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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."
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.
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?
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."