[ih] reinventing the wheel, was Internet History Lives on the Internet?

[Miles Fidelman]

On 2/24/19 9:53 PM, John Levine wrote:

>> That's what I find intriguing about my Benevolent BotNet notion.  Rather
>> than depending on finding an institution interested in, competent at,
>> and willing to save history, and hoping that it has longevity, you rely
>> on a network of volunteers to provide that survivable infrastructure by
>> volunteering their excess computing resources.
> Hi again.  Please look at Bittorrent and tell us how it is different
> from what you're proposing.
>
> Bittorrent has the advantage of already existing and being deployed
> all over the world.  It's notorious for pirated music but it's also
> widely used for sharing linux distributions and the like.
>
Bit torrent is transient.  It's more like an ad-hoc multi-cast 
streaming.  When nobody is downloading, there may be only one copy of 
the file.

Now gnutella, and some of the other P2P file sharing systems - that 
replicate copies, or distribute files across a distributed hash table - 
that's another story entirely.

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra