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USB-Based NIC Torrents While Your PC Sleeps
jangel sends us to WindowsForDevices.com for news on a prototype device created by researchers from Microsoft and UC San Diego. It's a USB-based NIC that includes its own ARM processor and flash storage, and can download files or torrent while a host PC is sleeping. As a result, its inventors say, the "Somniloquy" device slashes power usage by up to 50x. The device requires a few tweaks on the host OS side save state before sleeping. The prototype works with a Vista host but the hardware comprising the NIC is based on a Linux stack. Here is the research paper (PDF).
I had the realization that I'm not geek enough to care about posting on this topic.
she was the daughter of a wealthy florentine pogen read em and weep was her adjustable slogan
I read the article, then I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of music executives cried out in terror and were suddenly calling their RIAA lawyers...
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
Plug it in at the end of the day, pick it up in the morning. RIAA/MPAA catches the traffic? No tracing it back to you.
I already torrent furiously in my sleep.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Argh!
It's one of the following:
1/50 the power usage
or
a standard PC uses 50x the power of this NIC
Isn't this somewhat akin to what the much-hyped KillerNIC was all about-- a separate device to offload network activity (for example, BitTorrent downloads)?
there are so many other low-powered devices that will do so much more. like you could probably mod a router to run rtorrent and plenty of NAS already have torrent support. i have rtorrent running off a pico-itx board that also hosts my website,email,ftp,ssh,gopher,xmpp, a few python socket servers for random crap and if i had a script that would make me appear to be logged in on all those social networking sites 25/7 it would run this too.
having something that only supports bittorrent seems pretty limiting when you can have a fully featured unix CLI-based machine with plenty of room for expansion. but i said the same thing about a device that would "only play mp3's" in 2000
That is the boring bit. Were that what TFA is actually about, the correct response would be "Yawn. Get an NSLU2. Or a Gumstix, big deal."
The interesting(hardly earthshaking; but interesting) bit is the work they did on interaction between the gumstix board and the full PC. Making a little computer do stuff is trivial, making common applications IM, bittorrent, and parts of the network state, running on the full PC work with the little computer in a reasonably clever way is rather less so.
well... thats the color that little icon with a u on it is at least :P
it is a "BIG FUCKING DEAL" when you consider people all of the world are leaving (and wasting power) their computers on to see "Watchmen" before it comes out.
Or download a game that you play one time and decide - this sucks, so you save EVEN MORE MONEY.
My guess is that you do not pay your own electricity bill.
It's called the "Killer NIC". It's a PCI Express network card which offloads network packet processing to a custom embedded Linux distro running on a 400MHz ARM processor with 256MB of RAM, and oh, it works with Vista. As it's independent of the main CPU, it can run applications, such as a bittorrent client, while the main CPU attends to other tasks while still acting as a NIC for the main CPU even if one of the on-board applications is also network oriented -- they call this "Flexible Network Architecture" or "FNA apps." Oh, and did I mention that it has a USB port for storage of such applications and any associated data ( such as files downloaded via Bittorent ) on a USB flash drive?
Another "great innovation" from Microsoft.
jdb2
Yeah, but can it stay up all night looking up wikipedia for names of obscure early-90s dance acts and then scour all the torrent sites for full albums instead of just "Best of 90's Dance You Like Me Now?" compilations, and then stare at bittorrent, begging more seeders to come online to increase the speed from 0.01KB/s, and then say "screw it" and download the latest metallica and eminem albums on principle, delete them without listening to them, because it doesnt really like metallica or eminem, and then wander off to youtube to watch old WCW videos?
If not, it can't truly duplicate my torrent experience.
The trouble is, this extra hardware will be a PITA to use. You'll have to have special versions of all your torrent software, IM software, etc that run on this device. The complicated way it works means that it will be heavily OS dependent, and vulnerable to all kind of glitches and problems. It's just too complex a technology to use in order to save a few watts.
