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December 08, 2005
Real P2P
I've been so busy with work it has almost made me forget about politics and culture. Thus I've gotten wrapped up in the fun of tech culture. Tech politics are hideously annoying, unlike American politics which is endlessly fascinating and entertaining. So I'm trying to do a couple new things for my home system Christmas Upgrade.
The first is getting serious about P2P. But here's the thing. Almost none of the P2P software I can find out there is real P2P. It's all kind of file swarming software for anonymous people out to get warez, porn and otherwise hijacked & contraband materials. I'm actually looking for something to use with trusted peers who can host and search. What I don't want is a whole lot of anonymous nobodies looking at my shared stuff and downloading at will. What I want is to specifically give access to my mother and my father and my cousin in New York and a half dozen other family members.
So what's the right P2P solution for people who want to share media with known peers only? So far it looks like the Gnutella protocol is the right one because if everybody has a limited node list, then the whole thing stays private. There's only one shortcoming which is that it appears that to do direct connections, everyone has to have a fixed ip address. That can't work. I've got dialup people in my family. I like the LimeWire interface and it looks simple enough for everybody to install and use. But does it use other protocols? It's worth paying for a good commercial client, but I don't want third party servers negotiating all my stuff.
I've heard that Webdav is a nice protocol but that's way too low level for moms. What would be a good front end for that that would let her browse thumbnails of my pictures? I've also considered FileZilla but does that give me search capabilities on MP3 files? It's just FTP, secure and nice, but I don't think so.
What's a good brother to do?
Posted by mbowen at December 8, 2005 04:50 PM
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