M&M’s World Headlines: Mar 6, 2009
Bandwidth: Cogent Pricing @ $6, Juniper Confirms Normal Bandwidth Demand Growth dslprime
“There is still no sign of an exaflood that would swamp the network. If anything, the tendency seems to be towards a slowdown,Juniper’s CEO made a mistake cutting the cartoons, while taking a pay cut to support R&D not an acceleration,” says Professor Andrew Odlyzko, the world’s leading expert. The world’s #2 router maker has confirmed that’s wat their accounts are seeing. “Juniper customers report 50% to 60% annual growth in network demand, consistent with outside estimations the Internet is doubling every two years.” (CD) There’s similar data from Cisco, including projections the rate of growth won’t change much through 2012. Other sources have lower figures. Cogent, now a primary backbone connection, saw growth of 30% in traffic from 2007 to 2008, including adding new customers…. 50-60% sounds like an enormous increase, but in fact has been the norm for 6 years and simply not a problem. I prefer to use the 25-45% bandwidth growth per user, which is the cost a carrier needs to cover. [Comment: Very interesting. This "seems" to conflict with What I have read in CRTC submissions]
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French Telcos Point Out How Costly It Is If Sarkozy Forces Them To Be Copyright Cops Tech Dirt
With France still trying to move forward with its plan to require ISPs to remove accused file sharers from the internet via a “three strikes” policy, French telcos and ISPs are protesting the plan, noting that it would cost them millions of dollars to obey the law, and they see no reason why the burden should be on them. This is an important point that often gets missed in the debates over such “three strikes” policies.
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German Court Says E-Voting Was Unconstitutional Tech Dirt
It still stuns us that, despite so many problems found with e-voting technologies, that elections officials in the US seem to have no problem continuing to roll them out every election time, it looks like Germany is taking a slightly different perspective. A number of readers have sent in the news that Germany’s highest court hasn’t just rejected Germany’s use of e-voting technologies, but declared their usage in a 2005 election as unconstitutional.
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No Doubt: Buy A Concert Ticket, Download All Our Songs Tech Dirt
Slowly, but surely, more bands are starting to figure it out: the music is free. Whether they want to believe it or not, the actual music is free, so you might as well get it out there and then focus on selling scarcities. The latest example (which a ton of you have sent in), is the band No Doubt, who is giving away their entire catalog of music as a download, for folks who buy certain concert tickets.
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Quebec strippers vie for title on TV-Canadian event could be next CNet
This week, inside a swank Montreal restaurant-turned TV studio, 30 performers selected from bars across Quebec squared off head to head – and pole to pole – for provincial striptease supremacy. Packaged into a four-episode series, “Pole Position Quebec” will hit pay TV in May, but the show’s producer and host, Anne-Marie Losique, said she isn’t stopping there. Losique said a pan-Canadian competition – and possibly U.S. and European tilts – could soon follow.
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Robin Williams needs heart surgery, cancelling show CTV
Robin Williams’ publicist says the comedian needs heart surgery and must cancel the remainder of his one-man show, `Weapons of Self-Destruction.’ Diane Rosen said in a news release Thursday that Williams needs an aortic valve replacement. The 57-year-old Williams says he is `touched by everyone’s support and well wishes.’
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Facebook: Taking a cue from Twitter in sharing? CTV
The popular online hangout Facebook is revamping its home page and plans other changes so its millions of users can more easily choose the types of information they see. Perhaps taking a cue from Twitter, the rising service for letting people express themselves in 140 characters or less and keep up with what celebrities have to say, Facebook said Wednesday it will let users follow public figures like U.S. President Barack Obama and swimmer Michael Phelps, bands like U2 and even institutions like the New York Times. Facebook will also tweak its central feature, the status update, which now invites people to broadcast to their friends a response to “What are you doing right now?” Responses can now range from mundane to poetic to uncomfortably personal. It’s part of a larger marketing campaign for Skittles, which earlier this week redirected its home page to Twitter’s search page, such that every short post that included the word “skittles” got automatically displayed. That experiment turned sour when some tweeters posted vulgar comments. Soon, the candy’s page moved from Twitter to Facebook. [Additional info @ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/05/facebook_mimics_twitter/ also check the next story.]
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Facebook’s Zuckerberg: Copy to Win Beta News
It is now well-established that social network Facebook was built up from the idea (if not the actual code) of HarvardConnect, which later became ConnectU. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was sued for stealing the idea of Facebook from HarvardConnect, which he briefly worked on as a student. So when Facebook announced yesterday that interface changes would soon be rolled out, which will turn the user’s page into a real-time update feed of his friends’ activities, many assumed this move was to replicate some of the more popular functionality of microblogging service Twitter, and remove some of the luster from that popularity. This idea is largely due to repeated rumors of an attempted Twitter buyout by Facebook.
