Networking Forum

[ATTACH=right]16006[/ATTACH][I]Part dedicated professional, part creative thinker and part con man.[/I] On a weekly basis a major corporation’s data is compromised in a most public fashion – in an instant slaughtering consumer confidence and bringing immediate disgrace. Who doesn’t remember the Google Aurora attacks and AT&T’s iPad data leak exposing 114,000 …

The long summer holidays are over here in the UK, and our kids have pretty much all gone back to school this week. Which is good news for providers of anonymous proxies and bad news for the school network admins trying to prevent students from accessing inappropriate sites. One UK …

According to a recent survey of Apple iTunes, iPod, iPhone and iPod Touch users, conducted by The NPD Group, more than a quarter of consumers participating had a strong interest in a free cloud-based music option. Many were willing to pay a subscription fee to access their own music libraries …

[ATTACH=right]15786[/ATTACH]At Microsoft's [URL="http://www.digitalwpc.com/"]Worldwide Partner Conference[/URL] in Washington, D.C. this week, the digital diplodocus will announce its lumbering movement into the cloud along with an appeal for its partners to hold hands and make the leap as well. For those partners that are still a little hesitant to make the jump, …

[ATTACH=LEFT]15719[/ATTACH]The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has [URL="http://www.bluetooth.com/English/Products/Pages/Low_Energy.aspx?var=homepageHERO=Bluetoothv4.0"]completed[/URL] work on the new Bluetooth 4.0 specification and is officially ready to begin qualifying new devices for use with the technology. The most notable improvement is the support for devices with low-power consumption. This means Bluetooth can now be implemented in a …

Unless you are a techno-luddite of the first order, the chances are that you would agree the Internet has become an integral part of daily life for those blessed with decent access to the thing. But would you agree that broadband access of no less than 1Mbps is your legal …

Just [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story283037.html"]weeks [/URL]after Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales came under criticism for being overly zealous about removing information, particularly images, that could be considered to be child pornography from the electronic encyclopedia, the site is being accused by Fox News of harboring pedophiles. "Wikipedia has become home base for a loose …

Interesting that the US Department of Defense has banned thumb drives. The problem is that they can carry viruses and infect computers - and if your nation's defense depends on these systems (and by extension in the case of the US so does the defense of the rest of the …

Since the BP-contracted Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20th, killing 11 workers and sending tens of thousands of barrels of oil into the sea every day, the oil industry has been subject to an understandable barrage of bad press. Finding a good news …

At the State Opening of Parliament, the Queen has been giving her annual speech on behalf of the UK Government. Written by the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition Government itself, much of the speech was devoted to the inevitable cost cutting exercises, the 'Big Society' concept and reform in terms of …

All of the applications for the second round of broadband stimulus funding have been posted -- sort of. In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, Congress appropriated $7.2 billion for broadband grants, loans, and loan guarantees to be administered by the USDA’s …

Hewlett-Packard released this week a research [URL="http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2010/apr-jun/HP_ASME_PAPER.pdf"]paper [/URL]describing how a data center could be powered by the waste from a dairy farm. (Would that make it a 'green' data center, or a 'brown' one?) "The HP ASME paper shows how a farm of 10,000 dairy cows could generate 1MW of …

In response to [URL="http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/04/27/wikipedia-child-porn-larry-sanger-fbi/"]claims [/URL]from cofounder Larry Sanger that Wikimedia is harboring images of child pornography, founder Jimmy Wales has gone on a search-and-destroy mission against pornographic images in the company's family of websites, causing an outcry about his heavy handedness and resulting in his [URL="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/7711486/Wikipedia-porn-row-sees-founder-give-up-his-editing-privileges.html"]giving [/URL]up some privileges to …

[ATTACH=right]14831[/ATTACH]Two days ago, the Dow Jones Industrialized Average [URL="http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/probing+point+dive/3001581/story.html"]plunged almost 1000 points in a half hour[/URL]. That's almost 10 percent of the entire value of the market in 30 minutes. That's insane! What happened? Well, it turns out, it was a fairly simple technological trigger that caused the problem. Seems …

Gamers beware. There is an email going around with a subject line that reads something like this: "You Steam will be disabled. Please reactive it." (notice how they cannot even spell "your" properly) [attach=right]14694[/attach] In this email you will find a head banner with the STEAM logo and a couple …

It took two years, but Terry Childs, former network administrator for the city of San Francisco, has finally been convicted of one felony count of computer tampering. In [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story219397.html"]2008[/URL], Childs changed the system's router passwords and then for more than a week refused to give them to anyone, even after …

The case of a Philadelphia school allegedly [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story263325.html"]spying [/URL]on students through webcams in their laptop computers continues to wend its way through the legal system, with more recently filed court documents alleging that as many as 56,000 pictures were taken. While attorneys for the school system [URL="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/us/20brfs-SCHOOLDISTRI_BRF.html"]insist [/URL]none of the …

