ISPs defend plans for two-tier net

ISPs have defended their right to operate a two-speed internet, at a key debate into the future of the web.

The debate was organised by the government, which is keen to see the principles of a free and equal net maintained.

ISPs are increasingly looking to prioritise some traffic on their networks and block some.

After the meeting the BBC called for the creation of a broadband content group to represent content providers.
It, along with content providers such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Skype, is growing increasingly concerned about how the issue of net neutrality is being dealt with.

Net neutrality - the principle that all net traffic should be treated equally - has been challenged in recent years as ISPs look to make a return on their increasingly expensive networks.

They argue that if content providers want to pay to get their traffic prioritised on the network, then they should be allowed to do so.

But some content owners and digital activists such as Open Rights Group argue that such a policy would do long-term damage to the internet, which was always conceived as a platform for everyone - not just those with deep pockets.

Net neutrality has been a key issue in Europe and a raft of legislation comes into force in May which will force ISPs to be more open about how they manage the traffic on their network

 Free net

After the debate, Ed Vaizey, communications minister, made his views clear.

"Internet traffic is growing," he said. "Handling that heavier traffic will become an increasingly significant issue so it was important to discuss how to ensure the internet remains an open, innovative and competitive place.

Commenting about a code of practice drawn up by the Broadband Stakeholders' Group earlier in the week, he said the agreement should be guided by three principles.

"The first is users should be able to access all legal content," he said. "Second, there should be no discrimination against content providers on the basis of commercial rivalry and finally traffic management policies should be clear and transparent."

While Mr Vaizey is reluctant to regulate the industry, he has appointed world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee to bang heads together.

But he could struggle to persuade ISPs that all the traffic on their networks should be treated equally.

Jim Killock, director of the ORG, said ISPs were in no mood for compromise at the debate.

"They weren't willing to make any concessions on their ability to manage traffic," he said. "BT even said that if people want to block things they should be able to."

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Major spam network silenced mid campaign

The sudden drop in activity of a major spam producer looks to be the result of the largest co-ordinated attack on spammers.

At 15:30 GMT on 16 March, a network of spam-producing computers, known as Rustock, suddenly stopped.

It also appears that the infrastructure needed to control the spam network has been disrupted.

Security researchers said that would make it the largest ever take down of a cyber crime network.

In 2010, the Rustock botnet - a collection of infected machines - was the most prolific producer of spam on the internet, at its peak accounting for nearly half of all spam sent globally - some 200 billion messages a day.
Prolific spammer

The volume of spam coming out of Rustock has fluctuated wildly recently, so sudden drops in activity are not uncommon.

But usually, the spikes in activity last for 12 to 16 hours, Vincent Hanna of anti-spam group Spamhaus told BBC News.

"When Rustock stopped yesterday it was in mid-campaign," he said.

Furthermore, the botnet seems to be unable to communicate with its command and control infrastructure, he said.
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The malware used embeds itself deep in the operating system, making it difficult to identify”
Paul Wood
Symantec.cloud

Computers within botnets are controlled by other machines which send out instructions of when to instigate spam campaigns or other attacks.

But disrupting the command and control infrastructure is a Herculean task.

It requires the co-ordination of security groups with insight in to how the botnet operates, the participation of law-enforcement agencies, domain name registrars and internet service providers that can potentially be located in different time zones, said Paul Wood, a security researcher at Symantec.

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World after Wikileaks.

 Julian  Assange: (Founder of wikileaks)
Things will be different after Wikileaks, but not in ways we might expect, says regular commentator Bill Thompson.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange may not be Time Magazine Person of the Year for 2010 - that distinction has gone to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg - but he has certainly managed to dominate the global conversation over the past few weeks.

The reverberations of Wikileaks publication of so many confidential and secret documents will be felt for many years, and he has attracted a large band of supporters, but the support for Assange is as much about his personal situation as it is an expression of support for what Wikileaks does or proposes to do.

To properly understand the philosophy that underlies his activity or his long-term goals, people should read Aaron Bady's compelling analysis of Assange's politics, as published on the zunguzungu blog.

Bady uses a close reading of an essay by Assange on State and Terrorist Conspiracies to argue that Assange sees modern governance as a conspiracy by those with power that goes against the interests and desires of the governed, and that Wikileaks exists in order to undermine the ability of governments to communicate secretly and diminish the power of authoritarian states.

Doing this, he believes, will force openness and lead to more progressive forms of government - or at least, less repressive ones.

It will also, inevitably, lead to a response from the institutions targeted, and in the last few weeks we have seen what happens when a state feels threatened.

