[p2p-hackers] Ideas for an opensource Skype lookalike

[Greg Bildson]

It sounds essentially like a rebuild of the FastTrack (Kazaa) infrastructure.  If it can scale to 50 million then I will be really impressed.

Thanks
-greg
---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: Brad Neuberg <bkn3 at columbia.edu>
Reply-To: "Peer-to-peer development." <p2p-hackers at zgp.org>
Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2004 22:05:33 -0800

>Because they claim to have a scalable, secure, decentralized lookup 
>mechanism that is easy to use.
>
>At 04:10 PM 3/13/2004, you wrote:
>
>>The username and full name appear to be searchable.  The number of online 
>>users appears to be in the 100,000 to 200,000 range.  There is an advanced 
>>search that allows all profile information to be searchable.
>>
>>I wouldn't be surprised if the main index is roughly divided up on keyword 
>>prefix ranges amongst the long uptime addressable hosts.  Then again, I 
>>wouldn't be surprised if it is a more formal DHT.  Actually, their ability 
>>to do full substring searches argues against both of these 
>>approaches.  They appear to be doing a broadcast search within a fully 
>>distributed index.  The broadcast search ends when a set number of matches 
>>are reached.
>>
>>Why does this sound ground breaking?
>>
>>Thanks
>>-greg
>>
>>---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
>>From: Brad Neuberg <bradneuberg at yahoo.com>
>>Reply-To: "Peer-to-peer development." <p2p-hackers at zgp.org>
>>Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2004 15:03:18 -0800 (PST)
>>
>> >The Skype page claims to have implemented something
>> >called a "Global Index".  From their web page:
>> >
>> >"Global decentralized user directory:
>> >
>> >Most instant message or communication software
>> >requires some form of centralized directory for the
>> >purposes of establishing a connection between end
>> >users in order to associate a static username and
>> >identity with an IP number that is likely to change.
>> >This change can occur when a user relocates or
>> >reconnects to a network with a dynamic IP address.
>> >Most Internet-based communication tools track users
>> >with a central directory which logs each username and
>> >IP number and keeps track of whether users are online
>> >or not. Central directories are extremely costly when
>> >the user base scales into the millions. By
>> >decentralizing this resource-hungry infrastructure,
>> >Skype is able to focus all of our resources on
>> >developing cutting-edge functionality.
>> >
>> >P2P network technologies such as FastTrack (used by
>> >KaZaA) would be suitable for decentralizing this, if
>> >not for the fact that these networks are fragmented in
>> >nature ­ a search does not reach all nodes in the
>> >network. Clearly, in order to deliver high quality
>> >telephony with the lowest possible costs, a third
>> >generation of P2P technology (“3G P2P”), or Global
>> >Index (GI) was a necessary development and represents
>> >yet another paradigm shift in the notion of scaleable
>> >networks. The Global Index technology is a
>> >multi-tiered network where supernodes communicate in
>> >such a way that every node in the network has full
>> >knowledge of all available users and resources with
>> >minimal latency."
>> >
>> >Does anyone have any idea how they have done this
>> >securely, reliably, and with low latency? Also, what
>> >exactly is the "key" into this index (the phone
>> >number?)  If they have truly achieved this then it is
>> >ground-breaking work on their part.
>> >
>> >Brad
>>