central server to locate individual web servers and set up dynamic DNS accordingly - e.g. to find a replica when the master site is down, or to find a proxy that can accept incoming connections for a firewalled machine. The actual access to web servers is always done via dynamic DNS and HTTP, so there is virtually no cost to the central server (it's only used as machines log in and out of the system, or change proxying/replication relationships).

The central server (i.e. admin server and dynamic DNS service) could be very low cost - something like the cost of dynamic DNS, which can cost from $0 to $25 per year. Someone like TZO.com could easily offer this (they do a good dynDNS service already).

The reason this is better than a free hosting service is that you don't subject your readers to adverts, and you can host whatever content you want. The one thing that's missing from this is dynamic load balancing - if you could have 100 other sites replicating a popular open source software site, and have people automatically connect to a nearby low-load site, this would basically *solve the mirroring problem*. If you can make the creation and use of mirrors completely automatic, the non-corporate Web can easily scale to much higher volumes than today, without having to make mirrors visible to the user.

This does take up more of your bandwidth than central hosting, but that's the whole point of P2P - if this is a problem, apply rate limiting in the web server or the network. Most people use a lot more downstream bandwidth when surfing, so all you need to do is to reserve some bandwidth for upstream ACKs and upstream email - the remainder can be used for P2P serving without problems.

Open source hosting is very reliant on Sourceforge and on people paying for web hosting services - it would be great to see it scale through the application of standard protocols and some smart software. Freenet is a much more radical approach, of course, with some interesting features, but it requires a new client or that someone hosts an HTTP to Freenet gateway - probably both approaches will fit into different niches.

geekword compliant?

[nehril]

this story sounds like it came right out of the Slashdot Story Generator

Freenet without the overhead?

[Bonker]

Hmmm... I think it's been mentioned that this sounds like Freenet without all the extras thrown in.

Frankly, there are a few things inhibiting Freenet's popularity when compared to Gnutella and Fasttrack (Is that still running?).

1. High learning curve: Trying to figure out how to search for freenet keys is a bit of a challenge, especially compared to typing in "Matalika" in a Morpheus or Gnutella search window and getting dozens of relevent matches from Lars and co.. You don't have critical mass until you have the morons.

2. Difficult install: I have yet to see a Freenet implimentation that didn't require an attendant JRE install of some kind. Worse, it also frequently entails setting up Java class paths, a task that can confuse even Java developers from time to time. Then a user must understand that he usually has to use his or her browser to access Freenet. There is no 'Freenet' icon to point and click.

3. Difficulty of sharing: It's possible to make entire web pages available via Freenet, but if a Freenet user is firewalled for any reason, it really harms him in terms of being able to participate in the sharing.

4. Unpopular data doesn't propogate: Because the most popular data is shared and replicated most frequently. Warez and mp3s show up, but things like dissident and political theories, text files, and more personal data are lost... even to those who might be interested. (Oddly, Hotline is still a very good place to find these sorts of things. IRC fserves, as well.)

From what I read of the white-paper it looks like this project, or an open-source project very similar to it, could solve these problems and still acheive many of Freenet's goals.

Maybe the OSS community should look into something like this... a moron-safe, web-based file sharing project for the masses that ignores anonymization and encryption in order to gain a more critical mass. Better yet, because of the similarity between the two projects, once the sharing infrastructure was in place, it could accept a Freenet plugin, or vice-versa.

Just an idea...