Although it is not pleasant neither is it surprising: governments, like other complex systems, will act to preserve themselves and seek to damage or neutralise opposition, and nothing the US or other governments have done so far is exceptional.
Net conflict

In a statement dictated to his mother from his jail cell Assange said "we now know that Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and others are instruments of US foreign policy", referring to the way in which these large companies had decided not to provide service to Wikileaks.

But nobody who has observed the growth of the internet could have been surprised by this.

Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith wrote about this back in 2006 in their excellent book Who Rules the Internet, where they pointed out that government will always go after gatekeepers and choke points in their attempts to regulate online activity.
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We have called forth the network age, and yet carried on in our daily lives as if nothing has really changed”

In that same year, Visa and Mastercard refused to pass funds to the Russian music download site allofmp3.com, even though the site was legal within Russia, but that attracted little attention because it was about cheap music and not freedom of expression.

Now we face a different sort of conflict, and it appears to be one that will shape the political landscape for years to come.

In the finale of the film Ghostbusters the eponymous heroes are obliged to challenge the god Gozer, but before he appears they are told that they must "choose the form of your destructor".

Gozer, they realise, will materialise in whatever monstrous form they imagine, and Venkman tells the others not to visualise anything. Unfortunately, it is too late - Ray has already thought of "the gentlest thing he could, something that would never hurt me" - at which point a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man appears and proceeds to wreak havoc on New York.

Something similar lies behind the emergence of Wikileaks. Over the past two decades we have built the internet and the web and completed a process of digitisation that has turned most of the world's operational data into electronic form, from bank records to love letters to diplomatic cables.

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Natural disaster? There's an app for that

 











As Friday's earthquake in Japan demonstrates, natural disasters happen. And when they do, the first two things to go down are electricity and telephone services.

The massive earthquake in Japan was a perfect example. Power was cut for millions of people, which meant that TVs and radios were useless for getting emergency instructions. And phone lines were overwhelmed by people trying to call each other. To keep the lines available for emergency crews, the Japanese carriers placed restrictions on 80% of the voice traffic. When most people tried to call, the lines were dead.

That's why smartphones are so useful during an emergency. They have their own batteries, and they have Internet connections that function even when phone service is interrupted. Best of all, smartphones have smart apps that can give you lifesaving capabilities.

Here are the very best smartphone apps for emergency events:
BuddyGuard. The free BuddyGuard app from MPOWER Labs is now available for iOS devices and will soon ship for Android and BlackBerry as well, according to the company. Think of BuddyGuard as a smart "panic button."

By clicking on the big button on the app, your camera will start taking pictures every ten seconds. All sounds are recorded constantly, and your GPS location is captured every three seconds. All this data is uploaded every 30 seconds to the cloud, and a link to that data is broadcast to your list of emergency contacts.

Because the data is stored in the cloud, it's still available to others even if your phone is damaged or lost.

BuddyGuard also lets you say, "Never mind, I'm OK." The function tells your contacts you're safe, and erases the data from the cloud.

Another feature lets your contacts be notified if you don't check back in. Let's say you're going to try and help someone trapped in rubble after an earthquake. You can set BuddyGuard in a timer mode. If you fail to check back in within the time you set, an alert goes out to your contacts letting them know you're in trouble, and where.

BuddyGuard also performs another neat trick. It can detect an impact, fall or a 5G stop using your phone's accelerometer. If you don't tell it "I'm OK" within 5 seconds, it sends out an emergency alert with your location.

The BuddyGuard business plan is a freemium model. The app is free. But if you upgrade to a $9.99-per-month service, the app will send your alerts to the company's International Emergency Response Coordination Center, which will decide whether to alert local emergency teams or even your national embassy if you happen to be abroad. The upgrade also insures you via Lloyds of London for up to $100,000 for search, rescue, helicopter, ambulance and even translators associated with an emergency.

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Google aids Japan quake victims

Google has launched a version of its Person Finder service for people caught up in the Japanese earthquake.

The website acts as a directory and message board so people can look for lost loved ones or post a note saying they are safe.

It is designed to be embedded on websites and social network pages to reach as wide an audience as possible.

The system has proved useful after other disasters that have stopped people getting in direct touch.
Victim log

In its first few hours, the Japan quake Person Finder had logged more than 4,000 records.

The extent of the damage caused by the Japanese earthquake is not yet known but its magnitude and the widespread devastation wrought by the subsequent tsunami is likely to see tens of thousands displaced.

The Person Finder was developed to solve a problem common in the aftermath of many catastrophes when many different agencies are on the ground giving aid and gathering information about victims.

