On Thu, 27 Jul 2000 10:03:01 BST, Ian Clarke writes: > So, Napster has been shut down. > > This is probably bad news from a freenet point-of-view since it means > that we will probably see a marked increase in downloads as-of Friday, > despite Freenet still being incomplete. > > There is, however, an opportunity for someone here to take advantage of > this using Freenet. I am not saying it is nescessarily a great idea, > but if someone is going to do it, I would rather they do it in > cooperation with us (since, because Freenet is GPL, there is nothing to > stop someone from doing this without our say-so). > > If someone created a simple (initially Windows) piece of software based > around 0.2 specifically designed for distribution of mp3s (as has been > discussed in the "LARS" thread), then at least it would serve as an > effective test of Freenet. We should be cautious, however, to ensure > that people are encouraged to upgrade it when Freenet 0.3 comes out, > possibly by making it time-limited to 1st September or something. It > should, of course, run a server if possible.
I just got into work, so I hadn't heard about the Napster thing. There's no way I could hack out anything significant before Friday. I have way too much else going on in terms of workload and that 'having a life' thing that keeps cropping up (I promised the kids I'd take them to the water park this week, and my wife wants me to help clean house). It looks like I'm out of the picture if the deadline is Friday. Sorry. History calls, dudes. If you don't mind some occasional press questions, and a possible nasty lawsuit, it's time to step up to the plate. All I had to offer was the idea that you can really simplify things by assuming that everyone already knows the exact file name of what they want to request. Use non-Freenet techniques to announce & list what files are available. Do *not* use this for sharing programs, since it's trivial for someone to insert a rogue file under a known name -- virus city! Keep in mind that it's a temporary stopgap only. Oh, one more point. The file format I quickly offered earlier is not well-thought-out. Consider it more carefully before you commit to something, since the file name will in effect be your most critical piece of user-interface data. For example, I now realize that you'd be better off adding an extra field or two in the file name to show the file size (in bytes) and perhaps a hash/crc value. Keeping that as a separate data item is too dangerous and complicated for a quick ugly hack like this. The user could just look at the file name & file size to see if they match. In rare cases they could run a separate program to generate a matching hash/crc value to see if it matched the one in the file name, but I doubt if that will be used much in the real world. Oh, and you could dump the field for album name. For the most part, "albums" are a historical artifact related to the manufacturing costs of the distrubution medium. No need to prop it up. Most people just wanted a particular song, not a particular album. They can search Google or something if they really want to find out what songs were in an album. So, one posible format would be: - field for some kind of tag to identify the rest of the format - field for artist/group - field for song name - field for encoding (just something to differentiate different attempts to encode the same song or song segment). - field for a hash/crc/whatever value of some kind - field for the last 8 digits of the file size (in bytes) - field at the end for ".mp3" or ".mp4" or whatever. It may be a good idea to force it to only a few value types, to discourage people from downloading any sort of program this way. Those who are smart enough to safely share programs this way should be smart enough to change the code that disallows executable exensions. Long term, this last field & the restrictions on it are pretty dumb; but it might actually help for the quick-hack purpose here. Ack. 'Gotta get back to my real job. Have fun... --Will (Not speaking in any way for my employers, who probably will think I've gone insane if they ever read this.) willdye at freedom.net _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
