As some of you know, I was working on BitTorrent-based distribution system. Now, when my thesis is finished, I would like to share its results, in form of article, with anyone interested. Unfortunately, the article is not yet finished (it's a very late draft) and not yet officially published, so I can't make it publicly available (at least not yet). For this reason, anyone who would like to read it, please send me request (through my e-mail) and I will send you the article. Additionally, if you happen to be academic, I'd be thankful for (even short) review, because I'm participating in a contest for best Polish master thesis in the computer science area, and outside review would improve my chances. Nonetheless all kind of feedback is very welcome (including, or even specially, critical one).
Abstract of article:
"We present NauBTilus, a new BitTtorrent-based distribution system,
which enables to survive Distributed Denial Of Service (DDoS) attacks
and provides mechanism for securing data updates.
In NauBTilus we use proven in practice BitTorrent foundations
to create a new network that would serve a quite different purpose.
In the design process we eliminated some of original BT flaws,
like need to have constantly available tracker.
We show how NauBTilus can be used to handle attacks,
failures and how the update mechanism can be use to rejoin possible disconnected
subswarms (which could happen with longer tracker downtime).
We also exploit the idea of taking tools used in botnets
in order to help defend network from their attacks."
I'm currently quite busy working on my master thesis. If any of you wonder the subject of it is "A P2P-based survivable system for file distribution" and it's about designing network that could handle DDoS type of attack, while still letting owner to update shared data. It's based on BitTorrent protocol, inspired by Blue Security story and I came with the subject myself, so it's definitely not a boring kind of work. Actually it's quite opposite - I find it really fascinating, but unfortunately my procrastination is still killing me. So, although I'm not writing 24 hours a day, it's constantly sitting in my head no matter where I am and what I do.
Because I'm, as previously mentioned, busy man these days I don't have much time to deal with RTL8187SE drivers, my homepage and everything else. So don't expect any updates at least until June and please, don't bother me. I'm also thinking about dropping support for Hardy, because I've replaced it on my dual OS (Kubuntu and Kubuntu) with Jaunty (9.04) and I believe that 8.10 and 9.04 works much better (except Intel graphics on 9.04) on netbooks than 8.04. How many of you still use Hardy? Please let me know.
That's all for now. I think I will go wash some dishes, cook a diner and maybe do some shopping, before I get my stuff done;).
Couple of days ago I wrote another letter to Realtek (some bugreports) and ask them for updated drivers. Luckily for us they they sent me another, working (sub)release. I'm using those drivers right now and they seems to work fine, except for one nasty bug that pollutes system logs with "Error 2 opening /proc/acpi/ac_adapter/AC0/state" message. Below you can find link to sources I got from Realtek, simple patch that disable this annoying error message and to deb package, which includes previously mentioned patch, built against recent intrepid kernel (2.6.27-12-generic). For now, due the lack of time, this is only supported kernel. But if you need package for another kernel just let me know and I will see what I can do. But be aware - I support only official Ubuntu x86 kernels! Anyway, here are the files:
rtl8187se_linux_26.1023.1209.2008.tar.gzrtl8187se_linux_26.1023.1209.2008-dmesg.patch
linux-rtl8187se-modules-1023.3@2.6.27.12.15.deb (Intrepid)