The XO laptop I received last week as part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project’s “Give One Get One” (G1G1) promotion is unlike any other laptop I’ve ever used, both in appearance and functionality. It’s smaller, for one thing. The XO weighs only 3.13 pounds, is 9 inches wide, and approximately an inch thick when closed. But there’s a lot more difference between the XO and a normal laptop computer than size. It has strangely marked keys, unusual buttons, external wi-fi antennas, a unique UI, and an original reason for being. Most people, myself included, will compare the XO to normal laptops, but that’s not a good comparison. The XO is not designed to do the things that most notebooks are called upon to do, and no other notebook in the world can do the things the XO can do. There is some overlap, of course, but in the main it’s apples to oranges.
Browsing Posts published in December, 2007
The loss or theft of personal data such as credit card and Social Security numbers is soaring to unprecedented levels, and the trend isn’t expected to turn around anytime soon as hackers stay a step ahead of security and laptops disappear with sensitive information.
[From Data Theft Soars to Unprecedented Levels]
An MIT initiative called “OpenCourseWare” makes virtually all the school’s courses available online for free, and more than 100 universities worldwide, including Johns Hopkins, Tufts and Notre Dame, are joining MIT in a consortium of schools promoting their own open courseware.
24C3: Barcode systems susceptible to serious hacker attacks [From 24C3: Barcode systems susceptible to serious hacker attacks]
Today Microsoft launched a blog about the internals of their IT security research and patch development process. There are already some posts that you will not find in the official security bulletins or KB articles. One of the posts says, ‘We periodically identify workarounds or mitigations like this that we can’t use for official guidance because they’re either too nuanced or have some exception cases. When we discover something potentially useful but are uncomfortable listing it in the bulletin, we’ll do our best to describe it here in this blog.’ It looks like Microsoft is making an effort to become more ‘open’ in the area of security research and communication.
AT&T’s decision to deploy VDSL and FTTN instead of FTTH was done mostly to keep impatient investors happy and keep costs low. The telco will be spending less than a third of Verizon’s $23 billion FiOS budget on initial deployments. Of the eighteen million homes AT&T hopes to pass with U-Verse by the end of 2008, about a million of them will be FTTH. However, those users won’t see any difference in service from the U-Verse being delivered to VDSL users (6Mbps max speed, single HD stream), despite having all that potential capacity.Why? AT&T has told us the goal was to create “a consistent user experience across the board.” This user in our U-Verse forum is one of those lucky (unlucky) FTTH customers in Oklahoma who decided to give the service a spin anyway, and ultimately decided it wasn’t quite ready for prime time:
Well, that was short lived. We canceled it. Over the last few days we experienced lots of freezing on the HD channels. A reboot of the STB and/or RG fixed it for a bit, and then it would come back. Also, the HD quality was very mediocre. To add to that, it was even worse when played back form the DVR. When AT&T gets their act together in terms of reliability and features, I’ll give it a try again. No bad blood here, just disappointment. I WANTED it to work out.
[From AT&T Fiber To The Home - Is U-Verse ready for prime time?]
“The FBI today said it wants to install 150 digital billboards in 20 major U.S. cities in the next few weeks to show fugitive mug shots, missing people and high-priority security messages from the big bureau. The billboards will let the FBI highlight those people it is looking for the most: violent criminals, kidnap victims, missing kids, bank robbers, even terrorists, the FBI said in a release. And the billboards will be able to be updated largely in real-time — right after a crime is committed, a child is taken, or an attack is launched. Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Miami will be among those cities provided with the new billboards.”
[From FBI to Put Criminals Up in Lights]
Airlines around the world are gearing up to offer in-flight broadband for passengers, but overblown fears could make it less sweet than it should be. The fears, and why we don’t buy them.
