[wp-hackers] WordPress plugin to help 'illuminati' measurement project

[Michael J Freedman]

Hello,

I'm the author of CoralCDN ("Coral Cache"); I know some members of the 
blogging community have used it to offload their content when they 
otherwise would have been overwhelmed by requests.  More recently, we've 
begun a network measurement project for which we are looking for help:

   http://illuminati.coralcdn.org/

This project seeks to grapple with a number of questions about Internet 
and Web client populations and deployments that have been difficult to 
answer up 'til now, including things like:

   1. What is the distance between clients and their DNS resolvers?

   2. How suboptimal (in terms of network distance) are clients' use of
      web proxies?

   3. What do client populations behind NATs and web proxies look like?

   4. How effective is blacklisting/whitelisting IPs for admissions control
      to websites?  What additional information can be applied to make
      these approaches more effective?

This is an academic endeavour; while our results will be submitted to a 
refereed conference, all identifying information will be kept private and 
only released in anonymized or aggregate form. Some of our preliminary 
data can be found at:

   http://illuminati.coralcdn.org/stats/

While most of our measurements are done using CoralCDN, we are also asking 
web site operators to add 2 lines of HTML to their pages in order to 
contribute. We'll even track your individual team's contributions and how 
you rank against others (a la SETI at Home).

   http://illuminati.coralcdn.org/teams/

Now, to get to the reason I've emailed this list.  Dan Sandler recently 
developed a WordPress plugin to make it really easy to integrate 
illuminati into WordPress blogs.  It can be found here:

   http://www.cs.rice.edu/~dsandler/hacks/illuminati/

I hope it isn't an inappropriate use of this list to announce this plugin; 
we'd like to welcome people to install it and give illuminati a whirl.

Thanks,
Mike Freedman


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www.michaelfreedman.org                              www.coralcdn.org