Slashdot Mirror

Why, yes, in fact, I do.

(Thanks to fmaxwell for the idea.)

p

NYU bio with small b&w pic.

Ah, got the second link wrong. It's http://cat.nyu.edu/natalie/image.html.

C'mon. You COULD have used this picture, or (by popular demand) this picture (somewhat NWS in today's "politically correct" world, but it doesn't actually show anything).

C'mon. You COULD have used this picture, or (by popular demand) this picture (somewhat NWS in today's "politically correct" world, but it doesn't actually show anything).

Here's one. Oh yeah!

U2? Ugggh. Who listens to that pop band anyways. They should make a Led Zeppelin iPod engraved with a lemon being squeezed on the back.

U2 are still around, Led Zep aren't.

I'll take a The Stalin iPod.

The site was b0rked so coral to the rescue.
Read it here.

More info coral at the homepage

What is the evil force behind all wrongdoing in the universe?

It never had a name. Until now. Until we identified it and studied it while making ready to destroy it.

Its name is VladeKua5y !

VladeKua5y (pronounced "Vladequacy") is the root of the problem. VladeKua5y is the root of all problems. VladeKua5y is the enemy. VladeKua5y is what must be destroyed.

Kuro5hin + Vladinator + Adequacy = VladeKua5y !!

Who is the enemy? VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y !

What must be destroyed? VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y !

Who is the enemy of all trollers evarywhere? VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y !

Here is some information on VladeKua5y . Expect more people like Rusty Foster to be added soon.

NAME: Burdge, Jonathan E-MAIL: jlb@io.com, jlbatdarc@w-link.net, elby@adequacy.org, darc@w-link.net ALIASES: lb, jlb, Elby

NAME: Casillas, Luis E-MAIL: casillas@stanford.edu, em@adequacy.org ALIASES: em, Estanislao Martinez, Sylvain Tremblay

NAME: Corrigan, Barry E-MAIL: barry@bjcorrigan.fsnet.co.uk, bc@adequacy.org ALIASES: bc, ktb (Kiss the Blade), Lover's Arrival, Euroderf, Erbert Paget-Paget, Anya

NAME: Dickson, Craig E-MAIL: crd@inversenet.com, mendaxveritas@yahoo.com, mendaxveritas@pacbell.net ALIASES: mv, Mendax Veritas

NAME: Flickinger, Dan E-MAIL: flikx@geekizoid.com, flikee@xmission.com ALIASES: flikx

NAME: Haberberger, George E-MAIL: ghaberbe@frontiernet.net, George.Haberberger@usa.xerox.com ALIASES: GeorgeHa, Hairy_Potter

NAME: Huston, Bill E-MAIL: bozoman@vlad.geekizoid.com, ALIASES: bozoman

NAME: Johnson, Peter E-MAIL: peter.johnson@voicestream.com, shoeboy@adequacy.org ALIASES: Shoeboy, Peter Johnson

NAME: Lockwood, Scott E-MAIL: wsl3@attbi.com, vlad@geekizoid.com ALIASES: Vladinator, Lonesome Cowboy Burt, Quick Star, Pinkerton Floyd, etc.

NAME: Linwood, Rob E-MAIL: rcl@cs.csoft.net, rcl211@is9.nyu.edu ALIASES: AuntFloyd, Con Troll

NAME: Mann, Warren E-MAIL: broken@warmann.com ALIASES: osm, OpenSourceMan

NAME: McPherson, Craig E-MAIL: craig@laceyonline.com ALIASES: craig, naked&petrified guy

NAME: Nelson, Brian E-MAIL: elenchos@adequacy.org ALIASES: Elenchos

NAME: Osborne, Michaell E-MAIL: osborm@yahoo.com, dmg@adequacy.org,

The above mirror is going slow as aswell.

So use mirrordot or coral's mirror

So when do I get one of these??

LS

Coral's website offers a Firefox extension that will add an option to the right click context menu for links to append .nyud.net:8090 automatically to any link.

