Temporal Complex Network Measures for Mobile Malware Containment
Picture the scene: you've bought a shiny new smartphone and have been customising it all weekend by installing various apps from the app store, however the following week you encounter a run of bad luck...
...first your house is burgled when you're at work, next your credit card is maxed out, your friends have been receiving spam text messages from you and to top it off, weeks later, some of your colleagues have had the same experience; what is going on?
Little beknown to you, within one of these seemingly innocuous apps lurks a piece of mobile malware (mobware) which has access to a wealth of personal information which an attacker can access remotely. Â
IMDEA Workshop on Internet Science
See here for titles/speakers and slides...
So far Pablo's talk had some v. interesting stuff about scaling the twitter service - clever work on solving hotspots andoverloads in memcache/mysql setup - reminded me of previous work on trying to get the IMDB system to scale - seems like these inverted databases are a pain in general, so a fundamental solution would be welcome...for those of you working on social net analysis, worry about (particularly un-self-declared) spambots in twitter - see Mowbray's talk - plus looking at Vattay'sstats talk is worthwhile
anyhow, I was reading this Future Internet Roadmap and decided that Private Green Clouds is defintely the way to go (andwe are there yet, so that is good:-)
here's the barking bit: why not put a data center in every car?
rationale:1. future cars will be electric.2. its proposed that future electricity generation will incorporate a lot of micro-generation(certainly solar here in spain, and wind in uk etc etc)3. the power distribution net is not fit for "uplink" electricity in large amount, so...4. micro-generation is largely intermittent (esp. wind, but obviously solar is at least on/off day/nite)5. hence we need to do local distribution of micro-generated power6. or else we need to store micro-generated electricty
power solution=> use electric cars as storage; to get an idea of scale, (see Mackay's book) cars could store about 30% of UK generated power -when we get to 100% of the carpool of the UK being electric...
so then where we plug cars in, why not also have a dataport too then instead of using meagre compute resource in someone's house, have a big-fat data center in the car(s) in a street - they can run off stored power when local production exceeds demand (or predicted (say nighttime) production/stored exceeds local and car demand...
the numbers should work very well...you can easily smooth day/night variation, but also short term wind variation...
before you all shout, one problem is that the batteries are really designed for a relatively small number of discharge cycles - however, some technologies (hydrogen fuel cell etc) would fixthat
so this needs 2 things.1 a smaller unit for data center2 a plan to do fiber-to-the-charging-point....
IETF 80 highlights: congestion control
There were several interesting talks on various aspects of congestion control at IETF 80, spread around various working groups and research groups; the majority of work that I would classify as actual research being done in the IETF and IRTF at the moment seems to concern congestion control in some way or other.  I've already written about Multipath TCP and Bufferbloat; here's a potpourri of other TCP problems and proposed solutions.  Most of these came out of the meeting of the Internet Congestion Control Research Group (ICCRG) - strictly part of the IRTF rather than the IETF - but the presentation on SPDY came from the IETF Transport Area open meeting.
IETF 80 highlights: Bufferbloat
Continuing my series of articles about noteworthy happenings at last week's IETF meeting, here is a summary of Jim Gettys's presentation on "Bufferbloat" to the Transport Area open meeting, which is in turn a summary of his many articles on the topic. This is significant not because it is new, but because it is a very thorough treatment of an old problem which has gone ignored by much of the IETF community - and probably by others too.
IETF 80 highlights: Multipath TCP
I have spent the last week in Prague for the 80th IETF meeting, and will be writing a few articles on the most interesting of the sessions I attended. Â Here's the first.