3 ms·
I see this is a centralized service. Is there protection from DMCA takedowns? For example, if someone uploads a bundle of 50 N64 ROMs, and someone tries to DMC
by shawn 8y ago
I see this is a centralized service. Is there protection from DMCA takedowns?
For example, if someone uploads a bundle of 50 N64 ROMs, and someone tries to DMCA that link so that this service no longer provides an index to it, is there censorship resistance?
This is almost exactly what I need: A distributed index of massive datasets. I've been building a web browser that can source from such content. The idea is that you write a website which refers to some resources by SHA256, and anyone else running the browser will transmit the resource to you if they have it.
That would let you build an emulator which can play any ROM in history, without having to explicitly download the ROMs. It's equivalent to clicking on a link to "Super mario brothers" and then seeing it play immediately in your browser. No explicit downloading.
From a long term standpoint, the vision is that you can build whatever games you want, using whatever assets you want, and nobody can tell you that you can't.
So it was funny to see this service pop up, because it's nearly an identical use case: "I have some data (ROMs), I want to make it available to everyone else (people running the emulator), and it's decentralized so no one can say no (bittorrent)." But that raises the question of scope, or whether such use cases would be welcome.
- neuromantik8086 8y agoThis project isn't really what you're looking for. ROMs are more program than data, and Academic Torrents in particular is scoped to scientific datasets. What you're describing is more akin to Olive, bwFLA, or the Internet Archive's Javascript emulators [0]. For any of these, I don't know in particular if anyone has attempted to create a decentralized store of ROMs/disk images, although the general rule in digital preservation is to have at least 3 copies stored in different locations. The Internet Archive might have some redundancy for ROMs via the IA.bak project, which uses git-annex to distribute Internet Archive data across multiple machines [1]. [0] https://mellon.org/media/filer_public/0c/3e/0c3eee7d-4166-4ba6-a767-6b42e6a1c2a7/rosenthal-emulation-2015.pdf https://mellon.org/media/filer_public/0c/3e/0c3eee7d-4166-4b... [1] http://iabak.archiveteam.org/ http://iabak.archiveteam.org/
- fwip 8y agoRather than building your own browser, take a look at Beaker Browser.
- shawn 8y agoThanks! Unfortunately Dat doesn't provide any anonymity.
- fwip 8y agoThat's true, and a worthwhile consideration if you're doing illegal things. If you route your connection through Tor you'd be good to go, right?
- shawn 8y agoYes, but users can't be expected to know how to do that. And my users are the ones who want to play ROMs. Maybe it's possible to bundle tor with the executable though, and have the network connections automatically route through tor.