[mrb]

Yep. This appears to be nothing more than FEC. Maybe they used LDPC or LDGM, which are superior to traditional Reed-Solomon codes.

I remember doing research on FEC codes back in 2003-2004 for developing a protocol for sending large files over satellite links to multicast recipients when I was working for SmartJog.

[jwm]

> I remember doing research on FEC codes back in 2003-2004 for developing a protocol for sending large files over satellite links to multicast recipients when I was working for SmartJog.

Interestingly, this tool looks like it is useful for the problem you describe:

http://www.udpcast.linux.lu/satellite.html

[mrb]

Yup. I remember looking at udpcast. I did not select it because, amongst other things, it did not support encryption. And I don't think we could use IPsec.

[kokey]

Soon we will see an article about how they turn blocks of file data into algebra to save disk space.