Ian Clarke | |
|---|---|
 Ian Clarke in October, 2019 | |
| Born | 16 February 1977 |
| Citizenship | Ireland, United States [1] |
| Alma mater | University of Edinburgh, Scotland |
| Known for | Freenet peer to peer software, Revver |
| Awards | 2003 Technology Review Young Innovator |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science, artificial intelligence |
Ian Clarke (born 16 February 1977) is the original designer and lead developer of Freenet.
Clarke grew up in Navan, County Meath, Ireland. [2] He was educated at Dundalk Grammar School and while there, he came first twice in the Senior Chemical, Physical, and Mathematical section of the Young Scientist Exhibition. The first time, in 1993, was with a project entitled "The C Neural Network Construction Kit". The second time, the following year, was with a project entitled "Mapping Internal Variations in Translucency within a Translucent Object using Beams of Light". [3]
In 1995, Clarke left Dundalk to study Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. While at Edinburgh, he became president of the then dormant Artificial Intelligence Society, resulting in its revival. [4] In Clarke's final year at Edinburgh, he completed his final year project, entitled "A Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System". In July 1999, after receiving a 'B' grade for his paper, he decided to release it to the Internet and invited volunteers to help implement his design. The resulting free software project became known as Freenet, and attracted significant attention from the mainstream and technology media. [5] [6] [7]
In August 1999, Clarke began his first full-time job as a software developer in the Space Division of Logica plc, a London-based software consulting company. In February 2000, he left Logica to join a small software start-up called Instil Ltd. [4] In August 2000, he left London for Santa Monica, California, where he co-founded Uprizer, Inc. with the intent of commercializing some of his Freenet-related ideas. [8] In January 2001, Uprizer Inc. successfully raised $4 million in Series A round venture funding from investors including Intel Capital. [9]
In March 2001, Clarke published an article describing FairShare, developed in collaboration with Uprizer's co-founders, Steven Starr and Rob Kramer. Clarke was concerned that copyright would become increasingly difficult to enforce in the Internet age, the goal of Fairshare was to provide an alternative to copyright as a way to compensate creators. [10]
In September 2002, after leaving Uprizer, Clarke formed Cematics LLC to explore a variety of new ideas and opportunities. Cematics LLC developed a number of products including Locutus - a P2P search application for the enterprise, WhittleBit - a search engine that learns from user feedback, [11] and 3D17, a web-based collaborative editing tool. [12]
In October 2003, Clarke decided to leave the United States to return to Edinburgh, Scotland. In December 2004, he began work on Dijjer, a distributed P2P web cache, and Indy, a collaborative music discovery system, both in conjunction with ChangeTv, a company founded by his long-time collaborator, Steven Starr, who later brought in Clarke and Oliver Luckett as co-founders. In 2003, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. [13]
ChangeTv changed its name to Revver Inc. and unveiled a new website in November 2005 that strove to let creators of short videos earn revenue from their work. [14] Revver was one of several user-created video websites unveiled in late 2005, but was the first such website to financially compensate video creators, and is reminiscent of Fairshare.
In December 2006, Clarke left Revver and moved to Austin, Texas. [15] There, Clarke founded a new company, SenseArray, which is a drop-in ad targeting engine based on a proprietary algorithm developed by Clarke. [16] In October 2009, he released Swarm, [17] [18] [19] [20] a novel approach to distributing computation across multiple computers in a manner largely transparent to the programmer.
In January 2012, Clarke co-founded OneSpot, with the goal of creating "ads that don't suck". Over the next 3 years, he designed a real-time bidding engine capable of consistently outperforming Google Adwords. [21] In March 2012, he open sourced LastCalc, [22] an online calculator he intended to provide an open and more flexible alternative to tools like Google Calculator. [23]
Hyphanet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free software for publishing and communicating on the Web without fear of censorship. Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke, who defined Freenet's goal as providing freedom of speech on the Internet with strong anonymity protection.
Gnutella is a peer-to-peer network protocol. Founded in 2000, it was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network, forming a peer-to-peer network of nodes.
A distributed hash table (DHT) is a distributed system that provides a lookup service similar to a hash table. Key–value pairs are stored in a DHT, and any participating node can efficiently retrieve the value associated with a given key. The main advantage of a DHT is that nodes can be added or removed with minimum work around re-distributing keys. Keys are unique identifiers which map to particular values, which in turn can be anything from addresses, to documents, to arbitrary data. Responsibility for maintaining the mapping from keys to values is distributed among the nodes, in such a way that a change in the set of participants causes a minimal amount of disruption. This allows a DHT to scale to extremely large numbers of nodes and to handle continual node arrivals, departures, and failures.
BitTorrent, also referred to as simply torrent, is a communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P), which enables users to distribute data and electronic files over the Internet in a decentralized manner. The protocol is developed and maintained by Rainberry, Inc., and was first released in 2001.
