“Groovy Motherfucker”

Interesting post-mortem on the Skype downtime last week. Due to a bug in the client version used by 50% of their users (which had already been patched in a newer release), a small server overload feedbacklooped into taking out their entire P2P system.

An increasing number of services are forcibly updating their users clients (most notably, Google Chrome, which pushes releases to users without notification or interaction). How long until we reach a point that this is the norm?

Theoretically seamless and easy P2P file sharing. Add “http://edn.redswoosh.net/” to the front of a URL, and it’ll go through a P2P client instead of being served up by your HTTP server. Kind of similar to what OpenCola were doing in 2001.

Distributed P2Pish secure backups. You give up 10Gb of your hard drive, for the rights to distribute 1Gb of your files across hundreds of peers. Sadly Windows-only, and there’s no way to tweak how much *bandwidth* you’re willing to give up, but could come in handy.

Interesting attempt to add more social context (eg. trust, recommendations) to BitTorrent donwnloads.