Instead of fighting about property lines and whose dog is
keeping everyone up at night, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign want you and your
neighbors to get together and share your WiFi signal in a method that supposedly delivers better performance to each
individual user. Assistant computer science professor Haiyun Luo and graduate student Nathanael Thompson of the
school's Systems, Wireless, and Networking Group have released a free download that analyzes local airwaves and
exploits unused bandwidth from one network to complement ones experiencing heavy usage, but always gives users priority
access to their own signal. Part of the two-year-old PERM project, the application uses flow-scheduling algorithms to
determine bandwidth allocation, and has so-far undergone testing on Linux clients and with Linksys routers. Security is
obviously a key concern in such a sharing setup, so PERM developed the software to both "preserve a user's privacy
and security, and mitigate the free-riding problem."[Via PCWorld]