January 24, 2012
by sjvn01
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Closing Megaupload unlikely to even slow piracy down

The U.S. Department of Justice working in conjunction with New Zealand’s law enforcement agencies has taken down the popular file-storage and sharing site Megaupload. So, since Megaupload has been shut down, Internet piracy has gone down significantly, right? Right? Well, probably not, NPD market researcher Russ Crupnick said, “Only about 3 percent of the U.S. Internet audience relied on digital storage for legitimate purposes or piracy in the third quarter.”

So where is the file piracy going on? The same place it always has been: over BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer software powered networks. According to Crupnick, “Peer-to-peer systems like BitTorrent, which have little central coordination and are harder to stop, still have about three times as much usage among consumers as digital lockers.”

BitTorrent file sharing may account for far more than just 9% of Internet traffic. The latest research by Sandvine (PDF link), a broadband solution provider and analysis firm, shows that BitTorrent traffic took up 13.47% of all Internet traffic in the third quarter of 2011.

Closing Megaupload unlikely to even slow piracy down More >

January 24, 2012
by sjvn01
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Beyond the desktop: Ubuntu Linux’s new Head-Up Display

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, has announced that Ubuntu will be adopting a radical new change to the interface that will do away with the “menu” in the Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer (WIMP) interface, which has defined the desktop for the last thirty years.

Shuttleworth states, “The menu has been a central part of the GUI since Xerox PARC invented ‘em in the 70?s. It’s the M in WIMP and has been there, essentially unchanged, for 30 years. We can do much better!” This new interface, which will first appear as a beta in April’s Ubuntu 12.04 release, is called Head-Up Display.

Beyond the desktop: Ubuntu Linux’s new Head-Up Display More >

January 23, 2012
by sjvn01
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Weekend Anonymous attacks bring down major websites

The Internet-based hacker and protest group Anonymous is still ticked up by the Department of Justice’s (DoJ) takedown of Megaupload. Last week, Anonymous took down the DoJ, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and Universal Music with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Over the weekend, Anonymous brought down CBS, Universal Music, and Vivendi. Will Facebook be next?

While Universal Music and Vivendi, the French media giant that owns Universal, were brought down by a DDoS attack, CBS, ZDNet’s parent company, was hit by a Domain Name System (DNS) poisoning attack.

In the CBS attack, it appeared that the site itself had been hacked and all its content deleted. That wasn’t the case. The CBS site was fine. What actually happened was that DNS record for the site’s IP address was changed to a fake site that contained a single blank page. IF you’d attempted to reach any of CBS’s sub-sites, for a TV show’s page for example, you would have gotten only a generic 404 Not Found error message page.

Weekend Anonymous attacks bring down major websites More >

January 23, 2012
by sjvn01
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The poor get poorer and the rich get richer with Apple’s iPad-based textbooks

Apple’s iBooks2’s reinvented textbooks really are something. They’re gorgeous, they’re fast, they’re real-time interactive with up to date information and they’ll only cost $14.99 or less. But, to use them, you’ll need an iPad–minimum list price: $499.

Can you afford that for your kids? Can your school board? I could, but I’ve been lucky enough to do well in my career and I only have the one daughter. There’s certainly no way that any county I’ve ever lived in during my life in West Virginia, Maryland, or North Carolina could afford to give every student from K to 12 an iPad. They’re lucky when they can provide any kind of computer seat for each kid.

That’s why there have been programs like the so-called $100 laptop: the OLPC (One Laptop per Child). The OLPC project aimed to put first low priced notebooks, the XO-1.5 and now tablets, the OLPC XO Tablet, into the hands of kids who don’t go to private schools.

These XO Tablet is powered by a 1GHz Marvell Armada PXA618 processor, and have a mere 512MBs of RAM. It can run a minimized version of Red Hat’s Fedora Linux with the simplified Sugar interface on top of that and it can also run Android. Price: $100.

The poor get poorer and the rich get richer with Apple’s iPad-based textbooks More >

January 20, 2012
by sjvn01
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NGINX: The Faster Web Server Alternative

Picking a Web server used to be easy. If you ran a Windows shop, you used Internet Information Server (IIS); if you didn’t, you used Apache. No fuss. No muss. Now, though, you have more Web server choices, and far more decisions to make. One of the leading alternatives, the open-source NGINX, is now the number two Web server in the world, according to Netcraft, the Web server analytics company.

NGINX (pronounced “engine X”) is an open-source HTTP Web server that also includes mail services with an Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Post Office Protocol (POP) server. NGINX is ready to be used as a reverse proxy, too. In this mode NGINX is used to load balance among back-end servers, or to provide caching for a slower back-end server.

Companies like the online TV video on demand company Hulu use NGINX for its stability and simple configuration. Other users, such as Facebook and WordPress.com, use it because the web server’s asynchronous architecture gives it a small memory footprint and low resource consumption, making it ideal for handling multiple, actively changing Web pages.

That’s a tall order. According to NGINX’s principal architect Igor Sysoev, here’s how NGINX can support hundreds of millions of Facebook users.

NGINX: The Faster Web Server Alternative More >

January 20, 2012
by sjvn01
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How Anonymous took down the DoJ, RIAA, MPAA and Universal Music Websites

When the U.S. Department of Justice working in conjunction with New Zealand’s law enforcement agencies took down the popular file-storage and sharing site Megaupload and arrested its executives, they never counted on the Internet-based hacker and protest group, Anonymous, attacking the Department of Justice (DoJ), Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Universal Music, and other Websites. And, they certainly didn’t expect for many of these sites to be taken down by this assault.

Anonymous declared this attack was being made in reaction to Megaupload being taken down. The loosely knit group also said that this was its “largest attack ever, crippling government and music industry sites. Hacktivists with the collective Anonymous are waging an attack on the website for the White House after successfully breaking the sites for the Department of Justice, Universal Music Group, RIAA and Motion Picture Association of America.”

In the event, the White House’s site never went down. At this time, 11:30 AM EST, January 20th, the Universal Music site is still off the air but the others are back up.

How Anonymous took down the DoJ, RIAA, MPAA and Universal Music Websites More >

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