Re: [Social-discuss] P2P or server approach?

[elijah]

On 03/24/2010 10:06 AM, Sylvan Heuser wrote:
> As I see it, we have two approaches between we must decide.
> The pure P2P approach:
> ...
> The network of independent servers with small user groups approach:

On 03/24/2010 10:09 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> Are the two models mutually exclusive?  ... some PHP systems provide a
> multi user version and single user version ...

As I wrote before, I believe there is a hybrid approach that achieves
the benefits of both a p2p client and persistent cloud storage.

Such a system would look like this:

For every resource you want to share, encrypt it with its own key, slice
it into smaller chunks, and push it out to a distributed hash table.
When you share a resource, the client provides some revocable means of
sharing the resource's key.

This is the basic approach of wuala [1]. What is really cool about wuala
is the fine grain permissions you can grant and revoke. I don't know how
they do it, although supposedly some of it is based on cryptree [2].

The simple fact is that p2p applications are horrible at storing
persistent data. You need to do what wuala does: provide a reason to
keep the client open while also providing enough cloud servers to keep
the distributed hash table from degrading with the intermittency of
clients.

In free software, the closest thing we have is Tahoe [3]. Although with
tahoe, the relationship among storage servers must be specified in advance.

-elijah

[1] http://wuala.com
[2] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.67.8835
[3] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe-lafs