Freenet is hard to install and use--at least for the average user.

Rusty, I agree completely that on Linux (which is all I use) that it's a bit of a hassle. On IE on Windows it's all pretty seemless w/ just an OKAY click once or twice. Fortunately, Mac OSX comes with a sufficently modern JVM and WebStart already instealled, so it's even faster for them. Until mozilla for Linux starts shipping w/ a modern Java (not likely) there will always be an extra download for us Linux folks.

Although I agree that it's easy to use the tornado plugin, on the server side, it's far from acceptance on the user side. I had some large files that I was trying to distribute using the tornado plugin.

People get a popup window telling them they need to download something before they can download the file, and a lot of them stop right there. Under linux I had to download and install the Java Web Start thingy which was somewhat of a pain in the ass.

I'm not trying to be too critical here -- I understand the limitations of trying to do something like this via a browser-side plugin. Just commenting on the social difficulties involved distributing files this way.

So, in my case, I went back to the drawing board and made a simple mirroring system. Take a look at
http://www.rustybrooks.org/music/realbook/
for example. The links go to a url on my website, which redirects to one of the mirror locations, depending on the weight of the mirror. Crude but effective. And better (from my standpoint) than giving the user a list of mirrors, because the traffic gets split evenly in a way that I can define.

Just my $0.02

Level3 doesn't have a baroque pricing model; it has the standard industry pricing model. Which, yes, causes great pain to people who have relatively brief spikes of traffic. However, the standard contract explains it all in black and white.

I'm sympathetic but I do think it's reasonable to expect people to read the bloody contract before putting up 23 meg files, and if the contract is the same boilerplate everyone else uses, it's unfair to fault the network provider.

Let's not forget Freenet either (http://www.freenetproject.org). It has been working really well recently and has demonstrated its ability to handle large files (600MB+) handily.

One way to get the file into the OCN, Open Content Network, would have been to use the Onion Network's Tornado plugin. Tornado-enabling an existing download requires no server or software installation at all, and can be done in just 3 lines of javascript. An example can be found here: http://onionnetworks.com/ocn/ocn-example.php

I work for Onion Networks.

I'm writing an article about my own stupidity in this situation, so any suggestions for alternatives would be great. So far, I know about several systems for distributing P2P, and then there are several ISPs that charge based on total bandwidth or they cap you or put in governors to prevent the kind of charges that I saw at Level 3. (And Level 3 might be willing to lower the bill; hard to say yet if they will.)

If anyone has other ideas on this front, let me know (glenn@glennf.com) so I can incorporate them into the article.

The fundraising is going okay. I've raised maybe 5% of the money needed to pay what I estimate the bill is. We'll see how it goes.

Yeah, Apache modules are so easy to install...

It *needs* to be trivial to set up a BitTorrent server. Would that it was but an Apache module...

Bittorrent's amazing, brilliant code, but it's totally unrealistic to deploy server-side.

Kontiki shows the potential of the approach -- ever seen 100mbit saturation from the net? I have.

--Dan

Or they could have published it at Lulu for free.

Has anyone checked filesharing networks?