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Hacker [Acidstorm] gets 4 years in prison over malware install CTV
A Los Angeles computer security consultant has been sentenced to four years in federal prison for using malicious software that turned thousands of computers into “zombies” so he could steal private information. Prosecutors say 27-year-old John Schiefer was sentenced Wednesday after pleading guilty last April to computer fraud. [Comment: Check the next story now for a more detailed real-life look of whats happening with this "hacker"...]
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Web maven gives convicted botmaster [Acidstorm] keys to new kingdom The Register
For the past four or five months, Mahalo.com has entrusted its site to a security consultant who stole hundreds of thousands of bank passwords with a massive botnet, which he sometimes administered from his former employer’s premisis. For most of that time, serial entrepreneur and Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis was in the dark because no one at the company had bothered to Google the employee. But even after learning that 27-year-old John Kenneth Schiefer confessed to extensive botnet crimes just 16 months ago, they are continuing to trust him with system root passwords and other sensitive company information. “After really a lot of careful deliberation and looking at exactly what damage he could do here and how he was being supervised, we made a compassionate decision to let him work up to the day that he goes to prison,” Calacanis told The Register. “We’ve made a point of supervising him and I talk to him on a daily basis.” On Wednesday, a federal judge sentenced Schiefer to serve four years in federal prison and pay $20,000 in restitution and a $2,500 fine. The hacker, who went by the names Acid and Acidstorm, has been given 90 days to surrender to prison officials…. Asked how they can be sure Schiefer is reformed even before he’s served a day in prison or paid a dime in restitution, Calacanis said: “I think I know the difference between someone who is extremely malicious and looking to destroy people’s lives and steal a bunch of identities and somebody who is maybe too intelligent and curious for their own good. I think that’s the case here.”
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Court prohibits HTC smartphone sales in Germany Telecompaper
A court in Germany has granted one of two patent infringement claims made by commercial patent exploiters IPCom against Taiwanese mobile device manufacturer HTC. The district court in Mannheim ruled that HTC products are infringing on the specified patent and subsequently granted an injunction pending IPcom raise a EUR 1 million security bond. Once effective, the injunction will prevent HTC from selling or importing its mobile devices into Germany. HTC claims that the alleged infringing technology is present in the baseband chipset component supplied by HTC’s chipset vendor and does not involve HTC technology or intellectual property. The court decision will not impact HTC’s current customers in Germany or devices already on sale in Germany, according to the manufacturer. HTC will be appealing the decision…
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Catholic Church Tells Italians to Give Up SMS Texting During Lent Softpedia
Cellphones have been criticized for a lot of things so far. All of the studies taken on the effects of mobile phones over people have shown that they are bad for their health, the radiation emitted by them causing all sorts of diseases and disorders. However, it seems that they are bad for the spirit too, as the Catholic Church urged Italians to give them up and avoid playing their computer games, using their iPhones and social networking sites, such as Facebook, every Friday before Easter. The bishop referred particularly to text messaging since the Italians are the second most prolific text-messagers in Europe after the British, with each person sending 50 a month on average.
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March patch Tuesday omits Excel fix The Register
Microsoft forthcoming patch Tuesday will bring no relief from an unpatched Excel flaw that’s the target of active malware attacks.
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Skype COO blasts EU telcos The Inquirer
SKYPE COO, Scott Durchslag, blasted European telcos for trying to block his company’s path and delivered a “call to action” to form what he described as “win-win” partnerships with mobile operators and announced an alliance with text-to-speech outfit SpinVox. During his keynote at CeBit, Durchslag said Skype was “holding our hand out” to telcos and mobile operators in a bid to spread Skype far and wide in the smartphone market, despite attempts by certain telecom firms to stop it. [Comment: Read the next article on this...]
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Skype to give away wideband audio codec The Register
Skype this week said it will soon be offering royalty-free licenses to its new SILK wideband speech codec to interested third-party developers and hardware makers. The wideband codec recently debuted as part of Skype 4.0 for Windows (with a Mac version coming in April.) With a claimed 400 million Skype users registered worldwide, the VoIP provider is apparently none too concerned about handing the competition keys to the kingdom without the usual charges. Skype says it’s offering the licenses gratis to “establish a new industry-wide standard in speech processing,” ranging from web developers to chip manufacturers to mobile device makers.
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Zero-day Adobe PDF peril goes click free The Register
n unpatched flaw in Adobe Acrobat and Reader might be exploited without even needing to trick a surfer into opening a maliciously constructed file. Proof of concept demonstrations of this by security blogger Didier Stevens will increase pressure on Adobe to release a fix ahead of schedule. The exploit techniques demoed by Stevens make use of the Windows Explorer Shell Extension installed with Adobe Reader. The feature creates a conduit between Adobe Reader and Windows Explorer and means that simply hovering the mouse cursor over a booby-trapped file, or selecting it, are enough to allow the bust out of potentially malicious code. Selecting a thumbnail view poses a similar risk.
