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The brainchild of four students from New York University’s Courant Institute, Diaspora will be a distributed, open source network, offering direct competition to Facebook. Because it would run off of each user’s computer, instead of through a Facebook-like central hub, users would have complete control over their own privacy settings.

Throughout June, the team has been focused mainly on developing a system for passing various forms of information between users’ computers (or “seeds”, as they call them). The system now has functioning real time message passing, wherein all of user’s friends receive a message as soon as that user posts it on their seed. Likewise, as soon as any of those friends comment on that message, their comment is instantly sent to the original poster and all the other original recipients.

http://www.gizmag.com/diaspora-release-first-images-and-video/15608/

"We have made great progress with Light Peak," a rep told TechEye during a demo at Intel Research Day. However, the rep acknowledged that "internal discussions" about marketing and positioning the next-generation I/O technology alongside USB 3.0 were still ongoing.

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Would it be possible, using p2p and wireless technologies, to gain independence from internet providers and make free and open net connectivity a reality? Andrea Lo Pumo, a young Italian mathematician has developed Netsukuku, a vision for an alternative wireless network that may represent a disruptive change for the Internet as we know it.

Photo credit: Clipart

The Netsukuku project, which has been recently featured on Wired Italia, is based on the idea of linking multiple computers using only WiFi connectivity and a specifically-built address system that allows direct communications between machines without resorting to the HTTP protocol.

What Netsukuku aims to do is to empower local communities by creating private peer-to-peer networks where connecting to the “standard” Internet is possible, but non compulsory to exchange information and data.

You can think of Netsukuku as a scaled, democratized version of the Internet.

But what are exactly the main advantages of such a solution?

Internet-independent: The core idea behind Netsekuku is to get rid of Internet providers. Each machine inside the WiFi network serves as a router that redirects the information towards all other nodes in the network.

• Resource-uninintensive: The Netsukuku protocol is built to handle a massive number of computers while requiring minimal computer CPU usage and memory resources.
• Private: The Netsukuku address system doesn't work using the HTTP protocol. All computers inside the network cannot be identified outside the local network or remotely-exploited.
• Fast: The Netsukuku wireless network allows fast file transfers between machines because there are no central servers or storage systems. All information is exchanged privately, in a p2p fashion without intermediaries.
• Economical: The Netsukuku network works with standard machines that are WiFi-enabled, thus old machines will work just fine with no need to have last-generation computers, additional hardware or pricey software to install.
• Open-source: The Netsukuku code is released under a GNU / GPL license, it is open and freely editable and redistributable by anyone who wants to build upon on it or fix bugs.

In previous experiments the photons were confined to fiber channels a few hundred meters long to ensure their state remained unchanged, but in the new experiments pairs of photons were entangled and then the higher-energy photon of the pair was sent through a free space channel 16 km long. The researchers, from the University of Science and Technology of China and Tsinghua University in Beijing, found that even at this distance the photon at the receiving end still responded to changes in state of the photon remaining behind. The average fidelity of the teleportation achieved was 89 percent.

The distance of 16 km is greater than the effective aerosphere thickness of 5-10 km, so the group's success could pave the way for experiments between a ground station and a satellite, or two ground stations with a satellite acting as a relay. This means quantum communication applications could be possible on a global scale in the near future.

The public free space channel was at ground level and spanned the 16 km distance between Badaling in Beijing (the teleportation site) and the receiver site at Huailai in Hebei province. Entangled photon pairs were generated at the teleportation site using a semiconductor, a blue laser beam, and a crystal of beta-barium borate (BBO). The pairs of photons were entangled in the spatial modes of photon 1 and polarization modes of photon 2. The research team designed two types of telescopes to serve as optical transmitting and receiving antennas.