P2P Networks Version Vega

Monday – Session 2 - F

Convener: Markus

Notes-taker(s): dsearis

A.	Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

B.	Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

Second session, room G, monday

There are three architectures.

Centralaized... FB, Twitter, passport

Decentralized, Server-based, somewhat distributed... PDX, OpenID

Distributed. Meshable. No servers. Computer to computer. Like bittorrent. This is VersionVega.

Look up peeople by i-names. Yes, i-names need a centralized registry, but it's possible to store these in the network itself. People have done it. I havewnt' done it yet. For example: CSpace.

Demo with two machines, one Windows, one Mac.

Windows machine has a background system that exposes the api and servces, he can access the api and background. Needs TCP and UDP.

Two apps, customlight and Restarbot. Launches Customlight, which is the main browser app. Distrib net with five proxies. There is the concept of a node runlevel. Choice to start a new network or connect to an existing one.

Andy: It's not an XRI lookup, but a local lookup of the = name.

At the high level there is an XDI store. Strong certification. Based on RDF triples. Can store XDI statements in a distributed way.

The one weak point of the story is that i-Names are centralized.

The point of using i-names is so everybody can use a private/public key pair. Once they start communicating the session uses noting from i-names. A piece of data may end up being stored on multiple nodes by replication.

Andy: what if the network goes down, wher eis it?

Markus: gone. Think of the data as in the network,

Drummond: Lead access with link contracts?

Markus: no.

Storage is one of two major functions that the newtowrk provides. The other is simple messaging,. I can send messages between individual nodes.

Built into the network is the concep to of groups or multitasking. Members can send messages to any or al of those in a given group.

This one is build on XULrunner. So running this is very similar to running a firefox connection. The extention manager looks like Firefox's.

Showed a voting mechanism.

Mary Rundle: what about Malware?

Using a library called Freepastry, which has a lot of protection and intelligence.

Open Source? Haven't thought about it.