xdegrees was at the webdav interoperability testing event last year so there may be some dav under the hood there someplace jim original message from fork admin URL mailto fork admin URL on behalf of gordon mohr sent wednesday september NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER am to fork URL subject re microsoft buys xdegress more of a pNUMBERp distributed data thing mr fork writes files can be cached on multiple systems randomly scattered around the internet as with napster or freenet in fact the caching in xdegrees is more sophisticated than it is on those systems users with high bandwidth connections can download portions or stripes of a file from several cached locations simultaneously the xdegrees software then reassembles these stripes into the whole file and uses digital signatures to verify that the downloaded file is the same as the original a key component of this digital signature is a digest of the file which is stored as an http header for the file this more sophisticated than napster or freenet part seems to be the same behavior implemented in many other pNUMBERp cdns such as kazaa edonkey overnet bittorrent gnutella with huge extensions onionnetworks webraid though the quality of the digest used by each system varies wildly gordon 