Atemoya (AH-TEH-MOYA) is a distro designed to be a Virtual Appliance. A virtual appliance is basically an OS that does only one thing, like serve webpages, repositories, track torrents, etc., working exactly the same way on every computer. More than that, it's a plan to make a vehicle for an entirely decentralized, p2p computer network, with a limitless amount of functions.

Samizdat Content Delivery System

The primary feature of Atemoya would be a powerful content delivery/program update system that I call Samizdat. It would make sure that data can be propogated by trusted uploaders anonymously, and end the need for a vulnerable central server.

For example, a Wikileaks mirror appliance is built. The creator applies two GPG signatures, one to make sure that only the holder of the signature will be able to upload data to the servers, and one to prevent anyone other than the creator to send software updates.

The creator then calls for people to host a virtual machine. When someone wants to host a virtual machine, there will not even need to be a central download server. Rather, every single server acts as a p2p seeder, first sending the appliance (should be no more than 200 MBs), then sending the actual data (more than 10 GBs).

The uploaders could use any single server as the data source, as long as they have the correct cryptographic signature. Once new data is sent to a server, that one automatically updates the others with the signed package.

With this system, taking down a node will never stop the flow of information, unlike the centralized solution that Wikileaks currently uses. Should be based on this: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/AOS_Spin