No More Cog in the Wheel, Now You'll Be a Node in the Internet

GigaOM - 6.3.13 by Kevin Fitchard

A group of French researchers believe that the sensors and transmitters we wear will route and relay data, not just collect it. We won’t just be connected to the network. We’ll be the network.

Photo: Shutterstock/higyou

Ever wonder what the network infrastructure of the future will be? Try looking in the mirror.

Some day our bodies — or at least the clothing or accessories that adorn them — could become key network nodes in the internet of things. European researchers think that sensors and transmitters on our bodies can be used to form cooperative ad hoc networks that could be used for group indoor navigation, crowd-motion capture, health monitoring on a massive scale and especially collaborative communications. Last week, French institute CEA-Leti and three French universities have launched the Cormoran project, which aims to explore the use of such cooperative interpersonal networks.

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Internet to be 1000-times faster in a few years

Imagine if all the data traversing the world right now—on long distance networks and between and within computers and other hardware—could be sent through a single fiber the width of a human hair.

A new research center has been launched at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) to make that a reality. Researchers with the Terabit Optical Ethernet Center (TOEC) will develop the technology necessary for a new generation of Ethernet a thousand times faster, and much more energy efficient, than today’s most advanced networks. They are aiming for 1 Terabit Ethernet over optical fiber—1 trillion bits per second—by 2015, with the ultimate goal of enabling 100 Terabit Ethernet by 2020.

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Internet running out of addresses

ReadWriteWeb - 7.21.10 by Richard MacManus

The Internet will run out of Internet addresses in about 1 year's time, we were told today by John Curran, President and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). The same thing was also stated recently by Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist.

The main reason for the concern? There's an explosion of data about to happen to the Web - thanks largely to sensor data, smart grids, RFID and other Internet of Things data. Other reasons include the increase in mobile devices connecting to the Internet and the annual growth in user-generated content on the Web.

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Primal Pages - Semantic web builds pages around your thoughts

VentureBeat - 6.22.10 by Anthony Ha

We’ve seen a lot of startups using semantic technology, usually to improve Web search. Peter Sweeney, founder and co-president of a company called Primal, said he’s taking a different approach from the rest of the semantic crowd: “We’re focused less on annotating content, and more on expressing the thoughts and intentions of individual consumers.”

If that sounds a little vague, things should get a little clearer with Primal’s just-announced service, Primal Pages. Like other semantic companies, Primal tries to understand the actual meaning of a user’s commands, and with Pages it tries to create a webpage that contains the exact information you’re looking for. When you search for something on a service like Google, especially if you’re doing serious research, you probably find what you want in bits and pieces — a paragraph from a Wikipedia article, another paragraph from a research paper, an image from Flickr, and so on.

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The web is making it personal

gigaom - 4.21.10 (by Liz Gannes)

Facebook, as expected, launched at its f8 conference in San Francisco today its master plan to make the rest of the web social. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the social networking company’s director of product, Bret Taylor, laid out three major initiatives to that effect.

The f8 launches expand on the concept of authenticating on sites using Facebook Connect — which reached 100 million users in its first 15 months — and sending back updates to the Facebook news feed. Most interestingly, Facebook will move from the idea of a transitory stream of actions to give outside sites persistent access to its users.

First, social plugins are little widgets that bring Facebook to the rest of the web. They offer “instant personalization,” said Taylor, with the goal of increasing user engagement, using an iFrame and a cookie remembering the Facebook user. So when you visit a website, even if it’s new to you, you’ll see which friends have also logged in there, what their activity is and a set of recommendations based on their actions.

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What the Internet Looks Like

NYT - 3.1.10 (by John Markoff)

Photo credit: Peter Morance.

SAN FRANCISCO — In a dimly lit chamber festooned with wires and hidden in one of California’s largest data centers, Tim Pozar is changing the shape of the Internet.

He is using what Internet engineers refer to as a “meet-me room.” The room itself is enclosed in a building full of computers and routers. What Mr. Pozar does there is to informally wire together the networks of different businesses that want to freely share their Internet traffic.

The practice is known as peering, and it goes back to the earliest days of the Internet, when organizations would directly connect their networks instead of paying yet another company to route data traffic. Originally, the companies that owned the backbone of the Internet shared traffic. In recent years, however, the practice has increased to the point where some researchers who study the way global networks are put together believe that peering is changing the fundamental shape of the Internet, with serious consequences for its stability and security. Others see the vast increase in traffic staying within a structure that has remained essentially the same.

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Captchas, bots, and the intelligence arms race

New Scientist - 11.03.2009 by Colin Barras



Captchas, the scrambled images used to separate humans from software bots online, could become harder for bots to solve – and easier for humans to handle – by animating them.

That is the claim of computer scientist Niloy Mitra at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, who along with colleagues has devised a system that should separate the bots from the humans.

With some captcha systems close to being cracked, website owners are having to make them ever more fiendish to thwart bots. That comes at a cost, however: it makes them difficult for humans to read too, says Mitra.

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