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dkatana writes: WiFi Offloading is skyrocketing. This is the conclusion of a new report from Juniper Research, which points out that the amount of smartphone and tablet data traffic on WiFi networks will will increase to more than 115,000 petabytes by 2019, compared to under 30,000 petabytes this year, representing almost a four-fold increase. Most of this data is offloaded to consumer's WiFi by the carriers, offering the possibility to share your home internet connection in exchange for "free" hotspots. But this article on InformationWeek Network Computing also warns that "The capacity of the 2.4GHz band is reaching its limit. [...] the growing number of WiFi devices using unlicensed bands is seriously affecting network efficiency. Capacity is compromised by the number of simultaneously active devices, with transmission speeds dropping as much as 20% of the nominal value. With the number of IoT and M2M applications using WiFi continuously rising, that could become a serious problem soon."

dkatana writes: Overall, demand for encryption is growing. Cloud encryption services provider CipherCloud recently received a $50 million investment by Deutsche Telekom, which the company said positions it for "explosive growth" this year. The services are designed to allow corporations to benefit from the cost savings and elasticity of cloud-based data storage, while ensuring that sensitive information is protected.

Now, both Apple and Google are providing full encryption as a default option on their mobile operating systems with an encryption scheme they are not able to break themselves, since they don't hold the necessary keys.

Some corporations have gone as far as turning to "zero-knowledge" services, usually located in countries such as Switzerland. These services pledge that they have no means to unlock the information once the customer has entered the unique encryption keys. This zero-knowledge approach is welcomed by users, who are reassured that their information is impossible to retrieve — at least theoretically — without their knowledge and the keys.

dkatana writes: Yesterday, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said net neutrality is high on the agency's agenda, and a set of rules will be proposed beginning of next month. He also talked about reclassification of internet providers such as Google Fiber as Title II Telecom Companies. If Google and other fiber providers are given pole access, it could be the beginning of a race to deploy fiber-to-the-home to many cities and towns, where the cost of digging trenches has deterred many initiatives and protected the monopolies of the entrenched telecom providers. Advocates for net neutrality believe that Title II classification would allow the FCC to protect Internet services by regulating against paid prioritization. A related article suggests one side effect of the internet becoming a public utility will be higher costs for internet access.

dkatana writes: The ongoing deployment of internet-of-things devices is already creating serious issues and discussions about the privacy of users, IoT security, and the potential threat of cyber criminals taking control of sensors and smart devices connected to the Internet.

Security and privacy concerns associated with smart meters are why they are currently "optional" in several countries. That's the case in the Netherlands after consumer organizations and privacy watchdog groups campaigned vigorously to stop the mandatory smart meter deployment. A report from researchers at Tilburg University claimed that "smart meters have the capacity to reveal quite privacy-sensitive information, thus affecting not only informational privacy but also privacy of the home and of family life." This now applies to televisions as well — an article in Salon discusses the author's new "smart" TV, which came with a 46-page privacy policy. Quoting: "It logs where, when, how and for how long you use the TV. It sets tracking cookies and beacons designed to detect 'when you have viewed particular content or a particular email message.' It records 'the apps you use, the websites you visit, and how you interact with content.' It ignores 'do-not-track' requests as a considered matter of policy. It also has a built-in camera — with facial recognition."

First time accepted submitter dkatana writes Having some type of fiber or high-speed cable connectivity is normal for many of us, but in most developing countries of the world and many areas of Europe, the US, and other developed countries, access to "super-fast" broadband networks is still a dream. This is creating another "digital divide." Not having the virtually unlimited bandwidth of all-fiber networks means that, for these populations, many activities are simply not possible. For example, broadband provided over all-fiber networks brings education, healthcare, and other social goods into the home through immersive, innovative applications and services that are impossible without it. Alternatives to fiber, such as cable (DOCSYS 3.0), are not enough, and they could be more expensive in the long run. The maximum speed a DOCSYS modem can achieve is 171/122 Mbit/s (using four channels), just a fraction the 273 Gbit/s (per channel) already reached on fiber.

ygslash writes "Robert McMillen of Wired claims that we have gotten Net Neutrality all wrong. While we are all busy arguing about whether there should be regulations preventing large content providers from getting preferential bandwidth, McMillen says that not only have the large content providers already had preferential bandwidth for ten years, but that by now this has become an inherent part of the structure of the Internet and in practice cannot be changed. Instead, he says, the Net Neutrality discussion should be about ensuring a free and open competitive market for bandwidth, so that anyone who wants bandwidth can purchase it at a fair price.

