[p2p-hackers] Re: Identify "defective" nodes

[Greg Bildson]

>
> My pet plug-in idea is a little library called "Stitch" that takes
> over writing downloaded bytes to disk.  It'd be a multiple-app
> plug-in, so that I could run LimeWire and (for example) BitTorrent at
> the same time and if I happen to be downloading the same file in both
> P2P systems, it will figure that out and merge the results into one
> file.  Naturally, it would also need a way to report back to the apps
> "I got these segments elsewhere" and to make use of the app-specific
> integrity checking.
>
> (this would also expand the market for P2P file-sharing applications
> by making it more useful for individuals to use multiple applications
> instead of just one)
>
> Unfortunately, I can't think of any *other* reason a plug-in would
> need that particular kind of API, so it's kind of a one-trick pony.
>

That would be extremely hard to do efficiently with the internal algorithms
used to grab chunks of files.  If you don't want to redownload overlapping
regions, you would have to control the internals of both algorithms very
precisely.

The best reason I could see for doing this would be for failure recovery.
In that case, you just need to restart one download type using another
protocol.  Presumably, either protocol can handle the download of a specific
file well.

Thanks
-greg