Browsing Posts in Geek
How do you fit 1,000 words into a 140-character tweet? Short messaging networks like Twitter are packed with countless terse text messages, making images a more attractive way to broadcast complex messages and cut through the clutter. Wired.com shows you seven ways to visualization nirvana.
When federal regulators asked AT&T, Apple and Google to explain what happened when Apple rejected the Google Voice iPhone app, only Google filed parts of its answer in secret. Wired.com tells you why and seeks the answer.
[From What's in Google's Secret iPhone App Letter to Feds?]
The San Diego Supercomputer Center has built a high-performance computer with solid-state drives, which the center says could help solve science problems faster than systems with traditional hard drives. The flash drives will provide faster data throughput, which should help the supercomputer analyze data an ‘order of magnitude faster’ than hard drive-based supercomputers, according to Allan Snavely, associate director at SDSC. SDSC intends to use the HPC system — called Dash — to develop new cures for diseases and to understand the development of Earth.
To share that IronKey has released a USB flash drive with self-destruct capability. Specializing in “secure flash drives,” IronKey has launched the S200 aimed at government and enterprise customers, “featuring hardened physical security, the latest Cryptochip technology, active anti-malware and enhanced management capabilities. It’s the ‘first and only USB storage device to achieve FIPS 140-2, Level 3 validation’ and delivers advanced Cryptochip featuring AES-256, tamper-resistance and self-destruction circuitry.
With news of a new open source NX server, dubbed NeatX, that was released by Google and promptly lost in the shuffle of the Chrome OS announcement. “NX technology was developed by NoMachine to handle remote X Window connections and make a graphical desktop display usable over the Internet. By its own admission, Google has been looking at remote desktop technologies for ‘quite a while’ and decided to develop Neatx as existing NX server products are either proprietary or difficult to maintain. ‘The good old X Window system can be used over the network, but it has issues with network latency and bandwidth. Neatx remedies some of these issues,’ Google engineers wrote on the company’s open source blog. NoMachine had released parts of the source code to its NX product under the GPL, but the NX server remained proprietary. [...] Neatx is written in Python, with a few wrapper scripts in Bash and one program written in C ‘for performance reasons.
[From Google Releases Open Source NX Server]
Wednesday, at an event in Santa Clara, Sun Microsystems and the Internet Archive announced a joint effort to move the Archive’s growing, three-petabyte (about 150 Libraries of Congress) data store into one of Sun’s Modular Datacenters—the famous datacenter in a shipping container, which we’ve covered previously.
The Archive, which also hosts the ever-popular Wayback Machine, currently runs on a custom storage architecture. But, in keeping with the group’s mission of open access to information, they opted to move it to a Sun MD that’s based on Sun Fire x4500 servers and ZFS.
[From Sun puts Internet Archive in a box, but will it stay there?]
“Google engineers say it was not expensive and required only a small team of developers to enable all of the company’s applications to support IPv6, a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol. ‘We can provide all Google services over IPv6,’ said Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti during a panel discussion held in San Francisco Tuesday at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Colitti said a ’small, core team’ spent 18 months enabling IPv6, from the initial network architecture and software engineering work, through a pilot phase, until Google over IPv6 was made publicly available. Google engineers worked on the IPv6 effort as a 20% project — meaning it was in addition to their regular work — from July 2007 until January 2009.
Randall Stross has just published a sobering article in The New York Times about how the four major US wireless carriers don’t want anyone to know the actual cost structure of text message services to avoid public outrage over the doubling of a-la-carte per-message fees over the last three years. The truth is that text messages are ’stowaways’ inside the control channel — bandwidth that is there whether it is used for texting or not — and 160 bytes per message is a tiny amount of data to store-and-forward over tower-to-tower landlines. In essence it costs carriers practically nothing to transmit even trillions of text messages. When text usage goes up, the carriers don’t even have to install new infrastructure as long as it is proportional to voice usage. This makes me dream of the day when there is real competition in the wireless industry, not this gang-of-four oligopoly.
and also
Seven leading domain name vendors — representing more than 112 million domain names, or 65% of all registered names — have formed an industry coalition to work together to adopt DNSSEC. Members of the DNSSEC Industry Coalition include: VeriSign, which operates the .com and .net registries; NeuStar, which operates the .biz and .us registries; .info operator Afilias Limited; .edu operator EDUCAUSE; and The Public Interest Registry, which operates .org.” The gTLD operators are falling in line behind government initiatives, which we discussed last month. In light of these developments, Dan Bernstein’s push for DNSCurve might face an uphill slog. Reader data2 writes: “Dan Bernstein, the creator of djbdns and daemontools, has created his own proposal to improve upon the current DNS protocol. He has been opposed to DNSSEC for quite some time, and now he has proposed a concrete alternative, DNSCurve. He has posted a comparison between the two systems. His proposal makes use of elliptic curves, while DNSSEC favors RSA. He uses a curve named Curve25519, which he also developed.
The new alpha version of BitTorrent client µTorrent transfers data over UDP, making it either easier or harder on ISP networks than existing BitTorrent clients.
[From µTorrent's switch to UDP and why the sky isn't falling]
Clear your mind, Clearwire and Sprint Nextel say, as they announce the completion of their merger of assets into the new Clearwire to deploy WiMAX across the US under the Clear brand name. Google, Intel, and others chipped in an expected $3.2 billion to fund the first phase.
[From Future of WiMAX is Clear as Sprint, Clearwire close deal]