lkcl writes "After the reports on SSD reliability and after experiencing a costly 50% failure rate on over 200 remote-deployed OCZ Vertex SSDs, a degree of paranoia set in where I work. I was asked to carry out SSD analysis with some very specific criteria: budget below £100, size greater than 16Gbytes and Power-loss protection mandatory. This was almost an impossible task: after months of searching the shortlist was very short indeed. There was only one drive that survived the torturing: the Intel S3500. After more than 6,500 power-cycles over several days of heavy sustained random writes, not a single byte of data was lost. Crucial M4: failed. Toshiba THNSNH060GCS: failed. Innodisk 3MP SATA Slim: failed. OCZ: failed hard. Only the end-of-lifed Intel 320 and its newer replacement, the S3500, survived unscathed. The conclusion: if you care about data even when power could be unreliable, only buy Intel SSDs." Relatedly, don't expect SSDs to become cheaper than HDDs any time soon.

Nerval's Lobster writes "They may not all support what the NSA will do with its giant new datacenter in Bluffdale, but Utah officials do seem to agree on the value of having a world-class, $1.5 billion datacenter built in their territory. In general, they're for it, and are proving that by changing a law that would have added about $2.4 million in taxes to the datacenter's power bill—an addition that was an unpleasant surprise to NSA officials when they heard about it in May. A bill signed into law April 1 imposed a tax of up to 6 percent on electricity from Rocky Mountain Power, a requirement the NSA protested in an email to Utah Gov. Gary Herbert April 26. State tax agencies swear they informed the NSA about the impact of the law when it was still under debate; NSA officials denied knowing anything about it and complained that it would make Utah a less attractive site for the datacenter, which was only three to four months from completion at the time."

CowboyRobot writes "At the recent 2013 Open Networking Summit, Google Distinguished Engineer Amin Vahdat presented 'SDN@Google: Why and How', in which he described Google's 'B4' SDN network, one of the few actual implementations of software-defined networking. Google has deployed sets of Network Controller Servers (NCSs) alongside the switches, which run an OpenFlow agent with a 'thin level of control with all of the real smarts running on a set of controllers on an external server but still co-located.' By using SDN, Google hopes to increase efficiency and reduce cost. Unlike computation and storage, which benefit from an economy of scale, Google's network is getting much more expensive each year."

CowboyRobot writes "A proposed tax in Massachusetts may affect software services and Web design and hosting. If approved, the state estimates the tax may bring in a quarter billion dollars in 2014 by expanding its tax on 'canned software' to include some elements of cloud computing. The tax would cover custom-designed software and services based in the cloud. "Custom" software includes the design of Web sites, so the cost to local businesses of a new Web site would increase by 4.5% on contracts to design the site, write Java, PHP or other custom code. The cost of site hosting and bandwidth would also be taxed."

CowboyRobot writes "FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski recently proposed making RF spectrum publicly available, and many in the media (including the Washington Post) have been mistakenly conflating open access to WiFi signal with free Internet access; anyone can put up a wireless access point but that doesn't give them access to the Internet. The proposal will probably mean more attempts at providing free Internet access to specific neighborhoods or municipalities, but as Larry Seltzer at NetworkComputing points out, these programs also usually forget that access to signal is not the same as access to the Internet. After getting the funding to wire a city, these isn't money left to pay for the actual bandwidth usage."

CowboyRobot writes "The 802.11ac standard is expected to be ratified in 2013 and NetworkComputing has an interview with representatives of Cisco Systems and Aerohive Networks about what that will mean for everyone else. 'Out of the gate, the increases in performance over 11n will not be tremendously impressive. The second wave--which will require a hardware refresh--gets far more interesting... First-generation 802.11ac products will achieve up to 1.3 Gbps through the use of three spatial streams, 80-MHz-wide channels (double the largest 40 MHz channel width with 802.11n), and use of better hardware components that allow higher levels of modulation and encoding (up to 256-QAM). Whether we will actually see 802.11ac products capable of 6.9 Gbps is dependent on hardware enhancements on both the access point and client that are not certain.'"

Several readers have submitted news of the inevitable problems involved with trying to securely collect information from tens of millions of people on the same day. A video is making the rounds of a touchscreen voting machine registering a vote for Mitt Romney when Barack Obama was selected. A North Carolina newspaper is reporting that votes for Romney are being switched to Obama. Voters are being encouraged to check and double-check that their votes are recorded accurately. In Ohio, some recently-installed election software got a pass from a District Court Judge. In Galveston County, Texas, poll workers didn't start their computer systems early enough to be ready for the opening of the polls, which led to a court order requiring the stations to be open for an extra two hours at night. Yesterday we discussed how people in New Jersey who were displaced by the storm would be allowed to vote via email; not only are some of the emails bouncing, but voters are being directed to request ballots from a county clerk's personal Hotmail account. If only vote machines were as secure as slot machines. Of course, there's still the good, old fashioned analog problems; workers tampering with ballots, voters being told they can vote tomorrow, and people leaving after excessively long wait times.

