[Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

Mon Jul 31 05:28:33 UTC 2006

Oldak Quill wrote:

>On 31/07/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
>  
>
>>What exactly are you trying to achieve?  If you want immunity
>>against legal threats in the western world (and for what outlaw
>>purpose would you want this?), you probably have to relocate to
>>North Korea, Syria or Zimbabwe.
>>    
>>
>
>Since we're being a little unrealistic here anyway, I would suggest we
>develop some kind of distributed hosting system to supplement our
>servers. It would be similar to those distributed computing clients
>(Folding at home, Seti at home, &c.), except the client would be using some
>of your disc space and bandwidth instead of your computing power.
>
>But then, I'm only dreaming.
>  
>
Both of those systems use centralized database servers and coordination 
bandwidth.  Main advantage is in distibuting processing.  For example, 
when I was running Seti at Home and Folding at Home a processing packet would 
take a couple of minutes to download and then spend days processing in 
the screensaver before linking to upload results and download another 
processing packet.

Might be useful if we ever have heavy processing requirements such as 
creating and maintaining read only controlled files in a distributed 
content cache for serving to the public unless they  request editable 
version.

You might find  http://www.dijjer.org/ of interest.     This a plugin 
that provides distributed caching.  It would probably take some 
modifications to our server software to return a dijjer based URL to a 
cached version if the user is not editing and the current editable 
version when they click the edit button.   As I recall the Dijjer URL 
contacts a Dijjer server of some kind so modification might be required 
to talk to our own Dijjer URL server/tracker to be able to guarantee 
decent performance.  

Oceanstore (currently prototyped as "Pond") or BitTorrent (particularly 
in serving large backup files) might offer some reduced server loading 
advantages if we ever get to the point of serving controlled or official 
articles to the non editing public or casual users while editing and 
improving in the background at the central WMF project server farm.  
Last time I checked it uses a large number of servers to establish core 
funtionality.   IIRC individual desktops can be used for caching 
reliable chunk of information

Likewise:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet except I think it 
distibutes files to caches not reliability enhanced chunks for later 
reassembly and service to requestor.

later,
lazyquasar