Weekly News 2003-09-28

by

Progress

Because I took the summer off of writing news, but the mnet hackers continued to code, there have been significant advances since the last Weekly News. Please accept my apologies for letting the news get so out of date.
-- Artimage

Zooko has Ent passing numerous unit tests now. Ent is the next generation router built on top of a DHT. This will allow us to have a wholly decentralized introduction system, and later a lookup network. Currently Ent is doing some transitive introductions to bootstrap a nodes introduction into the network. This is very promising.

Icepick has got an implementation of Chord using twisted.PB's passing a critical unit tests as well. This exercise was mostly for educational purposes, but it is quite possible that this may be used in the future as either part of a migration to twisted, or to shore up some problems with other routing methods. Zooko has discovered that Kademlia, which Ent is based on, cannot self heal (rejoin a split network), which Chord can. Zooko has also pointed out that Chord does allow some leeway in picking host for your finger table.

Icepick has also been working on getting the old metatracker system to work with the new Router interface. This will allow us to merge the old metatracker based network with our forthcoming Ent network.

help wanted

The Mnet Hackers are looking for some new friends. Our turn-on's include: distributed hash tables, error correcting codes, long walks on the beach, encryption, and game theory. Our turn-offs are: single points of failure, censorship, war, and faulty random number generators. There are plenty of fun tasks, and hackers commited to helping you get started, so drop on by irc.freenode.net and get started hacking Mnet.