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The Pirate Bay to Become a Distributed Storage Cloud?
eldavojohn writes "After announcing the sale of The Pirate Bay to Global Gaming Factory X, it was unknown what would become of TPB. Details of the future plans have been released. 'According to Rosso, GGF plans to build a massive "storage cloud" on top of TPB that would use individual users as storage system's nodes. Apparently users can opt out for being part of the decentralized storage system, but then they'd have to pay a monthly fee for the service. More resources the user is willing to commit for the service, the cheaper the monthly subscription fee will be ... GGF's plan is to harness the resources users are willing to allocate to the cloud service and sell that computing power and bandwidth to 3rd party companies, essentially creating a service that could be used as a content delivery network (system that most large sites — including ours — use to deliver static content, such as images, software downloads and stylesheets, faster to the end user) or even as a web hosting cloud. As the service would use P2P technology, it could bring massive savings to ISPs, as the delivery of content to an end user would be provided from the closest possible "node," most likely from an user within the same ISP network.'"
Which would be useful for researchers, but not home users...By the time you'd exported the process to the "cloud" (I fucking hate the word "cloud" now, my god what an overhyped buzzword) you'd probably already be done with it locally. The biggest problem with distributing processing is exporting the right kind of processes...You don't want to lock up your whole cluster because it's waiting for input from some single machine.
And researchers already have a variety of free seti/folding/etc applications that take advantage of free cycles, so what real benefit can TPB offer?
Hell, Sony already went down that road with a vengeance when they put Folding@Home on the ps3.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Coda, and before that, AFS. Oh, and Lustre.
It's not a new idea. The only real difference here is that it's associated with BitTorrent and The Pirate Bay, and is designed to handle a whole set of problems you won't have, like untrusted machines communicating over the Internet, and how to compensate people for using their hard drive to store your stuff.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!