NETI@Home to Examine Net's Strengths

UnresolvedExternal writes "Wired is reporting about Georgia Tech researchers who want thousands of computer users to install their program to help them monitor traffic patterns on the Internet. They plan to use the data to strengthen the Net and unblock bottlenecks."

its stengths are easy!

1. pr0n
2. uninformed babbling by consipracy freaks
3. iditiotic blogs noobody cares about

Mac OS X Support

Has anyone tried to compile this on Mac OS X? What were your results?

Recent Findings

"Indicate the presence of a large DDoSing group known as 'Slashdot'. We will be looking further into this matter"

Re:I'm in!

Well, since it's looking at the 'Net, it's clearly yet another futile search for evidence of terrestrial intelligence.

And don't mind these ads...

Gee, sounds like gator got into academics.

Reduce Load

Well taking spam is put at between 30-50% of email usage how about getting rid of that for a start? Of course easier said than done

Rus

Re:Reduce Load

And when you also take random port scanning into account, one could easily estimate at least half of all internet traffic is either spam or port/vulnerability scanning. Get rid of both of these and connection speeds will jump!

I don't think so...

Folding@Home is my distributed computing effort of choice.

How is this more worthwhile than that?

Re:I don't think so...

Different people value things differently.

For example, a concerted effort to improve the quality of the net infrastructure could lead to more efficient distributed computing platforms, which means that eventually someone would write an improved folding program.

It's akin to an old computer science problem ... you can start a heavily computational algorithm now, and waste your time, or wait a few years for computers to be many times faster, and then do the parts of the calculation that you put off in a fraction of the time. Or wait a little longer ...

So, some people do the work now, and others work to improve the systems we use to do work. Seems worthwhile to me.

Personally, I run chessbrain [chessbrain.net].

and the resources

and the financial resources to unblock those bottlenecks are raised with the money they make from selling those 'traffic patterns' to anyone who bids...

Re:and the resources

According to the article:

The data collected by NETI, sans anything that might personally identify volunteers, will also be made available to other network researchers and the general public on the NETI website. As the project picks up speed -- currently there are only a few dozen volunteers -- they expect to make the data available in real time.

Do something much more worthwhile. FOLD!!!

If you're going to run any of these kinds of distributed clients, then you should run Folding@Home [stanford.edu] instead. The fruits of this work might just help save yours or a loved one's life someday.

Re:Do something much more worthwhile. FOLD!!!

Somehow I doubt the NETI client will be using all your CPU cycles to analyse things. It sounds to me like it's more of just a distributed network monitoring tool, so the two probably could cooperate together just fine.

Cool! Fewer spare cycles on my computer!

Maybe it can battle SETI@HOME, Kazaa, and Norton Antivirus for all of my CPU cycles, disk bandwidth and network bandwidth. It will not even leave me enough power to compose all my correspondence in notepad.

Don't just give those cycles away! Sell them! [popularpower.com]

SETI or NETI?

Arggh Its every geeks worst scheduling nightmare! Do I want the aliens or the faster pr0n. Dang what a scheduling conflict.

This just in from the future...

Researchers at Georgia Tech are concluding their two-year distributed analysis of network usage, concluding that most bottlenecks were, in fact, caused by NETI@Home traffic.

NETI@Home results

Internet traffic composition:

49.7% 0
49.7% 1
00.6% Other

Re:NETI@Home results

For those who wanted to know what the 'Other' might be [acc-eda.com]

IEEE 1164 std_logic
'U' Uninitialized
'X' Unknown
'0' Logic 0 (driven)
'1' Logic 1 (driven)
'Z' High impedance
'W' Weak 1
'L' Logic 0 (read)
'H' Logic 1 (read)
'-' Don't-care


I Have an exam involving this stuff (VHDL) Tomorrow... so I thought some of you might want to know... (But i'm sure most of you just '-' )

Tin Foil Hat Time

Ok Call me crazy, but somehow I see this information, crossing the boundry and making it off the reservation. One clever Hack, is probably all it would take. Better yet I see, the University as a Governmentally Funded Entity, somehow coerced by the Dept. of Homeland Security, into passing over the Data, or The program being Co-opted into some sort of Covert monitoring Utility, with a Cleverly conceled Opt-In, hidden in an Streamlined Update.

