Eternity Server 0.04 Available

I am pleased to announce that I have successfully installed Adam Back's
"Eternity Server" on my home page.  This server permits a user to
transparently browse Web content posted to Usenet in encrypted form in
newsgroups like alt.anonymous.messages. 

Eventually, the Eternity Server will also serve web content from a variety
of more permanent repositories, like Altavista and Dejanews.

The Eternity Webspace is comprised of http URLs in a new virtual top level
domain, .eternity.  All documents are PGP signed, and posters may
optionally choose to have their domains indexed in a top level directory
under the URL http://eternity/. 

PGP is used for encryption, and documents may require the user to supply a
password before they can be viewed.  Documents may also be encrypted
with the hash of the URL, so that documents are only accessible to
individuals who already know their names. 

Although I expect most people will want to install their own servers in 
their Unix shell accounts, I will leave my server open for a little while
so that people can play before installing the software.

To try it out, just select the "Eternity Server" link on my homepage

             http://www.zipcon.com/~enoch
 
In order that people have something to browse, I have seeded
alt.anonymous.messages with two virtual web sites.  

The first of these has a URL of http://barney.eternity/ and is a single
document describing different ways one might kill a certain purple
dinosaur.  

The second has a URL of http://boylinks.eternity/ and is a large index
of boy-related resources on the Web, recently made homeless by the
CPAC/Sewer people.  The authors have devoted their best efforts to make
sure this list contains no links to porn or illegal material.  

The latest version of the eternity server may be found at Adam Back's
Web site and is called eternity-0.04.tgz.  You will need Perl 5 and
access to cgi-bin to install it. 

The eternity home page is...

          http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/eternity

Included are the eternity server, written in perl, and a "sitegrabber,"
which can be used to post entire websites to Usenet.

Enjoy...

--
     Mike Duvos         $    PGP 2.6 Public Key available     $
     enoch@zipcon.com   $    via Finger                       $
         {Free Cypherpunk Political Prisoner Jim Bell}

On Wed, 30 Jul 1997, Mike Duvos wrote:

> Eventually, the Eternity Server will also serve web content from a variety
> of more permanent repositories, like Altavista and Dejanews.

How many other major repositories are there? I still have faith in Dejanews,
but have serious doubts concerning the permanence and expanse of the
Alta Vista database. Their Web index, at least, has not grown at the same
pace as Web documents, and seeminly arbitrary sites trigger their "spam
filter," where further URLs from that domain are refused.

>From <http://www.searchenginewatch.com/avsize.htm>:

"John Pike, webmaster of the Federation of American Scientists web site
responded to the article, complaining that he found only 600 of 6,000 pages
from his web site to be indexed by the Alta Vista.

"Pike's response went on to detail the a message he received from Alta Vista
regarding this. He was advised that 600 pages were probably the most he'd
see for any domain. He was also given the example of Geocities, which is a
popular site that provides web space for its members. He was told that
although Geocities has over 300,000 members (and thus at least 300,000
potential web pages), only 300 pages from the domain had been indexed."

Michael Stutz <stutz@dsl.org> writes:
> On Wed, 30 Jul 1997, Mike Duvos wrote:
> 
> > Eventually, the Eternity Server will also serve web content from a variety
> > of more permanent repositories, like Altavista and Dejanews.
> 
> How many other major repositories are there? I still have faith in Dejanews,
> but have serious doubts concerning the permanence and expanse of the
> Alta Vista database. Their Web index, at least, has not grown at the same
> pace as Web documents, and seeminly arbitrary sites trigger their "spam
> filter," where further URLs from that domain are refused.

What you say is probably true of the web index, but eternity uses
their USENET archive.  They seem to be keeping up with that.

There are a few altavistas around now.  I use one in europe somewhere
as it has faster net connectivity from where I am.


The idea of using altavista, dejanews, etc is really just a temporary
measure.  The long term goal is more abitious, but to garner interest
in eternity something has to be demonstrated first.

If someone said to you at this point that a useful resource like alt
USENET news was being cancelled forthwith, the hackers amongst those
that enjoy reading it would get together and rehost it somehow.


Here's one possible route to having a standalone distributed set of
eternity servers which does not rely on the borrowed resources of the
news search engines archives.  Modify USENET news distribution
software so that instead of expiring articles, it keeps around
articles for which there was either a direct payment made out for that
USENET node, or for which there are many requests (with micropayments)
to make it profitable to keep that article around.

The idea is to ensure that the use of the USENET node for eternity
purposes is self-funding.  If a node finds itself hosting lots of
eternity documents, it will generate enough funds to buy a bigger
disk.

Disks are cheap and getting cheaper.  I bought a 3.8Gb disk for $300 a
while back.  Reckon you could buy a 6Gb for the same price now, and
that was only a few months ago.  Probably around 5c per meg.

So here's the model: I want to post something which some government
would like to censor.  I include a storage fee of $1 digicash per
megabyte-year with my anonymous eternity document submission to USENET
cashable to a node of my choice.  (Or several payments for different
USENET nodes if I want the redundancy).

Now on top of this the USENET nodes can charge for NNTP access to that
document.  1c per meg or something to add to their profits, and to
cover bandwidth consumption.

Then we have a recursive auction market amongst USENET sites so that
if a site that does not have the article is asked for it, it will go
buy a copy from any node which will volunteer it for sale.  Then that
site will re-sell it multiple times to recuperate the buy price.

This can occur recursively, even small players with PPP lines can
participate by buying pages and re-selling them at a lower price to
reflect the poorer performance.

The way eternity is set up at the moment it is entirely feasible that
the re-seller of the eternity article would not know what it was they
were serving.

All the technology is here now (not all the software, but all the
technology, ecash, USENET, PGP signatures, encryption).  All we've got
to do is the proselytizing, advertising, putting juicy information up.

Heck I reckon perhaps if I code the USENET article reselling and
archiving stuff, I should put in a 1% royalty cut :-) 1% of eternity
document sales and storage charges might be a shit-load of money in a
few years.

Adam
-- 
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

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