Slashdot Mirror
Adeona Warns of Instability; OpenDHT Mothballed
gbickford writes "Adeona, the first open source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop, was featured on Slashdot last year. I was stoked when I read about how it worked and I installed it immediately. I just went to look for updates on the site and was greeted with a giant warning message stating, 'Adeona is currently not working.' It seems that OpenDHT, the distributed hash table that stores the location information and photos, has been fairly unstable lately. The developers claim that this is "largely because the back-end OpenDHT system is not able to tolerate the load imposed by Adeona. OpenDHT removed the need for a centralized database with tracking information, which in effect prevents a 3rd party from tracking a user's whereabouts. OpenDHT was Sean Rhea's Ph.D. project back in 2005 and he has decided to officially bow out of maintaining it as of July 1st, which has left the developers of Adeona looking for another back end to store location information and photos. The source code for Adeona is available and they are actively seeking developer contributions on the developer's list. Do any developers have ideas on where to put scads of information in a free, reliable, anonymous, and secure manner?"
"Distributed hashing tables are a class of decentralized distributed systems that provide a lookup service similar to a hash table: (key, value) pairs are stored in the DHT, and any participating node can efficiently retrieve the value associated with a given key." [1]
They should look at Bamboo DHT.
Put identity in the browser.
Yup, exactly my thoughts. I've been using the AppEngine's Data Store for some time and can't complain. 1Gig of data isn't a lot, but it's cheap to get more. Just get people to donate and you'll have all the storage you need. Just write a simple class that will convert stored objects to XML and it's a done deal. For upload? Simple POST to one of the servlets
Oh, and for people who don't see how they could encrypt the data from Google: PKI.
If nobody needs to be able to access the data excepted for one person, where's the problem? What's the fuss all about?