Here's some technical details that we're gonna reveal in a prototype at the open-holland conference:

• the oscar peer to peer layer uses a gossip-engine to multiplex traffic over a single TCP port. – it also allows to tunnel traffic eg. via HTTP to circumvent firewall, without much performance penalty.

• in this prototype the data-signing is not part of open-search, but the P2P layer: Every p2p-packet sent or received contains a RSA-SHA; (yielding ~35% overhead at the moment) – the signature will identify the host responsible for providing the information (not the ID of the Source of the Information ie. crawler or user)

• only "bad clients" not "annoying users" can be banned and the ban affect the local open-search-client only, not the whole network.

• we're testing & debugging a crawler with a local perl::DBD database (currently sqlite) – The SQL interface can be replaced with a p2p layer and is currently used to develop and debug the latter at the moment.

• privacy can be archived as an additional Feature. A user can select

any content of the p2p-network using it's identifier and checksum to sign it's content with a private key. A user's signed content can be referenced ,like any other content in the p2p-network (you can search for it) and it's up to the end-user-application to make use of it.