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Wireless Internet
In today’s world, people are constantly on the move—commuting, traveling frequently, attending classes, and working out in the field serving custome
rs and the community. Wireless communications has helped sever the tether, enabling people to access the public Internet and private intranets via the growing number of Wi-Fi HotSpots and wireless municipal networks. The wireless network supports full mobility where people enjoy continuous communications as they roam from place to place.
Wi-Fi mobility adds high-speed roaming to public Internet access services in public transportation systems, such as commuter trains, subways and buses. It also provides public safety officials and public works crews with powerful mobile multimedia communications while they protect and serve the community - while being out in the community.
Accessing a Mesh on the Move Wi-Fi mobility involves the ability to connect seamlessly to the nearest HotSpot while traveling through a HotZone, which is essentially a network of multiple HotSpots that extends throughout an area, such as a railway, a major thoroughfare or harbor, or an entire metropolitan area.
The potential to roam among Wi-Fi HotSpots became possible only after largescale Wi-Fi HotZones were made practical and affordable with the advent of wireless mesh networking. The wireless mesh is a self-forming, self-healing network that installs quickly and easily, and requires minimal ongoing management. The mesh topology utilizes multiple wireless paths, which allow the network to overcome obstacles, expand readily into new territory and deliver mission-critical reliability
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ozmanjusri writes "According to Information Week, within hours of its wide availability Windows XP SP3 had drawn hundreds of complaints from users who claim the update is wreaking havoc on their computers. One user said in a Microsoft newsgroup: 'I downloaded and installed [the SP3] package for IT Professionals and Developers on one of my computers. Now I can't get the computer to boot. I don't think Microsoft should have made this a critical update.' Other sites including IT Wire are also reporting problems, which include include random reboots or the inability to boot at all." Note that XP3 won't install on systems running beta IE8; and after a successful SP3 install users will no longer be able to downgrade from IE7 to IE6.
jcatcw points out a blog entry by Scott McPherson, CIO for the Florida House of Representatives. McPherson condemns the state of data sharing and data mining in law enforcement, saying that the US causes itself a great deal of trouble by focusing more on "antiterror armor and nuke-sniffing devices" than a useful information distribution network. He discusses a few such projects, and how they could have directly affected the events of 9/11. Quoting: "One of those ingenious things that actually worked, Seisint founder Hank Asher's brilliant MATRIX system, remains mired in controversy and politics. Hank showed me MATRIX just a few short weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Using law enforcement data and commercial data, all of the commercial data available in the public domain, Asher's query produced [hijacker Mohamed] Atta's photo -- and about 80 others, many of them fellow 9/11 hijackers, many of them associates of the 9/11 hijackers. It was simple data mining and algorithms, and none of the information was obtained illegally."
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Esther Schindler writes "CSO has an annotated, zoomable map of real botnet topologies showing the interconnections between the compromised computers and the command-and-control systems that direct them. The map is based on work by security researcher David Voreland; it has interactive controls so you can zoom in and explore botnets' inner workings. Hackers use botnets for spamming, DDoS attacks and identity theft. One recent example is the Storm botnet, which may have comprised 1 million or more zombie systems at its peak. As with any networking challenge, there are good (resilient) designs and some not-so-good ones. In some cases the topology may be indicative of a particular botnet's purpose, or of a herder on the run."
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An anonymous reader writes "Wired.com is reporting that the Firefox browser has been unknowingly distributing a trojan with the Firefox Vietnamese language pack. Over 16,000 downloads of the pack occurred since being infected. This highlights a risk on relying on user-submitted Firefox extensions, or a lack of peer-review of the extensions, many of which receive frequent upgrades."
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SecureThroughObscure writes "ZDNet Zero-Day security blogger Nate McFeters got an exclusive look at the Microsoft Blue Hat conference. This is an invite-only conference that few media get to attend, but apparently McFeters was brought in with co-worker Rob Carter to talk about some vulnerabilities they had discovered with a few product security teams in attendence, and was also asked to do a guest blog posting about the conference at the Microsoft Blue Hat blog. McFeters also included several pictures of the conference and after conference events."
