From: pvh-AT-wfeet.za.net (Peter van Heusden)
Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 07:57:35 +0200
Subject: Re: AUT: enclosure of geocities


On 4 Mar 2002 at 17:56, cwright wrote:

> Gra,
> 
> That's what I was thinking, actually.  Running a co-op site, that is. 

This is where the Freenet (www.freenetproject.org) technology might be helpful in 
the future. Apart from Freenet's anonymity features, Freenet is also interesting 
because it distributes material across the computers in the network, sharing 
bandwidth and diskspace load. Each time a request for data is made, the data ends 
up being moved closer to the person doing the request - thus well known 'freesites' 
(web sites hosted in Freenet) are served up by a distributed net of servers. The 
advantage here is that the publisher of a site can have rather modest bandwidth, but 
still get good exposure - for instance, 'Content of Evil', a rather funny freesite which 
is probably the most popular right now, is published by someone with a 56K modem, 
yet is well propogated and rapidly available over the network.

Less popular content gradually falls out of the network, so ultra-leftists sites would 
have to be periodically re-inserted to stay available. Tools could be written to semi 
or fully automate this process, though.

Anyway, Freenet is still very much in the development stages, but peer-to-peer, 
distributive technologies might provide an alternative to grand centralised servers in 
the future.

[snip]
> For now, pobox.com and mail.com offer free e-mail, but how long that
> will continue is uncertain to me.

And in South Africa, union.org.za, run on behalf of the union federation COSATU, is 
a free email service used by lots of South African leftists / ultra-leftists.
> 
> Just geeking.  Anyone interested in this?

Yes.

Peter


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