Eternity Server 0.04 Available
I am pleased to announce that I have successfully installed Adam Back's "Eternity Server" on my home page. This server permits a user to transparently browse Web content posted to Usenet in encrypted form in newsgroups like alt.anonymous.messages. Eventually, the Eternity Server will also serve web content from a variety of more permanent repositories, like Altavista and Dejanews. The Eternity Webspace is comprised of http URLs in a new virtual top level domain, .eternity. All documents are PGP signed, and posters may optionally choose to have their domains indexed in a top level directory under the URL http://eternity/. PGP is used for encryption, and documents may require the user to supply a password before they can be viewed. Documents may also be encrypted with the hash of the URL, so that documents are only accessible to individuals who already know their names. Although I expect most people will want to install their own servers in their Unix shell accounts, I will leave my server open for a little while so that people can play before installing the software. To try it out, just select the "Eternity Server" link on my homepage http://www.zipcon.com/~enoch In order that people have something to browse, I have seeded alt.anonymous.messages with two virtual web sites. The first of these has a URL of http://barney.eternity/ and is a single document describing different ways one might kill a certain purple dinosaur. The second has a URL of http://boylinks.eternity/ and is a large index of boy-related resources on the Web, recently made homeless by the CPAC/Sewer people. The authors have devoted their best efforts to make sure this list contains no links to porn or illegal material. The latest version of the eternity server may be found at Adam Back's Web site and is called eternity-0.04.tgz. You will need Perl 5 and access to cgi-bin to install it. The eternity home page is... http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/eternity Included are the eternity server, written in perl, and a "sitegrabber," which can be used to post entire websites to Usenet. Enjoy... -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ enoch@zipcon.com $ via Finger $ {Free Cypherpunk Political Prisoner Jim Bell}
On Wed, 30 Jul 1997, Mike Duvos wrote:
Eventually, the Eternity Server will also serve web content from a variety of more permanent repositories, like Altavista and Dejanews.
How many other major repositories are there? I still have faith in Dejanews, but have serious doubts concerning the permanence and expanse of the Alta Vista database. Their Web index, at least, has not grown at the same pace as Web documents, and seeminly arbitrary sites trigger their "spam filter," where further URLs from that domain are refused.
"John Pike, webmaster of the Federation of American Scientists web site responded to the article, complaining that he found only 600 of 6,000 pages from his web site to be indexed by the Alta Vista. "Pike's response went on to detail the a message he received from Alta Vista regarding this. He was advised that 600 pages were probably the most he'd see for any domain. He was also given the example of Geocities, which is a popular site that provides web space for its members. He was told that although Geocities has over 300,000 members (and thus at least 300,000 potential web pages), only 300 pages from the domain had been indexed."
Michael Stutz <stutz@dsl.org> writes:
On Wed, 30 Jul 1997, Mike Duvos wrote:
Eventually, the Eternity Server will also serve web content from a variety of more permanent repositories, like Altavista and Dejanews.
How many other major repositories are there? I still have faith in Dejanews, but have serious doubts concerning the permanence and expanse of the Alta Vista database. Their Web index, at least, has not grown at the same pace as Web documents, and seeminly arbitrary sites trigger their "spam filter," where further URLs from that domain are refused.
What you say is probably true of the web index, but eternity uses their USENET archive. They seem to be keeping up with that. There are a few altavistas around now. I use one in europe somewhere as it has faster net connectivity from where I am. The idea of using altavista, dejanews, etc is really just a temporary measure. The long term goal is more abitious, but to garner interest in eternity something has to be demonstrated first. If someone said to you at this point that a useful resource like alt USENET news was being cancelled forthwith, the hackers amongst those that enjoy reading it would get together and rehost it somehow. Here's one possible route to having a standalone distributed set of eternity servers which does not rely on the borrowed resources of the news search engines archives. Modify USENET news distribution software so that instead of expiring articles, it keeps around articles for which there was either a direct payment made out for that USENET node, or for which there are many requests (with micropayments) to make it profitable to keep that article around. The idea is to ensure that the use of the USENET node for eternity purposes is self-funding. If a node finds itself hosting lots of eternity documents, it will generate enough funds to buy a bigger disk. Disks are cheap and getting cheaper. I bought a 3.8Gb disk for $300 a while back. Reckon you could buy a 6Gb for the same price now, and that was only a few months ago. Probably around 5c per meg. So here's the model: I want to post something which some government would like to censor. I include a storage fee of $1 digicash per megabyte-year with my anonymous eternity document submission to USENET cashable to a node of my choice. (Or several payments for different USENET nodes if I want the redundancy). Now on top of this the USENET nodes can charge for NNTP access to that document. 1c per meg or something to add to their profits, and to cover bandwidth consumption. Then we have a recursive auction market amongst USENET sites so that if a site that does not have the article is asked for it, it will go buy a copy from any node which will volunteer it for sale. Then that site will re-sell it multiple times to recuperate the buy price. This can occur recursively, even small players with PPP lines can participate by buying pages and re-selling them at a lower price to reflect the poorer performance. The way eternity is set up at the moment it is entirely feasible that the re-seller of the eternity article would not know what it was they were serving. All the technology is here now (not all the software, but all the technology, ecash, USENET, PGP signatures, encryption). All we've got to do is the proselytizing, advertising, putting juicy information up. Heck I reckon perhaps if I code the USENET article reselling and archiving stuff, I should put in a 1% royalty cut :-) 1% of eternity document sales and storage charges might be a shit-load of money in a few years. Adam -- Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`
participants (3)
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Adam Back -
Michael Stutz -
Mike Duvos