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只要人人都献出一点 CPU ,就能够让 Internet 变得更美好一些。
这是 Georgia 技术学院的 NETI@home 计划 (http://www.neti.gatech.edu/) 的哲理。
( NETI@home 计划中文官方站点:http://www.equn.com/neti/ )
类似以前著名的 Seti@Home ,Neti@Home 希望最多的人能够下载这个小软件然后一直保持运行在自己的电脑上。而这个客户端就会不停的收集你的网络数据,包括各种协议的速度,下载次数,还有未被邀请的请求。从中便可以知道哪些ISP是最好的,速度和安全;哪里有一个影响了 Internet 的主干路由器问题。
当有了足够多的人下载并且使用了这个软件之后还会有更多的价值,比如实时的发现网络蠕虫病毒的爆发,甚至可以从数据地图中找到该病毒是从哪里起源的。
虽然想法很高尚,但是这个项目还刚刚开始。除了知道的人有限之外,更主要的问题还在于他们需要解除人们对隐私的疑虑。不会有人愿意自己的上网东西被一个中央数据库全部记录。当然 Neti@Home 已经做了足够多的承诺,软件上还有隐私级别的调整。
每个上网的人都希望 Internet 更完美,但是我看不会是每个 Internet 的使用者都会参与到这个项目中。就象每马路上的人都希望道路通畅,但是大家都不会管自己的乱穿红灯给多少人带来了阻塞。
文章来源:
引用:
http://www.wired.com/news/techno ... tml?tw=wn_tophead_2
NETI to Examine Net's Strengths
Georgia Tech researchers want you -- and your computer.
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.
Currently, Internet performance research almost always uses data gathered from various router points along the Internet's backbone, the high-speed pipelines that keep data moving around the globe. But George Riley, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Tech, and graduate student Robby Simpson want to use data collected directly from Internet users.
To do this they've developed an open-source software application that gathers network performance statistics such as average response time, average round-trip time, connection times, download times and number of packets sent and received.
Now they just need truckloads of volunteers to download their NETI@home application, and allow the application to send network performance information from the volunteers' computers to a server at Georgia Tech, where it will be analyzed and made available to anyone else who wants to use it for their own Internet improvement projects.
Neti@home is named after the University of California at Berkeley's SETI@home project, which uses volunteer computing power to search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
SETI distributes data collected from a high-powered radio telescope in Puerto Rico to millions of computers around the world, borrowing their processing power to analyze the data for potential evidence of extraterrestrial communications or activity.
"With NETI, we're searching for network intelligence -- intelligence about the way the Internet works so we can make it work better," said Simpson.
But the data that NETI will gather is far more personal than that gathered by SETI. Riley and Simpson know that people may be leery of having data on their network usage tracked and transmitted, but promise to protect volunteers' privacy.
NETI users can set privacy protections that will determine what types of data will be gathered and reported from their computers. The reports sent to Georgia Tech are also stored on the user's computer, so the user can see exactly what statistics are gathered.
"NETI is not spyware, and in no way compromises any of your private data," said Riley. "It is nearly painless from a performance point of view, and completely private if you opt to use our most restrictive privacy setting."
Simpson and Riley said they hope, however, that volunteers will not choose the most restrictive privacy setting. Less restrictive settings will allow them to gather more useful data from participating computers.
"We will use the collected data in our research to create realistic simulation models of typical Internet users' behavior," Riley said. "Better simulation models lead to better simulations, which lead to better protocol analysis, better protocols and, eventually, a better Internet."
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.
If NETI is installed on enough machines with a broad-enough distribution, the data that's being collected could even provide an early-warning detection system for worms and viruses, said Simpson.
"If we start noticing that many NETI@home users are receiving anomalous traffic, that could be an indication of the spread of an Internet worm, or some other sort of attack," Simpson said. "If the clients were distributed enough, one could even see which parts of the world are attacked first and then possibly use the data to track where the worm seems to have originated from."
Simpson also envisions using NETI data to produce a chart of the best and worse Internet service providers, in terms of performance and security.
"The beauty of collecting data such as this, data that hasn't been gathered before, is that we can't imagine all of the possibilities," said Simpson. "But one immediate way of meeting our goal of 'making the Internet better' would be to identify some of the worst network routes, and point these out to the organization that owns them. I would imagine it would be quite embarrassing for a major ISP if they were found to have the worst connections."
Systems administrators can also use NETI to monitor performance on their private networks. And since the NETI application is open-source, Simpson and Riley also hope the development community will come up with other interesting uses for the application.
Georgia Tech plans to keep the NETI project going "theoretically forever," according to Riley.
"Everyone agrees that the Internet is continually changing and growing, and data from year 2004 will likely be obsolete by 2005," Simpson said. "Besides, you can never have too much data."
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中文部分作者:莱茵枣
转自:http://218.87.20.106/forum/viewtopic.php?t=41
http://bbs1.iamalex.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=41
本帖中文部分转载,碧城仙 已于2005年1月与作者 莱茵枣 取得联系,获许转载。 |
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