Collaborative streaming of on demand videos for mobile devices

The 3G and LTE technologies made video on-demand a popular entertainment for users on the go. However, bandwidth insufficiency is an obstacle in providing high quality and smooth video playout in cellular networks. The objective of the proposed PhD research is to provide a user with high quality video streaming with minimal stalling time by aggregating bandwidth from ubiquitous nearby devices that may be using different radio networks

Survey on social reputation mechanisms: Someone told me I can trust you

Nowadays, most business and social interactions have moved to the internet, highlighting the relevance of creating online trust. One way to obtain a measure of trust is through reputation mechanisms, which record one's past performance and interactions to generate a reputational value. We observe that numerous existing reputation mechanisms share similarities with actual social phenomena; we call such mechanisms 'social reputation mechanisms'. The aim of this paper is to discuss several social phenomena and map these to existing social reputation mechanisms in a variety of scopes. First, we focus on reputation mechanisms in the individual scope, in which everyone is responsible for their own reputation. Subjective reputational values may be communicated to different entities in the form of recommendations. Secondly, we discuss social reputation mechanisms in the acquaintances scope, where one's reputation can be tied to another through vouching or invite-only networks. Finally, we present existing social reputation mechanisms in the neighbourhood scope. In such systems, one's reputation can heavily be affected by the behaviour of others in their neighbourhood or social group.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Enforceability of digital copyright on the darknet?

This dissertation seeks to comparatively analyse different emerging jurisprudence of pioneering jurisdictions on the operability of enforcing digital copyright in light of the growing use of the Darknet. It addresses the legal lacuna in the existing copyright laws with regards to enforcement against the illegal distribution of infringing copies of online digital content. It also seeks to illustrate how the concept of digital copyright protection has been compromised by the inoperability of enforcement laws on illegal distribution via the Darknet. It thereby advocates for a 'digital use' exemption and or free access as a recommendation. Although the advancement of technology created new and advanced forms of distribution or availing copyrighted works to the public, these new advanced channels of distribution have been compromised by rogue online clandestine file sharing networks. Digital copyright protection laws have been advanced so as to respond to illegal online file sharing, however, they have had limited impact due to the vast, flexible and unregulated nature of the internet which transcends the territorial nature of any single state's copyright laws. Currently, online file sharing is effected through peer to peer networks due to their operational convenience. This dissertation suggests that the need to control distribution, legally or technological, is driven by the urge to enable digital copyright owners to benefit financially from their works and get a return on their investment. Technologically, this has been effected through the adoption of Digital Rights Management (DRMs) measures that control access to these works through the use of paywalls on commercial websites that require online consumers to pay/ subscribe first before they gain access to the copyrighted works. (eg Netflix, Showmax, itunes e.t.c) However, since absolute control over one's digital works, online, is impossible, the success of these access-control mechanisms remains debatable and remain vulnerable to technologically sophisticated users who could easily circumvent them and make the protected works available to millions of other users in Darknets. This, in effect, creates a parallel and free market for digital content. Darknets have grown as the new preferred channel of distribution due to their unique features which have rendered any judicial or legislative threat of sanctions, merely academic and detached from practical application. The Darknet essentially provides for user privacy, in anonymity, and security from monitoring and detection. These two primary features have exacerbated online piracy as various Darknets ISPs have now developed more user-friendly Darknet versions for the average mainstream user. This dissertation will highlight how the digital creative industry faces an existential threat with the growing use of Darknets. Darknets have created a virtual environment where illegal digital content distribution continues with impunity, since the burden of the enforceability of copyright rests squarely on the individual copyright holder and the pursuit of liability only begins upon detection of any such infringement of copyright. In effect, copyright owners, most often than not, lack the technological expertise to monitor and detect and thereby cannot enforce their copyright. As such, this dissertation postulates that the legal/ technological effort to maintain any form of monopoly over digital content online is an unattainable objective. As a solution, to end both online piracy and safeguarding the financial interests of copyright owners, a change in the approach to digital copyright is needed. This will be achieved through creating a 'digital use' exemption and or free access. Rather than copyright owners trying to control access, they should provide free access and profit on alternative revenue business models. Free access to digital content will do away with the need of online users to pirate and also save copyright owners the effort and resource to keep monitoring the virtual world for infringement. It will also counter-react to the Darknet's parallel market since users will have free access to digital content from the official distribution websites. This dissertation will interrogate the viability of this option

