P2P Content Delivery for Open Source

Orasis writes "The Open Content Network is a collaborative effort to help deliver open source, public domain, and Creative Commons-licensed content using peer-to-peer technology. The network is essentially a huge 'virtual web server' that links together thousands of computers for the purpose of helping out over-burdened/slashdotted web sites. Any existing mirror or web site can easily join the OCN by tweaking the HTML on their site."

Comments

Slight change to Content Addressible Web

[jake_the_blue_spruce]

I see a slight problem, depending on how CAW is implemented.

Scenario #1:
Assuming the Originator Apache responds with HTTP headers such as those in CAW to advertise site-wide mirrors like this:
X-URI-RES: http://urnresolver.com/uri-res/N2L?urn:sha1:; N2L

When the originator Apache site updates any documents, the URN resolver (or mirror) will silently fail without realizing which document has been updated. It would need to rescan the entire website, even when only one document has changed.

Scenario #2:
The opposite problem occurs with the Originator Apache responding with HTTP headers such as this:
X-URI-RES: http://untrustedmirror.com/pub/file.zip; N2R

The mirror will respond successfully, but will give an out-of-date version of the file without the client or the mirror realizing it. The mirror would then have to manually scan the website on a regular basis (even when nothing has changed) to prevent anything getting too out of date.

Scenario #3 (Solution):
However, if the Originator Apache responds with HTTP headers such as this:
X-URI-RES: http://untrustedmirror.com/pub/file-mirrors.list; N2Ls; urn:sha1

When the URN resolver or Mirror sees the SHA-1 hash mismatch, it knows which document needs to be updated, and can respond by doing so for just that document.

I realize that CAW is mainly designed with static files in mind (images, PDFs, ISOs) where updates occur rarely (or never). And no, I don't see Apache calculating the SHA-1 for dynamic pages like Slashdot anytime soon. However, updates do occur to images, PDFs, ISOs, etc. on occasion. I do think CAW(#3) could be used (and useful) for large, heavily subscribed RSS feeds without too much trouble. Maybe elsewhere in dynamic content.

Help the slashdot effect?

[WPIDalamar]

I don't see this helping the slashdot effect. How many people are actually going to download the browser plugins required to make all this work?

I mean, I might get the plugins if I'm dealing a lot with sites that use this technology, but how many people will be dealing with a lot of these?

And those sites are using this, are probably the ones that are use to high volumes of traffic, so they prepare for it. The average site that can't handle a slashdot, can't handle it because they generally don't need to.

Since when?

[Some Bitch]

indviduals will be able to help distribute free content by donating their spare bandwidth and disk space to the network.


Sarcasm aside, while I can see where they're going with this I can't see it ever seriously taking off. Most of the world are still on 56k (or less) and I know I regularly hunt for things to delete so I can squeeze something else on my hard drive.