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Network Adapter Keeps Talking While a PC Is Asleep
Al writes "Researchers at Microsoft and the University of California, San Diego have developed a network adapter that lets a computer enter sleep mode without disrupting the network connection. The adapter, dubbed Somniloquy (meaning to talk in one's sleep), consists of a gumstix running embedded Linux, 64MB of RAM and a 2G SD memory card, connected via USB. The adapter keeps the network connection going and the researchers have also developed a simplified IM client and bittorrent client that carry out more complicated tasks autonomously, only waking the computer if, for example, an actualy IM is received or a download is completed."
So in other words you still have a computer running, just not your main computer.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
We put a computer on your computer so you can download while you download...
crazy dynamite monkey
.....their incompetency once again.
.
Apparently Timothy doesn't understand how to use Google, or, dare I say, even the Slashdot "Old Stories" search
Almost the exact same story was posted on Monday, April 27
jdb2
"Researchers at Microsoft"..."have developed"..."running embedded Linux"
Um, was that a misprint or did hell just freeze over? Hasn't MS referred to Linux as a "virus", a "cancer", "un-American", a "patent violator", and "communistic"?
only waking the computer if, for example, an actualy IM is received or a download is completed."
So now if my falling asleep leads to the computer falling asleep, it'll wake up to wake me up when it finished downloading.
It sounds like a dislexic "Yo Dawg..."
"carry out more complicated tasks autonomously"
Now all we need is a network cable that can carry on the tasks of this NIC allowing it to sleep when it isn't busy, waking it when it needs to wake the main computer! Wait...
So much for letting sleeping computers lie.
"I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me." --Hunter S. Thompson
'Round these here parts, we've had a device like that for years. We call it a network router.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
hmm, that makes sense.
jaymz
.. does this mean my botnet can continue to spam folks even if they turn off their PCs? If so, this is a great feature!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
so a lower cost ver of the killer nic?
If they'd only had this for Token Ring maybe one of its shortcomings wouldn't have hurt it so badly.
(Yes, I know they were supposed to close a pass-through relay on power loss -- and how often somehow they didn't.)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
are you ever in a position where you need your car to slooooowly move forward all night? Well, imagine a device that let's you do that while the motor "sleeps"! Just plug it into your lighter adapter, set the device out in front of the car, and go ahead and turn that engine off - by sunrise your car will be over yonder.
Magic? No... just a fully functional electric car that may well have more torque than your own. Or something. /analogy
Remember when your IBM mainframe had an array of special I/O processors? Well, the bus arbitrator on your motherboard looks suspiciously like one of those. And remember when disk arrays because "smart"? Well ... just looks at the electronics on the average SATA IDE drive and you'll see what I mean. It manages the hardware, and you only talk to the drive's on-board controller, never to the drive itself.
And now this network controller. Pardon me, I mean network card.
Check all your Ethernet connections, at all terminations, especially if you are a bank or R&D place. Has someone snuck a battery-operated Linux gumstick somewhere, transparently mimicking the MAC address at both ends of its traffic, secretly recording and transmitting all your traffic to a nefarious third source? You don't usually notice somebody ADDING something to your network -- of course, in the two seconds of downtime it took to insert it, you probably just thought it was a blip. Maybe you didn't even notice.
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
English motherfucker, we speak it.
both these nics are supposed to have this functionality.
They're using their grammar skills there.
You need to turn on; tune in; and drop out.
I am not advocating drug use.
Yours In Serotonin,
K. Trout,
NIC's with on board processors and off load for these types of applications have been on the market for several years.
http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/products/
I think the only difference here is the operation while sleeping which could easily be done with a killer nic with firmware/driver changes
This sounds strangely familiar to a Dell Remote Access Controller, where it's basically a computer inside of your computer that interfaces with its various input and output buses and has its own NIC that's always powered on as long as the PSU(s) in the system have power. As long as the system is plugged in and the DRAC has an active network connection, the system can be accessed remotely no matter what state the physical system is in. I've performed many remote OS installs from 5 states away with these nifty little guys. Now if someone or some company could come up with a standard interface for remote access controllers, then we'd really be in business. As it is now these guys are all proprietary (and hella expensive).
It's funny how today's PCs continue to take architectural queues from earlier mainframe and minicomputer designs.