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Vatican vetos ‘dot god’ domain The Register
The Pope has called on ICANN to keep religion out of the domain name system. The Vatican warned the internet address-making body of the “perils” of allowing new internet domains such as “.catholic, .anglican, .orthodox, .hindu, .islam, .muslim, [and] .buddhist”.
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Tweeter up before the beak The Inquirer
FLAVOUR O’ THE WEEK WASTE OF TIME TWITTER has ended up in court in the US… in the hands of a news journalist. Wichita Eagle hack Ron Sylvester (insert your own Tweety Pie joke here) has been given permission to post live tweets from inside a federal court room for the first time ever.
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Craigslist accused of pimping The Inquirer
PEDDLER OF TAT, CRAIGSLIST has been accused of acting as America’s biggest pimp by a top Illinois cop. Cook County Sherriff Thomas Dart has filed a suit against the listings site saying, “Craigslist is the single largest source of prostitution in the nation.”
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Robot transforms sewer into information superhighway The Inquirer
THE INQ HAS often been accused of having its head in the gutter and today at CeBit was no exception as we stumbled across a company flogging its fibre optic sewer setup offerings. Fibre Access By Sewage Tube (FAST) is a Swiss firm which boasts the ability to convert most standard sewage systems (man entry and no-man entry) into a super-fast information highway. The system includes a specially-designed sewer robot made from bits of teenage mutant ninja turtles and stainless steel to hold conduits in place using adjustable clamps. Fibre optic cables run through the conduits which then deliver a load of digital sh*te to your home computer via the Internet.
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Spotify is hacked The Inquirer
ONLINE record store Spotify has admitted that thousands of users’ personal details may have been nicked by hackers before Christmas.
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Additional Details on Choruss, Collective Licensing on Campus EFF
EDUCAUSE, the nonprofit for information technology in higher education, has posted a one hour conversation with Jim Griffin, the head of Choruss (and member of EFF’s advisory board), about the major label effort to create a voluntary collective license for music file-sharing on campus.
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The Best Way Through the Great Firewall of China Slashdot
“The MIT Technology Review brings news of a new report from Harvard assessing circumvention software. The best tools they tested (and they actually did test them in cybercafes in China) were…
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NY Bill Proposes Tax Credit for Open Source Developers Slashdot
“Assemblymen Jonathan Bing and Micah Kellner, along with a number of co-sponsors, have introduced proposed legislation in New York State which would grant a tax credit to individuals acting as volunteers who develop open source programs.
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UK School Introduces Facial Recognition Slashdot
“A UK school has quietly introduced new facial recognition systems for registering students in and out of school: ‘HIGH-TECH facial recognition technology has swept aside the old-fashioned signing of the register at a school.
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Thief cops personal information from NYPD pension database Beta News
UPI reports that a civilian employee of the New York Police Department has been charged with burglary, grand larceny, and computer trespass after disabling security cameras and stealing eight backup tapes from a warehouse on Staten Island. Anthony Borelli, the accused, is the former director of communications for the NYPD pension fund, and the tapes found in his home contain Social Security numbers and direct-deposit information for 80,000 current and retired officers.
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Man confronted by “field management crew chief” For Being Open Source/Linux Advocate Linuxlock
“Putting fuel in my truck was the last place I expected to get into a confrontation”…. Open source/linux hurts Windows repair sales projections 6-months down the road and destroys jobs per a crew chief salaried member a company’s Field Management.
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Which State Consumes The Most Online Porn? BuzzNewsRoom
Utah, that’s which state! Or so says Harvard researcher Ben Edelman, who “analyzed subscriber data from an unnamed ‘top 10 seller of online adult entertainment.”
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Uncensored Interview Releases 1000+ Creative Commons Theora Videos Creative Commons
Today, Uncensored Interview, a video producer and licensor of musician interviews, is releasing thousands of videos from its interview footage archive under our most permissive license, Attribution also known as CC-BY. Previously, Uncensored Interview’s library consisted of premium content available for commercial licensing, but now includes videos available via download in Ogg Theora, a free and open video compression format. Under CC-BY, users of the content are only required to give attribution to Uncensored Interview as the content source.
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You do the math. Or pay a website to do it Reuters
“You can’t do it? We’re here to help,” says the homepage of a new French website where children can pay for older students to do homework for them. On faismesdevoirs.com (domyhomework.com), children will be able to buy answers to simple maths problems for 5 euros ($6), while a full end-of-year presentation complete with slides and speaking notes will cost 80 euros ($100). The website goes live Thursday morning, founder Stephane Boukris told Reuters.
March, 2009
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