Slashdot Mirror
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."
Why not have a system that can deliver web pages(all the content YOUR hard drive can handle) via a P2P system?
I'd love to see unreliable, poorly maintained, pop-up happy free websites like angelfire and geocities go away and use a vastly superior P2p system instead. SOmeone wants to connect to your special web page? Have them connect to you via the P2p client. No need to fuss with slow FTPing into servers to upload/update web content. It's already on your system.
This is a great idea that's been a long time coming. It sounds to me like it takes the ideas first put forth in FreeNet (which spawned later P2P networks like Napster and Kazza) and finally makes them accessible to everyday content producers and consumers.
I'm wondering if maybe this is the future of blogs like Slashdot, with design, features, and content distributed the same way moderation and commenting are today. Creative Commons licensing would be a further boon.
This sort of next generation P2P network might be the weapon we need against the forces of evil, if only we are brave enough to use it.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
And isn't it very popular as a file trading tool? It seems that once a technology has gone down that road, it's very hard to come back to legitimacy credibly. IMO, this will be one of the biggest challenges for any p2p systems of this kind.....
Vacancy for signature. Apply within.
You'd run a client on your machine that would act as a local DNS server. Then you'd point your machine to this DNS server. So when you goto a site (say off of slashdot) the DNS server would interact with the P2P network and give the IP of the less loaded machine in the P2P network. Yeah, you'd have to run a deamon on your machine, but oh well...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
I always wondered if it were possible to share people's browser cache contents via P2P technology (with exceptions for the secure documents, of course).
I guess the big problem is still with the indexing.
This is like decaf coffee and nicotine-less smokes.
At least the nicotine-less smokes still cause cancer.
You also forgot to mention all the potential dates here on slashdot. At least, you can still find someone to kiss on slashdot... oh, wait... nevermind.
What good are these CPU hogging, network lagging programs if they aren't delivering pirated software and p0rn?
Fullfilling their purpose, just like the above items you mentioned.
Just as in the above cases, part of Corporate America's master plan to remove all joy from the universe. (+1 Insightful)
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
Codecon - www.codecon.info will be February 22-24 in San Francisco. It's a conference about writing code for applications like peer-to-peer and crypto (and crypto peer-to-peer, etc.), oriented towards authors presenting actual working demos. The program page has abstracts of the talks/demos. Many of these applications overlap some of the same space. One of the organizers is Bram Cohen, author of the BitTorrent P2P file distribution system (and one of the organizers of last year's conference), and the other is Len Sassaman, who does cryptographic remailers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
How far away is this from a
p2p://www.cnn.com/
style link for Explorer/Mozilla/Opera/Konqurer?
Turn everyone's browser cache into p2p.
CNN's probably a bad example, as the content would have to be updated more frequently... And you'd need some way of having a "revision model", so that sites could be updated. I guess it would be up to the clients to ditch old versions of pages.
Might also need some sort of (eep!) central authority to verify pages were who they claimed to be (so I couldn't take over CNN, for example). Maybe just signed keys for each content provider would be good enough?
From the website:
"Multimedia files are eligible to be distributed via the OCN if they are either released into the public domain or are available under a Creative Commons license that allows the content to be freely copied."
and
"Software is eligible to be distributed via the OCN if it is released into the public domain or is licensed under an Open Source license. The license must be an OSI Approved License that adheres to the Open Source Definition."
Honestly, those constraints seem to seriously restrict the real usefulness of the network. It means if I want to put up a webpage and publish the contents with OCN, I need to go through all the rigamarole to make sure that everything's copacetic with whatever the "approved" licenses are, instead of just saying "ok, stick this out there." Which I may not want to do because if I've just created some magnificent thing (music file, video file, whatever) I may not necessarily want the license to allow anyone to download it and modify it any way they want and then essentially claim it as their own.
Software is one thing, but online content is something else. Honestly, how many large "media files" have you seen that are licensed under an "Open Content" license?
Sure, it's nice to have something like this that caters explicitly to the OpenSource crowd, but with those constraints, I can't see it as used for very much other than putting new versions of GPL'd software packages online.
When I wanted to download a Linux distro, P2P was the first place I looked. I didn't want to cost the providers a gig of traffic when they're not making any money on it. Pity I didn't really find what I was looking for. This was a while back, though.
I'm the type of guy who doesn't like sharing my bandwidth, but I'd be willing to make an exception for Open Source stuff just on the grounds the it helps alleviate the costs of hosting free stuff.
"Derp de derp."
I looked around the web site and couldn't find any mention of the relationship between this project and the original OpenContent project that maintains the Open Publication Licence. What's the story?
While the OCN does not make it easy to discover what other users are downloading, it is not anonymous like Freenet.
However, the problem with systems like Freenet is that the latency is incredibly high and has no way to leverage the existing mirrors that host much of the open source content today.
Since the OCN is built around HTTP, it can start its downloads immediately from the network of mirrors and as peers are discovered, it moves more of the burden onto the peers.
The end result is that the OCN has about the same latency as normal web browser, but can provide very fast parallel downloads when leveraging existing mirrors.
That said, if high latency isn't a problem, then we highly recommend using Freenet. We think its a great project and look forward seeing more and more applications built on top of it.
One of the problems OCN faces is the seemingly obvious problem that data needs to be encoded in order to be shared. This is the problem we faced with MojoNation (the original swarm downloading system) and while throwing around ideas in a brainstorming session Bram came up with the idea of just swarming without encoding the data. This was not suitable to our needs at the time (it only works for popular, massively replicated files) but Bram stuck with the idea and developed it into BitTorrent.
The key insight here is that when data is encoded to increase its reliability within the p2p network it becomes useless to the person who is holding the data. This is not a problem for some applications, but when you are trying to solve the slahsdot effect or serve popular content it can become a limiting factor. The advantages that BT has over this system are that it does not require the data to be encoded in a special manner by the publisher and that data that is stored on the edge nodes is still useful to those nodes. A design like BT can peer data out of your browser cache and share data a larger range of data from each particular peer. This is going to be a significant advantage in the long-run.