[From Airlines planning to filter, censor in-flight 'Net access]
A pair of AP stories addresses Boeing’s Connexion failure and in-flight etiquette for Internet access: The AP’s Anick Jesdanun, who has written a series of detailed articles about the bloom in upcoming in-flight broadband and mobile services, files these two articles on specific aspects of the issue. He writes about Connexion by Boeing, a service that more or less worked as advertised technologically–I heard many rumors about problems, but also knew many, many happy users–but that didn’t have the right combination of weight and cost structure to “fly.” As the article points out, and I’ve learned in the last year from extensive interviews, Boeing’s system was out of date by the time it went up, and they had committed early on to extensive, expensive satellite contracts. Rivals and upstarts alike think they have the right combination. Pricing is starting to be disclosed more and more. AirCell is clearly intending to charge about $10 for a domestic flight, which is pretty much what they estimated the cost would be all along. I expect there will be subsidies and deals for frequent fliers, potentially a monthly unlimited subscription (as AirCell has fixed bandwidth costs once the system is built), and partnerships with aggregators to lower costs for corporations. In a related article, Jesdanun discusses whether and how airlines will deal with inappropriate behavior during conversations and in content viewing up in the sky. The various service providers will offer filtering of different kinds: Panasonic Avionics will filter for porn and violence, while AirCell will disable Internet telephony and voice chat. (Those who think you can get around that with a VPN or other purposes just need to remember that service providers can add jitter and such that will make calls indecipherable without affecting other sorts of data transmission.)…
[From Airlines' Sense and Sensibility for In-Flight Broadband]
AppScout directs your attention to a new database that’s part of a SEC effort to transparently track executive compensation. According to the database, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts takes home a $2.5 yearly million salary–but with bonuses, stock awards and other assorted perks, that number jumps to $26 million annually. Departed AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre last year netted a nifty yearly compensation package of $60.7 million. Echostar boss Carl E. Vogel is forced to slum it with yearly compensation of $2.8 million.Some additional names and numbers:
•Alltel: Scott T. Ford, president and CEO, $14.1 million
•DirecTV: Chase Carey, president and CEO, $12.4 million
•Intel: Paul Otellini, president and CEO, $9.8 million
•Level 3 Communications: James Q. Crowe, CEO, $8.7 million
•Qwest: Richard Notebaert, chairman and CEO, $16.5 million
•Sirius Satellite Radio: Mel Karmazin, CEO, $31.1 million
•Sprint Nextel: Gary D. Forsee, chairman, CEO, and president, $21.3 million
•Verizon: Ivan Seidenberg, chairman and CEO, $21.2 million
[From A Very Merry Christmas For AT&T, Comcast CEOs - It's good to be the king...]
Motorola has issued a press release summarizing the WiMax achievements that they accomplished in 2007. The company s most prized achievement was the demonstration of the historic first live mobile WiMAX 802.16e handoffs between continuous WiMAX cells supporting voice, data and multimedia applications at the World WiMax Conference held in Chicago in in September. They ve begun deployment of commercial WiMax in numerous countries and are a part of over forty trials currently taking place around the globe. The company also pointed to their partnership with Sprint on Xohm and said that they re fully set to support the upcoming soft launch. The press release indicates that this means the company is on track for significant WiMax progress in 2008 although they predict much of that taking place in Europe and Asia.
