[JDEV] File Transfer Proposals

[Steve Kennedy]

On Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 02:25:46PM +1100, Moz wrote:

> Some minor thoughts on details of David's idea.
> David said:
> >  My personal belief is that peer-to-peer connections open up
> >  a whole world of problems, such as firewalls and interconnectivity
> >  between different clients. 
> Flip side is that hosting files opens its own can-o-worms, not least
> because of the copyright issue. There's also bandwidth and storage,
> which could get annoying. I'm more concerned about cease-and-desist
> letters from the RIAA though.
> Peer to peer transfers can be intermediated at a peer level if

A distributed server model would help too, I haven't read all the
docs, but I think the big advantage of Jabber is that an ISP maintains
their users. However there needs to be a way for the user connecting
via their non-ISP server to connect locally to another server, but
their credentials are held by the ISP server.

The JUD could be used to say where the "home" Jabber server is. This
is somewhat how GSM mobile networks work, with the Home Location
Register which holds the actual mobile account info.

This would also allow hierarchical Jabber servers, just acting as
front-ends for connecting clients, which authg back to another
server which doesn't have clients connecting.

Passwords would probably have to be transferred as hashes or
similar, with maybe servers doing some secure key exchange between
them.

Then client file sharing could be done directly to another client
(just using the servers for location/presence), if the other client
was off-line, the client could request to save it to the server it
was connected to, which could refuse and say "connect to the client's
home server" and it would then try there.

There would obviously have to be controls, or the servers would easily
be subject to DoS attacks.

Steve

p.s. you could also do interesting things with transports, which could
be distributed across the network, and servers could locally divert
transport connects to another server. The transport servers could bounce
around a slection of differently connected servers, making tracking
them more difficult.

-- 
NetTek Ltd Flat 2, 43 Howitt Road, Belsize Park, London NW3 4LU, UK
tel +44-(0)20 7483 1169  fax +44-(0)20 7483 2455   mob 07775 755503
SMS steve-pager (at) gbnet.net [body] gpg 1024D/468952DB 2001-09-19