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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)?
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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