> There's still a problem if someone maliciously puts bad data into a
> server trying to supercede good data, and there still might need to be
> some kind of "who's on top" or "trusted server" approach when two sets of
> data both claim to supercede the other. But with this approach, if two
> people submit different data for the same CD, only one person has to look
> at the two and decide which wins. The new data will then supercede the
> old on other servers without human intervention.
Who is going to look at these two records and decide which one is
correct? It cannot be some central admin, since that admin is not
likely to have access to the data in question. Any one person will only
have a fraction of the knowledge neccesary to make such a call.
If we trust anyone to make this decision then people can gang up to
corrupt the data in the system.
Hmmmm. Reconsidering Rob's suggestion of having an admin -- what if
each server had several admins, who were hand-picked by the person that
is setting up the server. These admins could pick through the conflicts
at hand and decide to either:
Accept one of the conflicting records to be 'correct' or 'pass' because
they don't have enough information to make a decision. Once all the
admins for a server passed or some amount of time went by, the conflict
record could be propogated the peers, where the process would start
over again.
--ruaok Freezerburn! All else is only icing. -- Soul Coughing
Robert Kaye -- robert nospam at moon.eorbit.net http://moon.eorbit.net/~robert