Author Archive | Ed Oswald

Undersea Cable Failure Causes Mideast Internet Chaos

Well it looks like it has happened again, and nobody knows why just yet — another undersea cable — this time three of them — that run between Asia and North America have been cut. Only one cable remains, which is causing big problems for the Internet worldwide, and in some cases, cutting countries off altogether.

These cables handle about 75 percent of the traffic between Europe, Asia, and North America. They are located in the Medittereanean Sea between Sicily and Tunisia. Companies that own the cables can currently not give any time frame for restoration of service, however service could be back to normal by the end of the year.

Sabotage is possible, but it appears that officials are believing that a boat anchor may have been the ultimate cause. The worst effects seem to be in traffic passing from the European continent to the Middle East.

Traffic in the meantime will need to be rerouted, which could close slowdowns in Internet connections worldwide as the increased traffic could cause so-called “bottlenecks” to occur.

We’ll update this as more details come out.

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RIAA Abruptly Switches Piracy Tack, Works With ISPs

The days of the thousands of lawsuits against music downloaders may just be over. RIAA has apparently struck deals with ISPs which would now serve as the watchog for the industry group, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. What this seems to amount to is an admittance by RIAA that suing with wild abandon did little for its cause.

Altogether, its estimated the group has sued about 35,000 individuals. Obviously the legal costs associated with fighting so many cases simulatenously must be staggering. I’d willing to bet finances also played a large part in deciding on the new strategy.

ISPs would now serve as the eyes and ears of the industry. When a user is detected to be downloading pirated files, he would no longer receive notice from the RIAA. Instead, the ISP would contact the user and asking them to stop. If users continue, their Internet access could be crippled and eventually cut off altogether.

Chairman Mitch Bainwol says that it hopes the new strategy helps it to reach more people. He said he wants the public to realize that their actions on P2P networks are not anonymous. I’m wondering why they didn’t try this before, rather than make themselves look like unreasonable bullies.

RIAA is declining to specify who it has agreements with. It also said it would continue to sue heavy file sharers, but the lawsuits certainly wouldn’t come at the speed they had been previously.

This doesnt get those who were prosecuted under the old policy: outstanding lawsuits would still be litigated.

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Toshiba Introducing 512GB Solid State Drive

081216_ssdlineup_tmbSolid state drives are finally moving into capacities that are useful for today’s modern applications. Toshiba said Thursday that it would be introducing a 512 gigabyte 2.5″ SSD at CES 2009 in January. The flagship SSD would be complemented by smaller capacity 64, 128, and 256GB drives available in the company, which would come in sizes of 1.8 and 2.5 inches.

Mass production of the drives is set to begin in the second quarter of next year. The drives would be able to read and write data faster than the typical HDD, with a 240MB/sec read rate and 200MB/sec write rate.

Toshiba’s move is likely an attempt to get a foot in the door in what will be the next big thing in storage drives. One in ten computers will ship with SSDs in 2010, ramping up to one in four by 2012. This would also benefit users through decreased load times, quicker waking times, and higher durability.

Moving parts in HDDs are more susceptible to data loss and errors from sudden movement and drops. SSDs do not have this problem, mainly due to there being no moving parts. Additionally, they are far quieter.

Pricing has not been announced as of yet. However, I’m hoping that these companies work on ways to produce them much more cheaply — I’d love for my next laptop to be SSD based (the form factors can be so much smaller), but right now they’ll break the bank.

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Joost to Go Website-only on Friday

After debuting to a great deal of fanfare in 2006, it looks as if Joost will finally be giving up on P2P as a means of delivery for its content. In a message to users of its software application, the company said videos after Friday would only be viewable through the website.

The writing may have been on the wall then: Joost launched its web-based platform in October to generally positive reviews. Last month, it debuted an iPhone application, which appears still to be unaffected by the company’s decision.

Joost’s software application was an attempt at keeping bandwidth costs low by distributing some of the streaming to the P2P network. However, it must at this point just be an unnecessary extra expense to develop, and streaming videos using Flash (like everybody else) is obviously more economical.

With Joost pulling out of P2P, analysts like Forrester’s James McQuivey are saying the use of P2P for legal means is now a thing of the past:

Peer-to-peer “as a platform for legal consumer video is dead. The majority of what people watch on the PC is streamed. More than half the country is on broadband and compression is very effective now.”

Seems so far from the talk in the middle of this decade where many legitimate companies were looking to use P2P as a legal way to transfer content. Now, all but a few are out of business or have significantly altered their business models.

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Serious IE Flaw Gets Special Patch Treatment

Well, that was quick. The serious flaw in Internet Explorer that we posted about Tuesday has been fixed through an out of cycle security patch. Typically, Microsoft holds its “Patch Tuesday” event on the 1st Tuesday of the month. However, this time it was too serious to wait — and the company probably realized it would be a perfect time for its competitors to pounce.

It’s pretty bad when security experts are telling your customers to switch. These are unbiased (for the most part) folks, and the typical computer user is going to take their advice seriously.

Patch MS08-078 has been rated “critical” by Microsoft. The company is obviously recommending that users apply this patch immediately. Without it, they are obviously keeping themselves open to code execution attacks.

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An IE Security Flaw So Serious, Experts Suggest Switching

Microsoft has admitted that a serious flaw exists in all supported versions of Internet Explorer from IE5 right through the current betas, which could allow hackers to peer into user’s computers. Worse yet it is said some 10,000 websites have already been compromised to take advantage of the flaw, heightening the danger.

Right now hackers only appear to be stealing online gaming information. This could change — SANS Internet Storm Center expects the hackers to begin modifying the code to steal other (more personal) information.

