Re: [9fans] Venti by another name

[Eris Discordia <eris.discordia@gmail.com>]

BitTorrent protocol chops the upload into same-sized blocks and hashes each
block. Then the blocks are traded. It predates other P2P protocols that do
so. I don't know about anonymity/privacy guards (FreeNet was mentioned). In
BT these hashes are contained in the torrent file and used for integrity
checking so it can't be correlated with venti.

OFF's idea seems okay but it's rather trite. You can always represent
copyrighted content in different ways, pass it on, and claim you haven't
exchanged the "copyrighted bytes." That's why you are barred by the DMCA
from transcoding even for personal use the content for which you have an
"only personal home use" license (of course, you abide the law, don't you
;-). The person who did the transform/transcoding is still legally liable.

Also, you can always create a lookup table of all possible bit sequences of
a certain length and represent your data (padded to a multiple of that
length) as a chain of such sequences. That's no wonderwork.

> I've not pushed any mpeg data into venti, though I have idly wondered if
> there are any disk saving.

Can any lossless compression scheme improve on {J,M}PEG? If multiple
streams are stored in venti then there may be some common blocks but even
that should not significantly surpass RAR algorithm's "solid" archiving of
the same streams. Not that I understand these things.

--On Saturday, February 14, 2009 3:34 PM +0000 matt
<mattmobile@proweb.co.uk> wrote:

> I came across this today
>
> http://offsystem.sourceforge.net/
>
> It's a P2P system where data blocks are traded not files.
>
> A file becomes a set of blocks and if requested, anyone who has the block
> can supply the data, even if they don't possess the same file.
>
> In that way no-one is sharing copyrighted material in the large, just
> coincedent blocks.
>
> I've not pushed any mpeg data into venti, though I have idly wondered if
> there are any disk saving.
>
>
>
>