Re: [OSM-dev] [GSoC] Guix + GNUnet: what’s next

[Daniel Golle <daniel@makrotopia.org>]

Hi Paul!

Thank you for your instant reply!


On Thu, Jul 02, 2015 at 03:56:57PM -0700, Paul Norman wrote:
> On 7/2/2015 2:58 PM, Daniel Golle wrote:
> >This sounds very useful eg. for Planet.osm distribution.
> >http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm
> >It's already available via BitTorrent
> >http://www.mantlik.cz/tracker/torrent_functions.php
> >but the regions are very large and thus the files are too...
> In practice using the torrent files results in most of the data from
> webseed, getting it from planet.openstreetmap.org. They can help a bit, but
> don't really form a parallel distribution system.

Imho that could be greatly improved by introducing a partitioning scheme
for Planet.osm splitting it up into a lot of small files (e.g. max 10 megs)
and providing an index. I'm aware that this is a non-trivial problem...

> >Anonymous access to local OSM data as well as (cached) rendered map
> >tiles would greatly improve users privacy, obviously...
> With rendering on demand like tile.osm.org has, tiles might only be cached
> for 5 minutes. This is probably going to be a problem for any truly
> anonymous system. Also, to avoid the tile renderer knowing what you're
> accessing, everything has to be pre-rendered. Pre-rendered world-wide vector
> tiles are not a practical option.

I reckon that renderring locally is the only feasible choice then.

> This also leaves aside the fact that such a system probably isn't suitable
> for tile.osm.org, where the focus is on supporting map edits, and viewing
> the map is generally going to be associated with having edited the same
> area.

Regular read-only snapshots being available for anonymous access
without having to download several gigabytes of data would still be
nice and much better than not having that option, leaving freshness
and privacy concerns when editing aside for now.


> None of this stops someone from operating their own rendering server, even
> behind an air-gapped network. If someone downloads the planet dump, you
> don't know what part of it they're interested in, and even if consuming
> minutely updates, it still doesn't reveal where they are looking at.

Sure, but this is not something I'd expect regular users to do, as most
people neither have the knowledge nor the resources to do that.


Cheers


Daniel