Google's Person finder was used in the aftermath of the 2011 New Zealand earthquake.

Before the advent of tools such as Person Finder it was much harder to compare the information gathered by separate agencies and help to re-unite families and friends.

Underlying the site is a common format for describing people who are lost or who want to announce they are safe by whatever means they can.

In the wake of disasters, many volunteers in other countries often scrape sites for this formatted information and add it to the People Finder database. Others take information from blogs, texts and tweets and convert it to the format so it can be put in the database.

The system was first used following the Haiti earthquake that struck in January 2010. That first tool was based around work done in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans.
More on This Story.

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NASA scientist finds evidence of alien life

Aliens exist, and we have proof.

That astonishingly awesome claim comes from Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, who says he has found conclusive evidence of alien life — fossils of bacteria found in an extremely rare class of meteorite called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites. (There are only nine such meteorites on planet Earth.) Hoover’s findings were published late Friday night in the Journal of Cosmology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

“I interpret it as indicating that life is more broadly distributed than restricted strictly to the planet earth,” Hoover, who has spent more than 10 years studying meteorites around the world, told FoxNews.com in an interview. “This field of study has just barely been touched — because quite frankly, a great many scientist [sic] would say that this is impossible.”

Hoover discovered the fossils by breaking apart the CI1 meteorite, and analyzing the exposed rock with a scanning-electron microscope and a field emission electron-scanning microscope, which allowed him to detect any fossil remains. What he found were fossils of micro-organisms (pictured below), many of which he says are strikingly similar to those found on our own planet (pictured above).

“The exciting thing is that they are in many cases recognizable and can be associated very closely with the generic species here on earth,” said Hoover. Some of the fossils, however, are quite odd. “There are some that are just very strange and don’t look like anything that I’ve been able to identify, and I’ve shown them to many other experts that have also come up stump.”

In order to satisfy the inevitable hoard of buzz-killing skeptics, Hoover’s study and evidence were made available to his peers in the scientific community in advance of the study’s publications, giving them a chance to thoroughly dissect his findings. Comments from those who decided to sift through the evidence will be published online, alongside the study.

“Given the controversial nature of his discovery, we have invited 100 experts and have issued a general invitation to over 5,000 scientists from the scientific community to review the paper and to offer their critical analysis,” writes Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scientist Dr. Rudy Schild, who serves as the Journal of Cosmology’s editor-in-chief. “No other paper in the history of science has undergone such a thorough vetting, and never before in the history of science has the scientific community been given the opportunity to critically analyze an important research paper before it is published.”

Needless to say, if Hoover’s conclusions are found to be accurate, the implications for human life will be staggering. Here’s hoping that he’s right.

Update: While the Journal of Cosmology says that “no other paper in the history of science has undergone such a thorough vetting,” some highly respected names in the scientific community are challenging the validity of Cosmology, and the findings of Dr. Hoover.

“[The Journal of Cosmology] isn’t a real science journal at all,” says PZ Meyers in Science Blogs, “but is the ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth.”

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Saudi King Abdullah to buy Facebook for $150 billion to end the revolt

In what is being termed as pure Wall street Gordon Gecko tactics, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has decided to make an offer of $150 billion to buy out Facebook. Inside sources within the kingdom suggest that he is very upset with Mark Zukerberg for allowing the revolt to get out of control. In a personal meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and King Abdullah on Jan 25, 2011, Zuckerberg had promised that he would not allow any revolt pages to be formed on Facebook even while he allowed Egypt and Libya revolt pages to be formed. But little did King Abdullah know Zuckerberg. Had he seen the movie “Social Network”, he would have been better advised than to trust Zuckerberg.


Left with no option, Abdullah advised by Goldman Sachs has decided to buy out Facebook and “clean out the weeds”. The offer on the table is $150 billion. Facebook balance sheet was shown to King Abdullah and his kingdom advisors had mentioned that it is not even worth $1 billion given that it generates no profit. But the King threw the report into the dustbin and fired his advisors and decided to hand over the investment banking mandate to Goldman Sachs who put the value at $150 billion. The deal will be all cash. It is worthwhile to remind our readers that Goldman Sachs had invested into Facebook at an unimaginable $50 billion valuation.

Social networking site Facebook has raised USD 500 million from Goldman Sachs and Russian Internet investment group Digital Sky Technologies in a deal valuing the company at USD 50 billion, says a media report.

“Facebook, the popular social networking site, has raised USD 500 million from Goldman Sachs and a Russian investor in a deal that values the company at USD 50 billion,” the New York Times reported citing a source.

The deal makes Facebook now worth more than companies like eBay, Yahoo and Time Warner.