Sorry this is not correct. Rateless erasure codes is ECC per complete file not per packet. Please read the paper.

Well, all links have been Coralized by the auther (read more about Coral) in the hope of withstanding a slashdotting, but Coral is still still under development, so I would assume it's here the problem lies.

The link in the post is coralised. Maybe someone is blocking your outgoing port 8090 for you :-)

I feel your pain. Everyone keeps dropping the term like everyone knows it. When I asked, no one ever responded. So seeing your question, and after finding this, I thought I would share. It looks like Coral is an akami-like system run out of NYU.

What is the evil force behind all wrongdoing in the universe?

It never had a name. Until now. Until we identified it and studied it while making ready to destroy it.

Its name is VladeKua5y !

VladeKua5y (pronounced "Vladequacy") is the root of the problem. VladeKua5y is the root of all problems. VladeKua5y is the enemy. VladeKua5y is what must be destroyed.

Kuro5hin + Vladinator + Adequacy = VladeKua5y !!

Who is the enemy? VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y !

What must be destroyed? VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y !

Who is the enemy of all trollers evarywhere? VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y !

Here is some information on VladeKua5y . Expect more people like Rusty Foster to be added soon.

NAME: Burdge, Jonathan E-MAIL: jlb@io.com, jlbatdarc@w-link.net, elby@adequacy.org, darc@w-link.net ALIASES: lb, jlb, Elby

NAME: Casillas, Luis E-MAIL: casillas@stanford.edu, em@adequacy.org ALIASES: em, Estanislao Martinez, Sylvain Tremblay

NAME: Corrigan, Barry E-MAIL: barry@bjcorrigan.fsnet.co.uk, bc@adequacy.org ALIASES: bc, ktb (Kiss the Blade), Lover's Arrival, Euroderf, Erbert Paget-Paget, Anya

NAME: Dickson, Craig E-MAIL: crd@inversenet.com, mendaxveritas@yahoo.com, mendaxveritas@pacbell.net ALIASES: mv, Mendax Veritas

NAME: Flickinger, Dan E-MAIL: flikx@geekizoid.com, flikee@xmission.com ALIASES: flikx

NAME: Haberberger, George E-MAIL: ghaberbe@frontiernet.net, George.Haberberger@usa.xerox.com ALIASES: GeorgeHa, Hairy_Potter

NAME: Huston, Bill E-MAIL: bozoman@vlad.geekizoid.com, ALIASES: bozoman

NAME: Johnson, Peter E-MAIL: peter.johnson@voicestream.com, shoeboy@adequacy.org ALIASES: Shoeboy, Peter Johnson

NAME: Lockwood, Scott E-MAIL: wsl3@attbi.com, vlad@geekizoid.com ALIASES: Vladinator, Lonesome Cowboy Burt, Quick Star, Pinkerton Floyd, etc.

NAME: Linwood, Rob E-MAIL: rcl@cs.csoft.net, rcl211@is9.nyu.edu ALIASES: AuntFloyd, Con Troll

NAME: Mann, Warren E-MAIL: broken@warmann.com ALIASES: osm, OpenSourceMan

NAME: McPherson, Craig E-MAIL: craig@laceyonline.com ALIASES: craig, naked&petrified guy

NAME: Nelson, Brian E-MAIL: elenchos@adequacy.org ALIASES: Elenchos

NAME: Osborne, Michaell E-MAIL: osborm@yahoo.com, dmg@adequacy.org,

I think Slashdot should introduce a feature in its Slash script code to enable automatic conversion of all external links to their Coral equivalents.

Here is a Coral Cache link to your mirrored divx file.

If the editors only want to add a mirror link for sites that actually need it, I'd suggest having each editor prepare the mirror link in advance, visit the Coral-mirrored version of the site (to get it into the cache), and then update the article with the mirror link if the site bogs down. (Unfortunately, the Powers That Be may be against this idea since they'd like to sell /. subscriptions, and having a site get slashdotted probably helps to sell more of them.)

