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

Erik Anderson odysseus654 at gmail.com
Fri Jul 6 19:51:53 PDT 2007


A quick couple comments.  The whole "IP address spying" is always going to
be an issue when dealing with external stores.  There have been a couple
attempts to resolve this (take a look at the MP3 obfuscating filesharing
clients).

It is very difficult to serve the "wrong" image via BitTorrent, the "link"
that you are given when told to begin downloading it contains numerous
hashes of the file that would discard any bad data.

This may have changed since I read this, but there have been numerous
requests to the people that run Debian Linux to move their package system to
BitTorrent.  Their response is that the packages are so small that the
torrent system would not be optimized for retrieving them; the time it takes
to establish the connection to the torrent would cause too much of a
performance hit.

I'm also a bit worried about people that don't want P2P connections on their
network.  University campuses may not be too happy about it (MP3 sharing
again?) and an early version of Uru had a number of complaints lodged
against it for its use of P2P to handle voicechat.

On 7/6/07, dale at daleglass.net <dale at daleglass.net> wrote:
>
> 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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