[sldev] P2P Web Textures now in demand to enable lossless image downloads to viewer

[dale at daleglass.net]

On Fri, Jul 06, 2007 at 07:07:38PM -0700, Dzonatas wrote:
> In order to improve the quality of textures without an increase in cost 
> on the sims, we need to use P2P Web textures.

Hmm, what for? Textures seem to look very good to me. Maybe you could
post a comparison of textures that look ugly due to compression?

[snip]
> 8. A special login account status (like a daemon) that allows trackers 
> to login SL to request/download textures normally that would be 
> prevented from download by a regular viewer account.
> 
> *NOTE: These are just basic steps involved subject to change.

Now, textures over P2P sounds interesting, but potentially troublesome.
You need to ensure integrity by say, having LL run the trackers, or you
risk people serving the wrong stuff.

Practical problems:

1. How do you find a tracker to request the image from? The full DB
would be ENORMOUS, so it can't be all in one place. And a single tracker
couldn't handle the load.

2. Which files get hosted in which tracker? Let's say there's a tracker
per sim, that seems to be a possible option. But this has problems.

3. Even with a sim per tracker, are current trackers able to handle a
workload where lots of small files get posted? This may not be a huge
problem, and I don't have a deep understanding of BitTorrent, but AFAIK,
it's made for large amounts of data. Lots of small files might be
suboptimal. 


Privacy problem:

Alice comes to sim. Mallory has some sort of problem with Alice. Mallory
wants to find Alice's IP address. It's simple:

1. Mallory creates a new texture and uploads it
2. Then he sets it on some object, maybe his own avatar
3. Since the texture is new, there are 2 places with it: the sim, and
Mallory. 
4. Alice starts trying to download the texture. Mallory now only has to
see who else is on the tracker.

Sure, you can trick people to go to websites where you can check the
logs, or set a stream to something you control, but the first isn't
automatic, and the second requires control of a parcel and enabled
streaming.


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