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Stony Stevenson writes "It has surfaced that the US State Department can't account for up to about 1,000 laptops, perhaps as many as 400 of which belonged to the department's Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program. Internal auditors found that the department lost track of $30 million worth of computer equipment, 'the vast majority of which... perhaps as much as 99 percent,' were laptops, according to one official. Another official calculated that the average State Department laptop costs US$3,000 and figured that meant as many as 1,000 laptops might be astray — not 10,000 laptops as the US$30 million figure suggests. They're obviously not very good at maths."
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perlow writes "Using the free System Rescue CD you can perform bare-metal backups and restores of many types of computer systems. In this article, ZDNet columnist Jason Perlow explains the multi-step procedure in detail on an LVM-based system."
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Ben Rothke writes "There are two types of writers about terrorism, experts such as Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson who write from a distance and others that write graphic tales of first-hand from the trenches war stories. Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities, is unique in that author Malcolm Nance is a 20-year veteran of the U.S. intelligence community and writes from a first hand-perspective, but with the organization and methodology of writers such as Pipes and Emerson. Those combined traits make the book extraordinarily valuable and perhaps the definitive text on terrorist recognition." Read below for the rest of Ben's review
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Sean0michael writes "OpenOffice.org has announced their 3.0 Beta is ready for testing. The new version includes some great enhancements, including MS Office 2007 import filters, an improved notes feature, a built-in Solver component, and an Aqua interface for Macs. The site has a complete list of Beta features. Download your beta release from their site."
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Presto Vivace sends news of a server found by security firm Finjan that contained a 1.4-GB cache of stolen data, accumulated over a period of less than a month from compromised PCs around the world. The "crimeserver," as Finjan dubs it, "provided command and control functions for malware attacks in addition to being a drop site for data harvested from compromised computers. ... The stolen data consisted of 5,388 unique log files including 1,037 from Turkey, 621 from Germany, 571 from the United States, 322 from France, 308 from India and 232 from Britain." Oddly enough, the data was stored in the open, with not even basic auth to protect it. Finjan notes in their press release that this huge trove of data gathered over a short period of time indicates that the crimeware problem is far larger than most observers have been assuming. Update: 05/08 12:29 GMT by T : Note, the security firm involved is spelled "Finjan," not "Finjin" as originally shown.
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QtPi writes "Trolltech has announced the availability of Qt 4.4, the cross-platform software development framework. Ars Technica has an in-depth look at the release, which include an integrated WebKit-based HTML rendering engine, the new Phonon multimedia framework, support for Windows CE, and significant improvements to the QGraphicsView system. 'Qt 4.4 brings a lot of rich new capabilities to the toolkit that are sure to please open source and commercial software developers. It sounds like Trolltech already has some nice plans for Qt 4.5, and we will hopefully get to hear more about the long-term roadmap after Nokia completes its acquisition.'"
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LinucksGirl writes "Ext4 is the latest in a long line of Linux file systems, and it's likely to be as important and popular as its predecessors. As a Linux system administrator, you should be aware of the advantages, disadvantages, and basic steps for migrating to ext4. This article explains when to adopt ext4, how to adapt traditional file system maintenance tool usage to ext4, and how to get the most out of the file system."
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jcatcw writes "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols considers the dissimilarities between malware of yore and current infiltrations as we approach the 20th anniversary of the Robert Morris worm. Modern malware apps curl up and make themselves at home in your system, where they wait for a chance to snatch an important password or a credit card number. Welcome to the era of capitalist hacking. Any self-respecting malware program today is polymorphic, making signature-based antivirus approaches difficult. Heuristics and virtual sandboxes offer alternatives, but all such methods are reactive. Unfortunately, monitoring lists and networks is about the only current alternative."
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StarEmperor writes "Gamasutra has a good feature about four grad students who created 50 games in one semester. The article presents their insights about game design, evaluating gameplay, and generally what makes for a fun game."
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An anonymous reader writes "Krugle, a software search company, had some time on its hands — it compared frequency of mentions in open source code of presidential candidates, Beelzebub and yes, Britney Spears." I wish they'd link to a nice long list of the other terms this revealed — there are probably a lot of subtler funny references and asides.
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