As it stands currently, the Coral caching system can't access the slashdotted site any more than we can, but if everyone will try to access the site using the mirror instead of the main article's link, the slashdotted site should become available more quickly than if everyone continues to pound on the site directly.

Out of curiosity, have you looked at something like Coral?

"Is there an overwhelming reason to use port 8090? Not everyone lives behind a firewall that allows access to that port."

From the FAQ:

Why don't you use port 80?

The use of port 8090 is largely a relic of our beta deployment on PlanetLab, given that it is a shared test-bed. We hope to switch to using port 80 as soon as possible. Sorry for any inconvenience; in the short-term, if you can't access port 8090 due to a local firewall and still wish to use Coral, try finding an open web proxy running on port 80. For example, Google for the search term "cgiproxy start".

I've been thinking.. and this is the 5th instance of this.. why can't Slashdot auto-Coralize the links that they use in the articles?

If $ARTICLE_SUMMARY has a URL in it, split the domain off, append .nyud.net:8090 to it, and then post it publically. Thats exactly what the NYU Distribution Network was designed for.

In this case, this would be:

http://www.dvdanswers.com.nyud.net:8090/index.php? r=0&s=8&c=28

http://www.cherryos.com.nyud.net:8090/

Use Coral CDN! It works and it's available, no excuses except laziness.

Please write a little script so that you can put URLs in Coral Cache automatically.

Here's the URL: http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/

For example we'd have
http://slashdot.org.nyud.net:8090/

or for the article in this story
http://vitanuova.loyalty.org.nyud.net:8090/weblog/ nb.cgi/view/vitanuova/2004/10/07/2


That way people won't just get annoyed and copy the full text of articles into an anonymous comment.

Please please please, in the future when posting articles that link to innocent users' blogs, personal sites, sites hosted on DSL connections, and so on... do not link to them directly! Use the Coral'ized link syntax as below:

http://www.desktopos.com.nyud.net:8090/reviews.p hp?op=showcontent&id=19

This link was purposely not left clickable, because the 'nyud.net' at the end, would cause Slashdot to add the [nyud.net] to the link text, which would stop people from clicking on it (thinking it was a pr0n site).

Here is some more information about the Coral Distribution Network.

Seriously, use it. It helps a LOT.

--
Have you Plucked the Web today?

...with FreeCache or Coral.

Or just make it Slashdot-policy to use the past-tense when describing off-site content, like this:

Before: "There is a very cool video..."
After: "There was a very cool video..."

Kind of pre-empts the whole /. effect, don't you think?

It would be great to start moving away from the whole organised-DDOS attack thing...

From Coral FAQ here

"The use of port 8090 is largely a relic of our beta deployment on PlanetLab, given that it is a shared test-bed. We hope to switch to using port 80 as soon as possible. Sorry for any inconvenience; in the short-term, if you can't access port 8090 due to a local firewall and still wish to use Coral, try finding an open web proxy running on port 80. For example, Google for the search term "cgiproxy start"."

Coral is a system that is supposed to eliminate the /. effect. Apparently it isn't perfect, but at least, the OP diverted some traffic with it, so it does help a little bit.

Ahah.. I didn't read the /. article about Coral. Finding out what it was made me do some research. The Coral Wiki has a FAQ entry regarding the fact that Windows 2000 DNS server is incompatible with Coral. Bummer.

I'm surprised there was so little feedback on your article. I thought it was interesting and I've enjoyed playing around with it. :)

For those that wonder what this is about, like I did, this page explains it.
It's bascially a distributed caching system that anyone can use.
You just go to www.sitename.com.nyud.net:8090/rest/of/uri/

Right, if only there was already a premade solution. But, if there was, slashdot would certainly have already covered it.

