Practical Technology

for practical people.

February 17, 2011
by sjvn01
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Bahrain’s death toll grows and its Internet slows

Bahrain’s dictatorship looked at what has happened in Tunis and Egypt and decided that bullets would serve its cause better than relenting to its people’s call for ballots and reform. This morning, mercenaries of Bahrain, a small Persian Gulf country, overran a camp of sleeping protesters killing at least four of them. At the same time, it appears that Bahrain has started strangling the country’s Internet connection to keep news from coming in or out of the country.

Sources at Arbor Networks, a network security company, told me that “Bahrain has significantly increased its filtering of Internet traffic in response to growing political unrest.” While the Bahrain Internet has remained up, unlike Egypt’s Internet, it’s averaging a pronounced 10-20% reduction in traffic volumes.

The data for Arbor’s analysis was collected by its ATLAS (Active Threat Level Analysis System) network. This system collects Internet traffic data from about 120 worldwide ISPs.

Others have noticed this decrease as well. As New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof, who is reporting from Bahrain, tweeted, “Why slow the Internet? The #Bahrain govt view seems to be that if it isn’t uploaded on YouTube, it hasn’t happened.” Al Jazeera is also reporting that there are Internet slow-downs in-country and that some Web sites are being blocked.

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February 17, 2011
by sjvn01
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Open Source Obama

Every day, tens of thousands of developers from businesses, colleges, and homes contribute patches or new code to open-source programs. It’s not every day though that the White House does it. That’s exactly what happened last week when the White House’s New Media Director Macon Phillips announced the White House’s second code release to the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS).

Drupal, for those of you who don’t know it, is an excellent CMS. According to a 2010 survey by Water & Stone, a digital marketing agency, “WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal dominate the marketshare (PDF Link) and brand strength ratings in the open source CMS market. The Big Three lead in almost every metric and we have seen little this year to indicate that their leadership is being challenged in the near term. ”

It’s easy to see why. While WordPress is great for blogging, and indeed it can be used for massive publishing platforms such as ZDNet, but you have to built onto WordPress to make it a full-scale CMS. While, starting with WordPress 3.x, the popular blogging program is becoming more and more like a complete CMS Drupal, along with Joomla!, work well for people who want a ready-go-platform for sophisticated CMSs.

That’s one of the reasons why Obama’s White House went with Drupal. Since then, the White House hasn’t just used it. They’ve contributed to it.

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February 16, 2011
by sjvn01
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Freedom Box: Freeing the Internet one Server at a time

Free software isn’t about free services or beer, it’s about intellectual freedom. As recent episodes such as censorship in China, the Egyptian government turning off the Internet, and Facebook’s constant spying, have shown, freedom and privacy on the Internet are under constant assault. Now Eben Moglen, law professor at Columbia University and renowned free software legal expert, has proposed a way to combine free software with the original peer-to-peer (P2P) design of the Internet to liberate users from the control of governments and big brother-like companies: Freedom Box.

In a recent Freedom in the Clouds speech in NYC, Moglen explained what he sees as the Internet’s current problems and his proposed solution. First, here’s the trouble with the Internet today as Moglen sees it:

[6:13] “It begins of course with the Internet. Designed as a network of peers without any intrinsic need for hierarchical or structural control and assuming that every switch in the net is an independent free standing entity who’s volition is equivalent to the human beings who control it … But it never really worked out that way.”

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February 14, 2011
by sjvn01
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The London Stock Exchange moves to Novell Linux

September 8th 2008 was one of the worst days ever for the London Stock Exchange (LSE), and high-end Windows server-based applications. That was the day that the LSE came to a crashing stop. What happened? While the LSE has never come clean on the whole story, my sources told me that the LSE’s Windows-based .NET TradElec stock exchange had crashed. What we do know is that the CEO who had brought Windows and TradElec in was fired, TradElec was dumped, and a Novell SUSE Linux-based platform was brought in to replace it.

Today, February 14th, the LSE’s Linux-based Millennium Exchange took over and everything just worked. It did take longer to switch to Linux than expected, because of what the LSW first called “sabotage” but later put down to “human error” in late 2010. On its first day, out LSE ran like a charm.

It’s not the only stock exchange that’s found that Linux worked better. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange in South Africa is moving to Millennium Exchange. The LSE’s parent company is in the process of acquiring the Toronto stock exchange so it will soon be using Linux as well.

Novell’s not the only Linux company doing well by the stock exchanges. The Qatar Exchange, a major Persian Gulf Exchange, recently migrated from AIX and Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). These exchanges were only following in the footsteps many other stock and commodity exchanges that had moved to Linux.

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February 14, 2011
by sjvn01
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MPEG-LA targets Google’s VP8 Video Codec

First, Google opened up its VP8 video codec. Then, Google removed built-in support for the MPEG-LA patent encumbered H.264 video codec from its Chrome Web-browser in favor of VP8. After that it was only a matter of time before the MPEG-LA patent consortium came gunning for Google VP8.

As a MPEG-LA representative told ZDNet’s Ed Bott, “Yes, as we have said in the past, we believe VP8 uses many patents owned by different parties. To the extent VP8 includes technology owned by others, then a pool license which removes uncertainties regarding patent rights and royalties by making that technology widely available on the same terms to everyone would be beneficial to the market.”

In a statement, Google said that “MPEG-LA has alluded to a VP8 pool since WebM launched–this is nothing new. The Web succeeds with open, community-developed innovation, and the WebM Project brings the same principles to web video.”

So what’s really going on here? I asked Andrew “Andy” Updegrove a founding partner of Gesmer Updegrove, a top technology law firm, and a leading expert on patent law for his take on the situation and this is what he told me.

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February 13, 2011
by sjvn01
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How to crash the Internet

We know you can take down Web sites with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. We know that a country, like Egypt, can knock down a country’s entire Internet infrastructure. And, we thought we knew that you couldn’t take down the entire Internet. It turns out we could be wrong.

In a report from New Scientist, Max Schuchard a computer science graduate student and his buddies claim they’ve found a way to launch DDoS attacks on Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) network routers that could crash the Internet.

BGP is an essential Internet protocol. It’s the routing protocol used to exchange routing information across the Internet. Without it ISPs couldn’t connect to each other and you couldn’t connect Web sites and services outside of your local intranet. Because network connections and routers are constantly changing, BGP routers and switches are constantly working to keep current route maps of the Internet. In short, you don’t want to mess it.

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