Under the terms of the deal, Goldman has invested USD 450 million, and Digital Sky Technologies, which has already sunk about half a billion dollars into Facebook, invested USD 50 million, the report noted.

According Goldman report, the many advantages of buying out Facebook far outweighs the cost of the transaction. Goldman Sachs made a presentation to King Abdullah of how the facebook could be used to cement his position for ever. Never again will his kingdom see another revolt. The presentation also involved some Facebook pages of bikini clad models profile among other profiles. Sources reveal that King Abdullah had made up his mind immediately and spoke to Lloyd Blankfein to complete the transaction as soon as possible.

We are yet to hear back from Mark Zuckerberg on the offer though. But most analysts believe that Zuckerberg will not take the offer and will wait for King Abdullah to up the offer to at least $500billion. In the meanwhile king Abdullah has now logged on the Facebook and was buzy profiling some of the models in the Goldman Sachs presentation.

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Transparent cell phone

The Second Life Mobile is a transparent concept phone, designed to help us with our battery problems. It switches between an AMOLED display and E-ink, depending on the battery charge left.

The phone’s transparency also increases as the battery charge goes down, giving us a good idea of the charge left. The functionality may still be just a concept, but I’d love to use something like this. via

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PS3 hacking case: Sony gets downloaders' information

Sony has been given permission to obtain details of people who downloaded files needed to hack the PlayStation 3. A judge in San Francisco granted the electronics giant a subpoena that would allow it to see a list of IP addresses. The software, used to crack the PS3's operating system, was posted on the website of George Hotz, who is also known as Geohot. Sony is suing Mr Hotz, claiming his hacks breach copyright laws, and could allow users to play pirated games. Court documents, obtained by Wired magazine, show that the company successfully petitioned to obtain IP addresses from the web-hosting company Bluehost. The details could be used to trace the real-world geographical locations of users who accessed George Hotz's website, Geohot.com. However, it may not be Sony's intention to take legal action against those found to have downloaded the software crack. Illicit conduct Sources with knowledge of the case said there was unlikely to be the appetite for a prolonged and expensive series of legal challenges. Rather, the subpoena document suggests that Sony wants to discover the number and location of the downloaders in order to establish jurisdiction in its case against Mr Hotz. "SCEA [Sony Computer Entertainment America] needs to determine how rampant the access to and use of these circumvention devices has been in California in order to rebut Mr Hotz's suggestion that his illicit conduct was not aimed at the forum state," the document reads. The subpoena also grants Sony the right to access information relating to the case from Twitter, Google Blogspot and YouTube. Restraining order The company had previously been granted a restraining order against Mr Hotz, banning him from revealing techniques to manipulate the PlayStation 3's operating system. The 21-year-old, along with a number of other individuals, is charged with violating several copyright-related laws, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act He is also accused of offences under the United States' Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Mr Hotz denies that he set out to help software pirates, claiming instead that he was championing the 'home brew' community - users who write their own software for the PS3. Sony has said it is now able to remotely identify users who are running hacked PlayStation 3 consoles and that it will ban persistent offenders from using its online services.

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UK government pushes ahead with rural broadband plans

The government is pushing ahead with the second wave of funding for super-fast broadband across the UK.

It comes despite the fact that no firms or technologies have yet been chosen for original pilot areas earmarked to test how to roll out next-generation broadband to remote areas.

New bids are now being invited for a further £50m.

The government has pledged to make the UK the best place for super-fast broadband in Europe by 2015.

The £50m will be made available to local authorities around the UK.

"This is very much a locally-driven process and we encourage bids from all local people with plans for improving broadband in their local area," said Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne.

Local councils wanting to take advantage of the latest tranche of funding will need to apply via the Broadband Delivery UK.

The government estimated that the funding would help a further 800,000 homes to benefit from next-generation broadband.

Slow progress

Some have questioned the timing of the new scheme, given that pilots intended to be testbeds for best practice in connecting the so-called 'final third' have yet to begin.

This is the third of UK homes that are not economically attractive to firms such as BT and Virgin Media because offering next-generation services there would cost too much money.

At the time they were announced Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Jeremy Hunt said: "Our aim is to use these rural market testing pilots to discover exactly what needs to be done to make super-fast broadband commercially viable in rural communities".

Despite announcing the four areas in October - North Yorkshire, Cumbria, Herefordshire and the Highlands and Islands - no firm or technologies have yet been chosen for the areas.

Each trial was allocated a fund of between £5m and £10m.

Lack of progress led Labour MP Ian Lucas to ask the government to "pull its finger out" last month.

A spokesman for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport conceded that it has been a long process.

