Month: November 2004

Categories
technology

P2P traffic’s effect on ISP’s

The Internet was designed as a content access system which a predominantly client/server, assymetrically biased towards downstream (downloads etc.) With P2P exchange of data, the creation of decentralized groups allows for information to flow over the public Internet in an anonymous logical fashion. The individual users of these applications are shielded via this anonymity. There are obvious issues with IPR here but also more subtle issues regarding the categories and topology of P2P traffic. (I’ll provide a more rigorous mathematical look on this soon) via this form of information exchange, the service providers no longer have the ability to forecast network capacity based on historical subscriber usage patterns. There are four key areas where service providers are feeling the pinch:

  1. Upstream/downstream traffic is flipped where the upstream traffic is much larger then the downstream traffic. This results in network congestion on the upstream link that was never planned for with initial broadband deployments.
  2. Time of day usage statistics no longer apply. Previously, service providers could assume peak usage at certain times of the day and lower usage at other times. With P2P applications, the computers are often left to transfer data throughout the day in an unattended fashion.
  3. Previously, peering traffic always traversed the Internet to another location. In today’s world, two home users can form a direction connection.
  4. Over-subscription assumptions no longer apply. A handful of power users can “hog” all of the bandwidth deployed for a much larger usage base.

Thanks to network world for some pointers in this post.

Categories
technology

Native XML support in ECMAScript (E4X)

Yet another interesting nugget of information pulled from Jon Udell’s site. Makes you wonder how many bloggers are merely human blog aggregators of other people’s blogs. Eventually there’s 1 part content and O(nn) level of repetition, like P2P only worse as info is wrapped with ‘opinion’ by each subsequent blogger. There’s a study that could be done here using a combination of the google API and bloglines. Blog information is distributed virally? Discuss…
E4X is native data type for XML in ECMAScript. More information here

Categories
humour

Want to give yourself an epileptic fit?

Well look no further (literally perhaps) then the Seizure Robots site.Killer japanese seizure robots with cheesy 70s soundtrack, wow!. Just what the doctor ordered first thing on a monday morning…

Categories
politics

Art imitates life (for e-voting anyway)

E-voting is a very sensitive issue in Ireland. It was due to be introduced for local and MEP (Member of the European parliament) elections in may of this year but real concerns about the reliability and security of the proposed system caused it to be abandoned to the embarassment of the current government. Many computer science academics, myself included, were distinctly worried about the proposed system based on disclosed implementation details, it’s closed nature and many glaring flaws in both hardware and software that would have mandated the use of a Voter-Verified Audit Trail (VVAT). So we created petitions and discussed the pertinent issues with politicians across the media. As happens, this was often portrayed as academics having a left-ish political agenda. It seemed like we weren’t allowed to disapprove of the system on purely technical grounds. Perhaps a degree of intellectual hubris is desirable when a politician explains to a computer scientist that “the system can’t be hacked as it’s not on the internet”…. No kidding!

In the US, Diebold elections produces a similiar system. It’s equally flawed and controversial. Basically the Diebold offerings General Election Management System (GEMS) produces two tables for vote counts and precinct summaries which may not match. They should but the hack to falsify results is quite trivial. Not very comforting.

Well the creators of the popular computer game The SIMS have seized on the debate by introducing e-voting into their hugely popular life simulation game. Their ‘Dumbold’ system:

is programmed with cheats, bugs and easter eggs, which you can discover and read about by playing around with it. It demonstrates and simulates some alarming problems with real world electronic voting machines, with many surprising effects and subtle interactions

I particularly like the feature where Baxter the Chimp (catchy name, I’d vote for him) erases election votes. So if you’re planning to run for office in a major western democracy you could do far worse than practive your electioneering skills with Baxter.