President Bush Discusses World AIDS Day PODCAST VIDEO

President George W. Bush and Mrs. Laura Bush address reporters on World AIDS Day from the the North Lawn of the White House, Monday, Dec. 1. 2008, where President Bush reaffirmed the commitment to fight HIV/AIDS at home and abroad. A large red ribbon is displayed from the North Portico of the White House in observance of World AIDS Day. White House photo by Joyce N. Boghosian

President Bush Discusses World AIDS Day FULL STREAMING VIDEO North Lawn In Focus: HIV/AIDS 10:07 A.M. EST. PODCAST OF THIS ARTICLE THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. Today is World AIDS Day, a day we reaffirm our commitment to fight HIV/AIDS at home and abroad. Thirty-three million people around the world are living with HIV, including more than one million Americans.

Once again this year, to observe World AIDS Day, there is a red ribbon on the North Portico of the White House. The ribbon is a symbol of our resolve to confront HIV/AIDS and to affirm the matchless value of every life.

One of the most important initiatives of my administration has been the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR. It's the largest international health initiative dedicated to a single disease. When we launched PEPFAR, our goal was to support treatment for two million people in five years. Today, I'm pleased to announce that we have exceeded that goal -- early.

The American people, through PEPFAR, are supporting lifesaving treatment for more than two million people around the world. And when PEPFAR began, only 50,000 people living with HIV in all of sub-Sahara Africa were receiving antiretroviral treatment.

Around the world, we've also supported care for more than 10 million people affected by HIV, including more than four million orphans and vulnerable children. More than 237,000 babies have been born HIV-free, thanks to the support of the American people for programs to prevent mothers from passing the virus on to their children.

PEPFAR is bringing hope and healing to people around the world. On our trips to Africa, Laura and I have witnessed firsthand the gratitude of the African people.

We look forward to discussing our efforts to combat global HIV/AIDS with Rick Warren at the Saddleback Civil Forum on Global Health this morning. In the meantime, we thank our fellow citizens for being so compassionate and so caring and so decent. God bless.

END 10:10 A.M. EST For Immediate Release Office of the Press Secretary December 1, 2008

Tags: President Bush and World AIDS Day

Developing A Neighborhood Watch For The Internet

Fabian Bustamante David Choffnes

Internet network performance problems are not only annoying to users -- they are costly to businesses and network operators. But since the Internet has no built-in monitoring system, network problems often go unnoticed. To help fix this problem, researchers at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University have developed a new way to detect and report such problems in real time through their Network Early Warning System. While choppy playback on streaming video may be irritating to a user, it can drive thousands of potential customers away from the site providing the feed. As the Internet continues to grow, these network problems, or anomalies, become all the more frequent and frustrating. Determining the existence, let alone the impact, of network anomalies is important because the Internet has no overall monitoring system.

Current monitoring systems try to identify network anomalies and can look for issues that could lead to performance problems but cannot tell whether individual users are actually experiencing problems.

Yet every day, millions of Internet users worldwide naturally generate data traffic that inherently provides information about whether the network is working or not. (Think of the million of peer-to-peer users in systems like BitTorrent or Skype.). By sharing high-level information about their experience, these users could very efficiently and accurately detect where problems occur in real time.

So Fabián Bustamante, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and doctoral student David Choffnes are exploiting this observation to build a participatory approach to detecting, isolating and reporting network anomalies: the Network Early Warning System, or NEWS for short.

"You can think of it as crowd sourcing network monitoring," said Bustamante.

While the concept behind NEWS is straightforward, Bustamante and Choffnes overcame a number of design challenges to bring the approach to an Internet-scale deployment. By gathering information about network conditions from natural data traffic, NEWS focuses only on problems that affect end-users and does so without requiring any extra and potentially wasteful network-measurement traffic. NEWS incorporates knowledge of "normal" behavior for network applications to prevent false alarms and confirms suspected problems by checking with other nearby users.

NEWS is currently implemented as an extension to a popular BitTorrent client. By generating warnings about problems in the network, the software allows users to ensure that they get the proper Internet service they pay for. This was incentive enough for more than 12,000 users to install the software during its beta-testing phase. The researchers are also developing a portal for network providers to be notified about the network problems reported by their users.

Bustamante and Choffnes, who previously released the popular Ono extension for BitTorrent (now with more than 300,000 users worldwide), are applying the NEWS approach to build other valuable services, such as enabling comparison shopping for different Internet Service Providers based on the performance seen from subscribers.

For more information, visit the lab's web site at: aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu

Contact: Megan Fellman fellman@northwestern.edu 847-491-3115 Northwestern University