Worse, every time it wakes up your main machine's mechanical fans and hard drives, it increases the wear on those components.
A much better approach is a multi-processor PC with the technology to completely shut down un-used CPU cores and reduce fan RPM, combined with SSDs for storage. Such a setup would let you continue to run your normal software - even let you use the PC for low powered desktop apps - and when you do something that demands more power, the system would wake up.
Right now, AMD is much better for this : the low end, passively cool ATI graphics cards will run at a fraction of their normal clock-speed when idle in desktop mode. The current quad core AMD CPUs will severely underclock the unused CPU cores as well. It's not as good as a complete shut-down, but a decent AMD rig with variable speed fans (with an SSD of course) can now be built to run quietly on low power, but provide high performance on demand.
Here's something that hobyists have been doing for a long time. Get a router or NAS that can run Linux and put all the services you want on it. You now have something that works when your computer is completely powered down (not just in S3 sleep mode), requires no USB ports and if you really want to you can enable wake-on-LAN on your computer and have the same ability to remotely wake your computer with a particular network message as this board gives.
Zombie computers.
You can purchase a linksys router that will download your torrents to a usb hdd or cf card. One less thing that takes up a usb port.
This is dumb. I mean, every house already has a running device with an ARM processor: their router! It would be so much more logical if torrents ran on the router than on a PC. For one thing, the router could throttle back the torrent if computers on the network were asking for data, and it could upload full bore when everyone is asleep.
Before you post links to routers with a USB port and a shoddy torrent client: I know about these, and it's a step in the right direction, but the interface needs to be much better. I should click on a torrent file on my bedroom computer and have that torrent be loaded into my router.
I like the idea that this thing accepts SD flash cards. Pretty soon, 8GB will be trivially cheap, and that could serve as cache. Periodically, as the cache fills up, the router could wake up a computer, transfer finished files to it and put it back to sleep. This wouldn't be hard - any proper geek could write a script to do this.
Actually, I thought the interesting bit was the part where Microsoft Research was involved in creating a device that ran linux. I find it very hard to believe that they couldn't slim down Vista enough for this project.
I'm pretty sure that if you work at Microsoft and were capable of getting Vista running on a 400MHz ARM board with 64MB of RAM, they would either promote you to "Emperor of Microsoft" or bury you in a shallow grave outside of town.
PeerGuardian is a trap. Consider.
Loads of people are torrenting at any one time. Probably the vast majority of them will torrent a few files and then stop. A small minority will torrent 24/7 maxing out their pipes.
Now if you want to shut down filesharing it is this small minority that you want to target, firstly because they are a legally inviting target - it's hard for them to claim they are innocent if you can show they were maxing out their DSL connection 24/7. Also from a PR point of view it's better to sue the hard core pirates than the casual ones - you avoid headlines about grandmothers being sued for thousands of dollars because their grandkids downloaded a couple of songs. Last but not least they are the ones seeding most of the files because the casual torrenters download what they want and then shutdown the application.
Normally of course there's no good way looking at one torrent to work out which torrenters are the hard core minority and which are casual torrenters.
Enter PeerGuardian.
The hard core torrenters will download and install it and the casual ones won't bother. Now you have an easy way to distinguish the two. Try to connect from a few IP addresses on the blocklist, and try to connect from a few that aren't. The last point is important - anti piracy organisations have lots of employees and could easily ask those employees to run some sort of tool from their home DSL connection, or they could buy a few DSL modems and stick them in the basement, or use a VPN to a pool of residential IP connections. I.e. it's quite easy for them to get hold of IP addresses which are not in their organisational IP block. So long as they don't attack torrents from those IP addresses there is no reason for those addresses to be blacklisted.
So PeerGuardian provides no protection for downloaders and it provides very useful information to anti piracy organisations.
