There has been a fair amount of effort on UCAN (User Controlled Authorization Networks), and other types of ‘decentralized credentials’ over the last couple years. These efforts perpetuate the same control structures that exist today, with delegated trees of hierarchical control. This is in contrast to a personal or ‘decentralized’ trust we might hope for… Continue reading On Trust
Category: DistributedComputing
Retrieval Constraints
A couple months ago I wrote up some of the edges that I’ve encountered in thinking about how to structure decentralized data transfer systems. These are an extension of the limitations that were initially encountered in bittorrent style tit-for-tat exchanges, and have now matured into a much more extensive field looking at incentives and other… Continue reading Retrieval Constraints
Building Decentralization
I talked earlier this week on some of the current problems in decentralization at the rc3 event. It’s easy to be pessimistic about the current silo’d technological landscape, but decentralized platforms are continuing to make progress and there’s reason to be hopeful. At the same time, there’s a green field of many more decentralized protocols… Continue reading Building Decentralization
Stunning
I’ve started to dive once again into the mess of connection establishment. Network address translation (NAT) is a reality today for most Internet users, and poses a significant hurdle in creating the user-user (or peer-peer) connections. NAT is the process used by your router to provide multiple internal (192.168.x.x) addresses that are all only visible… Continue reading Stunning
proxy2p
A quick screenshot of what I’m doing for my distributed computing final project. I’m calling it friend.s for now, although I’m not totally satisfied with that name. It’s a cross-platform piece of software that brings elements of peer-to-peer communication into your web browser. The goal is to be able to eventually offer a completely decentralized… Continue reading proxy2p
Distributed Computing so far
I gave a half-hour presentation on my research at the admitted students weekend earlier. I think I was able to convey some sense of the opportunities that Mudd offers for research, and presented a reasonable face of what it could look like. The talk was an explanation of the concepts behind distributed hash tables, and… Continue reading Distributed Computing so far
Experimenting with 802.11s
The purpose of this document is an explanation of what is defined in the IEEE 802.11s standard, and the states of current implementations based on this standard. 802.11s is the standardization of mesh networking. That is to say that it defines a protocol for mobile devices where they can communicate amongst themselves even when not directly connected, and can route data beyond their immediate environment.
on p2p in the browser
The final project I want to accomplish this semester in my distributed computing independent study, is to come up with a way to access p2p capabilities from within the browser. I was originally hoping to do this with JavaScript API that relied behind the scenes on the new flash p2p protocol, rtmfp. The protocol has… Continue reading on p2p in the browser
Torrent Auditor
I have now migrated the python torrent client that I’ve been working on to a google code project. It lives at torrentauditor and now has basic support for actually downloading torrent files. I researched the bittorrent extension protocols this week, but was somewhat frustrated by what I found. Most of the interesting ones are implemented… Continue reading Torrent Auditor
Downloading Torrents
I extended the work from last week in order to actually get data from a swarm. The main change is that new sockets are now allocated for each connection, state is remembered, and the client can actually get so far as to download data from the other peers. What needs to happen still is that… Continue reading Downloading Torrents