Want a good way to spot all those Heavy Bandwidth, Warzer's and P2P Traders? Also how long before the Data gets Mined for some purpose, as well. No matter how, well intentioned, and no matter what they say, about their privacy, settings, it can be Co-opted, if someone wants the information.

Faster?

They want to figure out how to make the Internet faster and more reliable, but to do that they need to gather data from tens of thousands of personal computers around the world.

So, they want to make it faster by having people send out and receive more data.

low, medium, high settings

just looked at their THIS AIN'T SPYWARE, RILLY! page. Well, what else is it but that? Of course it is, just for their claim to be a benevolent purpose, it's "whitehat" spying to be totally fair about it. But, we don't know if any "blackhats" will get the information over to the university, or--well, if any foreign states might have an interest in it and some of the juicer info gets transferred to some other places that might have a different idea on what to do with the information. Could be, anyone who's seen the demographics at most unis would have to agree, and tech has a lot of students that might have loyalties other than what is publically presented here. Just a note, but it's valid.

The high security setting is the one I predicteth gets used the most by people who run it, for obvious reasons.

hmm, probable bottlenecks. Whenever the latest mega worm hits you'll see which routers choke easiest. Massive constant traffic from owned and zombiefied end users home machines, that should be fairly random and even. Pockets/areas where file sharing is still big. And places with a derth of fat pipes obviously.

Interesting project, but I will have to think on it some if I want to run it. Also, maybe I am not seeing it, but it doesn't seem to have any info on how much of your machine it uses, I see the operating system requirements,installation, etc, but not the resources required. Anyone see that? My apologies if I missed it.

"Strengthen the Net"?

One of the defining characteristics of the Net seems to have been its ability to defy planning and design.

Even simply "increasing capacity" without addressing specific bottlenecks is often a waste of time. Look at the heavy investment in fibre-optics, most of which lies unused as new technology squeezes more and more out of existing cables.

Call me a cynic, but such projects sound more like fun for research grants than useful for real life.

My humble opinion of the Net is that it is a largely a self-steering phenomena that feeds on change and technology cycles. Since you can't predict change, and you can't prevent the technology cycles that cause it, it's meaningless to hope to plan this.

NEWSFLASH!

if you're that concerned about spyware, READ THE *SOURCE* and see what it does!

it's not like you're being asked to install a random binary and run it 24/7....

YETI@HOME

Where's YETI@HOME? How can we ever hope to find all the lost Yetis?

ahh... here it is:

[e-mail] [yetiathome.com]

I see a problem with this....

NETI@home apparently uses CAIDA's "NetGeo" database to map network addresses to geographic locations. However, the NetGeo home page [caida.org] proclaims (in big red type):

NOTE: NetGeo has not been actively maintained for

several years, and this will probably not change in the foreseeable future. As a result, there are several known major issues affecting accuracy and service availability. Please be warned that NetGeo may give wildly incorrect results, especially for recently allocated or re-assigned IP addresses.

That might make it just a bit useless, no?

This will never gain popularity

You have to install three seperate programs and jump through hoops in order to install this NETI, software which is essentially just voluntary spyware in the first place. Even if someone were so inclined to help out, what makes these people think they'd be willing to go through so much BS for something that really doesn't benefit them at all? You can always tell when techies put out a software package by themselves; it'll technically work and perform it's function quite well, but the user's experience always takes a back seat. Hmm... sounds like a certain OS that will go unnamed.

NETI@home

I am all in favor of a project that attempts to find intelligent life on the Internet.