And fifos, and skip lists too!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
My first thought was "IMs? What about malware, etc?" In other words, a firewall on an embedded system in the NIC would be far more useful than something that lets your CPU sleep while you keep downloading porn.
And then my second thought was "Great, another vulnerability for attack. Why hack someone's PC, which could have any configuration, when you can hack the monoculture of embedded processors in consumer NICs?"
Either way, marketing this kind of NIC without addressing all of its security potentials/weaknesses would be hasty... and possibly even irresponsible.
I can see the fnords!
Does this wake the system up every time that 2GB has filled up then?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/27/2310234
and my comment to the first story: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1213805&cid=27741803
I'm guessing the inventor's statistics "In the office environment, 52% of respondents left their machines on for remote access, and 35% did so to support applications running in the background, of which e-mail and IM were most popular (47%)." are still true.
http://mesl.ucsd.edu/yuvraj/research/documents/Somniloquy-NSDI09-Yuvraj-Agarwal.pdf
Is this scary technology? Now your system can become a true zombie on a botnet while asleep. Couldn't a virus/worm just wake your system up and infect it?
Sounds a lot like Lights Out Management eh. Seen this in Sun and HP too.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Though I can't cite an old /. post or other article, I was reading about a LAN adapter with embedded processor and RAM for download storage at least a year ago. I don't think it was early news of this same.
Anyone but me get the Willies seeing "Microsoft" and "BitTorrent" used together in such a fashion?
Without having even reached the end of the paragraph I had already gone into "Yeah, right." mode.
Seriously, with as much effort as Microsoft has put into DRM development, how can anything like this be expected to actually function the way WE, the end-user, want it to work?
I find it exceedingly difficult to dismiss a past such as Microsoft possesses, and having some university name attached to the idea does nothing for me. Universities these days will do anything for a buck, much like Microsoft.
And if I didn't already have a raging case of the Willies, throwing the name "Akamai" into the mix didn't help.
Why run on battery when decent switches (used by banks...) have PoE available?
Because the switches and switch-router-NAT appliances marketed for use in homes or small businesses often aren't "decent switches", and because PoWLAN isn't yet available.
Management engine in the chipset has it's own IP stack and runs even when PC is off.
They make the mistake of using Linux.
They should be running Windows CE!
(Yes, this is a joke for those without humor sense. I'm actually somewhat happy to see linux used.)
RES PUBLICA NON DOMINETUR
of Network Adapters!
I already have a store-bought version of this on my PC! It doesn't use USB though...it uses cat5 as the bus and does much more than their hobby version....the box says "broadband router" but I'm a techy person...I read the specs and figured out what it REALLY was....
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
on a large scale network chatter costs energy, and causes power fluctuations strangely enough. these tiny fluctuations actually cause power-supply's in servers to break quicker, and that's why you should always separate the power of network devices. most switches are of truly crappy quality and thus destroy the stability of your power, allot of servers don't like this strangely enough! the best thing to do is to have them connected to a UPS or another external power-system. why can't anyone make a power-noise free switch?
>The adapter, dubbed Somniloquy (meaning to talk in one's sleep) ... keeps the network connection going ... ... IM is received or a download is completed."
>also developed a simplified IM client and bittorrent client that carry out more complicated tasks
>autonomously, only waking the computer if, for example, an
.
"Talking in Your Sleep" -- The Romatics
[...]
I hear the secrets that you keep;
When you're talking in your sleep;
I hear the secrets that your keep;
When you're talking in your sleep;
.
When I hold you in my arms at night;
Don't you know you're sleeping in the spotlight;
And all the things that you keep inside;
You tell me the secrets that you just can't hide;
.
You tell me that you love me;
And you tell me that yuo need me;
You tell me that you love me;
And I know that I'm right;
'Cause I hear it in the night;
.
I hear the secrets that you keep;
When you're talking in your sleep;
I hear the secerets that your keep;
When yuo're talking in your sleep;
[...]
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
perhaps today is the day Satan goes to work in a snow plow?, seriously though, is anyone else a little surprised at this?
prepare the survey weasels.
"Researchers at Microsoft... running embedded Linux. "
I wonder why they didn't use Windows XP Embedded for this task. 64MB of RAM is plenty enought for Windows XP, right?
Instead of putting a pig operating system to sleep on the main board, while a daughter card runs Linux, it's a lot simpler to just run Linux on the main board.