"Councils are having to get everything ready. They have to know what work needs to be done."

He said that announcements would be made soon.

In total the government has earmarked £530m of public money to be spent on bringing super-fast broadband to rural areas.

This money is drawn from the BBC licence fee and was originally earmarked to help people with the switch over to digital TV.

Any funds to speed up broadband roll-out should be applauded said Sebastien Lahtinen of broadband news site ThinkBroadband.

"This crucial step will be welcomed by those living in the 'final third', the most remote areas of the UK which currently suffer from a lack of decent broadband services.

However, many in those areas will continue to be frustrated that it's going to take years to roll out across the entire country," he said.

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Microscope with 50-nanometre resolution introduced.

UK researchers have demonstrated the highest-resolution optical microscope ever - aided by tiny glass beads.

The microscope imaged objects down to just 50 billionths of a metre to yield a never-before-seen, direct glimpse into the "nanoscopic" world.

The team says the method could even be used to view individual viruses.

Their technique, reported in Nature Communications, makes use of "evanescent waves", emitted very near an object and usually lost altogether.

Instead, the beads gather the light and re-focus it, channelling it into a standard microscope.

This allowed researchers to see with their own eyes a level of detail that is normally restricted to indirect methods such as atomic force microscopy or scanning electron microscopy.

Some of these indirect methods have imaged to a resolution of one billionth of a metre (nanometre), and even given a glimpse of a single molecule - but none is the same as simply looking down a microscope directly at details this tiny.

Using visible light - the kind that we can see - to look at objects of this size is, in a sense, breaking light's rules.

Normally, the smallest object that can be seen is set by a physical property known as the diffraction limit.

Light waves naturally and inevitably "spread out" in such a way as to limit the degree to which they can be focused - or, equivalently, the size of the object that can be imaged.

At the surfaces of objects, these evanescent waves are also produced.

As the name implies, evanescent waves fade quickly with distance. But crucially, they are not subject to the diffraction limit - so if they can be captured, they hold promise for far higher resolution than standard imaging methods can provide.

Going viral

"Previously, people including ourselves have been using microspheres for focusing light for fabrication purposes, so we can machine features smaller than the diffraction limit," explained Lin Li, of the University of Manchester's Laser Processing Research Centre.

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Ofcom wants to ban misleading broadband speed ads

Ofcom is seeking to stop internet service providers from advertising unrealistic broadband speeds.

Currently most ISPs advertise services as 'up to' a certain speed - for instance, 20Mbps (megabits per second).

But Ofcom's latest research finds that very few consumers actually get these headline speeds.

"There is a substantial gap between advertised speeds and the actual speeds people get in their homes," Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards told the BBC.

"The chances of someone receiving the advertised headline speed are fairly remote," he said.

"We would like to see clearer information provided to consumers which more accurately reflects the likely speeds they will actually receive," he added.

Ofcom's latest research into broadband speeds found that just 14% of customers on 'up to' 20Mbps services received speeds of over 12Mbps, while 58% averaged speeds of 6Mbps or less.

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PS3 imports banned in patent row

European customs officers have been told to seize all shipments of PlayStation 3s (PS3), following a patent row between Sony and LG.

LG has won a 10-day import ban on the games consoles from the civil court of justice in the Hague.

The long-running dispute between the two tech firms centres around the playback facility for Blu-Ray discs.

Custom officials in Holland have already seized tens of thousands of PS3s, according to reports.

Experts say that the ban, if extended, could affect the stock available in shops within three weeks.

LG claims that Sony PS3s infringe a number of patents relating to the playback of Blu-Ray discs.

It is also seeking a ban in the US and has filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission (ITC).

The stakes are very high for LG, said patent solicitor Michael Coyle, of law firm Lawdit.

"It will have to pay an astonishing amount of money if a judge rules that its patent is invalid. When a firm seeks to have goods seized they make an undertaking to pay for storage and compensation," he said.

Patent rows between technology firms are nothing new but tend only to be played out among big firms with deep pockets.

"Patents are very subjective so a patent claim is very risky," said Mr Coyle.

The LG Sony row has a strong element of tit-for-tat.

In December, Sony filed a complaint against LG, seeking its own import ban on a list of mobile phones, saying they breached Sony phone patents.

Neither firm wanted to comment on the dispute.

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Related Information

• Sony scores in PS3 hacking fight 28 JANUARY 2011, TECHNOLOGY
• PS3 update blocks hardware hack 07 SEPTEMBER 2010, TECHNOLOGY
• 3D gaming on the phone 15 FEBRUARY 2011, TECHNOLOGY

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