At a university I used to attend there was a real demand for a filesharing and chat program to operate between students in the dorms. They have been using Direct Connect for years, but it's really a poor solution. Someone has to be running and administrating a hub, users have to hassle with accounts, and nobody outside the firewall can get any access to the thing at all. They also had to manually police against people connecting through dialup, as they would slow the filesharing for everybody. The file transfers themselves were rudimentary at best.
I looked to KDrive as a good solution. Based on overnet/eDonkey technology, KDrive relayed realtime chat so people outside the firewall could participate, and file transfers were much more intelligent. Unfortunately development of KDrive came to a halt soon before it was sufficiently completed. But yes, I think there would be a good deal of demand for similar functionality. With a web of trust handling access to the network it would be even better. I'd suggest using a global namespace setup so that members of the group can all contribute files that appear in a shared filesystem. ~Chris Matthew Toseland wrote: > In other words, what we have to do to build a large darknet is provide > IM and filesharing functionality, as Michael Rogers said. Local sharing > of indexes and possibly of whole files, local sharing of bookmarks and > blogs, local chat, etc. > > If we provide strong incentives for people to add darknet peers, then we > can quite safely implement an opennet as well.