You need help.
Wooooooo-wheeeeeeee, you need help !
Squirrel!
can i get rid of skype then ?
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
Why, between that and the AT-370 I had a perfectly working data centre in a box ;-)
Of course, you had to know
But, it still was fun.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32(King James Version)
There is already a NIC on the market that does this (and it runs Linux) so why is it suddenly news now that Microsoft has developed one?
These people have successfully recreated the Linksys NSLU2. Yaayyy!
Any moron can buy a Gumstix and install Linux and TorrentFlux. All it takes is a shell script to send a WOL packet to the snoozing storage PC, dump the files on it and put it back to sleep. Or you could just treat the whole thing as a torrent appliance, hook up a USB-adapted hard drive and cut the redundant desktop PC completely out of the picture.
There's nothing newsworthy about "inventing" a seedbox that runs on miniaturized PC hardware, because there is no technological gap to bridge. You buy the thing, you install the things on the thing, and then you use the thing. Most techies can do that in their sleep.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Isn't this just a Bigfoot Networks Killer M1 NIC ( http://www.tomsguide.com/us/killer-m1-nic,review-1083.html ) with a USB port and a flash drive? Not to say that's not a great upgrade, but certainly not anything revolutionary or even original.
Is the machine 'sleeping' or 'hibernating'? Because my Wii stays connected to the network when it's 'asleep', too. Doesn't sound like they 'invented' anything, just implemented a slick way to do something interesting.
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg
If the summery is correct. They actually used Linux instead of their own baby.
Servers already have "lights out" management processors that perform similar functionality.
I dun wanna toss da salad! imareed IMMA LERN TO REED!
Now Windows Update can fuck your computer up even if it's turned off.
At night, when your main software firewall is off, people store illegal files in to your machines, causing FBI and other law enforcement agencies to knock on your door, costing thousands of dollars in legal fees, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars due to health conditions related to high stress, and also you will lose your home and your family due to bankruptcy and divorce.
In short, you should never keep your machine plug in over night, let alone run a server.
That is, until we have a better legal system, or anarchy where the true freedom lies.
New Economic Perspectives
Yo dawg, I heard you like torrenting, so we put a computer in your computer so you can use your computer when you're not using your computer!
So what we have here is a bandaid over the failures of x86 (power consumption), in order to avoid exposing a fatal flaw of Windows (can't really be ported because the apps are the only reason people use it). Huh... Yeah. No, that's nice guys... you just keep working on that.
now just a gosh darned second .. did I READ it right ? .. Microsoft .. with a GAZILLION DOLLAR research budget .. decided to show how well it can use linux ..
well firstly .. uClinux has been run on many such devices .. in the past .. one particularly cool one was almost the size of a big RJ45.
ahh ..well .. I wonder if the CE department just got made redundant ..
I've seen more of these posts here on /. ... Very disturbing =x
If this is a joke then it's not funny and if it's not then you need to search for help...
Here be signatures
Nearly Headless NIC
(it is not headless anymore after waking the PC)
Old news, you posted this along time ago.
You speak of a connection that can transfer 1 GB of data, or roughly 10000 Mbits including layer 2, IP, TCP, and BitTorrent overhead, in 600 seconds. So you define a "decent connection" as one that can sustain 16 Mbps. But the summary mentions "Researchers at Microsoft and the University of California", which are in the United States, and 16 Mbps to the home isn't affordable in many parts of the United States. Comcast in particular provides only 6 Mbps down to homes, and the customer is capped at 250 GB per month.
But then waking every 10 minutes might still save power if it means the computer will be on less than 20 percent of the time. Take 5 seconds to POST, 5 seconds to boot a minimal OS without X (if Moblin can boot all the way to Xfce in 5 seconds, it's possible), 60 seconds to copy data from the SD card, and 5 seconds to shut down.
maybe the 2GB is upgradable
The summary says it's an SD card. My concern is whether the SD slot takes SDHC cards.
Yes, you're right. Sorry, I'll take better care next time. I don't mind being corrected because spelling mistakes like this look stupid.
Typing increases my ability to spell. I'm a much better speller when I type than when I write. ...and why is this a problem?
My writing speed is slow enough that I write and think about each letter instead of words as a whole. When typing, I type whole words and don't even notice that they contain letters.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au