Social Mirroring

Social Mirroring

Think: mirroring + reddit ftw

mirrorparty.org is a website to facilitate the matching of content with volunteer hosts. Volunteers sign up, specify how much and what kind of content they want to host, and provide login credentials (rsync, (s)ftp, S3, etc.) for a webserver. mirrorparty.org will periodically scan The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent search engines for specially tagged content (partywithme). XXX filesharing sites too Such torrents will be automatically downloaded, their content extracted and then transformed to add the necessary JavaScript, keys and signatures. The resultant party will be divided into appropriately-sized portions and uploaded to volunteer hosts. Mirror lists on existing hosts will be updated periodically.

As the website is highly likely to be blocked, its use is entirely optional. However, as content creators need access to BitTorrent, not the site itself, this problem is somewhat mitigated.

Updates

By signing the content tarball using author keys (described in Proof of Authorship XXX link), the party creator gains the ability to update content in the future. To update a party, the author creates an update tarball with new/changed files and a manifest of deletions. This file is signed using the author private key, and the tarball and signature are served through BitTorrent as described above. mirrorparty.org can download this new torrent, verify the signature and update the mirrors as necessary. Note that the public author key can be included in the torrent and need not be uploaded to an external keyserver.

Community Moderation

Several difficulties arise from a fully-automated mirroring system. There may be more content than hosting space available. Some content may expose mirror owners to local legal or political liability. The existence of free storage is an attractive target for spammers and trolls.

These problems can be mitigated with the use of collaborative decision making systems (a la Reddit). A small subset of content from a potential party will be unpacked and served to browsers (either by direct hosting or on nodes willing to host unreviewed content). Users can help provide a brief description and other metadata (political relevance, legal risks), as well as flag potential parties as spam or inappropriate. They will be able to vote on whether that content should be mirrored on mirrorparty.org. Additional weight will be given to the votes of users who:

• provide more mirror space (logarithmic, so that small mirrors are not overwhelmed)
• have a longer history of mirroring (again logarithmic, so that new users are not automatically outvoted)
• mirror content on under served countries, languages and topics
• mirror under-replicated content (see below)

The actual content mirrored on a particular node is left up to that node's owner. Volunteers may allocate space to parties selected by the community, subject to constraints they specify (i.e., "exclude content that is legally risky in my jurisdiction"). Alternately, they may prefer individual parties, authors, topics or countries. Extra voting weight will be given to volunteers who mirror scarce (i.e., under-replicated) content.

System administrators may set reasonable limits on the number of mirrors for popular parties. For example, the world probably doesn't need any more WikiLeaks mirrors at present.

Other Content & Services

mirrorparty.org will provide a list of known parties, instructions on how to use the software and links to information about communications safety. It could run a spider as described in Health Checks (XXX link) and use the reports to improve the redundancy of the networks it manages. Note that mirrorparty.org will not host parties itself, as this would significantly increase its exposure to legal and technological threats.