Check out the FCC test report. According to the document, it looks like max RF output of the unit is 1.45mW -- not very much power!
Coral P2P link to FCC report
or
Direct FCC link to report

More info on Coral distribution network

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~amw243/diaries/

Go is such a beautiful game. The rules are simple in the extreme, but Go is exponentially more difficult for a digital computer than chess. After 25 years, the best commercial Go programs are still weaker than 5kyu (okay for an amateur but way below any pro-level player).

Barring unexpected breakthroughs in AI/quantum/parallel computing, computer Go won't threaten human dominance for decades to come.

I think you mean this site. This was mentioned in this post related to the cookingforengineers site.

'As the moderator flexes his mod point to mod the post down as off-topic, the poor soul screams out, yelling, "Wait! It was this guy who was off-topic. I'm totally on-topic. Mod him down."' :)

...and you insert .nyud.net:8090 at the end of the hostname.

I use this wonderful extension called Coralize.

Coral, man! Here's your site coralized: www.wherisphantom.com.

Well, as I type this, Coral isn't helping. Mebbe if next time the submitter coralizes you before the /.ing begins? Come on, cluster D! Do your thing!

want to know more? see ... http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/

What ever happened to the Coral P2P cache? The site makes it look like it's still up and running. It doesn't seem to be working for any links I try, however.

Are others seeing the same thing? I'm guessing they are, because no one's included Coral mirrors of the sites, and they're feeling awfully slow.

Not quite... Note: I'm about to karma whore here.

About a year ago, right before starting my senior year at UCLA, I was offered an opportunity to work on this P2P project. At the time it was called "Gnucla," and was being developed by the UCLA EE department's Complex Networks Group. I turned it down, because I had already committed to working on a p2p system in the CS department. But since in all honesty their research was more novel than ours (and my friend was in their group), I subscribed to their mailing list and kept informed on what they were doing.

What they've done isn't find a novel way of picking ultrapeers. Let's review what motivated ultrapeers -- in the beginning, there was Gnutella. Gnutella was a power-law based network. What this meant is that there was no real "topology" to it, unlike peer to peer networks that were emerging and based on Distributed Hash Tables (such as Chord, Pastry, Kademlia [on which Coral is based]). It had nice properties: a low diameter, and very resilient to attacks common on p2p networks. (Loads of peers dropping simultaneously could not partition the network, unlike, say, in Pastry -- unless they are high degree nodes.) But the big problem was that to search the network, you had to flood it. And that generated so much traffic that the network eventually tore itself apart under its own load.

So someone thought that maybe if only a few, select, high-capacity nodes participated in the power-law network, it wouldn't tear itself apart because they could handle the load. These would become the ultrapeers. The nodes that couldn't handle the demands of a flooding, power-law network would connect to ultrapeers and let the ultrapeers take note of their shared files, and handle search requests for them. Thus, when a peer searches, no peer connected to an ultrapeer ever sees the search unless they have the file being searched for, because the searching happens at a level above them. Between low-capacity nodes and ultrapeers, it's much like a client-server model. Between ultrapeers, it's still a power-law network.

But the ultrapeer network has problems in itself, so this group sought to find a way to search a power-law based network, such as Gnutella, without flooding. They exploited the fact that, in a power-law network, select nodes have very high degree connectivity. If you take a random walk on a power-law based network (meaning, starting from your own PC, randomly jump to a node connected to you, randomly jump to a node connected to that node, etc...) you'll end up at or passing through a node with very high connectivity. Thus, they were a natrual spot rendezvous point for clients wishing to share files, and clients wishing to download files. Perhaps, in this sense, they are an "ultrapeer," but we haven't separated the network into two different architectures like before. The network is still entirely power-law based, and retains all its wonderful properties.

But that's not the entire story, just the gist of it. There are other neat tricks to it... Trust me, this is really good stuff we're talking about here. They recently won Best Paper Award at the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing. (See paper here.)

