So, I’ve been recently considering building a darknet machine with spare parts I have sitting around. I’ve come to realize that the plethora of media I have is so large, and normal P2P channels so inherently dangerous, that a subversive way to share it all with friends and family is really the way of the future. What if each of us puts together a mighty collection, a massive underground library, and then we all link up and share all that information. That would be beneficial to everyone.
The real question is how.
There’s always the old alternatives. Direct Connect has been around for years and you can still find DC hub and client software. That would probably offer the least overhead. We’d simply need a machine to be left on as a hub and then each person could connect at their leisure.
An old school WASTE network is another possibility, but that would involve sharing public keys to gain access, which is tiresome.
A small Hamachi (or Hamachi2) network would operate in a similar fashion, as would an OpenVPN. In those instances however, the user would all need client software and would have to add predetermined “friends” or friendly IP addresses.
Freenet would offer a step up from that in terms of content management since we’d be creating our own mini-internet.
Beyond that we’re talking about setting up home web and FTP servers. That might be a little more complicated (especially if I’m doing it) than I’m willing to get.
This is actually something I’d like to do. I have a perfectly usable AMD Athlon generation PC sitting under my desk at home not doing anything and a 20mbps fiber connection at the house. The trick would be finding huge IDE hard drives. Or, finding the money to upgrade to SATA. Originally I had wanted to use the box as a HTPC, but given that I don’t have anything worth streaming to my TV and that my TV tuner card died, that seems like more of a hassle than it’s worth.
Anyone have any ideas as far as setting up a network would be concerned? Anyone even interested in sharing their music/game/tv show collections? Thoughts?
Personally, I’d lean toward BitTorrent. Secure the tracker with SSL, require encryption on all clients, turn off all distributed tracking functions. Maybe a little trickier to set up than DC++ or similar, but I think it’s a tech that more people are familiar with these days.
hmmm, true, but I was hoping for a method with more of a “browse” feature. Private torrents are certainly easy enough, but you’d have to know what I have, and I’d have to know what you have, and then we’d both have to make torrents each time someone wanted something.
DC hubs always had that great “browse share” feature where you could see everything someone had to offer. That’s the only reason I would learn towards more of a network rather than individual torrents.