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

[Paul Norman]

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.

> 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.

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.

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.