A Pragmatic Approach to DHT Adoption

Despite the peer-to-peer community's obvious wish to have its systems adopted, specific mechanisms to facilitate incremental adoption have not yet received the same level of attention as the many other practical concerns associated with these systems. This paper argues that ease of adoption should be elevated to a first-class concern and accordingly presents HOLD, a front-end to existing DHTs that is optimized for incremental adoption. Specifically, HOLD is backwards-compatible: it leverages DNS to provide a key-based routing service to existing Internet hosts without requiring them to install any software. This paper also presents applications that could benefit from HOLD as well as the trade-offs that accompany HOLD. Early implementation experience suggests that HOLD is practical

Final Doctoral Recital

Viola, York Bowen, Atar Arad, Georg Philipp Telemann, Astor Piazzolla. Please see Additional Documents for Recital Program

Semantic-free referencing in linked systems

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 43-45).The Web relies on the Domain Name System (DNS) to resolve the hostname portion of URLs into IP addresses. This marriage-of-convenience enabled the Web's meteoric rise, but the resulting entanglement is now hindering both infrastructures--the Web is overly constrained by the limitations of DNS, and DNS is unduly burdened by the demands of the Web. There has been much commentary on this sad state-of-affairs, but dissolving the ill-fated union between DNS and the Web requires a new way to resolve Web references. To this end, this thesis describes the design and implementation of Semantic Free Referencing (SFR), a reference resolution infrastructure based on distributed hash tables (DHTs).by Michael Walfish.S.M

Litigating the Carceral Soundscape

Sound has always been a material issue in prisons, whether it be in connection with sonic surveillance, the “silent cell,” or the insistence of sound (excessive noise, counter-carceral music making). This article asks: How and when does the carceral soundscape become a litigable issue? Our article opens with a discussion of the challenges involved in attempting to study the sonic ambiance of the penitentiary through the medium of written documents and proposes a methodology of “sensing between the lines” by way of a solution. It goes on to analyze the “moral architecture” at the foundation of the modern prison in an effort to excavate the sonic dimensions of incarceration in the context of a system that was designed with silence at its core. Solitude and silence were presumed to have an “emancipatory effect” on the prisoner by attuning the carceral subject to “the inner voice of conscience” through forced withdrawal from the distractions of the senses. The next part considers the ways that, despite attempts to manage sound, its insistence has resisted these forms of control. It presents solitary confinement as a crucial site to explore the ways in which enforced silence, as an organizing principle, has undergone several contortions that gave rise to alternative rationales such as “structured intervention,” yet has persisted. The article then explores how this enduring silence has figured in the contemporary case law, alongside other forms of acoustic violence, such as excessive noise and sonic resistance to the conditions of incarceration on the part of prison inmates (e.g., rapping to beat the rap). While some cases describe the experience of the prison as one of unbearable silence, others describe it as noise without respite. This research highlights the ways that sound in prison has remained an important site of discipline and contestation that reverberates through the case law, yet without being appreciated adequately by the courts. The article concludes with observations about the ways that probing the role of sound in the logic of incarceration can complement litigation efforts that question carceral logics