33 of the 4,000 people who worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission in the last five years -- 31 of them within the past three years -- were busted viewing pornography on the job, including 17 senior employees earning between $99,000 and $222,000 a year, according to a [URL="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/SECPornSummary.pdf"]report …

The [URL="http://openid.net/"]OpenID[/URL] authentication method allows visitors to participating Web sites to log in with a single digital identity and avoid having to remember [I]yet another[/I] login / password combination. Many businesses are implementing this method on consumer-facing Web sites in order to lower the barrier to user registration and participation …

Awards from the first round of broadband stimulus grants are coming under criticism for duplicating existing infrastructure. "Now as the government awards the money, some phone and cable companies complain that not all of it is being used to bring broadband to places that lack it," said Joelle Tessler in …

In response to criticism of the way it was testing broadband Internet speeds, the Federal Communications Commission, following up a [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story267741.html"]promise [/URL]it made last month, [URL="http://blog.broadband.gov/?entryId=359987"]announced [/URL]it had hired a vendor to help it perform more accurate tests. "In a couple of weeks, we will be asking for consumers from …

Well thanks for that O2, my iPhone was as much use as a chocolate teapot from lunchtime yesterday thanks to the pay monthly data network suffering a monumental failure. There I was, sitting in a (without wifi) Costa Coffee about to start an informal meeting with a potential client. I …

Applications for the second round of U.S. broadband stimulus funding are starting to become publicly available on a federal [URL="http://www.ntia.doc.gov/broadbandgrants/applications/search.cfm"]website[/URL]. Approximately 870 applications had been posted to the database as of Saturday, [URL="http://www.stimulatingbroadband.com/2010/04/update-broadband-stimulus-round-ii.html"]according [/URL]to Stimulating Broadband, a website dedicated to tracking broadband stimulus funding. In the American Recovery and Reinvestment …

Just six weeks after Google [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story259442.html"]announced [/URL]its plan to build a gigabit fiber network for a city, more than 1,100 cities have applied, the company [URL="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/next-steps-for-our-experimental-fiber.html"]said [/URL]on Friday. In addition, more than 194,000 individuals responded, Google said. The company has put a map up on its corporate blog showing which …

As the saying goes, a man (and presumably a woman) is known by the company he keeps. In fact, last [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story224479.html"]fall [/URL]some MIT students did a study where they demonstrated that they could tell someone's sexual orientation by the sexual orientation of their friends on Facebook and other social networking …

There's a disturbing story kicking around the UK wires at the moment - young people are hacking into other people's computers purely for fun. Here's the [URL="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8574259.stm"]BBC's take on it[/URL]. I saw the PR person who organised the survey only last week and can confirm she's not a time waster, …

Happy Birthday to the .com domain, 25 years old today. Yes, it really was way back on the 15th March 1985 that symbolics.com became the very first true dotcom company by registering a .com domain on the Internet. Today there are no less than 80 million registered dotcom websites. One …

In preparation for releasing its national broadband plan tomorrow (which is already coming under [URL="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/business/media/13fcc.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1268658134-LNz+NNwd7fnSKyovP4YlZw"]criticism[/URL]), the Federal Communications Commission has started collecting data from users on their broadband [URL="http://broadband.gov/qualitytest/"]performance [/URL]-- a test that is also coming under criticism. Like [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story219530.html"]similar [/URL]testing a couple of years ago, the broadband.gov testing suffers …

This time last year The Pope was warning the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to not let religion into the domain name system, with the Vatican arguing that suggested domains such as .catholic and .islam would provoke bitter disputes. New generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) have always …

Announcements for the first round of broadband stimulus grants and loans have slipped a bit; while all the announcements were supposed to be made by March 1, they are now expected to be made by March 15, according to an [URL="http://www.stimulatingbroadband.com/2010/03/broadband-stimulus-pipeline-usda-says.html"]article [/URL]on the Stimulating Broadband website. In the first round …

Call the National Guard. On second thoughts, call someone else. After all, it is the National Guard which has somehow managed to lose an archival data disk containing five years worth of staff records covering some 15,000 personnel. The US National Guard is now recommending that any current and former …

The last time we asked that question here at DaniWeb was back in June 2009 when the Internet was, apparently, [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story220586.html"]183 million big[/URL]. Of course, it is bigger now, but not actually by that much if the new figures from Internet infrastructure services provider VeriSign are anything to go by. …

40 million people were without power in the eastern United States, more than 60 million cellphones were out of service, and Wall Street was closed for a week due to a terrorist cyberattack against the United States. No, it didn't really happen. But it could. Coverage of a simulated cyber …

