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."

Mac OS X Support

[usermilk]

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

Reduce Load

[rf0]

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

I don't think so...

[drfishy]

Folding@Home is my distributed computing effort of choice.

How is this more worthwhile than that?

Re:Reduce Load

[cexshun]

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!

Tin Foil Hat Time

[CygnusXII]

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.

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

[jafuser]

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.

Re:NETI@Home results

[photon317]

Actually, I would bet that the 0's and 1's are not evenly distributed, considering how much of packet contents are unencrypted text, and that the protocol headers are bound to have bias, as are the assigned IP addresses that are most heavily used, etc...

Of Course its About Data gathering

[TubeSteak]

You seem to question the reasoning behind their idea... Its called QoS or Quality of Service. and I'm bet you're right, ISPs do it & won't give away their #s. So thats the point, independant QoS tests. Once you start thinking of the Internet as infrastructure & not a service, it makes a lot more sense.

Imagine if instead they were offering a little box that you plug into your wall and then into the internet. It will measure just about everything, from voltage fluctuation to how many watt hours you draw... and it'll report this back to someone who's trying to build an independant quality map of your nation's infrastructure. Is this any better/worse of an idea? Like they said, you can never have to much information.

This will never gain popularity

[spaeschke]

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.

Hi, I'm Bill Gates, and I wrote...

[Seng]

...an Internet tracking program. Honest! It works! How many viruses are going to pop up after something like this launches proclaiming to be the real thing?