Mr frugal boy

I am thrifty in terms of luho like fancy dress, savvy gadgets, technological accessories and other small accessories that I don't really need.  You may see me wearing clothes that are give away as long as i am  comfortable and look decent.
I am thrifty in going to high end restaurant and  fine dining.  But i make it sure we have food on our table and food to prepare from our freezer,  I like going to  the  market every weekend to replenish our supply for the week. We cook the food that we like and enjoy to eat, also i love to drink a couple of beer at the end of the day.
I am thrifty in going to movie houses, i rather download  movies on the internet and watch with the family.
I am thrifty spending postpaid plans on  my phone, data, cable tv and other subscription like Spotify  because it hurts me financially, I use prepaid instead.  I barely keep my bill to a minimum and only  necessary utilities like electricity, water and gas.
I am thrifty in a gym membership or buying sport equipment like treadmill, i rather run on a community oval or community sport complex its free and  had the opportunity to  see other people and catch a fresh and cool air.

These are my reasons to be thrift:
To save enough for the education or our children.
To put aside a fund for  our health care in case emergency happens.
To save money to increase my investment portfolio and achieve financial confidence.
To retire from financial burden and enjoy the good things in life.
To live comfortably based to my earning capacity.
To travel more on different places.

Learning Notes on: "Rationality and Self-Interest in Peer to Peer Networks"

Rationality and Self-Interest in Peer to Peer Networks

By: Jeffrey Shneidman and David C. Parkes

Paper Abstract:

Much of the existing work in peer to peer networking assumes that users will follow prescribed protocols without deviation. This assumption ignores the user’s ability to modify the behavior of an algorithm for self-interested reasons.

We advocate a different model in which peer to peer users are expected to be rational and self- interested. This model is found in the emergent fields of Algorithmic Mechanism Design (AMD) and Distributed Algorithmic Mechanism Design (DAMD), both of which introduce game-theoretic ideas into a computational system. We, as designers, must create systems (peer to peer search, routing, distributed auctions, resource allocation, etc.) that allow nodes to behave rationally while still achieving good overall system outcomes.

This paper has three goals. The first is to convince the reader that rationality is a real issue in peer to peer networks. The second is to introduce mechanism design as a tool that can be used when designing networks with rational nodes. The third is to describe three open problems that are relevant in the peer to peer setting but are unsolved in existing AMD/DAMD work. In particular, we consider problems that arise when a networking infrastructure contains rational agents.

Learners Notes and Synthesis:

In our social environment every human being tends to protect its own self interest and survival at all cause. In order for a society to grow we should learn to be govern by protocols and rules. So with peer-to-peer network we cannot assume that every nodes will follow desired  protocols establish by the central authority or the developer of the application.

Some peer to peer application are govern by rules  and protocols:

* Routing to reach other peer

* Resource management

* Decision making based on facts and environment behavior

* Distribute load among other peer

Rationality vs  Self interest

Based on the example on this paper, running the auction on a large peer-to-peer network, initially you will. Be announcing the bidding for the auction and you are waiting for a lot of bids. But unfortunately there are only three bidders only to find out that they are your direct neighbors, for their self interest  of this neighbor they did not forward the advertisement for the auction.  This example illustrates basic problem  of peer-to-peer network  for rationality vs self interest.

Rationality in peer-to-peer network

Free rider problem:

“A free rider receives the benefit of everyone else's cooperation without having to cooperate himself. Think of a single person in the community who doesn't pay his taxes; he gets all the benefits of the public institutions those taxes pay for—police and fire departments, road construction and maintenance, regulations to keep his food and workplace safe, a military—without having to actually pay for them.” [1]

Tragedy of the commons  problems:

“A Tragedy of the Commons occurs whenever a group shares a limited resource: not just fisheries, but grazing lands, water rights, time on a piece of shared exercise equipment at a gym, an unguarded plate of cookies in the kitchen. In a forest, you can cut everything down for maximum short-term profit, or selectively harvest for sustainability. Someone who owns the forest can make the trade-off for himself, but when an unorganized group together owns the forest there's no one to limit the harvest, and a Tragedy of the Commons can result” [1]

In peer-to-peer system nodes that do not produce the same level of their consumption are considered leechers, while peers that  share the their resources to provide a better performance.

Another example peer to peer clients that deflect from protocols for their own interest are the user that develop their own client program that will deflect on the protocols and will circumvent the network for their own self interest.

I wish to be a farmer producer of healthy food

Human basic needs: food, shelter and  clothing.

Next needs are fuel, electricity, internet and the rest are just material that are less important.

Our planet does not need more lawyers, doctors, engineers the planet is now full of tools and other material things that are readily available for our day to day needs.  Our people need food  and the producer of food.  Here in the Philippines the average age of a farmer is 57 years old and we are running out of young farmers. I wish i had the opportunity to go back to these basic activity of producing healthy food and take care of our nature. Nature farming where we can use the tricks of nature to produce food  and totally eradicating the use of synthetic and chemical farming.  Natural farming a combination of diversification and smart ways to produce a healthy food  by taking care of our environment the soil, water and its ecology.

I wish i had a farm that i can cultivate and enrich, raise some chicken that will eventually lays eggs, pigs for the bacon and ham, some goats for the daily milk and cheese  for a very good breakfast meal.  A healthy breakfast that will nourish and support a nice life style.  More livestock, poultry, cultured fish and other fruit bearing plants for the rest of the day.

I wish i had a farm that produces and had surplus for me to sustain my family daily needs like (health, schooling and other needs) and other necessities.  