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[From Motorola WiMax Deployments on Track for ë08 - Press release summarizes year end achievements]
With 120 countries now in the cyber arms race, intelligence agencies around the world are working to assess their offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. Developing cyber weapons does not require the massive infrastructure usually associated with conventional arms. A couple of PCs and a couple of smart programmers and you have all you need to create a cyber weapon. Advanced Data Weapons have unique capabilities that make their detection and elimination much more difficult than conventional viruses and trojans. Self morphing malicious code applications Electronic circuitry destruction capabilities Self encrypting / decrypting of malicious code External disruption capacity of wireless networks Exploitation of unreported vulnerabilities in common commmercial software Working with Intelomics and Spy-Ops, two international cyber security companies, we were able to collect enough data to construct the high level cyber threat matrix featured above. As with the conventional arms race, countries with significant defense spending have taken the lead in the cyber arms race. But that trend is rapidly changing. In the past few years malicious code with advanced features has been created for under $3,500 USD. We are beginning to see the emergence of cyber arms dealers. The cost of cyber…
[From Cyber Threat Matrix]
From an alert DT reader… Russian Sub Test Fires Ballistic Missile: Navy Spokesman By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, MOSCOW Dec 17, 2007 A Russian submarine on December 17 successfully test-fired a new ballistic missile from the Barents Sea to the far east of the country, a navy spokesman said. The Sineva missile was launched from the submerged submarine “towards the Kura test ground in Kamchatka,” navy spokesman Igor Dygalo told AFP. “The head section of the missile reached the test ground on time,” he said. Russian television showed the missile thrusting out of the sea at the start of its trajectory. The Sineva, which has the NATO classification Skiff SS-N-23 and a range of 8,900 kilometers (5,500 miles), was brought into service by Russias navy this July. It is designed to carry four individually targeted warheads, according to the Interfax news agency. Our reader comments: I was ready to issue kudos when it occurred to me that SS-N-23 (R-29RM) is not a new missile. The people at GlobalSecurity.org state that: The R-29RM is a three-stage liquid-propellant missile carrying four or ten MIRV. Compared to the R-29R the missile has a larger launch weight (40.3 to 35.5 Tons) providing a heavier payload (2800…
Russia’s Sevmash shipyard at the Arctic city of Severodvinsk has completed a hybrid submarine powered by a diesel-electric plant and a small nuclear reactor. Designated B-90 and named Sarov, the submarine was completed on 17 December. The submarine is known as Project 20120 in Russian design terminology. She apparently employs the small nuclear reactor — known to some engineers as a “teakettle” — to keep a charge on the battery, providing essentially unlimited underwater endurance on relatively quiet electric propulsion. In effect, this is an Air-Indpendent Propulsion (AIP) system. The “teakettle” concept is not new. The Soviet Navy deployed a Project 651 (NATO Juliett) cruise missile submarine (SSG) in 1986-1991 with a similar diesel-electric/nuclear plant. That craft had a pressurized-water reactor with a single-loop configuration coupled with a turbogenerator. The Soviet report stated that the sea trials “demonstrated the workability of the system, but revealed quite a few deficiencies. Those were later corrected.” However, no follow-on efforts were undertaken at that time. (The Soviets built 16 diesel-electric Juliett SSGs from 1963 to 1968.) The B-90 was designed by the Rubin design bureau in St. Petersburg. Construction was begun at the Krasnoe Sormovo shipyard in Nizhnii Novgorod (formerly Gor’kiy), and…
No royalties to pay in interop deal?
The Samba team has reached an agreement with Microsoft, with the software giant agreeing to disclose technical and legal information to the software libre project. Samba is by far the most widely-used software stack that allows non-Microsoft computer to talk to Windows machines, and use proprietary Microsoft network services.…
‘Next Generation Identification’ awaits you
“If someone steals and spoofs your iris image, you can’t just get a new eyeball.” Paul Saffo, technology industry observer…
According to CSO Magazine.
A Vermont federal judge has ruled that a person cannot be compelled by police to divulge his PGP key. This is by no means the end of the legal debate (Orin Kerr comments), but it’s certainly good news.
[From PGP and the 5th Amendment]
The software maker creates a single business unit, called Connected TV, to handle its Internet Protocol television, Media Center PC, and HD DVD efforts. [From Microsoft quietly combines TV efforts]
An international venture called the Universal Library Project has made more than one million books freely available in digitized format. The joint project of researchers from China, India, Egypt, and the US has the eventual aim of digitizing all published works of man, freeing the availability of information from geographic and socioeconomic boundaries, providing a basis for technological advancement, and preserving published works against time and tide.
