BotTorrent?

[mdlbear]

This article about Bit Torrent, Comcast, and spam led me to briefly contemplate carrying BitTorrent traffic over email, which one might call "BotTorrent". Keep track of available and requested files using a mailing list. Break a file into chunks, forward them to a few friends who have indicated interest, let them forward them, and so on. Keep track of where each chunk has been so you don't send duplicates. Of course, everything would have to be base64 encoded, which makes it bigger. And big files would take a lot of chunks. So the carriers would figure out how to label it as spam, and block it. Nevermind.

There are, however, other protocols that are harder to block. Notably HTTP. And you can request a range of bytes from a file. So if you could locate a number of servers all of which had the file, you could spread your requests among them. Hashes are good both for identifying files and for randomizing requests. Alternatively you could just use the Coral content distribution network. I still think there's a pony in there somewhere.

Comments

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I think you have reinvented...Usenet.

Oh, well.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Hey, Usenet was a good and happy thing until those two green-card lawyers moved in and ruined it.... I would *love* to go back to a Usenet-style peer-to-peer model, particularly for blogging.

A host is a host from coast to coast
But no one will talk to the host that's close
Unless the host (that isn't close)
Is busy, hung, or dead..."

(I didn't realize that was a filk of Mr. Ed until about last year. I first saw the quote in 1985. Sometimes I'm *really* slow. :)

[mdlbear]

Actually, no. Usenet is a flood fill to every site, with small articles distributed in their entirety in a single transfer. I'm advocating something much more selective, with large files requested a block at a time from multiple servers.

I thought about Usenet, though. Just didn't have time to write a suitably elegant brush-off for it.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Sounds to me like Coral may be the way to go. It's already-proven tech.

Wonder if you could cross-hybrid Coral with TOR...

[mdlbear]

For public content Coral is definitely a win, though it requires some serious hacking on the website to make it work smoothly: it's not transparent at all.

For anything else -- private content, semi-private content, illicit content, outright piracy -- it's not so good. You can get around most, if not all, of the problems with end-to-end encryption and a decrypting local proxy. At that point you've reinvented not Usenet but the hash table, only on a global scale.