Experimental design for a next generation residential gateway

Puolella eurooppalaisista kotitalouksista on laajakaistaliittymä. Yleensä käyttäjä kytkeytyy ulkoiseen verkkoon kotireitittimen avulla (residential gateway). Internet-yhteyden ja IP-perustaisten palveluiden kuten VoIP- ja IPTV-palveluiden lisäksi kotireititin muodostaa kotiverkon ytimen kodin verkkolaitteiden liittyessä siihen. Kotiverkkojen lukumäärän ja koon kasvun seurauksena kotiverkoissa voidaan tunnistaa kolme ongelmaa. Ensinnäkin kotiverkkojen hallinta on haastavaa kotiverkossa tuettavien verkkotekniikoiden ja laitteiden määrän kasvaessa. Toiseksi sisällönhallinta. on monimutkaistunut käyttäjien luodessa ja kuluttaessa yhä enemmän sisältöä. Kolmanneksi uudet verkkoperustaiset tekniikat kuten sähköisen terveydenhuollon ratkaisut (e-health) integroituvat usein heikosti olemassa olevien kotiverkkolaitteiden kanssa. Tässä diplomityössä edellä mainittuihin ongelmiin pyritään löytämään yhtenäinen ratkaisu kotireititintä apuna käyttäen. Työssä analysoidaan uudentyyppisen kotireitittimen vaatimuksia käyttämällä hyväksi joukkoa käyttötapauksia. Vaativuusanalyysin perusteella luodaan malli, joka sisältää seuraavat pääkomponentit. (i) Virtuaalisointitekniikkaan pohjautuva kotireititinarkkitehtuuri. (ii) Kotireititinperustainen mekanismi yhteisöverkostoiden pystyttämiseen kotiverkkojen välillä. (iii) Hajautettu tiedostojärjestelmä yhteisöverkkojen pystyttämiseksi ja parannetun sisällönhallinnan ja sisällön jakamisen mahdollistamiseksi. (iv) Mekanismeja joiden avulla vierailevat käyttäjät voivat hyödyntää muiden käyttäjien kotireitittimien resursseja. Työssä. toteutetaan em. ydintoimintoja laaditun mallin perusteella ja toteutuksen toimivuus verifioidaan käyttötapauksiin perustuvalla testauksellaToday over half of the European homes have a broadband Internet connection. Typically, this connection is enabled through a residential gateway device at the users' premises. In addition to facilitating triple play services, this gateway also forms the core of users' home networks by connecting their network-enabled devices. While the number and the size of such home networks keep on increasing, three major problems can be identified in current systems. First, home network management is getting increasingly complex, and a growing number of networking technologies and connected devices must be supported and managed. Second, content management has become difficult. Users are generating an increasing amount of content and this content is stored (and sometimes shared) in an almost anarchical manner across different home network devices as well as online. Third, new network-enabled services, such as e-health systems, are emerging, but are typically poorly integrated into existing home networks. There is a clear need for home networking solutions that address these problems. In this thesis, we adopt a gateway-centric approach to address these problems in a unified manner. We concretise the requirements for a next generation residential gateway by analysing a set of future home networking use cases. These requirements serve as input to our gateway system design. In summary, our design includes the following main components. (i) A residential gateway architecture based on virtualization. This enables new features and new ways to implement the other components of our design. (ii) A gateway-based mechanism to set up community networks between different home networks. (iii) A distributed file system to establish community networks and to enable improved content management and sharing. (iv) Mechanisms for visiting gateway users to utilize other users' gateway resources. We implement these core functionalities and develop a proof-of concept prototype. We successfully validate our prototype through use case driven testbed experiments. Finally, we believe that the insights gained from this study and the prototype implementations are important overall contributions that can be used in the future research to further explore the limitations and opportunities of this gateway-centric approach

The Piratical Ethos: Textual Activity and Intellectual Property in Digital Environments

The Piratical Ethos: Textual Activity and Intellectual Property in Digital Environments examines the definition, function, and application of intellectual property in contexts of electronically mediated social production. With a focus on immaterial production - or the forms of coordinated social activity employed to produce knowledge and information in the networked information economy - this project ultimately aims to demonstrate how current intellectual property paradigms must be rearticulated for an age of digital (re)production. By considering the themes of Piracy , Intellectual Property , and Distributed Social Production this dissertation provides an overview of the current state of peer production and intellectual property in the Humanities and Writing Studies. Next, this project develops and implements a communicational-mediational research methodology to theorize how both discursive and material data lend themselves to a more nuanced understanding of the ways that technologies of communication and coordination effect attitudes toward intellectual property. After establishing both a methodology and an interdisciplinary grounding for the themes of the work, this dissertation presents a grounded theoretic analysis of piratical discourse to reveal what I call the piratical ethos , or the guiding attitudes of individuals actively contesting intellectual property in piratical acts of distributed social production. Congruently, this work also investigates the material dynamics of piratical activity by analyzing the cultural-historical activity systems wherein piratical subjectivity emerges, emphasizing the agenic capacity of interfacial technologies at the scales of user and system. Exploring the attitudes of piratical subjects and the technological genres that mediate piratical activity, I contend that the conclusions drawn from The Piratical Ethos can assist Writing Studies researchers with developing novel methodologies to study the intersections of intellectual property and distributed social production in digital worlds

Actas da 10ª Conferência sobre Redes de Computadores

Universidade do MinhoCCTCCentro AlgoritmiCisco SystemsIEEE Portugal Sectio

Protecting data privacy with decentralized self-emerging data release systems

In the age of Big Data, releasing private data at a future point in time is critical for various applications. Such self-emerging data release requires the data to be protected until a prescribed data release time and be automatically released to the target recipient at the release time. While straight-forward centralized approaches such as cloud storage services may provide a simple way to implement self-emerging data release, unfortunately, they are limited to a single point of trust and involves a single point of control. This dissertation proposes new decentralized designs of self-emerging data release systems using large-scale peer-to-peer (P2P) networks as the underlying infrastructure to eliminate a single point of trust or control. The first part of the dissertation presents the design of decentralized self-emerging data release systems using two different P2P network infrastructures, namely Distributed Hash Table (DHT) and blockchain. The second part of this dissertation proposes new mechanisms for supporting two key functionalities of self-emerging data release, namely (i) enabling the release of self-emerging data to blockchain-based smart contracts for facilitating a wide range of decentralized applications and (ii) supporting a cost-effective gradual release of self-emerging data in the decentralized infrastructure. We believe that the outcome of this dissertation would contribute to the development of decentralized security primitives and protocols in the context of timed release of private data