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Advogato - Good metadata, even when under attack, based on a trust metric | |
presenters | Raph Levien |
history | Advogato launched in November 2000, as a testbed for a network flow based attack-resistant trust metric. In July 2002, Advogato added a new eigenvector based trust metric for rating diaries. The thesis is still ongoing. |
demo | We will tour Advogato, and run the trust metric code by itself. Also explain how it works, including both network flow (which is simple), and the random walk interpretation of eigenvectors, which is very strongly related to Google's PageRank algorithm. |
achievements | Advogato has become an integral part of the free software scene. We definitely showed that it's realistic to construct a trust graph. The accuracy of the trust metric may not be perfect (there is definitely "cert inflation"), but overall the site manages to be remarkably free of trolls and abuse, with virtually no manual moderation. |
claim to fame |
Salon Story "This is yet another piece of good work from Raph Levien" -- Daniel Veillard. |
future plans | Keep Advogato going. Finish my thesis. Spread the word about trust metrics. |
Alluvium - p2p media streaming for low-bandwidth broadcasters | |
presenters | Brandon Wiley |
history | The Tristero project develops a set of standard reusable components for peer-to-peer systems. When the recent shutdown of Internet radio stations occurred, we began using these components to build a superior system for audio and video streaming. |
demo | Hosting and downloading will be demonstrated |
achievements | Broadcasters only publish metadata Very low bandwidth requirement Exempt from current RIAA webcasting royalties Only a webserver is required |
claim to fame | The author is a well-known peer-to-peer researcher and former co-founder of the Freenet project |
future plans | After the beta release of the product, we plan to help alternative sources of news and culture establish low-cost media broadcasting stations. We have founded a non-profit organization, the Foundation for Decentralization Research, to help fund the adoption of peer-to-peer media broadcasting technologies by alternative media such as indymedia, Guerilla News Network, and local college and pirate radio stations. With our technology, it should be possible for users with little technical experience to run media broadcasting stations on old PCs and a consumer-grade broadband connection which will scale well past a reasonable number of listeners. |
Bayonne - Telephony application services for freely licensed operating systems | |
presenters | David Sugar, Rich Bodo |
history | Started in middle of 2000. Has been in wide use since 2001 in e-government, commercial organizations, and carriers. 1.0 release of GNU Bayonne in September 2002. |
demo | A live GNU/Linux system will be demonstrated with an OpenSwitch12 telephony card installed and acting as a complete telephone system, with several analog telephones attached, using the GNU Bayonne telephony service daemon. |
achievements | GNU Bayonne is already used by commercial carriers in Europe, in e-government projects, and in many industries to provide voice response application services that can integrate freely with other services. We are soon going to also provide direct office telephony solutions using GNU Bayonne. |
claim to fame | Awarded prestigious "Best new Enterprise Infrastructure Application of the year" by 2001 the Singapore Linux Conference. |
future plans | IP Voice support, DS3 capacity voice response applications on a single server, support for Carrier Grade Linux enhancements. |
Cryptopy - pure Python crypto | |
presenters | Paul Lambert |
history | Wrote code. Ran code. Saw code run. |
demo | Demo will include -
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achievements |
'Pure Python' crypto library
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future plans |
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DeepGreen - Agent Oriented investment analysis designed to be self-funding | |
presenters | Michael F Korns |
history | Began in 1993 with version 1.0, and released version 4.3 this July. Project is vertically integrated with its own lisp/javaScript/XML compilers, proprietary agent oriented database, and IDE. Project has been self funding from investing profits. In 1999 spun off a commercial start up, InvestByAgent, to handle all commercial application of the technology. InvestByAgent received a $10 million first venture round in 2000 |
demo | Laptop demo of DeepGreen, its current successes, current weaknesses, and plans for DeepGreen Version 5. |
achievements | Balanced hedged-growth investing with a nine year (through today) average per annum return of 25%. Our best year was a 104% gain our worst year was a 13% loss |
claim to fame | We're "black". Fame is not a desired option. |
future plans | We're in the process of adding a Cognitive layer to DeepGreen to further increase investing profits. |
GNU radio - Hacking the RF Spectrum with Free Software and Hardware | |
presenters | Eric Blossom, Matt Ettus |
history | GNU Radio was launched in April of 2001 to build a platform to learn about, explore and deploy software defined radios, using open source software and hardware. ``Regulatory hacking'' has led us down a path that has most recently lead to the creation of a software HDTV transmitter and receiver. The HDTV receiver can serve as the basis for an open source digital TV recorder in the TiVo/Replay genre. |
demo | We'll be demoing some of applications that we've built with GNU Radio including: concurrent multi-channel FM receiver, the mother of all scanners, and our all software ATSC (HDTV) receiver. [If it's working by the conference, we'll also demo our encrypted digital radio transceivers.] Demos and talks will include show and tell of radio construction by scripting together signal processing modules (radio hacking made easy), transparent use of SMP hardware and other cool stuff. |