I wish my main source of living is producing food, where my income does not rely solely on the wages as a regular daily earner. That we are earning just enough  from payday to payday where the big pie of that salary goes to the monthly duties like electricity bill, water bill, housing mortgage  and other items.   A life where we are not oblige to report  on a daily (8am-5pm) basis as long as you are productive in any time of the day. A work place where we can avoid unnecessary and too much politicking.  A work place where we enjoy the view of the crops as they grow, flourish and bear fruit till the harvest season. 

Retirement at the age of 60, i dream of retiring earlier where my body is still capable of doing more work and attending to things that i wish i can do now.  Things like roaming around a farm(wish i had now), observing everything as it happens on the field from planting up to harvesting. Helping the ecology to balance itself and watching the nature mystery as they happen.

Guys of the 90's do you still remember Agfa, Fujifilm and Kodak?

Those were the precious company during the 90s, can you still remember the local photographer like the name of Mang Temy, who usually ride his bike all the way from the other town, just to attend the  event and take you snapshot that will cost  30 pesos to 50 pesos per shot. In todays money what is 30-50 pesos, thats a lot of money during the 90s it  is a one day  wages for transplanting rice in the field  where you are literally planting  rice under the rain or under the sun.  You plant rice all day and get your wages at sun down then spend a little for a bottle of coca cola and save the rest for school and some coins for the bamboo bank.  This bamboo bank will later be opened during special occasion like foundation day, intramural  or christmas party celebration.  During this event the school will organized some activity and have the opportunity to celebrate with classmates, crush-mate, friends and barkadas and sometimes we can take some photographs like one or two shots with the help of the photographer which eventually will pay for the photo when it is printed. Well, those were the experience during the 90s where selfies and duckling smile are not yet conceptualize. Every smile were so precious  which we always cherish those experiences.

What happened to Agfa, Fujifilm, Kodak   and  other photo film company? Today they were overtaken by smart device which will take a photo of you and enhance your look to make you even better.  When you look at the photos of today everything is perfect but sometimes they are very far from reality to the point where you will not be able to realized the same person from the photograph.

Just remembering the days of yesterday.

Advanced Persistent Threat: Personal perspective the right to be informed and equipped

Background:
In todays  information security landscape there are dramatic change in the way and the motivation of cybercriminals.  From the use of worms, virus, spyware, bots to advanced persistent threats (APT), zero day targeted attacks, dynamic trojans, stealth bots and zombie devices from the proliferation of IoT(Internet of Things).  Organisation or individual are facing a threat which is coordinated, organised, targeted and motivated. These new threat are no longer  intended to  disrupt, annoy, destroy and commit cybercrime. They are targeting organisation/individual to steal information for financial gain (financial information), intellectual property or cyber espionage(national security) .

What is APT? (definition by Symantec)

An APT is a type of targeted attack. Targeted attacks use a wide variety of techniques, including drive-by downloads, Microsoft SQL® injection, malware, spyware, phishing, and spam, to name just a few. APTs can and often do use many of these same techniques. An APT is always a targeted attack, but a targeted attack is not necessarily an APT.

How Advance Persistent Threat(APT) Works:
Cybercriminals are taking advantage of the zero-day attack,  polymorphic malware and blended threat to launched a sophisticated and determined attack to a specific target.  Some anti-virus company  tag these attacks as malware where in fact these type of attack are intelligent malware that targets organisation or individual for a specific purpose or gain.

Learning notes on "Self-Organization in Peer-to-Peer Systems"

Self-Organization in Peer-to-Peer Systems

By:  Jonathan Ledlie, Jacob M. Taylor, Laura Serban, Margo Seltzer Harvard University

Paper Abstract:

This paper addresses the problem of forming groups in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems and examines what dependabil- ity means in decentralized distributed systems. Much of the literature in this field assumes that the participants form a local picture of global state, yet little research has been done discussing how this state remains stable as nodes enter and leave the system. We assume that nodes remain in the sys- tem long enough to benefit from retaining state, but not suf- ficiently long that the dynamic nature of the problem can be ignored. We look at the components that describe a system’s dependability and argue that next-generation decentralized systems must explicitly delineate the information dispersal mechanisms (e.g., probe, event-driven, broadcast), the ca- pabilities assumed about constituent nodes (bandwidth, up- time, re-entry distributions), and distribution of informa- tion demands (needles in a haystack vs. hay in a haystack [13]). We evaluate two systems based on these criteria: Chord [22] and a heterogeneous-node hierarchical group- ing scheme [11]. The former gives a failed request rate under normal P2P conditions and a prototype of the latter a similar rate under more strenuous conditions with an order of magnitude more organizational messages. This analysis suggests several methods to greatly improve the prototype.

Notes and synthesis:

In human cooperation we can build a super organization example in a dragon boat, a single member of a team can only row at a low speed but when the team is composed of more members and they are organized they can achieved greater speed. Peer-to-peer system and current algorithm used by this technology  is increasingly advantageous in a variety of situation.

Peer-to-peer system can be used in variety of services e.g. voice communication like Skype.  Delivering information in a greater scale and millions of users imagine a single video server that distributes content to a thousand or million of users will lead to performance degradation and greater possibility of failure. The reason for a distributed system is to attain redundancy and to have speed of light in the delivery of service.

This paper has contributed in the following:

1. implicit goals and assumptions about a particular decentralized system affects measures reliability

2. Introduced a self-organizing hierarchically-based P2P system

3. Take assumptions implicit in current P2P filesharing systems and evaluate the reliability of Chord and the hierarchical grouping system.