Month: October 2005
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Virtual World, Meet Terrestrial Government
Something remarkable is happening in virtual worlds. These are online virtual “spaces” where you can play a virtual character, and interact with countless other characters in a rich environment. It sounds like a harmless game, but there’s more to it than that. Much more. When you put so many people into a place where they…
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Cost Tradeoffs of P2P
On Thursday, I jumped in to a bloggic discussion of the tradeoffs between centrally-controlled and peer-to-peer design strategies in distributed systems. (See posts by Randy Picker (with comments from Tim Wu and others), Lior Strahilevitz, me, and Randy Picker again.) We’ve agreed, I think, that large-scale online services will be designed as distributed systems, and…
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"Centralized" Sites Not So Centralized After All
There’s an conversation among Randy Picker, Tim Wu, and Lior Strahilevitz over the U. Chicago Law School Blog about the relative merits of centralized and peer-to-peer designs for file distribution. (Picker post with Wu comments; Strahilevitz post) Picker started the discussion by noting that photo sharing sites like Flickr use a centralized design, rather than…
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Cellphone Denial of Service
A new paper by Enck, Traynor, McDaniel, and La Porta argues that cellphone networks that support SMS, a technology for sending short text messages to phones, are subject to denial of service attacks. The researchers claim that a clever person with a fast home broadband connection could potentially block cell phone calling in Manhattan or…
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eDonkey Seeks Record Industry Deal
Derek Slater points to last week’s Senate hearing testimony by Sam Yagan, President of MetaMachine, the distributor of the popular eDonkey peer-to-peer file sharing software. The hearing’s topic was “Protecting Copyright and Innovation in a Post-Grokster World”. Had the Supreme Court drawn a clearer legal line in its Grokster decision, we wouldn’t have needed such…