-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Ian Clarke wrote: > But then the claims discuss using this technique to retrieve things over > a network. Now, one might argue that simply applying a common computer > science technique to a distributed situation is not novel (I don't > believe you can get a valid patent simply by combining two other things > you didn't invent), but it would be really useful to find some robust > examples of requesting files by their hashes over a network that > pre-date October 1997.
The PRR paper that's the basis of Pastry and Tapestry might cover this. C. Plaxton, R. Rajaram, and A. Richa. Accessing nearby copies of replicated objects in a distributed environment. In Proceedings of the 9th Annual ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures, pages 311-320, June 1997. http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs296-2/papers/plaxton.ps "Accessing shared objects. Consider a set _A_ of m objects being shared by a network G, where several copies of each object may exist." (page 1) "Each object A has a unique (log m)-bit identification." (page 3) "Most of the earlier work in this area, e.g., emulations of PRAM on completely-connected distributed-memory machines (e.g., [9, 16]) or bounded-degree networks (e.g., [14]), and algorithms for providing concurrent access to a set of shared objects [12], assume that each of the nodes of the network has knowledge of a hash function that indicates the location of any copy of any object." (page 3) The last quote seems to point to even older prior art, but I haven't followed up the references. Cheers, Michael -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFE8YRQyua14OQlJ3sRArxvAKDFii6PTuHZ49lnVTwP5j6xSjT5cQCeN0WI 8/1JldDNNp+yU5a47Jpjs3A= =E5jK -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
