Cool hack of the day

Some folks at Northwestern were thinking about the problem of getting P2P systems like BitTorrent to prefer local peers. A local peer will be faster, more reliable, and cause less expense for the Internet as a whole.

Now, who do we know who has a widely deployed network of machines that are located as close to the edge as possible? That's right, Akamai! (And any other CDN, really.) So you resolve a known Akamaized domain name and see what the results are. The more your results overlap with some other P2P node, the closer you are, network-topologically speaking.

I saw it mentioned on Ars Technica. Here's the link to Ono (Hawaiian for 'good to eat', apparently.) http://www.aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/projects/ono/developers.html

Cool hack of the day

Some folks at Northwestern were thinking about the problem of getting P2P systems like BitTorrent to prefer local peers. A local peer will be faster, more reliable, and cause less expense for the Internet as a whole.

Now, who do we know who has a widely deployed network of machines that are located as close to the edge as possible? That's right, Akamai! (And any other CDN, really.) So you resolve a known Akamaized domain name and see what the results are. The more your results overlap with some other P2P node, the closer you are, network-topologically speaking.

I saw it mentioned on Ars Technica. Here's the link to Ono (Hawaiian for 'good to eat', apparently.) http://www.aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/projects/ono/developers.html

Books

_Little Brother_, Cory Doctorow

Is it possible you haven't heard of _Little Brother_?

No, it is not possible. But I am a student of the impossible, so I will scrunch up my eyes very hard and pretend that you have not. Ah! It is difficult. Especially, it is difficult to type with my eyes scrunched. So...

The place is San Francisco, the time is the near future -- next year perhaps, or the year after that. Almost now. Our hero is a 17 year old high school student: bored, gifted, geeky, but not socially inept. In the first few pages, we watch him skip school with some friends to play a bit of an Augmented Reality Game, a little like a LARP, a little like goecaching, a lot like a global scavenger hunt. Then somebody blows up a bridge -- not the Golden Gate, for some reason, but the Bay Bridge. Is it terrorists? Maybe. Doctorow doesn't hint at it much, but it is entirely plausible that the Bad Guys did it. The Bad Guys, in this book, are the Department of Homeland Security, and to a lesser extent, the entire Federal government. Somehow, the DHS thugs are on the scene seconds after the blast...

The rest of the book is, let's say, intensely involving. And a good story. And morally inspiring. So go buy a copy.

Books

_Little Brother_, Cory Doctorow

Is it possible you haven't heard of _Little Brother_?

No, it is not possible. But I am a student of the impossible, so I will scrunch up my eyes very hard and pretend that you have not. Ah! It is difficult. Especially, it is difficult to type with my eyes scrunched. So...

The place is San Francisco, the time is the near future -- next year perhaps, or the year after that. Almost now. Our hero is a 17 year old high school student: bored, gifted, geeky, but not socially inept. In the first few pages, we watch him skip school with some friends to play a bit of an Augmented Reality Game, a little like a LARP, a little like goecaching, a lot like a global scavenger hunt. Then somebody blows up a bridge -- not the Golden Gate, for some reason, but the Bay Bridge. Is it terrorists? Maybe. Doctorow doesn't hint at it much, but it is entirely plausible that the Bad Guys did it. The Bad Guys, in this book, are the Department of Homeland Security, and to a lesser extent, the entire Federal government. Somehow, the DHS thugs are on the scene seconds after the blast...

The rest of the book is, let's say, intensely involving. And a good story. And morally inspiring. So go buy a copy.