CowboyRobot writes "Is full disk encryption (FDE) worth it? A recent study conducted by the Ponemon Institute shows that the expected benefits of FDE exceed cost by a factor ranging from 4 to 20, based on a reduction in the probability that data will be compromised as the result of the loss or theft of a digital device. 'After doing all of the math, Ponemon found that the cost of FDE on laptop and desktop computers in the U.S. per year was $235, while the cost savings from reduced data breach exposure was $4,650.'"

hal9000(jr) writes "While IPv6 day was a successful marketing campaign, is anyone really moving to IPv6? On World Launch Day, Arbor Networks noted a peak of only .2% of IPv6 network traffic. It appears that IPv4 addresses are still valuable and are driving hosting acquisitions. Windows 8 will actually prefer IPv6 over IPv4. If you want IPv6, here's what to do about it."

alaederach writes "I run a lab in a non-profit academic life sciences research institute. Our IT recently decided it would be a good idea to use PGP whole disk encryption on all of our computers, laptops and servers and picked PGP's suite of software. The main reason is that a small subset of our researchers work with patient information which we obviously are mandated to keep confidential. My lab does a lot of high-performance computational work (on genes from Tetrahymena, no humans here) and I am concerned that the overhead of complying with our ITs new security policy will be quite detrimental to my research program. For example, dynamically reallocating a partition on a PGP encrypted disk is apparently not possible. Furthermore, there is some evidence that certain forms of compression are also incompatible with PGP whole disk encryption. Interestingly, it is hard to find any negative articles on PGP, probably because most of them are written by IT pros who are only focused on the security, and not usability. I therefore ask the Slashdot community, what are the disadvantages of PGP in terms of performance, Linux, and high-performance computational research?"

tomlasusa writes "In a post on LinuxQuestions.org, user 'chessonly' cites a 2003 article from Networkcomputing.com by writer Steven J. Schuchart as evidence of that Phoenix Technologies has made its BIOS more Windows-friendly — thereby locking out users from using other OSs. In a rebuttal posted at nwc.com, Schuchart says that this is just not true."

richkarpi writes "Network Computing's security editor won the recent RSA Interactive Testing Challenge. He has up a blow-by-blow description of the events at their site: 'The most important factor in the contest besides basic web exploitation skills (cross site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, cross site request forgeries (CSRF), etc.) was speed ... I squeaked out a win in the tie-breaking challenge the first day with only a few seconds to spare as my opponent was right behind in the hunt to combine three injectable fields into one long javascript function.'"

Thomas LaSusa writes "In this year's reader survey, Network Computing Magazine editors invited IT managers to vent about the tech challenges they face every day and how they wish vendors would address these problems. Read the unvarnished truth about what your peers are thinking." From the article: "This isn't the Top 10 worst vendor list, though. The largest tech companies tend to get the blame because they're the easy targets. Individual experiences with a particular company will vary widely; for every person who blasted Dell or Symantec for poor equipment or lousy service, someone else sang their praises. Instead, we find it more worthwhile to identify key areas where technology vendors as a whole aren't living up to their own boilerplate marketing. Some of the vendors contacted for their reactions to this story explained that today's enterprise networks are bewilderingly complex and run a vast number of OSs, applications and protocols. They all defined customer support as a top priority, but recognized that problems can't be solved by first-level support. Whether you consume or sell technology products, read on for an unvarnished look at what 755 IT decision-makers want — and don't want. You might just come away with new strategies for dealing with your vendors or serving your customers."

Thomas LaSusa writes "In this year's reader survey, Network Computing Magazine editors invited IT managers to vent about the tech challenges they face every day and how they wish vendors would address these problems. Read the unvarnished truth about what your peers are thinking." From the article: "This isn't the Top 10 worst vendor list, though. The largest tech companies tend to get the blame because they're the easy targets. Individual experiences with a particular company will vary widely; for every person who blasted Dell or Symantec for poor equipment or lousy service, someone else sang their praises. Instead, we find it more worthwhile to identify key areas where technology vendors as a whole aren't living up to their own boilerplate marketing. Some of the vendors contacted for their reactions to this story explained that today's enterprise networks are bewilderingly complex and run a vast number of OSs, applications and protocols. They all defined customer support as a top priority, but recognized that problems can't be solved by first-level support. Whether you consume or sell technology products, read on for an unvarnished look at what 755 IT decision-makers want — and don't want. You might just come away with new strategies for dealing with your vendors or serving your customers."

