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."
Can you hide your IP?
That's the only thing that matters!
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
What we need is some gateway product to get young kids hooked on programming.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
It's open source peer-to-peer and handles exactly the problem of distributed serving.
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.
...have been doing this for awhile now. I've seen download sites giving you the option of grabbing game demos from their site or through some small P2P client that they offer, which snags parts of the file from other users and combines them all on your end.
This technology's out there, but it's nice to see it gaining some fairly widespread adoption.
levine
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
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.
"There's so much left to know/ and I'm on the road to find out." -Cat Stevens
What good are these CPU hogging, network lagging programs if they aren't delivering pirated software and p0rn? I won't stand for this abomination!
Well, at least until the next time I need to download the newest slackware...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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.
How would something like this work? Presumably slashdot would have to link to a single site, which then farmed out the requests to participants? If this is the case, there is still a single point of faliure, right? And presumably browsers need to know that they are being redirected so any subsequent requests. Thus, how is this more powerful than an (albeit intelligent) javascipt forwarder...? If it's just a simple load baalncing system then I don't see what's so groundbreaking.
Vacancy for signature. Apply within.
I for one can not wait until the golden age of computing, an age in which my computer will be inexplicity linked to that of every script kiddie from Taiwan to San Jose. This will be a stunning monument to the ingenuity of man. There will be a great many personal homepages replaced with vivid images of genitalia and beer bottles. What a wonderous age it will be.
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.
To recap:
- Reliable
- Anonymous
- Totally decentralized
- More popular files are more widely distributed thus avoiding any
/. effect
Install a recent snapshot of Freenet, then visit this freesite to check it out.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.
...Google's cache!
Any existing mirror or web site can easily join the OCN by tweaking the HTML on their site
Sounds a lot like it to me - especially the bit about it being like a virtual server. I suppose if it stored images and stuff then it's be a bit better, but will it ever match Google's speed and breadth of content?
I surely see some potential in the idea but what about standards. Allthough it's GPL-ed the standards aren't adopted by any organisation like IETF, OASIS or W3C. If one of these organisations would see the potential for this it would make things a lot easier. You would get rid of plug-ins, extentions etc. and all browsers as well as servers would support it.
In fact I'm pretty astonished none of these organisations has ever picked up P2P.
/(bb|[^b]{2})/
It seems like alot of you just read the front page and seem to think this is some type kazaa clone. I agree the browser pug in is kinda gay.
What this "could" mean is say if your favorite distro has just been updated, we all know how hard it is to download 3 isos while they are in high demand. The thing about OCN and OnionNetworks type software is that the high demand and download rate will help the availibility. Plus everything is authenticated and logged so worms/trojens/fakes really arnt a problem.
As far as OCN goes, it's not for warez, and divx. I think it's intended for geek's free software distrobution. So love it, and try to inovate it.
-makoffee
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?
Indeed. It's a shame no one thought of it sooner.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
You can limit the amount of bandwidth Freenet uses if you think it is using too much.
The newly relaunched Happy Puppy uses the Tornado Cache Plug-in to provide some pretty fast downloads. If you're interested in seeing this stuff in action I recommend checking out the site.
That said, the OCN is open to any and all applications out there, so I'd encourage them to join the OCN.
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.
The CC License Engine framework really does all that is needed to identify a license that would allow the P2P network to redistribute the material , so why not use it?
Or am I missing something now?
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
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 over the website and the site for the current client, and found only faint, inspecific references to what loading such a client does to your machine and internet connection.
This is terrible.
We complain when Gator is loaded as an 'add-on' to our system, yet we don't mind if we are not allowed to download some content without loading some P2P app which then uses our disk space and internet connection to serve others?
They need to put up a specific message that says, in effect, "This download client will significantly speed up the process of obtaining this file. Once downloaded your computer will allow other people to download this same file, or portions of it, from your computer so they can gain the same speed benefit you will get. There is no security risk, and you can stop the client from letting others download this file by moving or deleting the file, or ending the client by doing x, y and z. If you wish to simply download the file normally without installing this client, click here - otherwise click 'OK'"
Yes, we all understand what P2P means - we are donating part of our computer and network to the P2P network for as long as we are connected to the internet. But this is not common terminology - ask a non-computer expert who has spent hours downloading music from their favorite P2P app what the P2P app does, and all they know is that they can get "free" music with this cool program. They often have no idea that others are downloading music from their computer, etc.
This may slow down adoption, but the reality is that the backlash that may come out against it is not worth the extra adoption it may gain without full and well-explained disclosure - as well as a method to download the file normally.
-Adam
By the way, your home page is ugly....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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?
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.
The OCN does not require data to be encoded and uses standard HTTP for all of its data transfer.
This means that it can download content from a regular Apache web server w/o any modification whatsoever.
This also means that the peers are simply embedded web servers, can stream content (video) straight to the browser, and can use SSL out of the box.