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CodeCon: A Conference for P2P Hackers
Rolig liten hattgubbe writes: "infoAnarchy has the scoop about Codecon, which is an interesting P2P-themed hacker conference in San Francisco (Feb 15-17) at JWZ's DNA Lounge. Some of the next-generation projects discussed are already functional, and a demo of Peek-A-Booty is going to be presented. I wonder if anyone will be arrested?"
It's really time to get rid of central authority technically, because it has been proven to be impossible to achieve freedom of expression by economic and political means. He who owns the press has freedom of the press. After September 11th everyone who even thinks about not swimming in the political mainstream is marked as potential terrorist.
I've discovered that the cheapest form of Peer to peer file sharing in Australia is loading the files your friends want on a CD-RW, take the CD to them, and then blank it and put the files you want from your friend's computer before taking it home. Depending on how far you live from your friend's place, and how you get there, it costs between $0.10 and $1.00 AUD per gigabyte. Much cheaper than Pacific internet ADSL at $139 a gig, or Telstra ADSL at $198 a gig.
Even better. The good ones (you know, the ones who could actually make p2p work) will be hired by big business and subsequently forget why they got into the game in the first place.
What with all the Internet kiosks and all. Jamie's input alone will make this a hypercool event. Plus, everything that goes over the Lounge's sound system is streamed live to the Internet. Does that include CodeCon, I wonder?
Still, it's too bad it couldn't have been held in JWZ's old Tent of Doom (essentially a cubicle wrapped in 500' of camo netting to ward off the ST:TNG theme of the Netscape office decor). I know it's ancient history now, but his TOD page was an inspiration to cubicle-dwellers everywhere, when it was up. Like the once-bright promise of Netscape, it will be missed.
I've read the Chord technical note. After ten or so pages of generic blurb, it struck me as perfectly obvious: binary search on doubly-linked circular lists! But unfortunately, it seems that simple and workable solutions can only be found when everything else has been discarded, an excercise that CS people seem better suited at.
The Chord protocol is not perfect; its more obvious omission is the lack of a large-scale implementation to prove its viability. But I think it's a step in the right direction, involving people with massively-parallell computing background that I think its very relevant to the P2P infrastructure.
In the end, P2P seems to be no more than the implementation of a distributed keyed store on a high-latence, low-bandwidth, high-failure-rate massively parallell supercomputer.