syslog
22May/110

Opportunistic Networking, Altruism and Disasters+secure p2p socnets

The Social Nets project just got a very good final review in Brussels (excellent and beyond expectations) - one of its outputs is a prototype p2p decentralised social net tool called Safebook.

This was partly a successor project to Haggle... ... ...

One of the premise behind Haggle and opportunistic networking was that people are altruistic more often than not - while this may not be true when too much money (relative to personal wealth) is involved, a lot fo studies show it is true particularly in disasters - I am reading this popular journalism book on the topic called "A Paradise built in hell", by Rebecca Solnit, which is heavily researched and cites many many studies to show that contrary to government fears and many hollywood disaster movies,the vast majority of people in major catastrophes "do the right thing" and do not panic and loot - from 1906 SF earthquake to the 2005 New Orleans Katrina floods , the biggest cause of unnecessary death was autoritarian policing over-reacting (to the tune of 500 deaths in SF from shootings by national guard when there was almost no looting at all and evidence that much panic was _caused_ by people being told there might be panic...)

In contrast, people carried out many activities of mutual aid - one assumes that a comms network that supported this  would work really rather well...

On another note, this UCSD study on spam finds choke point - this from Stefan Savage et al., so probably very thorough.

This is a result of a long running project with UC Berkeley which was heavily funded, so sometimes these big projects make some sense(maybe)?

 

 

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