Social network scheme without server software - network-programming

(I realize that this question might cost me a reputation score I still want to ask:)
Imagine a social networking software much like a trivial Facebook (Adding friends, sharing statuses and chatting) where the only software component needed is a client app. With no server farms and with no sensitive data stored on servers with no government control and with no server software at all.
Well while this is theoretically almost possible (If there is at least known one user address) still I cant figure out a way how can clients discover each other in the internet (Not in local IP range) if there is not some server where all client addresses are recorded in a least case.
Please drop any ideas how client can discover each other in the internet without server software if you got one or if there is already precedence case.

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Accept any Wi-Fi password on OpenWRT (hostap)

After reading this article on Ars Technica I started looking for a way to enable an encrypted, yet passwordless public network. It is probably not possible due to specifications which require a certain number of characters and OSs complying with them, but what about accepting any password?
It will most definitely require custom scripting or even modifying the sources, so I've chosen OpenWRT to try this out. The relevant sources can be found here and here, which are used for building the wpad, hostpad and wpa-supplicant packages. By default OpenWRT uses wpad-mini (suffix mini means an absence of the WPA Enterprise support).
One of my thoughts was to also try WPA Enterprise for this purpose. Would it be possible to write a simple script to mimic the Radius server response, being always positive, as if credentials were correct?
Another aspect of this question is security. If accepting any password was possible, wouldn't it mean that anyone could trick my device to connect to an AP with the same name, as say, I use at home, and have control over the traffic? This can be a very serious issue and it is better to talk about it publicly than just pretending that if we don't publish a way to do this, no one else will do the same on black markets or in governments.
upd: Would it be possible to use a simple captive portal to 'negotiate' encryption, ideally, without any user interaction apart of opening the page? Naturally, it won't be WPA. Here is a good list of captive portal solutions for OpenWRT. A precaution: with the current OS-level implementations this wouldn't prevent leaking unencrypted data before the negotiation happens. But since OSs already recognize captive portals and display notifications, it should be possible to add a security feature to prevent any data transfers before passing the captive portal.

Video Streaming for Mobile App

I'm building an iOS app for a client that allows users to pay a subscription and unlock additional content within the app. Part of the additional content will be videos which need to be streamed from a server... but I'm not sure whether we should use a hosting service (like Amazon CloudFront or Wowza, perhaps?) or roll our own solution.
Have any of you had experience with either of these options? I looks like this is supported natively by nginx, which we're currently using as our rProxy, but I'd like to hear some thoughts about that. I would be somewhat concerned about saturating our server's 1Gb network connection too...
Whatever the solution, we must be able to verify a person's account before they can access the video content. Variable bitrate is also desirable, and the ability to support >500 concurrent users. This company is also a new startup, so subscription costs are an important factor.
It is usually best to deploy streaming-specific software or services instead of generic HTTP servers such as Nginx. For Wowza, as an example, here's a quick list of features for this type of workflow.
Performance and scalability. You can do a quick comparison on playing back concurrent streams (using load test tools) and see what kind of load can be handled by an HTTP server vs Wowza.
Monitoring. Statistics collection is also integrated with Wowza, which may prove beneficial for start-up companies that need to leverage this kind of data mining.
Security. Wowza also has several options that you can use, such as Secure Token. For example, you can configure your mobile app to query the user's IP address once you determine that they are authorized to receive the stream. You can then generate a hash token based on this IP address and the stream they are authorized for, and only allow playback with the valid token. You can also expire these tokens.
Manager UI. Not as attractive for developers/sys admins, but users can take advantage of a relatively intuitive UI.
Extensibility. Wowza has REST and Java API that can allow you to add custom modules or integrate third-party systems. For example, you can use a custom module that monitors stream connection time, and cuts off any connections that are longer than x number of hours.

How an orchestration engine works [closed]

