2005/07/14

Vonage calls for 'naked DSL' | The Register

Vonage calls for 'naked DSL' | The Register

Vonage want BT to offer broadband without consumers having to take phone services off them at all i.e. not paying line rental, as they can then utilise a VoIP service.

BT make a substantial ammount from line rental, and though they have been forced to offer services like CPS (carrier preselect) which allows the customer to choose another voice provider, and more recent WLR (wholesale line rental) you cant get rid of the line rental charges.

BT claim that line rental costs are needed to support the broadband infrastucture and have rubbished Vonage's claims.

It is a mockery of course as everything will disappear into VoIP anyway as BT roll-out their 21CN.

2005/07/12

UK hacker - now where did he hack?

The case against the UK hacker GARY MCKINNON who broke into various US military, NASA etc computer systems has been published (he was convinced the US were covering up alien landings etc and wanted to find proof, unfortunately he didn't just peek around, but messed with the systems).

There's a PDF of the case at findalaw. The document has all the IP addresses of the hacked systems blacked out.

However open the document in Acrobat, select all, and copy into your favourite text editor .... lo and behold the black marks have disappeared revealing the orginal text (i.e. IP addresses).

No wonder the US government is worried about hackers ... doh

Industry giants get tough on spam - vnunet.com

Industry giants get tough on spam - vnunet.com

There's another anti-spam standard being submitted to the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) called Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM). It's been developed by Yahoo (who developed DomainKeys) and Cisco Systems' Identified Internet Mail, though other companies are contributing to the standard such as Alt-N Technologies, America Online, EarthLink, IBM, Microsoft and VeriSign.

If adopted by the IETF the technology will be available free of charge (and more probably free of license restrictions).

DKIM uses a public key infrastructure such that each Email is signed (usually by the ISP mailserver, though it can be done by the Email client) with a private key, and when it's received by the recipient (or more likely their ISP's mailserver) it can check the authenticity of signature by checking with the public key for that Email domain (which is made freely available).

SPAMmers wouldn't be able to forge the private key for another domain, so it would reduce the ammount of forged Email pertaining to come from real addresses. They could use their own domains, but these would rapidly be found to be SPAM sources and blocked by normal means.

Microsoft already has a technology that performs differently but would also reduce forgeries (caller ID for Email, now Sender ID) but they refused to drop licensing restrictions on it, though they are implementing on Hotmail and MSN (for outgoing Email) and any inbound Email without SenderID will be marked as SPAM sometime late this year.

Another technology, Sender Policy Framework is also availble and is freely licensed. Unfortunately it's not been widely adopted and has issues will mail forwarding services.

Maybe DKIM is the answer and will be adopted by tthe IETF.

BBC NEWS | England | Mobiles 999 contact idea spreads

BBC NEWS | England | Mobiles 999 contact idea spreads

ICE or in case of Emergency was the idea of East Anglian Ambulance Service paramedic Bob Brotchie. Users are encouraged to store an entries called ICE. If one than one entry is required just start the entry with ICE followed by an name i.e. ICE mum, or ICE steve.

Hopefully most people will have lock codes on their phones, but these can be overridden if you know how. If the phone hasn't been turned off, generally the address book can still be accessed.

It's a reasonable idea as most people will carry a mobile with them wherever they are and it could help identify people or at least allow the Emergency services to contact someone to let them know how the person is, not just in the case of terrorist attacks.

Net4Now :: News Story

Net4Now :: News Story

Be have chosen Alcatel for their new high speed ADSL2+ based LLU offering. This will allow them to offer a triple-play (voice, data and Internet where data can be any number of items such as TV), though initially only Internet services are being offered.

Be is unlikely to have the relationships to offer any kind of content at the moment anyway, and going the content route is a difficult game to play in, they'll probably have to partner with other companies who have content, but there'll be huge competition to get those relationships in place as all the LLU operators start offering content services.

Though the Alcatel kit has the ability to do sensible things with bandwidth reservation and quality of service, backhaul is still going to be difficult (and expensive), it accounts for a large ammount of the cost of running an LLU service.

Where current players have to worry about 2Mb/s or even 8Mb/s, offering 24Mb/s is pushing the requirements even higher. Since BT still own 85% of the infrastructure in the UK, it's likely Be will have to buy significant ammounts from them, and they definately aren't the cheapest supplier in the UK

Net4Now :: News Story

Net4Now :: News Story

Sky have been trying to get this service off the ground for a while and now they've done a deal with Demon (THUS Plc) to make it available on the Demon web hosting platform.

Sky's SkyActive platform is based on WAP pages (slightly modified to allow for TV usage - so called WTVML or WAP TV markup language). This will allow anyone with a Sky box to hit the red button and have access to content from sites using the new content platform.

Skykeys are shortcodes, such that content providers can give access to pages in an efficient manner by just typing in a numeric number rather than having to remember the full URL. Demon have a SkyKey of "666".

Whether this takes off is another matter, but it will allow pretty much anyone to put content up for thr Sky platform in an easy to use manner.

Digit Online news - Toshiba backs larger disc format

Digit Online news - Toshiba backs larger disc format

1TB per disk is the potential for this medium (HVD or holographic versatile disk), however initial products due in June 2006 will support 200GB writable disks and consumer read-only disks will be at the 100GB mark (hopefully launched in 2007).

Current single layer disks only support 4.7GB and even the new HD-DVD disks only support 15GB.

With the advances in optical storage it's likely >TB devices are going to start appearing everywhere.