Redmond’s suggestions to protect users include enabling “data execution prevention” (Tools > Internet Options > Advanced), and setting security settings to “high.” This may be a problem for some, as that setting disables active scripting.

Security experts are recommending users go one step further: switch browsers. Neither Opera, Safari, nor Firefox are vulnerable to the issue.

Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler puts in it blunt terms (perhaps with some motive):

“Stop using IE now. You are in serious danger. Even if you don’t like the other browsers, you just cannot afford to be using IE right now with this massive vulnerability being exploited as we speak.”

My suggestion would be the same. Using Microsoft’s suggestions will cripple your online experience. So even if you are an IE fanboy, suck it up, download Firefox, and go back when Microsoft is ready. Don’t be stupid — it’s just a browser.

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McCain Campaign Still Inept Post-Election, Sells Unwiped Blackberry

If you thought John McCain ran a shoddy campaign, here’s another reason to add to your argument. Fox 5 in Washington, DC was able to pick up a used BlackBerry from the campaign at a fire sale for a rock bottom price of $20. What the newsroom found when charging up the device was shocking. The campaign didn’t even bother to wipe the device’s memory!

Reporters were able to find the contact information for about 50 people associated with the campaign, as well as hundreds of emails dating from September through a few days past election night. The phone in question apparently belonged to a member of Citizens for McCain, a group of Democrats that were working to elect the Arizona senator.

The contact information was correct, Fox 5 reported, as it successfully contacted several of the individuals in the BlackBerry’s contact list. A few of them were quite peeved about the slip-up. When the McCain campaign was approached about it, they said it was a mistake and the phone was supposed to be erased.

One of the people they called made a comment that I have to admit I did chuckle at.

“They should have wiped that stuff out. Given the way the campaign was run, this is not a surprise.”

Isn’t that the truth. It’s not like its too difficult to wipe a BlackBerry clean: actually its a simple process that takes less that a minute to begin. One begins to wonder: with all the other stuff that was being sold, what else may we find out?

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In the Year 2020…

richterUs longtime Conan O’Brien fans know that one of the signature skits of his late night show was “In the Year 2000,” which made predictions — however ridiculous — of what life would be like in the future. Well, Pew Internet and American Life project did something similar, but they took a serious look at life in the year 2020.

In order to come up with their predictions, Pew surveyed Internet leaders, activists, and analysts to see what they thought the net would be like a little over a decade from now. One of the most notable findings is that a general consensus believe that the mobile phone will become the primary access point to the Internet.

Voice recognition and touch screen interfaces will also become more prevalent in use of the Internet, and efforts to improve the Internet would continue. Rather than a full “reboot” of the Internet, where it is rebuilt from scratch, future enhancements would build on the current architecture.

More connectivity mean the lines between work and play as well as the real and virtual world would further disappear. This is bad news for Internet critics who say the ‘Net is destroying inter-personal communication, because it appears as if that will only get worse.

Sick of the ongoing piracy battles? Better get some earplugs. Pew says respondents expect the copyright fight to continue as pirators continue to attempt to circumvent the restrictions placed on digital content.

What are my predictions for the Internet in the year 2020? I don’t know, but I’m much more progressive than what Pew has listed here. I fully expect the Internet to be much more immersive. Everything we own will be connected, from our clothing that will know when we are sick and will call for help on its own, to our cars that will use the Internet to avoid traffic, to our lives themselves which could nearly be lived 100 percent digitally if we so desire. Matrix anyone?

All the things I have listed above aren’t far fetched. In fact, every single one of them are in development to some extent. While we won’t be plugging in like Neo, It will be pretty god darn close. It’s unbelievable how fast technology is moving these days.

I’m interested what you think will happen. What do you see in the Year 2020?

(Pew’s full study can be found here.)

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The Case of the Disappearing iTunes Ringtones

ituneslogoSome iPhone users are finding that iTunes is no longer displaying whether it can make a purchased song a ringtone for the device within the application itself. This forces the user to search for the track within the iTunes Music Store to see if it is eligible, or just taking a chance and seeing if the track will work through attempting to use the “Create Ringtone” menu bar option.

I myself am a victim of this problem. I stumbled upon it after attempting to make a Christmas ringtone for my phone. I have about 400 purchased songs, and not a single one shows the little bell that signifies you can purchase a ringtone of that song.

At first, I thought it may have been some license dispute, so I checked to see if ringtones were still available on the iTMS. They are. Then I tried to make a ringtone. After finally finding a track that was eligible, I was able to purchase, transfer, and use it without a hitch.

A search of the Apple support forums finds a thread where this problem has been discussed, And here’s another. And yet another (there are more, but I’m not posting them all here). Users are reporting the same problems I’m seeing. It looks from the responses that Apple is not even sure why users have suddenly lost this functionality within iTunes.

I haven’t been able to find another person in my network of friends with iPhones that is seeing this problem, so whatever it is, its pretty localized. Yes, its not a showstopper, but its pretty darn annoying.

We’ve got a request out to Apple for comment on the problem.

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The Price is Right for iPhone: Almost as Good as the Real Thing!

img_0002I’m in absolute heaven, and I don’t know how I missed this. Video game developer Ludia has released The Price is Right for the iPhone, which in my biased TPIR fanboy opinion is one of the best gaming titles I’ve seen on the App Store yet. And at $2.99 for a “limited time,” $2 less than its $4.99 typical price, you can’t go wrong with this one.

The 35 year old game show franchise has made a significant push into interactive media, releasing games for the Nintendo Wii and DS consoles, as well as PC. I guess with the iPhone being one of the preeminent mobile gaming platforms, it was only a matter of time before developers brought the game to the device.

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