A Duke Chronicle Article
includes this:
Cox said his team is concerned that users' personal information
is all controlled by a single centralized entity, making it
vulnerable to hackers. The other danger, Cox explained, lies
in the fact that social networking Web sites own rights to
users' information and can use that data as they see
fit.
“Is there a way to get the same service and protect ourselves a
little more?” Cox asked.
Cox and his collaborators aim to find a more decentralized setup. In
this alternative, instead of personal information being
concentrated in a single administrative domain, each user
would upload his or her information into a Virtual
Individual Server. This VIS would be one component of a
peer-to-peer network.
“It’s a much safer model if you’re in
control,” he said.
You can see other blurbs about
this grant
from the US News site which is
essentially an NSF press-release.
You can see it called out as essentially wasteful
by republican.senate.gov
Landon Cox is Duke class of 1999 and currently an Assistant Professor of
Computer Science at Duke. On his list of publications his first paper
listed is co-authored by Owen Astrachan and two other Duke
undergraduates. In 1998 he was an undergraduate TA (UTA) for Compsci
108 along with another visitor to Compsci 82: Ge Wang. Luis von Ahn,
yet another visitor to Compsci 82, was in the class for which they served as
UTAs as was current Duke Professor
Rebecca Willet.
A Duke News
release about his recent NSF grant includes this:
"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.