Posts tagged “distributed systems”

BitTorrent isn't just piracy infrastructure: it's a glimpse of data's future. The "real cloud" is content stored in the network itself, perpetually in transit, owned by no one. This phase-change from liquid to solid data is being held back by legal stigma, but not for long.

I sketch out what a truly distributed social network protocol might look like: federated identity like email, distributed search, spam handled via key exchange rather than AI filtering, and pub/sub activity streams. Facebook's "Open Graph" isn't any of those things. Here's what it would actually take.

BitTorrent's P2P magic should apply to websites, not just big files. I'm proposing WebTorrent: a local proxy that lets browsers share cached pages with each other, eliminating the Slashdot effect without requiring any changes from website owners. Someone please build this. I'm begging you.