Hey Hey,

This is a pretty cool concept in my opinion. It's quite the interesting caching server (or sequence of caching servers) that are open for anyone to use. http://www.coralcdn.org/

Coral is peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the price of a $50/month cable modem.

Publishing through Coral is as simple as appending a short string to the hostname of objects' URLs; a peer-to-peer DNS layer transparently redirects browsers to participating caching proxies, which in turn cooperate to minimize load on the source web server. Sites that run Coral automatically replicate content as a side effect of users accessing it, improving its availability. Using modern peer-to-peer indexing techniques, Coral will efficiently find a cached object if it exists anywhere in the network, requiring that it use the origin server only to initially fetch the object once.
I only came across this because someone replied on the nmap-dev mailing list that this could be a great way for Irongeek to distribute his nmap tutorials without hogging his bandwidth. It's also a great way for anyone else wanting to share large files with the community. You simply attach .nyud.net:8090 to the end of any website and it'll access it through one of the caching servers. This could have gone in security as it also doubles as a proxy, but I decided to place it here instead. Using Irongeek's Your IP page along with the .nyud.net:8090 added on causes the following to be displayed.

Info obtained by PHP on the server:

IP 128.59.67.202
Hostname planetlab3.comet.columbia.edu
Operating System
Entire User Agent String CoralWebPrx/0.1.14 (See http://coralcdn.org/)
Referrer http://www.irongeek.com/
Remote Client Port: 46690
This is quite obviously not my information. Anyways.. it is quite interesting and felt it worth sharing since searches for Coral on the site didn't bring up anything related.

Peace,
HT