achievements | A fully functional HDTV receiver. |
future plans | encrypted digital transceivers, ad-hoc networking using cognitive radio techinques, GPS receiver, trunking and relaying for existing radio services, research with new modulation techniques and protocols. |
HOTorNOT - People submit their picture for others to rate from 1 to 10 | |
presenters | Jim Young, James Hong |
history | Started site in October 2000, Added "meeting" component 3 months later. |
demo | We will discuss our approach to UI, and why it has been so important to the success of HOTorNOT. |
achievements | Website scaled very quickly, built entirely on open source tools, with no real financing. |
claim to fame | We were once profiled in the New Yorker |
future plans | Continue to grow the site. |
Hydan - Steganographically conceal a message into executable applications | |
presenters | Rakan El-Khalil |
history | This project started conceptually while on vacation during the summer of 2002. Hydan was then put to code in september of that year, and a working version was ready shortly thereafter. |
demo | Will embed a given text message into an application chosen by the audience. This application will then be run to show that execution proceeds identically to the original program, and then we will retrieve the concealed message. |
achievements |
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future plans |
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Khashmir - A distributed hash table library upon which applications can be built | |
presenters | Andrew Loewenstern |
history | Khashmir has been written in an attempt to spark distributed application development with scaleable search techniques. |
demo | Demo of a peer to peer .music recommendation system based on Khashmir. |
achievements | Includes Airhook reliable datagram protocol over UDP for STUN-like NAT penetration |
future plans | Deploy a useful system based on Khashmir |
Mixminion - A next-generation anonymous remailer | |
presenters | Nick Mathewson |
history | Mixminion began in early 2002 as a project to design a
next-generation successor to the current 'Type-II' anonymous
remailer network. It aims to resist all known attacks as well as
or better than currently deployed software; to add a secure and
anonymous reply mechanism where not even remailers can distinguish
forward messages from replies; to add an integrated directory
design; and to add link encryption. In addition to a specification, we also decided to provide a working reference implementation. Mixminion has been in development since the first version of the specification was near-complete in May 2002. |
demo |
We'll demonstrate a working Mixminion client and server. If, as planned, we have directory servers working before the materials submission date, any user with a static IP will be able to start a Mixminion node and have other users route their packets through the network. If not, messages will pass through a set of servers on- or off-site. The presentation will focus on attacks against mix-nets, and the defenses Mixminion uses to prevent them. As many attacks as possible will be demonstrated against live servers. The presentation will also discuss issues involved in implementing anonymity software, and discuss the good and poor implementation choices we've made along the way. |
achievements | We've got a specification and a design paper, both available from our project's homepage. Our protocol design has been adopted by the Mixmaster team as the basis for Mixmaster v4. Today, we have over 14K lines of code in CVS, implementing all of the spec except as discussed below, with acceptable performance (approximately 1.2 MB of messages per second on an 800MHz Pentium-III desktop). |
future plans |
The following features from the Mixminion spec are not yet
implemented in our library:
We're also researching additional improvements to our current specification, including:
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Neurogrid - Decentralized Fuzzy Meta-Data Search | |
presenters | Sam Joseph |
history | Released 1st web prototype one month after the first O'Reilly P2P conference. 1st personal version released for windows May 2001. NeuroGrid P2P simulator code released before second O'Reilly P2P conference, and used in CodeCamps in Tokyo. More recently NeuroGrid has implemented the Tristero search interface and separated out its core features into the NG Core. Once stable the NeuroGrid API will be proposed as a Tristero reputation/search interface extension. Current work focuses on isolating the persistence, search and transport apis, so that the system will be more maintainable and interoperate with other projects. |
demo | Brief overview of NeuroGrid design. Demonstration of bookmark file being imported into NeuroGrid, searches over the imported urls and meta-data editing. Assuming we have internet connectivity the demonstration will also include a connection to the NeuroGrid net for distributed searches. The key part of the demonstration will be to show how NeuroGrid learns the users preferences in response to the way they search. Thus if a user bookmarks a url, the words used to search for it become more strongly associated with it, leading to a higher ranking in future searches. Similarly if a user bookmarks a url provided by a remote search engine/neurogrid node, then this node will appear higher in future rankings. |
achievements |
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claim to fame | Mixup led to an unprepared Lightning talk at the first O'Reilly P2P conference. "Remember the site http://www.neurogrid.net - don't go there yet, wait until March 15th" Sam told the audience. |