dirkmuon asks: "The streaming video shootout on Network Computing and the subsequent Slashdot discussion touched upon the process of creating and streaming live content on Linux. The article mentioned one method that required $1000 worth of hardware, not including the camera or the Windows 2000 box. Has anyone devised a simple, specific mix of Linux software and hardware for serving up a live video feed, particularly a method that costs less than $1000? RealSystem Producer Basic and Server Basic with a capture card would cost less, obviously, but are there other solutions? For example, is there a Linux way to broadcast *live* video with the Darwin Streaming Server?" This topic was discussed over a year ago, and the answers weren't very encouraging: Real is expensive; Darwin is great but you can't watch the movies in Linux; and Microsoft Media for Linux is vaporware (and likely to stay that way). Has that year improved the outlook?

dirkmuon asks: "The streaming video shootout on Network Computing and the subsequent Slashdot discussion touched upon the process of creating and streaming live content on Linux. The article mentioned one method that required $1000 worth of hardware, not including the camera or the Windows 2000 box. Has anyone devised a simple, specific mix of Linux software and hardware for serving up a live video feed, particularly a method that costs less than $1000? RealSystem Producer Basic and Server Basic with a capture card would cost less, obviously, but are there other solutions? For example, is there a Linux way to broadcast *live* video with the Darwin Streaming Server?" This topic was discussed over a year ago, and the answers weren't very encouraging: Real is expensive; Darwin is great but you can't watch the movies in Linux; and Microsoft Media for Linux is vaporware (and likely to stay that way). Has that year improved the outlook?

CrazyEd writes "LinuxSecurity is reporting that EnGarde Secure Linux has received the Network Computing Editor's Choice award to win the battle of the Secure Linux distributions. Well deserved, me thinks." Update: 06/10 15:16 GMT by T : An anonymous reader points out that Linuxlookup.com reviewed this distro last week, awarding it a perfect score.

pinqkandi writes "Network Computing recently ran an extensive shootout of video streaming servers, in areas from setup to quality to buffering times. The free, open source Darwin Streaming Server, which streams QuickTime content, edged out costly and closed source Windows Media & RealVideo streaming systems." Well, it edged out Real. It blew Microsoft away.

pinqkandi writes "Network Computing recently ran an extensive shootout of video streaming servers, in areas from setup to quality to buffering times. The free, open source Darwin Streaming Server, which streams QuickTime content, edged out costly and closed source Windows Media & RealVideo streaming systems." Well, it edged out Real. It blew Microsoft away.

Simon Crosby writes " Network Computing is running an special report on Linux in the enterprise. It evaluates strengths and weaknesses of Linux useage in the enterprise. It also discusses perceptions, roadblocks, security, clustering and other Linux enterprise issues."

Simon Crosby writes " Network Computing is running an special report on Linux in the enterprise. It evaluates strengths and weaknesses of Linux useage in the enterprise. It also discusses perceptions, roadblocks, security, clustering and other Linux enterprise issues."

mirko writes: "Here's a link to some weird projects that consist of recycling old servers. You have the SGI Fridge, but also the VAXbar, the SGI Espresso Machine, the VaxTap2000Pro and the SGI HiFi-Miniset. Now that you recycled the case, you can get inspiration from this project in order to recycle their inside components..." We've linked to some of these before, but a couple of them are new (to me, anyway).

cryptonix writes: "This device seems pretty cool. it attaches to your network and allows you to degrade network preformance (for testing purposes only of course). runs on windows and supports gigabit ethernet or 10/100 networks. There's more info at emprix's site about the PacketSphere." Alright, that's funny as hell, and frankly a really good idea.

KarmaWhore writes "For it's 10th anniversary Network Computing has put together what they consider to be the top ten people of the decade. Linus is number three. Gates is number two. " I dunno - lists like this are certainly useless - but it's always a fun debate.

Andrew Dvorak wrote to us with Network Computing's take on Linux. Good chronicle of why Linux is moving into the higher end markets, and the huge surge of support that has been seen in the last six months.

MECC wrote in to send us an evaluation of Linux vs. NT that appears over at network computing. The review is a little more evenly considering showing that the OSs are much closer in performance than a certain "other" test, and that either can be made to outperform the other (surprise surprise). Some numbers, some samba benchmarks, and more. A good looking piece.

Richard Silver writes "Looks like Circuit City threw enough money at Divx. The sales were good enough this fall to get them a spot on the DVD panel at the Consumer Electronics Show this week. Check out the article on Network Computing They even refer to DVD as "Open DVD" "

An anonymous reader wrote in to say that "Unix World is running a series of tutorials on configuring services on Linux. This is part 4, but there are links to the previous secitons. Topics include: HTTP, FTP, Telnet, inetd, Firewalling, Mail services and more. find it here "