Buried in all the Google Buzz hype today was a[URL="http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/10/google-fiber-optic-network-home/"] little story on TechCrunch[/URL] that Google is planning to offer [I]1 gigabit-per-second[/I], super-duper, high-speed fiber-optic cable in up to 50,000 homes in the US shortly. This is more significant to me than Google taking on Facebook. Think about this for …

It all kicked off last night with a [URL="http://hackersblog.org/2009/02/07/usakasperskycom-hacked-full-database-acces-sql-injection/"]posting to hacker board[/URL] claiming to have carried out a relatively simple SQL Injection attack on one the world's biggest and best known IT security companies: Kaspersky. The hacker, currently only know as 'unu' claims that the SQL Injection attack on usa.kaspersky.com …

Yesterday [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry3943.html"]I reported[/URL] how the security vendor Kaspersky had allegedly fallen victim to a SQL Injection attack, with the usa.kaspersky.com website hacked and plenty of data potentially exposed. I said that Kaspersky would no doubt make an official statement sooner rather than later, and it has. Unfortunately it is one …

No sooner had the news of the untimely [URL="http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/daveyw/2009/06/28/that-michael-jackson-effect/"]death of Michael Jackson[/URL] hit the Internet than the vultures started circling. For once it was not the gossip columnists and tabloid journalists digging up the dirt, but rather spammers and hackers looking to exploit a golden opportunity to distribute their wares …

Internet security giant Symantec has just published the latest [URL="http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/theme.jsp?themeid=threatreport"]Internet Security Threat Report[/URL], based on an in-depth analysis of global Internet traffic and email during the last six months. Beyond all the usual who is hosting what and where, how much malware is contained in spam and which threats are …

The Federal Communications Commission asked Congress this week for a one-month extension to its Feb. 17 deadline for a [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story220560.html"]report[/URL] on a national broadband plan, according to an [URL="http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100107-707117.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines"]article[/URL] in the [I]Wall Street Journal.[/I] The agency said it needed more time to fully brief commissioners and key members of Congress, …

The UK has finally ratified the 802.11n standard for WiFi at last. Although we've had '802.11n-ready' kit on the market for a fair while, it hasn't been official as yet. I can only hope people in stores will be able to explain what people are buying. I say this because …

I write a lot of about the battle among large technology corporations in this space and the importance of competitive checks and balances. Yet Comcast seems to be growing into a super power with control over the very pipes that provide many of us with internet access, but without any …

British Telecom has announced that it is ahead of schedule for superfast broadband* and will deliver it in time for the [URL="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8424401.stm"]Olympic Games in London[/URL]. It's less good that only 40 per cent of customers will be able to get at the service but then the Internet was ever thus. …

Well, well, how about that [URL="http://www.dell.com"]Dell[/URL]? In a landmark decision, Dell [URL="http://www.itwire.com/content/view/23052/1231/"]announced[/URL] that it has penned a deal to use [URL="http://www.novell.com"]Novell[/URL]'s SUSE Linux in its data centers to power its new OptiPlex FX 160 thin client systems. Wow. Dell is doing this to save money and simplify its IT infrastructure …

The federal government today [URL="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/vice-president-biden-kicks-72-billion-recovery-act-broadband-program"]made[/URL] the first awards aimed toward improving broadband access in the U.S. In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, Congress appropriated $7.2 billion for broadband grants, loans, and loan guarantees to be administered by the USDA’s Rural Utilities …

The Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers ([URL="http://www.ieee.org"]IEEE[/URL]) has started work on WiFi the next generation. While that news in itself might not exactly rock your socks off, the small matter of a big speed increase might. Word is that WiFi TNG could be fast, very fast indeed. Anyone fancy …

IBM today announced that it has opened a Cloud Computing Laboratory in Hong Kong to support its LotusLive cloud services and the numbers are pretty impressive whichever way you look at them. From the 18 million seats in year one that LotusLive has amassed, to the $126 billion IBM expects …

You might not think that a 12,000 square foot data center would be anything for the environmental lobby to get excited about, but this is no ordinary IT facility. The Green Data Center ([URL="http://syr.edu/greendatacenter/"]GDC[/URL]) has been built by Syracuse University in partnership with New York State and IBM in order …

Forget about tight budgets and economic woes impacting upon the IT business, there's a post-recession return to pre-recession spending happening and networking is likely to benefit the most. According to IDC, "transformation will impact every corner of the industry in 2010" but the most important transformational force of all is …

Smaller businesses and people who use Hotmail as n email system or backup email system need to change their passwords - Microsoft has confirmed it's investigating a security breach. It seems that in spite of the industrial strength security everybody of any size applies to these systems - and let's …

Depending upon the level of your paranoia, Google is either attempting to take over the online world or simply trying to make it a better place in which to work and play. This latest announcement does nothing to clarify these already muddy waters. "As part of our ongoing effort to …