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I have several questions on this topic. For example, I have found a lot of papers like
"Towards Dynamic Orchestration of Semantic Web Services"
"Decentralized Orchestration of Composite Web Services"
and so on... but in practice, I have only found orchestration linked to Bitztalk or ESB (I mean big software programmers).
Is it possible to develop and orchestration language yourself?
What is the best way to develop an orchestration engine?
Perhaps the best source of information on Purpose and Application of Orchestration are the papers themselves which you quoted.
Background
We surf the web on Firefox, type a document on Microsoft Office. These are centralized applications. These types of software sit and work from one place. They work on your computer, they work on my computer.
You go to a supermarket, pickup an item and check-out from one of the many cash counters. Each clerk at each desk has his own barcode scanner and his own swipe card reader. Each of the cash registers on these counters are linked to one server in a back room somewhere. In this setup, the billing software is distributed across the clerk's counters, but the whole application is still centralized. The server manages the stock and records the sales. It is the center of the centralization.
Then you write an email and send it. Say you send an email from your Gmail account to my Hotmail account. There is Gmail's server, and there is Hotmail's server. There are two centers, instead of just one. Now things are no longer centralized - we have a distributed system. Here, failure of one center does not cripple the whole system. If Hotmail goes down, Gmail still survives.
Rather than purchasing from local supermarket, purchase something from an online store. Say eBay or Amazon. In this example, there is eBay's server, and there are the suppliers to eBay. The suppliers manage their own inventory on their own servers, not on eBay's server. There is also the courier company which brings the package to the buyer. The buyers have their own servers as well. The online payment that the buyer made was through MasterCard, yet another separate server. Now we are talking about a really big distributed system.
Purpose
Now that you are making an online purchase, a hell lot of things are bout to happen, which would need more than a bunch of servers. There has to be a master puppeteer who synchronizes activities among these servers. An account has to be deducted. An email has to sent. A warehouse has to be notified. A courier needs to be arranged. who controls this intricate dance? This is your orchestrator.
Application
Most of the time there are many different and independent servers, each owned by different entities. Yet when all these entities need to work together to create a business flow, a "user interaction session", we need orchestration.
Orchestration of the activities among a set of servers is achieved through a master-puppeteer server. In reality, the orchestrator is itself a set of servers. So one set of servers directs another set of servers. These second set of servers is where actual work is being done. eMails are being sent. Images are being compressed. Addresses are being sorted, and so on. The first set of servers (the orchestrator) makes sure things happen in the order they needs to happen.
Implementation
One answer: queues. The one activity that started this whole story was an attempt to make an online purchase. From there, the clicks you made, the commands you sent, were all queued up in these orchestration servers. The command like purchase-this-item or make-a-payment and then payment-received are all queued and then processed one after another.
The orchestration system accepts these commands on one thread, and on a different thread, the orchestration server asynchronously dispatches them to the respective worker servers. So the purchase-this-item command is dispatched to eBay's server while make-a-payment command is dispatched to MasterCard's server.
The worker servers might produce further commands. The MasterCard server, after validating your card number, might decide to send you an SMS. so it add a send-sms command to the queue. That command is dispatched to, say, a Vodaphone server.
This queuing and dispatching logic is called the "orchestration engine". From there, things can complicate. Vodaphone server might be offline. MasterCard might reject the card. The warehouse server might return an out-of-stock response. Then that response will need to be routed to eBay's server which could re-queue the purchase command to some different warehouse. There are server crashes. Disk failures. Power outages, and so on.
Finally
Orchestration is to make sure that so many diverse components, distributed geographically, in different points of time, some are parallel, some are faulty, some are slow, some are malicious, some are illegal,.. all work together towards getting you the damn headphones that you purchased over internet.

iOS client server approach

I'm familiar with SOAP and Webservices for peer-to-peer or client/server messaging on other platforms. What is the Apple equivalent for messaging?
I'm trying to put together an application server that will manage a collaborative work environment. It will have an average of 200 and maximum of 1000 mobile clients on a LAN. For example, one Mac and 200 iPhones. I'm planning to use Apple's Enteprise approach to distribute our private (commercial) app to each of our iPhones clients.
The server can push configuration settings to each client. The server will also push small sets of data to the clients. The clients will perform tasks on this data locally, and eventually report back status to the server. The clients can request more data sets from the server. These exchanges can be managed asynchronously.
There is also be a need to have synchronous exchanges for critical processes. This is rare, but it is a requirement.
The data that needs to be exchanged is reasonably small. These client/server processes are time dependent, so performance is critical requirement.
The network won't be shared, but needs to be tightly controlled (and fast). E.g. it can be Bonjour if there is a compelling reason for that.
I'm looking for a recommendation on which components of the Mac/iOS SDKs to leverage. Please leave 3rd party software out of this discussion. I must know what Apple already offers and what gaps exist before considering outside software. Thanks.
If you are only going to be using Mac and iOS products then Bonjour is really your best bet. There are a ton of native ways to transmit data in either byte or object forms.
There were a couple great videos from WWDC 2012 showing what the new Xcode can do to create client and server applications. It is under NDA, but you may want to take a look there: https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2012/.
Also you said you did not want third party, any particular reason? Would you use an open source layer on top of Bonjour?

Detecting end-user connection speed problems in Apache for Windows

Our company provides web-based management software (servicedesk, helpdesk, timesheet, etc) for our clients.
One of them have been causing a great headache for some months complaining about the connection speed with our servers.
In our individual tests, the connection and response speeds are always great.
Some information about this specific client :
They have about 300 PC's on their local network, all using the same bandwith/server for internet access.
They dont allow us to ping their server, so we cant establish a trace route.
They claim every other site (google, blogs, news, etc) are always responding fast. We know for a fact they have no intention to mislead us and know this to be true.
They might have up to 100 PC's simulateneously logged in our software at any given time. They have a need to increase that amount up to 300 so this is a major issue.
They are helpfull and colaborative in this issue we are trying to resolve for a long time.
Some information about our server and software :
We have been able to allocate more then 400 users at a single time without major speed losses for other clients.
We have gone extensive lengths to make good use of data caching and opcode caching in the software itself, and we did notice the improvement (from fast to faster)
There are no database, CPU or memory bottlenecks or leaks. Other clients are able to access the server just fine.
We have little to no knowledge on how to do some analyzing on specific end-user problems (Apache running under Windows server), and this is where I could use a lot of help.
Anything that might be related to Apache configuration would also be helpfull.
While all signs points to it being an internal problem in this specific client network, we are dedicating this effort to solve that too, if that is the case, but do not have capable or instructed professionals to deal with network problems (they do, however, while their main argument is that 'all other sites are fast, only yours is slow')
you might want to have a look at the tools from google "page speed family": http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/overview.html
your customer should maybe run the page speed extension for you. maybe then you can find out what is the problem: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/extension.html

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