Listics

Stanislav Shalunov, Director of Engineeering for BitTorrent, Inc. presented a paper at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Infrastructure Workshop in Boston today (PDF) calling for IETF support in resolving user performance and ISP congestion problems by standardizing a mechanism improving cache discovery for Peer to Peer (P2P) applications. That’s a mouthful.

People using BitTorrent can experience response time delays of from 2 to 4 seconds while uploading files because of buffers filling up in their communications equipment. This makes impractical the use of other applications such as games and real time communications (applications requiring sub-second response times) while files are being uploaded.

The paper suggests that vendors (ISPs) support P2P applications by improving caching, cache discovery (peer selection), and congestion control. It concludes,

Our μTorrent client, with 35M active installs, is one of the most popular and probably the most popular is the U.S. We’re looking forward to implementing standard ways of making it work better for the users and the ISPs and we believe that the vendors of other popular BitTorrent clients would follow because this would improve the experience of the users of their clients.

(Shalunov twitters fun things like, “Bob became evil because he sat next to my raincoat in a restaurant: he subverted TCP fairness by opening two Firefox tabs at once,” and “When I have a spare decade, I’ll write the Sucklopedia, which will document the ways in which everything, alphabetically, sucks.” You can follow him here.)

Technorati Tags: BitTorrent, Shalunov, Sucklopedia, P2P

http://www.broadbandcensus.com

Go the site, take the census, and do the speed test. Drew Clark introduced us to this new “crowdsourcing” application this morning at F2C. Grab a button for your blog.

Technorati Tags: crowdsourcing, broadband census, drew clark

Among the bazillion wonderful links at Anne Mathews’ Ample Sanity, I found this strange and heartwarming holiday tale…

But then, I also found this stealth recruitment flash animation…

I guess you takes the good with the bad.

RB is the one in the blue shirt and khakis, right there in the middle of the mob of tourists grabbing walk-away crab cocktails on the wharf… there, see him?

Boy.  What if we had evolved with 12 fingers?  Not only would we have to hack a duodecimal arithmetic, but our lists would perforce be two things longer.  Here are ten things that every non-profit needs to know about gene splicing or something… wait, that’s ten things that every non-profit EXECUTIVE needs to know about INFORMATION technology, courtesy of Deborah Elizabeth Finn.

net2

Peter Forret, YAFG (yet another farging genius), wasn’t satisfied with the O’Reilly memeMap for Web 2.0 so he drew a better one.  At least I think it’s better, less chaotic.  Get, remix, deliver…

A decent, far more legible image is available on Peter’s FlickR site.

I just want to meet Rashmi, that’s why I’m going on like this…

Web 1.0 was all about linking and searching, publishing and presenting, and of course there was commercial activity from online banking to retail sales and auctioneering.  Web 2.0 is not here yet but some think it is emerging out of the fog of the future through ripples of Skype and MMPORGs, rapids of BitTorrent and foamy drifts of tags.  It seems self-serving of someone to aver that Web 2.0 has anything to do with a Technorati feed on Newsweek.  It seems in fact sort of, I dunno… retro?  Web 2.0 seems more about progress toward that Isenbergian ideal of dumbing down the center and smartening up of the edges of the net.  Never mind that infrastructure pieces that route Gigabit ethernet over MPLS or SONET or whatever are hairy smart components…  what the Weinbergerites and the Isenbergians are talking about is not having a bunch of databases in there driving authentication and billing.  All that infrastructure provides a commodity and the commodity is called throughput.  Don’t be inspecting my packets Mr. Bell.  That’s content and that’s all you need to know.  You pipeline it, we’ll use it.  We’ll bundle up and unbundle the content at the edges.  You just provide the transport.

Thus we have the vision of a vast peer to peer network that comprises Web 2.0.  I must ask, "What’s Newsweek got to do with it?"

Compumentor is a non-profit outfit that distributes tech tools to other non-profits and NGOs. They are planning to "Internet empower" those customers.  This will potentiate freedom of speech, freedom of virtual assembly, empowerment writ large, writ global. 

This has the potential of empowering communities that have never had a free press.  It’s exciting and I’m in.  The NetSquared site says there are 209 days to the event.  How many blawgers, journalists, teachers and techies and geeks have the stones to offer up a little pro bono service for a good thing?

Incentive? You want incentive?  April 26th there’s going to be a "blow-out party… entertainment, food and drink."    I think there might be music and dancing and stumbling around in the parking lot.  At least that is what I would expect.  On the 27th they promise aspirins and wi-fi and comfort food and a chance to deepen those relationships….