Amazement: Freecache.org
Reading a post on Dav’s Akuaku.org I was once again amazed today. He pointed to Freecache.org, which is a service started by The Internet Archive allowing you to make files bigger than 5MB available over a distributed network of servers! Judging by the FAQ, it gets a little less special though, because it works by people donating their bandwidth and server space. So this is not somebody giving away a lot of bandwidth for free, but lots of people doing that, which makes it more or less special, depending how you look at it. Everyone with more than 5Mbps of bandwidth can install a freecache server and be a distributor. Most of the stuff being served is probably still from archive.org, but the people behind this thing are getting more and more special. They are moving amazing amounts of data around and they are doing it more and more efficiently.
In a sense, Freecache.org is like Akamai for big files but free. People that need performance and reliability take Akamai and pay for it, but for others, just take free cache! Great. (It will be interesting to see how they survive the attack of the porn people. ;))