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Real Time Gnutella Visualization
brett42 writes "Some students at Berkeley wrote a python program that connects to the Gnutella network and maps out connections between nodes in real time. " I gotta say thats pretty smooth. Hopefully future gnutella clients will incorporate something like this just for the time wasting potential of watching the graph wiggle while seeing what porn others are searching for.
These guys disected the Gnutella protocol and used the Furi interface (which provides network status screens and gives users info about nodes they're connected to) for their project. I was looking over the source code briefly and it looks very tight. It's nice to see college students interested and working on projects like these. If you go to the website and read over their final paper it is very interesting. You'll find a lot of stuff about the guts of Gnutella and what is unique about this project. They toyed with interfaces for a long time and rejected a great deal of them. It seems they spent a lot of time making this a very easy to use tool. They even worked hard on getting the color scheme down (hence this rejected scheme). Seeing a few people that are this poetic in refining their tools so that the user can use them best is rare.
The final visualization was createed with Python and Tkinter ("Tk interface"-- the de-facto Python interface to the Tk GUI toolkit). Tkinter is not the only GUI for Python. However, they chose it because it is commonly used and is easily portable between Unix and Windows (how thoughtful of them!)
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
Is if this kind of technology was used for a new kind of music chart:
Top 100 pirated songs!
It would be doubly interesting to see if the same songs which were top of the 'real' charts, were also the top of the Gnutella charts. Maybe we could catch the record companies that buy their own records to boost their positions in the charts red-handed.
*r
--- My dad's political betting
Our efforts are paying off in fighting this disease called "l33t speak".
In out time, we'll wipe out this idiotic, hacker wanna-be, script kiddie morons who think they're special when they type things like a moron.
But we must remain vigilant!