brejc8's Journal: Distributed Mirror Project (Stop the /. effect)

I was thinking about doing this for some time and after considering some rather complex methods I decided that this one is as good as any.
"Distributed Mirror Project" is a method of creating mirrors and distributing the information that you are hosting a mirror to others. There are two main sections of it.
Firstly there is your end. Using a script you can easily make a mirror of a site and then submit the information that you have a mirror of a site or a file to the server site.
The other end is the server site which collects the information about the mirrors. It then allows users to search for mirrors of sites or files.
Its really as simple as that. The download a site and submit the information to a mirror server script is three lines. The server end is a little more complex but I am very happy about the way its working so far.
Try it out. (It won't work with some characters yet but thats next on the todo list)

Nice idea

[sketerpot]

This sounds like a pretty good idea. If it gets to the point where it is fairly easy to set up mirrors and automatically update them (either your implementation or somebody else's) the big problem I can think of is making it easy for people to find mirrors. I suppose you could automatically post a comment with a list of mirrors or something. A mozilla plugin to automatically search for mirrors with the ability to search your mirror list along with Google cache and Archive.org would be great, and a lot of people would use it.

Good Idea, but it can be better

[kilroy_hau]

I though of two problems:

1.-You could be reproducing somebody's copyrighted content. (who cares?, maybe the owner?)

2.-A malicious user could copy some opinion, fact or event, and edit it, distort it or alter it to fit a particular point of view. There is no mechanism to validate this content

Re:Good Idea, but it can be better

[brejc8]

Oh absolutely.

1: Yeah but thats the problem of the mirrorer. If you are mirroring someones work then make sure that you are not stealing their banner clicks or good name. Othewie I dont think most people would mind if you let some of the load off their hands.

2: Its currently a two line solution. Hopefully later there should be CRC checking blacklisting, etc.