The recent case of Wikileaks being booted off AWS provoked the following thought: if lots of people started mirroring wikileaks on EC2, Amazon would be forced into playing whack-a-mole to stop it. Game over: the revolt of a user-base, the inevitable collateral damage, etc. leads to bad PR and (hopefully) reform and vertebrates. Amazon's nice GUI combined with their introductory offer making a micro instance basically free for a year, means that putting up a how-to page/YouTube video showing every college kid with a credit card how to do it can't be too difficult.
My question is, what next? How to you turn a swarm of small, transient mirrors, potentially not just on EC2 but all over the 'Net, into something findable and load-balanced to deal with the (potentially) huge demand of serving Wikileaks traffic?
Therein lies a problem. Round-robin DNS load-balancing with a very short TTL is one obvious approach, but this begs the question of how one boot-straps and then maintains the CNAME record containing the list of mirrors. The stable domain could be a CNAME to DNS servers that are themselves part of the mirroring swarm, if each node acted as both a DNS and an HTTP server. Each node would return a randomized list of the nodes in it's neighborhood.
Apart from that, I'm not much further along in my thinking. What do you think about the feasibility of the idea?
My question is, what next? How to you turn a swarm of small, transient mirrors, potentially not just on EC2 but all over the 'Net, into something findable and load-balanced to deal with the (potentially) huge demand of serving Wikileaks traffic?
Therein lies a problem. Round-robin DNS load-balancing with a very short TTL is one obvious approach, but this begs the question of how one boot-straps and then maintains the CNAME record containing the list of mirrors. The stable domain could be a CNAME to DNS servers that are themselves part of the mirroring swarm, if each node acted as both a DNS and an HTTP server. Each node would return a randomized list of the nodes in it's neighborhood.
Apart from that, I'm not much further along in my thinking. What do you think about the feasibility of the idea?