Winny is a Japanese peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing program developed by Isamu Kaneko, a research assistant at the University of Tokyo in 2002. Like Freenet, a user must add an encrypted node list in order to connect to other nodes on the network. Users choose three cluster words which symbolize their interests, and then Winny connects to other nodes which share these cluster words, downloading and storing encrypted data from cache of these neighbors in a distributed data store. If users want a particular file, they set up triggers (keywords), and Winny will download files marked by these triggers. The encryption was meant to provide anonymity, but Winny also included bulletin boards where users would announce uploads, and the IP address of posters could be discovered through these boards. While Freenet was implemented in Java, Winny was implemented as a Windows C++ application.
An anonymous P2P communication system is a peer-to-peer distributed application in which the nodes, which are used to share resources, or participants are anonymous or pseudonymous. Anonymity of participants is usually achieved by special routing overlay networks that hide the physical location of each node from other participants.
The Invisible Internet Project (I2P) is an anonymous network layer that allows for censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer communication. Anonymous connections are achieved by encrypting the user's traffic, and sending it through a volunteer-run network of roughly 55,000 computers distributed around the world. Given the high number of possible paths the traffic can transit, a third party watching a full connection is unlikely. The software that implements this layer is called an "I2P router", and a computer running I2P is called an "I2P node". I2P is free and open sourced, and is published under multiple licenses.
A dark net or darknet is an overlay network within the Internet that can only be accessed with specific software, configurations, or authorization, and often uses a unique customized communication protocol. Two typical darknet types are social networks, and anonymity proxy networks such as Tor via an anonymized series of connections.
A friend-to-friend computer network is a type of peer-to-peer network in which users only make direct connections with people they know. Passwords or digital signatures can be used for authentication.
This is a timeline of events in the history of networked file sharing.
The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, by using the Internet and other forms of media.
Oskar Sandberg is a key contributor to the Freenet Project, and a PhD graduate of the Chalmers Technical University in Gothenburg, Sweden. Oskar collaborated with Ian Clarke to design the new "darknet" model employed in Freenet 0.7, work which was presented at the DEF CON security conference in July 2005. Oskar recently completed a Ph.D. about the mathematics of complex networks, especially with regard to the small world phenomenon. Besides this he has an active interest in distributed computer networks and network security, and has been an active contributor to the Freenet Project since 1999. Oskar now works at Google.
Peer-to-peer file sharing is the distribution and sharing of digital media using peer-to-peer (P2P) networking technology. P2P file sharing allows users to access media files such as books, music, movies, and games using a P2P software program that searches for other connected computers on a P2P network to locate the desired content. The nodes (peers) of such networks are end-user computers and distribution servers.
Steven Starr is the producer of FLOW: For Love Of Water, and the founder of Revver.
A distributed search engine is a search engine where there is no central server. Unlike traditional centralized search engines, work such as crawling, data mining, indexing, and query processing is distributed among several peers in a decentralized manner where there is no single point of control.
Cemetech is a programming and hardware development group and developer community founded in 2000. Its primary focus is developing third-party software for TI and Casio graphing calculators, along with a focus on mobile and wearable computing hardware. Among its most notable projects are the Doors CS shell for the TI-83+ series of graphing calculators, the Clove 2 dataglove, the Ultimate Calculator, and the CALCnet / globalCALCnet system for networking graphing calculators and connecting them to the Internet. The Cemetech website also hosts tools for calculator programmers, including the SourceCoder TI-BASIC IDE and the jsTIfied TI-83+/84+ emulator. The founder of the site, Dr. Christopher Mitchell, began the site to showcase his personal projects, but it has since branched out to become one of several major sites in the TI calculator hobbyist community and a source for hardware and programming development assistance. It has incubated many software and hardware projects which began in the calculator community but included microprocessor development, general electrical engineering, desktop applications, and mobile/web applications.
Twister is a decentralized, experimental peer-to-peer microblogging program which uses end-to-end encryption to safeguard communications. Based on BitTorrent- and Bitcoin-like protocols, it has been likened to a distributed version of Twitter.
Reptile is a distributed content syndication and management software with privacy protection, written by the co-creator of the Jakarta Project's Jetspeed software. It's designed to allow users to securely find, share, publish and subscribe to web-based content.
ZeroNet is a decentralized web-like network of peer-to-peer users, created by Tamas Kocsis in 2015, programming for the network was based in Budapest, Hungary; is built in Python; and is fully open source. Instead of having an IP address, sites are identified by a public key. The private key allows the owner of a site to sign and publish changes, which propagate through the network. Sites can be accessed through an ordinary web browser when using the ZeroNet application, which acts as a local webhost for such pages. In addition to using bitcoin cryptography, ZeroNet uses trackers from the BitTorrent network to negotiate connections between peers. ZeroNet is not anonymous by default, but it supports routing traffic through the Tor network.
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