At 07:56 PM 10/16/2001 +1000, Julian Assange wrote:
The anonymous push nature of the mirroring software. We can support non-unix pull mirrors too, provided there are enough push mirrors to feed from. The software could be ported to other operating systems without too much difficulty, but that's another project.
I get the impression this isn't exactly "mirroring" static content, but participating in a distributed publishing/retrieval system, a la Freenet and Mojo Nation or BitTorrent .. or maybe more like Gnutella or Kazaa .. or even Publius, which was nice but never seemed to catch on. Is that correct?
The mirror would presumably need a fixed IP address. Are there any other requirements?
An ability to create mail-aliases, gpg, perl5, and a good sense of humour :)
What software are you using? Is it well-known? Debugged? Is the source available? (well, it's Perl, I guess..) I don't mind mirroring Cryptome, but I'm pretty wary of installing other people's newly-hacked-up code in a [quasi-]production environment .. your proposal creates two kinds of risk. The first, which is relatively familiar by now, is content risk, from people angry about the content .. the second is the risk of security problems in the code or its configuration/installation, and that sounds like a bigger issue to me. Why not just use one of the existing distributed systems for this content? If you put content in the Gnutella or Kazaa systems, you can give us filenames or search strings and then we just make locally cached copies and leave machines running (even crappy little windows boxes) to create dispersed hard-to-clobber-them-all content. If you put it in the Mojo/Freenet/BitTorrent systems, and make the URLs of the content publically available, helpful people can make local copies of all or parts of your files pretty easily, too. Or, alternately, make just content available as a .zip or .tgz, and let others serve it using FTP/HTTP servers they're already familiar with. If you can find a way to separate the content risk from the untrusted software risk, this project (whatever it is) might have a better chance of success. -- Greg Broiles gbroiles@well.com "We have found and closed the thing you watch us with." -- New Delhi street kids