WASTE

[andrewducker]

Right, that's it, I'm off of WASTE.

It's a nice enough system in some ways, but I've decided that I really don't like the fact that if I'm friends with Bob and Bob's friends with Charles and Charles is friends with Derek, then Derek has as much right to my bandwidth as Bob does.

I want to be able to shared files with my friends. And it'd be nice if they could share files with their friends, but that's no reason for me to be sharing with them. If I want to share with the world, I'll do it via Kazaa or something similar.

Nathan's challenged me to come up with something that works along these lines, so that'll be a good project for me.

Cheers for the people that helped me play around with the system. Sorry it didn't quite work out.

Comments

[thepaintedone.livejournal.com]

You're describing an index, which is a discrete function from the actual upload/download process. The issues you have with security and bandwidth are more the later process than the former.

Use a simple and robust existing protocol for the actual transfer and design an app which indexes your files somewhere that people you want can view them. This could be a http (or similar) server on your machine, a list you publish and send to your friends for them to localy search, or a central depository.

Actualy, WindowsXP has various automatic indexing functions built into it, dont know if its presented via an API but you might be able to hook into the OS's own indexing and searching.

[andrewducker]

Of course, FTP also doesn't support file-swarming, which I view to be a pretty essential part of any modern file transfer system.