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| Should We Be Concerned That The Military Will Use Counterfeit Routers Bought Off eBay? |
Techdirt
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| (+ Subscribe) Posted on: Wednesday, May 14 2008 09:38 AM |
| Tags: cisco, counterfeit routers, military |
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There was a story last week that got a lot of press about how the FBI discovered that the military was using a ton of counterfeit technology equipment, including thousands of fake Cisco routers. Dan Wallach has an excellent writeup looking at the security implications of what happened. From the description, it certainly doesn't sound like any of the equipment was found to include any kind of questionable technology for spying, but the point is that it would have been easy enough if someone had wanted to do so. Basically, the background is that while the government only buys equipment from approved vendors, those vendors can subcontract out the actual tech purchases to anyone. That leads to situations where (no joke) one subcontractor purchased a bunch of fake routers off of eBay and then resold them to the government via an authorized vendor. Or, try to follow the details of the case of the US Navy contracting with Lockheed Martin for equipment. Lockheed outsourced the deal to an unauthorized Cisco reseller as a subcontractor. That subcontractor turned to its own subcontractor who (yup, you guessed it) hired another subcontractor who shipped the equipment straight to the Navy. If you lost count, that's five layers deep, with most of those layers having no real oversight on what they did. You would think the government (and especially the military) would be a bit more careful in where it sourced its products from, but it certainly doesn't seem as though that's the case at all. Given all that, it's almost difficult to believe that compromised equipment hasn't been sold to the government at some point.
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| Big important study: Violent games so aren’t bad for kids |
CrunchGear
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| (+ Subscribe) Posted on: Tuesday, May 13 2008 11:18 AM |
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We’ve been saying for awhile that violent video games aren’t bad for kids, and now we’ve got research from Harvard to prove it.
They spent nearly one and a half million dollars in four years following the habits of 1,200 kids. As it turns out, violent games are a good way for kids to relieve stress and it doesn’t roll over to real life in most cases.
So it’s OK to let your 8 year-old run over hookers in GTA IV. It really is.
  
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| Now Texas Is Wondering Why Amazon Doesn't Pay State Taxes |
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Techdirt
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| (+ Subscribe) Posted on: Monday, May 12 2008 04:22 PM |
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Following New York's decision to change its laws to force Amazon.com to collect sales tax for New York-related transactions, other states are apparently going back and reevaluating Amazon and taxes. Texas, for example, has been alerted to the fact that Amazon probably should be paying sales tax in the state. This is different than the situation in New York. The rule has always been that, if the company has a "physical presence" in the state, it is required to collect and pay sales tax. The question in New York was what counted as a physical presence. Amazon doesn't have offices or a distribution center in New York, but New York was trying to claim that all its Amazon affiliates in New York represent a physical presence. In Texas, however, Amazon actually does have a physical presence in the form of a distribution center. It's just that the state of Texas didn't recognize that until someone from a Dallas newspaper pointed it out. So even if Amazon is successful in fighting the law in New York, it looks like the renewed interest in forcing online retailers to collect and pay sales tax is catching up to Amazon in other ways.
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| CitizenHawk Raises $3 Million To Target Cybersquatters |
TechCrunch
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| (+ Subscribe) Posted on: Monday, May 12 2008 09:01 AM |
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CitizenHawk, a digital brand management company, has raised $3 million in funding from Maveron LLC.
CitizenHawk helps companies protect their online brands by targeting cybersquatters. According to CitizenHawk, up to 20% of hand-typed URLs are misspelled, which has created a market for “typo” domains. Many of these “typosquatting” sites employ the use of profane ads and spyware to maximize their profits, which can tarnish a brand’s image. CitizenHawk locates these sites, notifies them of their trademark infringements, and initiates legal action if the offenders refuse to cooperate.
CitizenHawk intends to use the money to increase their staff and encourage growth in the market. The company was founded in 2006 and is based in Aliso Viejo, California.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
   
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| 80 Gbps Deep Packet Inspection Hardware Announced |
Slashdot
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| (+ Subscribe) Posted on: Monday, May 12 2008 10:53 AM |
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| An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Procera Networks is launching a new weapon on the deep packet inspection (DPI) front. At $800,000 these 80 Gbps tanks aren't going to be sitting in everyone's closet, but it could mean that more traffic shaping is on the way. "The PL10000 can handle up to 5 million subscribers and can track 48 million real-time data flows. That's certainly a potent piece of hardware, but larger ISPs will need more. That's why Procera designed the new machines with full support for synchronizing traffic flows where return traffic might be routed to a different PacketLogic machine. The machine receiving the return traffic can make the machine monitoring the outbound traffic aware that it sees the other half of a TCP/IP conversation, for example, giving the devices more accuracy than those which might only have access to one side." 
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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| HP Turns to Lasers to Cut Copper From Chips |
GigaOM
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| (+ Subscribe) Posted on: Monday, May 12 2008 08:47 AM |
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HP is trying to eliminate copper on semiconductors to make them run faster, and today the company is gathering about 150 researchers at its Palo Alto campus to push lasers as a means to do this. If it and chip manufacturers such as Intel, IBM and Luxtera succeed, the chip firms will follow in the telcos footsteps, turning to light to transmit information quickly.
Only, in this instance, the light would provide short-haul transport on a chipset measured in nanometers or millimeters rather than over distances of miles. Lasers could replace the copper connecting multiple processing engines inside a chip, but could also act as interconnects between multiple chips on a board. Light pulses provided by a laser could reduce the bill of materials (if adapted for silicon), power consumption and solve some of the problems associated with following Moore’s Law because it reduces some of the materials needed on a chip. Improved chips mean more computing power and a faster, more dynamic web.
Such efforts are in the early stages with real products likely 10 years out. However, it isn’t so far-fetched. Already Infinera, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company whose products are sold to telecommunications companies, makes an optical chip, but it builds its chips on a far more expensive substrate than a silicon wafer.
    
