Using Virtual Worlds to ‘soft Control’ People’s Movements in the Real One

Northwestern University researchers have found they can influence smartphone users’ movements by creating mobile games that have incentives designed to steer people toward specific locations. “We can rely on good luck to get the data that we need, or we can ‘soft control’ users with gaming or social network incentives to drive them where we want them,” says Northwestern professor Fabian Bustamante.

Read more on ACM Communications

Who pays for your P2P habit? ISPs or you?

Who’s paying for peer-to-peer traffic across the internet? It’s not the largest ISPs, which can actually profit from such traffic, but smaller regional internet providers and those who operate campus or corporate networks, according to a new paper out that studies how P2P applications affect ISPs. The paper claims to look at the whole ecosystem, across network boundaries and geographical borders to detail the effect of the entire system of files.

Read more on Gigaom

Japan’s earthquake didn’t even slow BitTorrent use

Not even the worst earthquake in its recorded history can keep Japan’s file-swapping community down. Last month, a team at Northwestern University near Chicago used its own BitTorrent monitoring tools to watch the number of BitTorrent peers exchanging data during the week before the earthquake and the week of the earthquake. They were largely identical, with one exception.

Read more on Ars Technica

P2P, mimetizzarsi tra la folla si può

Roma – Suscita notevole curiosità uno studio effettuato da alcuni ricercatori statunitensi che ha rivelato una potenziale minaccia per la privacy degli utenti nascosta nel cuore delle reti P2P . Secondo lo studio, tracciando le attività del filesharing sarebbe possibile arrivare a sgominare più utenti con uno sforzo pressoché nullo. Lungi dal creare isterie collettive, i ricercatori hanno già fornito una soluzione: un tool di mimetizzazione che si interfaccia con i maggiori client del circuito torrent, ma che necessita di qualche piccolo sacrificio in termini di banda.

Read more on Punto Informatico