Optimizing on-demand resource deployment for peer-assisted content delivery

Increasingly, content delivery solutions leverage client resources in exchange for services in a pee-to-peer (P2P) fashion. Such peer-assisted service paradigm promises significant infrastructure cost reduction, but suffers from the unpredictability associated with client resources, which is often exhibited as an imbalance between the contribution and consumption of resources by clients. This imbalance hinders the ability to guarantee a minimum service fidelity of these services to clients especially for real-time applications where content can not be cached. In this thesis, we propose a novel architectural service model that enables the establishment of higher fidelity services through (1) coordinating the content delivery to efficiently utilize the available resources, and (2) leasing the least additional cloud resources, available through special nodes (angels) that join the service on-demand, and only if needed, to complement the scarce resources available through clients. While the proposed service model can be deployed in many settings, this thesis focuses on peer-assisted content delivery applications, in which the scarce resource is typically the upstream capacity of clients. We target three applications that require the delivery of real-time as opposed to stale content. The first application is bulk-synchronous transfer, in which the goal of the system is to minimize the maximum distribution time - the time it takes to deliver the content to all clients in a group. The second application is live video streaming, in which the goal of the system is to maintain a given streaming quality. The third application is Tor, the anonymous onion routing network, in which the goal of the system is to boost performance (increase throughput and reduce latency) throughout the network, and especially for clients running bandwidth-intensive applications. For each of the above applications, we develop analytical models that efficiently allocate the already available resources. They also efficiently allocate additional on-demand resource to achieve a certain level of service. Our analytical models and efficient constructions depend on some simplifying, yet impractical, assumptions. Thus, inspired by our models and constructions, we develop practical techniques that we incorporate into prototypical peer-assisted angel-enabled cloud services. We evaluate these techniques through simulation and/or implementation

Optimizing on-demand resource deployment for peer-assisted content delivery (PhD thesis)

Increasingly, content delivery solutions leverage client resources in exchange for service in a peer-to-peer (P2P) fashion. Such peer-assisted service paradigms promise significant infrastructure cost reduction, but suffer from the unpredictability associated with client resources, which is often exhibited as an imbalance between the contribution and consumption of resources by clients. This imbalance hinders the ability to guarantee a minimum service fidelity of these services to the clients. In this thesis, we propose a novel architectural service model that enables the establishment of higher fidelity services through (1) coordinating the content delivery to optimally utilize the available resources, and (2) leasing the least additional cloud resources, available through special nodes (angels) that join the service on-demand, and only if needed, to complement the scarce resources available through clients. While the proposed service model can be deployed in many settings, this thesis focuses on peer-assisted content delivery applications, in which the scarce resource is typically the uplink capacity of clients. We target three applications that require the delivery of fresh as opposed to stale content. The first application is bulk-synchronous transfer, in which the goal of the system is to minimize the maximum distribution time -- the time it takes to deliver the content to all clients in a group. The second application is live streaming, in which the goal of the system is to maintain a given streaming quality. The third application is Tor, the anonymous onion routing network, in which the goal of the system is to boost performance (increase throughput and reduce latency) throughout the network, and especially for bandwidth-intensive applications. For each of the above applications, we develop mathematical models that optimally allocate the already available resources. They also optimally allocate additional on-demand resource to achieve a certain level of service. Our analytical models and efficient constructions depend on some simplifying, yet impractical, assumptions. Thus, inspired by our models and constructions, we develop practical techniques that we incorporate into prototypical peer-assisted angel-enabled cloud services. We evaluate those techniques through simulation and/or implementation. (Major Advisor: Azer Bestavros