"Brunet," as they call it, is designed to be a framework for any peer-to-peer application that could exploit the percolation search outlined above. Google-like searching is just one possible approach (and perhaps a little unrealistic...). Right now I can tell you that they have a chat program in the works, and it is working well. The framework should be released when it's ready.

Please don't flood me with questions -- remember, I'm not actually in their research group :)

- sm

Coral (covered in this slashdot story) is on of the projects using PlanetLabs.

The editors should really start using Coral when linking. This applies especially to small personal sites, but also to the larger ones which probably don't much appreciate the spike in their bill.

The one bad thing about Coral is that it would tend to mislead Google--but certainly Google is smart enough to know how to interpret Coralised URLs.

NYU's Coral Project, which seems to be the rage of the so-called "karma whores" on Slashdot these days seems to be a consumer of PlanetLab. Seems to be a strange coincidence.

While this obviously isn't an ideal solution, users that cannot access
DNAME records can try to append .http.l2.l1.l0.nyucd.net:8090 (note the "C" in
nyuCd) to the end of hostnames, instead of the traditional .nyud.net:8090, to be able to use Coral today.

http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/overview/#problems

A coral cache isn't for use for every link you post - it is a perfect tool for links from sites which act as a lens, focusing a ton of traffic (such as slashdot, memepool, etc), much like the flash crowds in Niven novels. Low traffic sites such as my personal sites will never need to reference third party sites via a coral link, but then I get so little traffic that a link from my site is not going to even be noticed, let alone cause problems to any third party. Such is not the case with slashdot.

Fine, don't use coral for a link to Amazon, or IBM. But use some judgement - it would be nice to be able to still visit the smaller (personal) sites and actually read the stories more than 1 minute after the site hits the main page. The smaller tech company site announcements about new products would likely appreciate avoiding a slashdotting.

Also, Coral lists the IPs and hostnames of all of their servers, and updates a page every five minutes - if you were really obsessive about your stats, you could flag coral servers, and write a script to pull them from your Apache logs. If you saw them every five minutes, you could then safely assume that someone was saving your site from a hammering.

You are truly paranoid, though. Coral is a university research project, hosted by volunteer mirrors. Apart from the fact that there are no hidden agendas or nefarious motives behind Coral, I doubt that the traffic stats for a flash crowd are very meaningful or marketable given the breadth of content covered over a month (mile wide, inch deep). For the revenues from the type of info Coral could collect, I doubt that it would even be worth the costs of setting up the hardware for caching servers, let alone writing the software and paying the bandwidth charges and staff time.

A coral cache isn't for use for every link you post - it is a perfect tool for links from sites which act as a lens, focusing a ton of traffic (such as slashdot, memepool, etc), much like the flash crowds in Niven novels. Low traffic sites such as my personal sites will never need to reference third party sites via a coral link, but then I get so little traffic that a link from my site is not going to even be noticed, let alone cause problems to any third party. Such is not the case with slashdot.

Fine, don't use coral for a link to Amazon, or IBM. But use some judgement - it would be nice to be able to still visit the smaller (personal) sites and actually read the stories more than 1 minute after the site hits the main page. The smaller tech company site announcements about new products would likely appreciate avoiding a slashdotting.

Also, Coral lists the IPs and hostnames of all of their servers, and updates a page every five minutes - if you were really obsessive about your stats, you could flag coral servers, and write a script to pull them from your Apache logs. If you saw them every five minutes, you could then safely assume that someone was saving your site from a hammering.

You are truly paranoid, though. Coral is a university research project, hosted by volunteer mirrors. Apart from the fact that there are no hidden agendas or nefarious motives behind Coral, I doubt that the traffic stats for a flash crowd are very meaningful or marketable given the breadth of content covered over a month (mile wide, inch deep). For the revenues from the type of info Coral could collect, I doubt that it would even be worth the costs of setting up the hardware for caching servers, let alone writing the software and paying the bandwidth charges and staff time.

Or if you use firefox, mozilla, etc., Coral has a context menu extension that you can install here.