A Decentralized Online Social Network with Efficient User-Driven Replication

Unprecedented growth of online social networks (OSNs) increasingly makes privacy advocates and government agencies worrisome alike. In this paper, we propose My3, a privacy-friendly decentralized alternative for online social networking. The My3 system exploits well-known interesting properties of the current online social networks in its novel design namely, locality of access, predictable access times, geolocalization of friends, unique access requirements of the social content, and implicit trust among friends. It allows users to exercise finer granular access control on the content, thus making My3 extremely privacy-preserving. Moreover, we propose different replication strategies that users may independently choose for meeting their personalized performance objectives. A detailed performance study evaluates the system regarding profile availability, access delay, freshness and storage load. By using real-world data traces, we prove that My3 offers high availability even with low average online time of users in the network

Crux: Locality-Preserving Distributed Services

Distributed systems achieve scalability by distributing load across many machines, but wide-area deployments can introduce worst-case response latencies proportional to the network's diameter. Crux is a general framework to build locality-preserving distributed systems, by transforming an existing scalable distributed algorithm A into a new locality-preserving algorithm ALP, which guarantees for any two clients u and v interacting via ALP that their interactions exhibit worst-case response latencies proportional to the network latency between u and v. Crux builds on compact-routing theory, but generalizes these techniques beyond routing applications. Crux provides weak and strong consistency flavors, and shows latency improvements for localized interactions in both cases, specifically up to several orders of magnitude for weakly-consistent Crux (from roughly 900ms to 1ms). We deployed on PlanetLab locality-preserving versions of a Memcached distributed cache, a Bamboo distributed hash table, and a Redis publish/subscribe. Our results indicate that Crux is effective and applicable to a variety of existing distributed algorithms.Comment: 11 figure

Socially-Aware Distributed Hash Tables for Decentralized Online Social Networks

Many decentralized online social networks (DOSNs) have been proposed due to an increase in awareness related to privacy and scalability issues in centralized social networks. Such decentralized networks transfer processing and storage functionalities from the service providers towards the end users. DOSNs require individualistic implementation for services, (i.e., search, information dissemination, storage, and publish/subscribe). However, many of these services mostly perform social queries, where OSN users are interested in accessing information of their friends. In our work, we design a socially-aware distributed hash table (DHTs) for efficient implementation of DOSNs. In particular, we propose a gossip-based algorithm to place users in a DHT, while maximizing the social awareness among them. Through a set of experiments, we show that our approach reduces the lookup latency by almost 30% and improves the reliability of the communication by nearly 10% via trusted contacts.Comment: 10 pages, p2p 2015 conferenc

A First Step Towards User Assisted Online Social Networks

This work is at: 3rd ACM Workshop on Social Network Systems (SNS'10), co-located with EuroSys 2010 Conference, took place April, 13-16, 2010 in Paris, France.The current Online Social Networks' infrastructure is com- posed by thousands of servers distributed across data-centers spread over several geographical locations. These servers store all the users' information (pro le, contacts, contents, etc). Such an infrastructure incurs high operational and maintenance costs. Furthermore, this may threaten the scal- ability, the reliability, the availability and the privacy of the o ered service. On the other hand this centralized approach gives to the OSN provider full control over a huge amount of valuable information. This information constitutes the basis of the OSN provider's business. Most of the storage capacity is dedicated to store the user's content (e.g. photos, videos, etc). We believe that OSN provider does not have strong incentive to dedicate a large part of its infrastructure to store majority part of this content. In this position paper we introduce the concept of user assisted Online Social Network (uaOSN). This novel archi- tecture seeks to distribute the storage load associated to the content (e.g. photos, videos, etc) among the OSN's users. Thus the OSN provider keeps the control on the relevant in- formation while reducing the operational and maintenance costs. We discuss the bene ts that this proposal may pro- duce for both, the OSN provider and the users. We also discuss the technical aspects to be considered and compare this solution to other distributed approaches.This research is funded in part by the EU grant for the SO- CIALNETS project, 217141, by the Spanish Ministery of Science and Innovation through the CONPARTE project, TEC2007-67966-C03-03/TCM, and by the Regional Gover- ment ofMadrid through theMEDIANET project, S2009/TIC- 1468.Publicad

Knowledge Management As an Economic Development Strategy

The United States is shifting to an information economy. Productive capability is no longer completely dependent on capital and equipment; information and knowledge assets are increasingly important. The result is a new challenge to the practice of local economic development. In this information economy, success comes from harnessing the information and knowledge assets of a community and from helping local businesses succeed in the new environment. Knowledge Management (KM) can provide the tools to help economic development practitioners accomplish that task. KM is a set of techniques and tools to uncover and utilize information and knowledge assets -- especially tacit knowledge. Economic development organizations can use KM tools to enhance external communications of local companies including marketing and to promote internal communications within local businesses and help companies capture tacit knowledge. More importantly, they can use those tools to uncover and develop local intellectual assets, including helping develop information products, and helping identify entrepreneurial and business opportunities. KM tools are also useful in developing local economic clusters. Finally, these tools can be used to enhance external knowledge sharing among the economic development community and to capture and share tacit knowledge within an economic development organization