Measuring Infringement of Intellectual Property Rights

© Crown Copyright 2014. You may re-use this information (excluding logos) free of charge in any format or medium, under the terms of the Open Government Licence. To view this licence, visit http://www.nationalarchives.gov. uk/doc/open-government-licence/ Where we have identified any third party copyright information you will need to obtain permission from the copyright holders concernedThe review is wide-ranging in scope and overall our findings evidence a lack of appreciation among those producing research for the high-level principles of measurement and assessment of scale. To date, the approaches adopted by industry seem more designed for internal consumption and are usually contingent on particular technologies and/or sector perspectives. Typically, there is a lack of transparency in the methodologies and data used to form the basis of claims, making much of this an unreliable basis for policy formulation. The research approaches we found are characterised by a number of features that can be summarised as a preference for reactive approaches that look to establish snapshots of an important issue at the time of investigation. Most studies are ad hoc in nature and on the whole we found a lack of sustained longitudinal approaches that would develop the appreciation of change. Typically the studies are designed to address specific hypotheses that might serve to support the position of the particular commissioning body. To help bring some structure to this area, we propose a framework for the assessment of the volume of infringement in each different area. The underlying aim is to draw out a common approach wherever possible in each area, rather than being drawn initially to the differences in each field. We advocate on-going survey tracking of the attitudes, perceptions and, where practical, behaviours of both perpetrators and claimants in IP infringement. Clearly, the nature of perpetrators, claimants and enforcement differs within each IPR but in our view the assessment for each IPR should include all of these elements. It is important to clarify that the key element of the survey structure is the adoption of a survey sampling methodology and smaller volumes of representative participation. Once selection is given the appropriate priority, a traditional offline survey will have a part to play, but as the opportunity arises, new technological methodologies, particularly for the voluntary monitoring of online behaviour, can add additional detail to the overall assessment of the scale of activity. This framework can be applied within each of the IP right sectors: copyright, trademarks,patents, and design rights. It may well be that the costs involved with this common approach could be mitigated by a syndicated approach to the survey elements. Indeed, a syndicated approach has a number of advantages in addition to cost. It could be designed to reduce any tendency either to hide inappropriate/illegal activity or alternatively exaggerate its volume to fit with the theme of the survey. It also has the scope to allow for monthly assessments of attitudes rather than being vulnerable to unmeasured seasonal impacts

The ambivalences of piracy : BitTorrent media piracy and anti-capitalism

This thesis argues that a more nuanced study of online media piracy is necessary in order to augment the dominant focus on piracy's relationship to copyright. Copyright as a frame for understanding piracy's relationship to capitalism has left potentially more crucial areas of study neglected. An approach to understanding the relationship of media piracy to anticapitalist projects must engage with forms of media piracy in their specificity and not as a homogeneous field. The thesis argues that it is possible and necessary to push beyond the constraints of copyright activism and intellectual property and in so doing opens up new areas of inquiry into online media piracy's potential to challenge logics of property and commodification. Original research is presented in the form of a highly detailed description and analysis of private BitTorrent filesharing sites. These sites are secretive and yet to receive scholarly attention in such a detailed and systematic way. This research finds both public and private variants of BitTorrent media piracy to be highly ambivalent with regards to their transformative potentials in relation to capital and thus tempers more extreme views of piracy as wholly revolutionary and emancipatory, and those that see pirate as a 'simple' form of theft. Public and private BitTorrent filesharing are theorised through the lens of Autonomist Marxism, a perspective that has a novel view of technology both as a tool of domination and a force for potential emancipation. Piracy is analysed for its capacity to refuse the valorisation of the enjoyment of music or film via the surveillance and tracking of audiences, which has become typical for contemporary legal online distribution venues. The thesis further analyses BitTorrent piracy's relationship to the 'common', the shared capacities for creating knowledge, ideas, affects. The thesis concludes that further scholarly research must move beyond concerns for creators' remuneration and its focus on reforming existing copyright policy and instead engage with the emergent institutional structures of organised media piracy. Though publicly accessible BitTorrent piracy has contributed to a broadening of awareness about issues of access to information, such an awareness often leaves in place logics of private property and capitalist accumulation. Finally, the thesis argues that the richness and complexity of private sites' organisational valences carry with them greater potential for radically destabilising capitalist social relations with regard to the distribution of cultural production

More Than Movies: Social Formations in Informal Networks of Media Sharing

This project examines the social structures, formations, and practices of informal networks of media sharing (INMSs) through both historical and sociological lenses. INMSs are comprised of individuals who distribute and circulate media to one another through noncommercial, unauthorized networks. The networks can be centered around texts, such as the early videophile publication The Videophile’s Newsletter, or they can be constituted by disparate groups of people who come together as a community using digital platforms like BitTorrent. While nominally concerned with circulating media, INMSs are also sources of social sustenance for their members and are sites of struggle for social and symbolic capital and power. They illuminate the complex ways in which community members utilize media as a starting point to satisfy a variety of needs, including developing bodies of cultural and technical knowledge, thinking through legal and ethical concerns, creating social bonds, and engaging in a variety of pedagogical practices. In short, INMSs are loci of social and cultural meaning-making for their members. This dissertation catalogs and analyzes the social practices and formations of three INMSs, the aforementioned Videophile’s Newsletter and two private, BitTorrent networks focused on cinema, Great Cinema and FilmDestruction, showing there to be diachronic and transplatform similarities between different networks. Rather than instances of rupture and divergence, this project argues that these networks are best understood through an evolutionary lens. It contends that INMSs and other similar formations should be increasingly studied because of their prevalence throughout the 20th and 21st centuries and their importance to consumers as unauthorized media distribution spaces whereby network members have greater latitude to experiment with media and create unique, diverse social structures and practices that are not contingent upon restrictions imposed by the media and copyright industries

