[thaumaturgy]

Distributed, decentralized, redundant, encrypted online file storage with the ability to share information with specific groups and individuals.

From the user standpoint, a user would access their content primarily through client software that would ask for their id & password (or perform other authentication). The authentication process fetches a small file from the network and decrypts it using the user's identification. That file then acts as a key to find and access the rest of the user's content in the network.

From a network standpoint, every client system has access to an amount of data proportional to the amount it's willing to store for the network. Data stored on the network is chunked down, encrypted, and stored on multiple nodes. Piecing together encrypted data without being able to read the contents of a user's index file should be considered Very Hard.

Something along these lines could really change the computer industry, and I think it's within the realm of possibility for a university and 5 CS majors, if they're sharp and motivated to work on it.

[stoney]

Interesting idea, but I wonder how many copies of my data would need to be stored across the system to guarantee that at least one copy is available when I want it?

Many people don't leave their personal computers switched on all the time, especially if they go away for a few days, then there are network outages, people deciding to leave the network, ...

[thaumaturgy]

Yeah. I think some of that would resolve itself as the network grew. Otherwise, whenever I've spent much time thinking about it, I've figured that it should be possible to have a nearest-neighbor node notification protocol.

Node A declares that it's quitting to Nodes B and C (or Nodes B and C are suddenly no longer able to poll Node A); Nodes B and C both check the chunks that they know Node A had, and see if there are enough redundant copies of those chunks in the network.

There's a lot of "and then magic happens!" in this idea, but I'm pretty sure it's do-able. The worst part of it by far is doing node searches on a completely decentralized structure.

[mikeknoop]

You could always run a CDN to add your own guarenteed-up nodes for this scenario.

[rmc]

Sounds like Freenet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeNet

[thaumaturgy]

Oh wow, thanks! It's been a very long time since I've looked at Freenet; it looks like they've come a long way. Good to see that it's been done.