I'm new to Freenet. I glanced through the archives, and didn't see anything related to this, but I apologize if I just missed it:
So I'm at a semi-small University (about ~4000 students). There are about 1500 University-owned computers. Lots of these have big hard drives with unused space, because each person has a directory on a central fileserver to store stuff on (and permissions to not allow files to be saved locally). I estimate that there is 15TB - 30TB of free space between the University-owned computers. Filesharing is a problem on University campuses. The RIAA doesn't like it. College students download lots of illegal music, clogging up the pipes between the University and the outside world. College networks typically have high-speed switched internal LANs though. Could Freenet be adapted to function only on a LAN, to share file of dubious legality? It seems that the University could avoid liability, by acquiring common-carrier status for the files that are distributed. Also, the RIAA would be none-the-wiser to all of the files shared internally over the University Freenet. I don't know much about the inner workings of Freenet, but what would it take to get this started? It seems to me that the main hurdle (after convincing the University administration to go along with it) is to create a useful means of searching. Would it be feasible for each node to have a list of all of the files available on other nodes (probably in dbf format [open standard and efficient compression])? I expect the number of nodes to number in the thousands (1000 - 6000) and the number of files to number in the hundreds of thousands. Again, all of this will be done over a switched network -- primarily 100mbps, but also some gigabit and 10mbps. Thanks for your suggestions, Drew Bradford http://www.drewbradford.com/ _______________________________________________ devl mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hawk.freenetproject.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
