p2pnet news roundup #6: October 10, 2008
p2pnet news view | P2P:- Today is Day 5 of p2pnet’s Canada elections 2008 special and although I won’t be doing the usual posts (with one or two exceptions) , I promised I’d run headline roundups two or three times a day.
Cheers!
Jon
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Wikipedia simplifies IT infrastructure by moving to one Linux vendor – Computerworld
Since the free, online Wikipedia user-created encyclopedia began in 2001, the Linux-based IT infrastructure behind it has been expanded and lassoed together to keep up with the demands of the popular Web site. That meant that often it was haphazardly expanded by tossing in a new server with a different operating system each time. Over five years, the servers were running a variety of versions of Red Hat Linux and Red Hat Fedora, making it more complicated to install applications and maintain the servers. Soon, that problem will be gone. In a few months, Wikipedia will finish a major transformation by moving from a combination of versions of Red Hat products to Ubuntu Linux Version 8.04 on all 400 of its servers that support the Web site.
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Linux 2.6.27 Released – Heise Online
Twelve weeks after the release of 2.6.26, Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.27. The new kernel release sees numerous improvements to the Linux kernel, of which the most prominent are better built-in Wi-Fi and Webcam support and better suspend/resume support, making 2.6.27 a much better fit for the new generation of netbooks. The release of 2.6.27 is also the signal for a number of Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, OpenSuse and Fedora, to move forward from their current beta and release candidate releases towards full releases in the next month or two.
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[OT] Ottawa sued over lack of legislation to protect B.C. killer whales – CBC
Scientists say killer whales on the B.C. coast face serious threats such as declining salmon stocks, increased boat traffic, and toxic contamination.Scientists say killer whales on the B.C. coast face serious threats such as declining salmon stocks, increased boat traffic, and toxic contamination. Six environmental groups filed a lawsuit in Vancouver on Wednesday against the federal government, accusing it of failing to protect endangered and threatened killer whales on the B.C. coast. The legal action came after Ottawa’s decision last month to not protect killer whales beyond existing measures, said Laura Tessaro, a lawyer for Ecojustice, formerly the Sierra Legal Defence Fund. “The lawsuit alleges that the federal government has failed to legally protect the critical habitat of endangered and threatened resident killer whales,” she said. Ecojustice, a non-profit organization of lawyers and scientists, filed the lawsuit on behalf of the David Suzuki Foundation, Environmental Defence, Greenpeace Canada, International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, and the Wilderness Committee.
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BlackBerry super-phone in the works, Storm 2 and 3 coming soon – The Boy Genius
We don’t have too much info to go off of at this point in time, but if you are still waiting to get your hands on the Pearl Flip 8220, Curve 8900, Bold, or Storm, we’re about to screw you up real quick. We’ve now confirmed from 2 independent sources that RIM is working on a device that will blow the roof off all previous models. Ready for it? 5 megapixel auto-focus camera, 1GB of RAM so your precious worthless apps don’t cause memory leaks, and a “near-HD quality” screen. We’re honestly not sure about the form-factor but we heard this device could be sort of a Bold and Storm mashup. Either Treo-esque or a slide-out device. One last thing… we have also heard from a different source that RIM is hard at work on a second generation Storm device and they’ve even started the first stages of a third generation Storm. That’s all we’ve got for now, but you know we’ll be on this quicker than a plus-sized girl and a jar of Mayo. Who’s your favorite blogger?
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WiFi is no longer a viable secure connection – SC Magazine
Global Secure Systems has said that a Russian’s firm’s use of the latest NVidia graphics cards to accelerate WiFi ‘password recovery’ times by up to an astonishing 10,000 per cent proves that WiFi’s WPA and WPA2 encryption systems are no longer enough to protect wireless data. David Hobson, managing director of GSS, claimed that companies can no longer view standards-based WiFi transmission as sufficiently secure against eavesdropping to be used with impunity. He also said that the use of VPNs is arguably now mandatory for companies wanting to comply with the Data Protection Act.
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October 10th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
I believe that Comcast’s ‘throttling’ interfered with VPN and ssh tunnels. Apparently they think that if anything is encrypted the customer must be ’stealing’ from the media cartels. If you want privacy, you must have something to hide.
If you have nothing to hide, then give me your name, address, your mother’s maiden name, your social security number, your debit card number and its PIN. Everyone has something to hide. The people that think they don’t are apparently idiots and are a danger to themselves.