future plans | Total World Domination (of decentralised fuzzy search systems) Seriously though, the main aims are more rigorous simulation including adversarial meta-data environments; and release of more user-friendly software. The project code has been re-written recently to fix various problems that the web prototype brought to light. The core code can be used as a generic way to organise data, but in order to get that across there needs to be a simple to use, easy to understand application that runs on top of it. The main example applications still revolve around organising urls, and still have a way to go before they are simple to use. We intend to have a smoothly operating application demo (of url organisation) for CodeCon, but ultimately we would like to see this system in use for organising files, email, perhaps available as a basic OS service, so that any application could access resources via meta-data as opposed to file paths. |
OpenRatings - An open source, professor ratings engine | |
presenters | J. Paul Reed, Brian Morris, Kennan Blehm |
history |
OpenRatings, released under the Jabber open source
license on July 1st, 2002, grew out of the work done
to rewrite the Polyratings.com professor ratings engine
in PHP and import the data from flat files into a
database. Polyratings, launched in January of 1999, was one of the first such professor ratings sites on the Internet. The PHP version was open sourced to protect both the intellectual property value invested in the original project and the First Amendment rights of students at Cal Poly, SLO. This makes OpenRatings a unique open source project in that it not only protects "freedom" in terms of "free beer" and "free code," but in terms of the "free speech" of over 16,000 students at one site alone. |
demo |
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achievements |
Apart from the technical achievements accomplished
during the project's relatively short lifetime,
which would be covered in the demo, the OpenRatings
project is currently in use by students at California
Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo,
Colorado State University, and the University of
California at Santa Cruz. We've also received serious interest and requests for installation support from the University of Colorado at Boulder, Nova Southeastern University, the University of Leoben, Austria, the University of California at Davis, and the University of California at Santa Barbara. |
claim to fame |
The original Polyratings.com ratings engine was one
of the first such engines on the Internet, and has
been featured in the Los Angeles Times, the Japan
Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Houston
Chronicle, the Sacramento Bee and various other
publications. One of the original authors of the ratings engine has also consulted in a court case involving professors suing students running a similar site at San Jose State University. |
future plans |
Technical plans include adding a web-based
administration interface and 'enterprise-level' features
to make OpenRatings more attractive to smaller
universities who may want managed student feedback, but
don't have the technology budget to write or purchase
proprietary software to accomplish this. These plans,
while important, do take a backseat to providing features
that are required by our first "customers": college
students all over the world. Current project leaders have also identified installation and operational support as a critical area to assist students at universities world-wide. Support areas include both the technical issues associated with starting an OpenRatings installation, and the socio-political and legal issues such a site can raise with the university administrators. This is yet another aspect which sets OpenRatings apart from many open source projects, and which would be covered in more detail in a demo. |
Paketto Keiretsu - Interesting and Useful Techniques for TCP/IP Networking | |
presenters | Dan Kaminsky |
history | Paketto is similar in lineage to Dan's presentation at CodeCon 2002 |
demo |
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achievements | The Paketto Keiretsu is a collection of tools that use new and unusual strategies for manipulating TCP/IP networks. They tap functionality within existing infrastructure and stretch protocols beyond what they were originally intended for. It includes Scanrand, an unusually fast network service and topology discovery system, Minewt, a user space NAT/MAT router, linkcat, which presents a Ethernet link to stdio, Paratrace, which traces network paths without spawning new connections, and Phentropy, which uses OpenQVIS to render arbitrary amounts of entropy from data sources in three dimensional phase space. |
claim to fame |
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future plans | You'll see :-) |
YouServ - A communal web-hosting system for the masses | |
presenters | Roberto Bayardo, Dan Gruhl |
history | The YouServ system has been deployed in a constantly evolving form within the IBM intranet for almost 18 months. In that time, it has been used by over 5000 unique users, with around 1500 of them actively running the software in any given week. Many more have accessed YouServ-hosted content over the IBM internal web. Earlier this year, a limited version of YouServ (e.g. no p2p search) was deployed for use by the Carnegie Mellon University community, but has yet to achieve critical mass. |
demo | We will give a demonstration of the YouServ system as it is deployed
within IBM (through secure tunnel into the IBM intranet). We will focus
on the unique features of publishing a website or sharing files with
YouServ compared to something like Apache. These features include:
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achievements | Demonstrated P2P file sharing is useful within a corporate environment. |
future plans | Our goal is to open source the system to allow deployment outside of IBM (without any licensing headaches). However this is a complicated process we are still navigating. |
Panel - 'Current Developments in Version Control' | |
topics |
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panelists |
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organised by Len Sassaman.
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