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• File-sharers forced to play fair
• IBM Stores Data on Single Atoms

File-sharers forced to play fair

A team of researchers has found a way to enforce good manners on file-sharing networks by treating bandwidth as a currency. The team has created a peer-to-peer system called Tribler in which selfless sharers earn faster upload and download speeds but leechers are penalized. The technology is being assessed by a European broadcasting body looking at ways of piping TV across the net.

Tribler has also been used to turn Sony’s PlayStation 3 into a video-sharing device. While file-sharing networks are good ways to help lots of people get hold of large files often they have far more people taking from the system than they do giving.

Peer-to-peer networks can become sluggish if too many users download content without sharing with others. Using bandwidth as a kind of currency helps to encourage better habits feels Dr Johan Pouwelse, an assistant professor at Delft University of Technology, Amsterdam and co-creator of Tribler.

Dr Pouwelse has been working with associate professor David Parkes from Harvard University to add an accounting system to Tribler to encourage users to upload as often as they download. He feels that using bandwidth as a currency can remove some of the problems seen in file-sharing systems such as BitTorrent.

Tribler has already caught the attention of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which is trying to create a standardized Internet broadcasting system across Europe.

The EBU has already tested a number of other P2P systems and is in the process of building a media portal, which will allow EBU members to publish their radio and television channels across Europe. Overlaid on Tribler is social networking technology that helps to police the system and encourage fair sharing. A passionate community was as effective at policing content as a central administrator. Peers can “gossip” or report on the behavior of malicious users. Moreover content is not stored on a central server, making it harder for malicious users to attack a P2P network.

IBM Stores Data on Single Atoms

IBM Corp. has demonstrated how to perform certain computer functions on single atoms and molecules, a discovery that could someday lead to processors the size of a speck of dust. Researchers at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California developed a technique for measuring magnetic anisotropy, a property of the magnetic field that gives it the ability to maintain a particular direction. This is a crucial step toward the magnet representing the ones or the zeroes used to store data in binary computer language.

In a second report, researchers at IBM’s lab in Zurich, Switzerland, said they had used an individual molecule as an electric switch that could potentially replace the transistors used in modern chips. As chipmakers use build ever smaller circuits and go from 65 nm in the current generation of chips and plan to continue to 45 nm and 32 nm in coming years, wires built from silicon tend to leak more electricity at each step on that scale, and will eventually reach a limit where they are no longer useful. IBM scientists used a tool called a scanning tunneling microscope to photograph and manipulate individual atoms, in their research. Their next challenge is to find a way to make these laboratory demonstrations work at room temperature.

The Zurich researchers also developed a technique for using a molecule containing two hydrogen atoms as a switch, either on its own or with an adjacent molecule. They are now looking to apply the method to many other molecules, enabling the system to work as a collection of logic gates, the building blocks of microprocessors.

Even if the teams reach those goals, they must find a way to manufacture the systems on a large scale, instead of moving single atoms with the STM. One possibility is to use the process of self-assembly, where atoms under certain conditions will naturally form the desired shapes. In May, IBM said it had used that approach to insulate the wires on a chip by creating trillions of tiny, vacuum-filled holes around each one.