If you don't want to get sued, don't seed and don't install things like PeerGuardian.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I like the idea it makes the computer much more efficient. The one design decision that confuses me is the choice of using the nic card. I guess it benefits those without a router, but couldn't you just develop a os for a nas that does the exact same thing. Main benefit is that it doesn't require a proprietary nic card designed for torrenting.
My housemate has something similar. It's the typical NAS with two drives, but the cool part is the web interface. You can c&p torrent urls straight into it and even manage all your existing torrents through the web interface. So every computer in the house has a central torrent location. When it's time to play L4D we don't have to go around checking which machine is sucking all the band, we just log into the NAS and pause the torrents.
Just went and looked at it. It's a D-link DNS 323 (company link: http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509).
I'd say the d-link beats the Microsoft research team's device (even though gumstix is awesome). No pc required and it can sit anywhere on your network.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
I'm pretty sure that if you work at Microsoft and were capable of getting Vista running on a 400MHz ARM board with 64MB of RAM, they would either promote you to "Emperor of Microsoft" or bury you in a shallow grave outside of town.
C'mon man, this is Microsoft. They will do both.
"In the office environment, 52% of respondents left their machines on for remote access, and 35% did so to support applications running in the background, of which e-mail and IM were most popular (47%)."
Never mind the fact that emails are saved on the server, but is this device is really necessary in case "An instant messenger (IM) client will require the PC to be on in order for the user to stay "online" (reachable) to their contacts."
So instead of telling a significant number of respondents that they really don't have to leave their computer ON to run background applications such as IM and email (unless of course you are running an IM/email server at work or home), the author does a cartwheel while holding a sermon on how to be green.
Now that everybody has get some green in order to be green, something similar but different, here is a bare-bone OS running on a daughter card (PCIe) which allows secure access to the host's hardware even when the host is OFF but the motherboard still has power. http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/smdrac3/drac5/OM53/en/ug/racugc1.htm#31825. Works with Dell. A must if you don't have unrestricted physical access to your servers, and every once in a while the main power cycles but your servers don't boot/reboot automatically.
Small correction to the main article, a couple of the authors are from University of California, San Diego and not University of San Diego.
It might be linux, but it's still crap.
From the article:
Sorry... still no anonymity. Did you actually think the same developer responsible for DRM-enforcing Windows Vista would actually help produce a device that might make you immune to it?
A tiny computer that can download files while another computer sits idly by.
Yo dawg, we herd you like torrents, so we put a computer in your computer so you can torrent while you torrent.
Too bad that torrent clients and the bit torrent protocol in general require you to seed. Tit for tat protocol remember. If you want the data, you have to share the data. Well, at least if you want it in this century instead of 4GB or more @ 1kb/s (WoW and AoC, I am looking at you). Did you even have any idea at all how Bittorent works?
If I stop seeding once I have the file it doesn't affect the download time at all, it's not like people bear a grudge against my IP address. Not that they could actually, it's dynamic.
But seriously...some protection is better than no protection at all, and your fallacious argument about suing grannies is just silly. They've sued DEAD PEOPLE.
Yeah, and it was a PR disaster and didn't achieve anything. If I were them I'd concentrate on finding hard core pirates and targetting them.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Most home NAS devices are headless linux servers, and many of them support taking over a torrent download when you shut down your PC. Or you can start a torrent/ftp/whatever download directly onto it in the first place. Maybe a home NAS uses more power than a USB stick, but much less than a typical PC or even a laptop. They also often have a full LAMP stack and much more storage than a USB stick thingy.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I'm pretty sure that if you work at Microsoft and were capable of getting Vista running on a 400MHz ARM board with 64MB of RAM, they would either promote you to "Emperor of Microsoft" or bury you in a shallow grave outside of town.
C'mon man, this is Microsoft. They will do both.
...and in the wrong order.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
could easily ask those employees to run some sort of tool from their home DSL connection, or they could buy a few DSL modems and stick them in the basement, or use a VPN to a pool of residential IP connections
Are those employees all licensed private investigators?