Systems-compatible Incentives

Originally, the Internet was a technological playground, a collaborative endeavor among researchers who shared the common goal of achieving communication. Self-interest used not to be a concern, but the motivations of the Internet's participants have broadened. Today, the Internet consists of millions of commercial entities and nearly 2 billion users, who often have conflicting goals. For example, while Facebook gives users the illusion of access control, users do not have the ability to control how the personal data they upload is shared or sold by Facebook. Even in BitTorrent, where all users seemingly have the same motivation of downloading a file as quickly as possible, users can subvert the protocol to download more quickly without giving their fair share. These examples demonstrate that protocols that are merely technologically proficient are not enough. Successful networked systems must account for potentially competing interests. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how to build systems that give users incentives to follow the systems' protocols. To achieve incentive-compatible systems, I apply mechanisms from game theory and auction theory to protocol design. This approach has been considered in prior literature, but unfortunately has resulted in few real, deployed systems with incentives to cooperate. I identify the primary challenge in applying mechanism design and game theory to large-scale systems: the goals and assumptions of economic mechanisms often do not match those of networked systems. For example, while auction theory may assume a centralized clearing house, there is no analog in a decentralized system seeking to avoid single points of failure or centralized policies. Similarly, game theory often assumes that each player is able to observe everyone else's actions, or at the very least know how many other players there are, but maintaining perfect system-wide information is impossible in most systems. In other words, not all incentive mechanisms are systems-compatible. The main contribution of this dissertation is the design, implementation, and evaluation of various systems-compatible incentive mechanisms and their application to a wide range of deployable systems. These systems include BitTorrent, which is used to distribute a large file to a large number of downloaders, PeerWise, which leverages user cooperation to achieve lower latencies in Internet routing, and Hoodnets, a new system I present that allows users to share their cellular data access to obtain greater bandwidth on their mobile devices. Each of these systems represents a different point in the design space of systems-compatible incentives. Taken together, along with their implementations and evaluations, these systems demonstrate that systems-compatibility is crucial in achieving practical incentives in real systems. I present design principles outlining how to achieve systems-compatible incentives, which may serve an even broader range of systems than considered herein. I conclude this dissertation with what I consider to be the most important open problems in aligning the competing interests of the Internet's participants

Commons-oriented information syntheses : a model for user-driven design and creation activities

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-195).The phenomenon of user-driven creation activities has recently emerged and is quickly expanding, especially on the Web. A growing number of people participate in online activities, where they generate content by themselves, freely share their creations, and combine one another's creations in order to synthesize new material. Similar activities also occur in the area of product development, as people design products for themselves and share their designs for others to reuse or build upon. The phenomenon shows that under some special circumstances, typically passive users can become active creators. Also, under such circumstances, creation activities are not just isolated do-it-yourself activities of an individual; instead, people build on one another's creations and further share their own. Recognizing the positive potential of user-driven design, this work endeavored to understand the underlying drivers of open source creation and essential environmental elements. The most important element is the commons, or shared resources, of the communities where the activities take place. A model of commons-oriented information syntheses was formulated. The model provides a unifying description of user-driven creation activities and, more importantly, serves as a general prescription for how to construct a circumstance to recreate the phenomenon for desired applications. Key aspects of the model include: that, in this particular form of information synthesis, the processes of information creating, participating in a community, and sharing of information take place integrally; that the three processes revolve around the commons; and that people consider the prospective benefits and costs of all three processes when they decide on whether or not to engage in a synthesis activity. This understanding can be employed to build circumstances under which the phenomenon can be recreated.(cont.) The ability to recreate the phenomenon of user-driven creation activities can be beneficial in many areas, including design and knowledge transfer. In the design area, the understanding can be used to build an environment that induces and fosters open-source design. With such environment, people can design things for themselves by reusing, remixing, and building on designs shared by others. They can also freely make available their own designs, which can continue to evolve through a series of building-on processes by others. In the knowledge transfer area, the understanding can be a key to constructing an environment that not only supports transfer of knowledge, but also enables people to further generate knowledge by building on what they receive, particularly when the transferred knowledge is in meta-forms such simulation models. Possible applications include: engineering education (where students can connect models of fundamental topics in various ways to create simulations of complex systems and learn from them), sustainable development (where citizens can integrate models of potential environmental remedies to figure out which solution mix will be the most effective in their situations), and academic communities (where researchers can share and allow their colleagues to reuse or build on simulation models from which the results they publish in journal papers are derived). A prototypical online environment was designed and implemented, employing the essential elements outlined in the model. Hosting a commons of environmental and energy-related simulation models, the environment functions as an open-source design environment for alternative energy systems and a public platform for generative transfers of environmental knowledge. Anyone can freely access the commons, build on them to synthesize new simulation models, and further share their synthesized models as new commons.by Sittha Sukkasi.Ph.D

