A demonstration of Tribler : peer-to-peer television

The success of Peer-to-Peer Television (P2P-TV) systems depends on the inducement of users to cooperate massively and voluntarily. To operationalize our proposed applications of incentives based on psychological backgrounds, we discuss a demonstration of our own P2P-TV system called Tribler. It is a system for downloading, video-on-demand (VoD), and live streaming of Television content. This paper discusses the demonstration of Tribler version 4.0 as the first operationalization of relevant psychological backgrounds

A demonstration of Tribler : peer-to-peer television

The success of Peer-to-Peer Television (P2P-TV) systems depends on the inducement of users to cooperate massively and voluntarily. To operationalize our proposed applications of incentives based on psychological backgrounds, we discuss a demonstration of our own P2P-TV system called Tribler. It is a system for downloading, video-on-demand (VoD), and live streaming of Television content. This paper discusses the demonstration of Tribler version 4.0 as the first operationalization of relevant psychological backgrounds

A Gossip-Based Distributed Social Networking System

Social networking Web sites, which allow users to create identities and link them to friends who have also created identities, are highly popular. Systems such as Facebook and MySpace utilize a traditional client-server approach to achieve this, which means that all identities and their social links (the entire social network) are stored and administered on central servers. Although this approach supports highly mobile user access - users can log-in from any computer - it also poses high dependence on predefined central server(s), which results in possible exploitation of private data.In this paper we present an alternative approach, based on gossip protocol, in which we use a completely decentralized peer-to-peer system to create and store the social network. Our system is self-administered and works in a highly transient environment of peer availability. We propose the design and implementation in Tribler of a distributed social networking system that is scalable and robust, allowing users to perform core social networking functions of establishing and removing social links without any requirement for centralized servers or administration

A Hybrid Distributed Architecture for Indexing

This paper presents a hybrid scavenger grid as an underlying hardware architecture for search services within digital libraries. The hybrid scavenger grid consists of both dedicated servers and dynamic resources in the form of idle workstations to handle medium- to large-scale search engine workloads. The dedicated resources are expected to have reliable and predictable behaviour. The dynamic resources are used opportunistically without any guarantees of availability. Test results confirmed that indexing performance is directly related to the size of the hybrid grid and intranet networking does not play a major role. A system-efficiency and cost-effectiveness comparison of a grid and a multiprocessor machine showed that for workloads of modest to large sizes, the grid architecture delivers better throughput per unit cost than the multiprocessor, at a system-efficiency that is comparable to that of the multiprocessor

Towards the Science of Essential Decentralised Infrastructures

Dependence of our society on digital infrastructures is growing daily, confronting us with an urgent task of building ethical and democratic alternatives to monopolistic big-tech platforms. We call upon the scientific community to put our talents to this challenge by creating decentralised infrastructures for trust-based economic and social cooperation. We empirically demonstrate that a public infrastructure to establish trust between peers in decentralized networks is possible at significant scale. Our work is based on over 15 years of improving our distributed systems which were used by more than a million people. We present six stringent criteria for designing trustworthy infrastructure, called zero-server architecture. Adhering to these principles, we designed a novel trustworthy networking infrastructure, called P2P-Apps. It enables smartphone apps to communicate without any servers, by forming a scalable overlay that uses our generic mechanism to build trust between peers, Trustchain. P2P-Apps are generic and can be expanded to serve as an alternative to centralized infrastructure owned by Big Tech.</p

Power Management for Portable Devices

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc

Deployment of a Blockchain-Based Self-Sovereign Identity

Digital identity is unsolved: after many years of research there is still no trusted communication over the Internet. To provide identity within the context of mutual distrust, this paper presents a blockchain-based digital identity solution. Without depending upon a single trusted third party, the proposed solution achieves passport-level legally valid identity. This solution for making identities Self-Sovereign, builds on a generic provable claim model for which attestations of truth from third parties need to be collected. The claim model is then shown to be both blockchain structure and proof method agnostic. Four different implementations in support of these two claim model properties are shown to offer sub-second performance for claim creation and claim verification. Through the properties of Self-Sovereign Identity, legally valid status and acceptable performance, our solution is considered to be fit for adoption by the general public

A Blockchain-based Micro-Economy of Bandwidth Tokens

A challenging problem in decentralized systems is encouraging long-term cooperative behaviour between strangers. It is often not immediately bene_cial to cooperate without the guarantee of direct reciprocity. Cooperation among entities in the long term results in sustainability while sel_sh behaviour can lead to the collapse and distrust of such communities. This collapse is also referred to as the tragedy-of-the-commons phenomena and is notoriously hard to prevent when considering mutual access to resources [2]. Our aim is to incentivize network participants in _le-sharing communities to cooperate with each other by introducing monetary rewards for good behaviour. We explore whether a _le-sharing ecosystem based on band- width tokens is capable of addressing the tragedy-of-the-commons and increase cooperation and sustainability in general. Blockchain technology is used to achieve tamper-proof accounting of such bandwidth tokens. While blockchain is often used to securely maintain digital currencies without _nancial institutions, our goal is to deploy a distributed ledger to promote cooperation amongst content providers and consumers. Based on this goal, we designed a blockchain with superior scalability, compared to existing blockchain solutions [4]. A high-level system architecture of our micro-economy is presented in Figure 1. The key component of our design is a bandwidth token, irrefutably stored and tracked on our deployed blockchain fabric: TrustChain [4]. TrustChain is speci_cally designed to build trust between interacting strangers and has no hard requirement for global consensus, in comparison to popular blockchain applications. Instead, consensus is reached between transacting parties and fraud is guaranteed to be eventually detected by the means of network gossiping. In contrast to existing blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum, each user creates and grows their own chain of transactions [3]. Every transaction in TrustChain is dual-signed and stored in the chains of both transacting parties. Our approach yields superior scalability while signi_cantly reducing storage requirements. Content providers are able to mine or earn bandwidth tokens by uploading content to others using our decentralized _le sharing client Tribler [1]. Token mining is an autonomous process that attempts to optimize the amount of uploaded data by _rst downloading and then uploading a subset of available content. Mining is both bene_cial for the provider, who earns spendable tokens, and the community, where contributed bandwidth results in faster downloads and increased availability of content. Content consumers pay providers for their provided resources with bandwidth tokens. When the di_erence between the amount of uploaded and downloaded bytes (the token balance) of a speci_c user is below a certain threshold, content providers refuse to upload content to these peers, until they contributed a su_cient amount of bandwidth back to the community. This basic but e_ective free-riding policy makes bandwidth tokens usable and ensures that there is a basic demand for them. We address privacy issues arising from sharing content with a deployed and tested Tor-like communication overlay. When this overlay is enabled, an end-to-end encrypted path is constructed with other nodes and tra_c is routed through these nodes. This allows peers to interact with the community in an anonymous way. In contrast to Tor, the anonymous layer as implemented in Tribler is fully decentralized and does not rely on centralized (directory) servers. The system o_ers anonymity at the cost of increased bandwidth requirement