77percent™

a little discussion with the civil netizen folk, in case you’re interested (probably not)

it’s all about social direct p2p file transfer, starts off with me just comparing them with pando with the goal of discovering what really made them different (besides the stated ideals behind the project), and now i’ve got it, straight from horse’s mouth. special indeed

So what makes Civil Netizen special? Well, for one we have spent a lot of time working on solving a very fundamental problem on the Internet. That is, computers behind the NAT (network address translation) of home routers have trouble connecting to each other directly. Even the BitTorrent protocol requires users behind NATs to map certain ports on the router to get decent speed (by avoiding relying on computers with open IPs). Techniques such as UPnP are less than universally supported and, unfortunately, not turned on by default on common router models. We believe we have come up with a NAT traversal solution that requires no end-user configuration.

With this first beta release, we have begun the first large-scale public testing of our custom networking stack, which chooses between a few known strategies that have been circulating in the peer-to-peer technology circles. So far the results we have collected on NAT-to-NAT connections have been promising. We believe that solving the NAT problem will enable a new class of Internet applications that does not rely on expensive, centralized web-based services. When combined with BitTorrent-style multi-source download strategies, the overall download speed and success rate would be much improved over the current generation of implementations, especially for torrents (or parcels in Civil-speak) with very few seeds and peers. Given the “long tail” nature of the Internet, serving the low seed/peers use case is particularly important.

~christopher of civil engines