[MUD-Dev] Seamlessly Distributed Online Environments

[Paolo Piselli]

--- J C Lawrence <claw at kanga.nu> wrote:

> You have no way to explicitly specify one particular version of a
> data object in a fashion that can't be forged or otherwise dicked
> with.  You have a name space consisting of object names and
> associated meta data which does NOT guarantee uniqueness.

disclaimer: IANANetworkProgrammer

Perhaps the problem of determining some object's identity can be
addressed by settling for a system that may not guarantee
uniqueness, but at least makes forgery difficult, and has some
corrective properties so that the inevitable collisions can be
resolved. For discouragement of forgery, identity could be
determined by the file name, the name of the network node
responsible for publishing this file, the content length, and some
difficult-to-forge transform of the content (i.e. something a little
more non-trivial than a checksum).  Although this extra-verbose
identifier certainly can be tweaked with, modifying any of those
four properties inherently changes the identity of the modified
object, and the reference to the node responsible for publishing
this object allows us to reaquire a verified version if we ever have
reason to doubt an object's identity.  And if we ever do find an
impostor object, we tell our peers that there is an impostor for
object (N,P,L,T) floating around and they redownload the object from
either the publisher or someone they trust.

- Paolo

=====
Paolo Piselli
ppiselli at yahoo.com
www.piselli.com , www.bestcoastswing.com
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