Adeona Warns of Instability; OpenDHT Mothballed 82
gbickford writes "Adeona, the first open source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop, was featured on Slashdot last year. I was stoked when I read about how it worked and I installed it immediately. I just went to look for updates on the site and was greeted with a giant warning message stating, 'Adeona is currently not working.' It seems that OpenDHT, the distributed hash table that stores the location information and photos, has been fairly unstable lately. The developers claim that this is "largely because the back-end OpenDHT system is not able to tolerate the load imposed by Adeona. OpenDHT removed the need for a centralized database with tracking information, which in effect prevents a 3rd party from tracking a user's whereabouts. OpenDHT was Sean Rhea's Ph.D. project back in 2005 and he has decided to officially bow out of maintaining it as of July 1st, which has left the developers of Adeona looking for another back end to store location information and photos. The source code for Adeona is available and they are actively seeking developer contributions on the developer's list. Do any developers have ideas on where to put scads of information in a free, reliable, anonymous, and secure manner?"
Re:Realistic? (Score:2, Insightful)
BitTorrent to the rescue?
Re:"Do any developers have ideas on where to put (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Over-reaching (Score:2, Insightful)
They're not saying that their folding up tents. Just that they are actively seeking contributions to help resolve this technical issue. Seems to me, a post on Slashdot is the perfect place to make this plea.
Re:Why does it have to be free? (Score:2, Insightful)
Let users specify a server of their own, and either FTP the data or send it to them with a HTTP post form.
HTTP post forms are perhaps the most reliable way to transfer data.
Other methods that involve different TCP/UDP ports, or custom protocols like RPC are prone to failure when firewalls on a foreign network block the traffic in the name of security.
It would be very difficult to accidentally block Adeona if its outbound traffic looked like ordinary web traffic and wasn't to a small list of servers (that thieves could easily research and block traffic to).
Re:An open DHT is a highly valuable resource (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, I should state clearly that OpenDHT's capability should not be abandoned.
But IMO it's sort of a big job to make this scale. It takes people with a pretty strong mathematical computer science background, and a lot of testing, and long-term support. Hopefully the right folks will step up (and don't look at me, I don't have the math).