AT&T's Version of FreeNet

Surprises

from the anti-censorship dept

There’s been a lot of hype about distributed file systems like FreeNet that make it more and more difficult to censor information online. It’s no surprise that other systems would be coming out as well. What I didn’t expect was one such system to come from AT&T Labs. They’ve created a system called “Publius” that encrypts information, breaks it apart, and distributes the pieces to multiple servers. This makes it more difficult (obviously) to pull data off the internet, as the data has to be tracked to the multiple servers and then pulled off of each one. What’s not clear from the article, though, is whether or not there’s any redundancy of the pieces. If there’s not, then I just need to bring down one server that holds a piece of information and it should make it more difficult to reassemble all the pieces. It will definitely be interesting to watch as other similar systems are released as well, to see how they develop and how they are used.