Venus AUEB Forum

When people post pictures or political opinions to share with their friends, they're actually turning them over to the owners of the network as well.
"My concern is that they're under the control of a central entity," Cox said. "The social networks currently control all the information that users throw into them. I don't think that's necessarily evil. But it raises some concerns."
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Though users may not have caught this when they clicked to accept a site's terms of service, they've largely signed away the rights to their own data by joining an Online Social Network. "These rights commonly include a license to display and distribute all content posted by users in any way the provider sees fit," Cox said.
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"What the grant will do is fund research into alternatives for providing social networking services that don't concentrate all this information in a single place," he said. Cox's notion is instead to create what network architects would call a "peer-to-peer" system architecture in which information is spread out. Being distributed, individual data is thus harder to steal or otherwise exploit.

"The basic idea is that users would control and store their own information and then share it directly with their friends instead of it being mediated through a site like Facebook. And there are some interesting challenges that go along with decomposing something like Facebook into a peer-to-peer system.
"Facebook is a great service because it's highly available and really fast. When you break something into thousands and millions of different pieces instead, you'd want to try to recreate the same availability and performance. That's the research challenge we're going to be looking at over the next three years."
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"The research will point in a couple of directions," he said. "Can we get a desktop machine to intelligently switch over to a cloud? Can we reduce the cost by only using a cloud when the desktop is not available?"
Or perhaps the same information can be put in a number of places in the hope that at least one of those computers is always working. "So in addition to serving my own stuff I might ask my friends to serve my stuff as well," Cox said.

proskopos wrote:Πολύ ενδιαφέρων άρθρο...
Βέβαια, καταπιάνεται με την σκοπιά του privacy in social networks, ωστε να εξηγησει ζητήματα που προκύπτουν σε όλα τα μεγάλα δίκτυα κεντρικής διαχείρησης.
Το cloud computing, μπορεί να έιναι λύση σε πολλά από τα ζητήματα που προκύπτουν αλλα είναι νέα τεχνολογία και θέλει πολύ πειραματισμό ακόμα για να στηρίξουμε εκεί μεγάλα δίκτυα...