Pirates, Hydras, Trolls, and... Authors? On the Authorial Capacities of Digital Media Piracy

In this thesis, I undertake a positive analysis of digital media piracy to examine the movement’s authorial capacities. Proposed by James Meese as a way of looking beyond the traditional “piracy is theft” framework, this perspective offers new insights about how the increasingly mundane act of downloading and sharing media files can incite social change. I begin by examining what it means to be a digital media pirate, and how that question is part of the construction of the piracy movement. In the second chapter, I explore the complex relationship between piracy and information capitalism, highlighting how piracy arises from within information capitalism. In the third chapter, I look to how moral panic discourse has been used to demonize pirates, but also how this process has been appropriated by pirates to circulate counter-hegemonic discourse. In the fourth chapter, I examine how pirates are the authors of alternative ethical criteria within private filesharing communities, and how pirates mobilize moral and ethical discourse to push back against attempts to impede their ability to pursue a good piratical life. The final chapter of this thesis takes up the ethnographically rich moment of the Kickass Torrents shutdown in July 2016. Looking at the shut down as an event that like digital media piracy is both meaningful yet mundane, we see how pirates, though contesting romanticized and naturalized norms of property and authorship, push for a new form of authorship constituted by p2p communication in online spaces. Through these perspectives on the piracy movement in the summer of 2016, I argue that through the agglomerated effects of individual acts of piracy, the broader piracy movement radically changes the ways we understand and engage with cultural media objects

Networks, complexity and internet regulation: scale-free law

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Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed

We’re used to talking about how tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon rule the internet, but what about daemons? Ubiquitous programs that have colonized the Net’s infrastructure—as well as the devices we use to access it—daemons are little known. Fenwick McKelvey weaves together history, theory, and policy to give a full account of where daemons come from and how they influence our lives—including their role in hot-button issues like network neutrality. Going back to Victorian times and the popular thought experiment Maxwell’s Demon, McKelvey charts how daemons evolved from concept to reality, eventually blossoming into the pandaemonium of code-based creatures that today orchestrates our internet. Digging into real-life examples like sluggish connection speeds, Comcast’s efforts to control peer-to-peer networking, and Pirate Bay’s attempts to elude daemonic control (and skirt copyright), McKelvey shows how daemons have been central to the internet, greatly influencing everyday users. Internet Daemons asks important questions about how much control is being handed over to these automated, autonomous programs, and the consequences for transparency and oversight. Table of Contents Abbreviations and Technical Terms Introduction 1. The Devil We Know: Maxwell’s Demon, Cyborg Sciences, and Flow Control 2. Possessing Infrastructure: Nonsynchronous Communication, IMPs, and Optimization 3. IMPs, OLIVERs, and Gateways: Internetworking before the Internet 4. Pandaemonium: The Internet as Daemons 5. Suffering from Buffering? Affects of Flow Control 6. The Disoptimized: The Ambiguous Tactics of the Pirate Bay 7. A Crescendo of Online Interactive Debugging? Gamers, Publics and Daemons Conclusion Acknowledgments Appendix: Internet Measurement and Mediators Notes Bibliography Index Reviews Beneath social media, beneath search, Internet Daemons reveals another layer of algorithms: deeper, burrowed into information networks. Fenwick McKelvey is the best kind of intellectual spelunker, taking us deep into the infrastructure and shining his light on these obscure but vital mechanisms. What he has delivered is a precise and provocative rethinking of how to conceive of power in and among networks. —Tarleton Gillespie, author of Custodians of the Internet Internet Daemons is an original and important contribution to the field of digital media studies. Fenwick McKelvey extensively maps and analyzes how daemons influence data exchanges across Internet infrastructures. This study insightfully demonstrates how daemons are transformative entities that enable particular ways of transferring information and connecting up communication, with significant social and political consequences. —Jennifer Gabrys, author of Program Eart