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| Rising Cost of Facebook Infrastructure; CTO Resigns |
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GigaOM
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| (+ Subscribe) Posted on: Sunday, May 11 2008 09:18 PM |
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Last month, I wrote about Facebook’s insatiable hunger for hardware. Over the weekend, Spencer Ante of Business Week reported that Palo Alto-based social networking company had raised about $100 million from Triplepoint Capital, a venture lending operation. “It will be used entirely for servers,” Facebook Chief Financial Officer Gideon Yu told Business Week’s Ante. That gives us a sense of how much hardware is gulping down.
In other words, Facebook could easily increase its number of servers from current estimates of about 10,000 servers to over 50,000 servers, in order to keep up with its growth. Various web analytic companies estimate that Facebook as over 100 million visitors and serves up billions of pages every month. One of my sources had told me that Facebook was looking to spend about $9 million this year on hardware, but apparently, their needs are much bigger. All that spending should prove to be good news for Rackable (RACK) which has been a big server supplier to Facebook.
Facebook has built an enviable infrastructure. I personally believe that their desire to market Facebook Connect is a way to offload some of the pressures Facebook apps are placing on their system, but at some later stage. Regardless, one exec who is not going to be around to help architect the next phase of Facebook’s back end bulk-up: CTO Adam D’Angelo, who left the company according to Kara Swisher and Eric Eldon.
Facebook spokeswoman confirmed the news and added that “D’Angelo will be transitioning out of his role as CTO and leaving Facebook to take some time off.” The company is currently looking for a VP of Engineering. Apparently, Adam’s main interest was engineering and the CTO role moved him too far away from that.
If this story interests you then you should definitely check out our
upcoming conference, Structure 08.
    
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| NSA Takes On West Point In Security Exercise |
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Slashdot
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| (+ Subscribe) Posted on: Sunday, May 11 2008 06:00 AM |
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| Wired is running a story about a recent security exercise in which the NSA attacked networks set up by various US military academies. The Army's network scored the highest, put together using Linux and FreeBSD by cadets at West Point. Quoting: "Even with a solid network design and passable software choices, there was an element of intuitiveness required to defend against the NSA, especially once it became clear the agency was using minor, and perhaps somewhat obvious, attacks to screen for sneakier, more serious ones. 'One of the challenges was when they see a scan, deciding if this is it, or if it's a cover,' says [instructor Eric] Dean. Spotting 'cover' attacks meant thinking like the NSA -- something Dean says the cadets did quite well. 'I was surprised at their creativity.' Legal limitations were a surprising obstacle to a realistic exercise. Ideally, the teams would be allowed to attack other schools' networks while also defending their own. But only the NSA, with its arsenal of waivers, loopholes, special authorizations (and heaven knows what else) is allowed to take down a U.S. network." 
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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| Memoright’s solid state drives annihilate every hard drive out there |
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CrunchGear
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| (+ Subscribe) Posted on: Saturday, May 10 2008 03:16 PM |
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Solid state drives have always excelled in power economy and heat levels, but have faltered in the price-to-performance ratio, and even lagged behind in sheer performance by some measures. That last complaint is valid no longer. Memoright’s high-speed drives operate at far higher speeds than other SSDs on the market, and show nearly double the performance of the closest competitors in the spinning disk category where it counts — or more.  With four 32GB modules in RAID 0 configuration, the Memorights showed read and write speeds of 450MB/S and 323MB/s, respectively. That’s madness, friend. Their I/O counts are off the charts as well, I’m talking like 20 times HDD performance.
It’s not a total shutout, of course; the WD VelociRaptor is comparable on several measures but gets its ass handed to it on just as many. And it’s worth noting that the Memoright modules cost fully ten times as much ($1000 per 32GB). But when Tom’s Hardware goes this gaga over something, you know it’s worth the cash if you’ve got it.
The take-away message here is that the performance gap between SSD and HDD has been decisively closed; it’s now just a matter of getting that price down. Man, I can’t stop thinking about that 0.45GB/s read speed. I’m freaking out here.
  
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| Eye-Fi launches Eye-Fi Home, Share, and geotagging Explore |
Engadget
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| (+ Subscribe) Posted on: Sunday, May 11 2008 11:23 PM |
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Filed under: Peripherals, Wireless, Storage  Eye-Fi's expanding from a single card to a family of three tonight. All are the same 2GB as before, but now we've got the new flagship Eye-Fi Explore ($129), which includes geotagging courtesy of Skyhook (the same WiFi-based location system that helps the iPod touch and iPhone find their way). Then you've got the Eye-Fi Share ($99) -- basically the same card we used to know simply as the Eye-Fi -- and finally the Eye-Fi Home ($79), which appears to only be able to upload photos through desktop software using your home network. Expect 'em all on sale come June 6th.
Gallery: Eye-Fi launches Eye-Fi Home, Share, and geotagging Explore    Permalink | Email this | Comments
 
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Just in time for the 
