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Twitter Updates for 2010-03-10

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• Club Purgatory

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Dare We Aim for Terabit Ethernet?

The next speed grade of Ethernet is only at the beer-and-pizza stage, but discussion is already heating up over whether the jump to Terabit Ethernet should be a consideration.

That would represent a tenfold increase over 100-Gbit/s Ethernet, continuing Ethernet’s tradition of leaping forward by factors of 10.

But Terabit territory is so far off that some Ethernet experts think 400 Gbit/s is a more pragmatic goal.

“When I try to stretch out my imagination to how we would do Terabit, I don’t see an obvious road,” says John D’Ambrosia, who currently works at Force10 Networks Inc. , but who has been a figurehead in high-speed Ethernet standards ever since “high speed” meant 10 Gbit/s. (His comments for this story are personal observations that don’t necessarily reflect Force10’s plans; Force10 is letting D’Ambrosia consult for Ethernet standards efforts.)

“With all of these projects, whether it’s been 10 Gbit/s or 40 Gbit/s or 100 Gbit/s, all these discussions go on in the back room,” says The Ethernet Alliance director Brad Booth. “Even in Geneva, we’ll sit down for a beer and talk about: What is possible? What if we start too early or wait too long?”

“Geneva” refers to a joint Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) and International Telecommunication Union, Standardization Sector (ITU-T) workshop being held there on May 28, when all this chatter could start turning formal. The agenda tentatively includes something called “Beyond 100G,” an ITU-T spokesman writes in an email.

Prior to that, on March 22, there’s an OFC/NFOEC morning workshop titled “1Tbit/s Ethernet Transport — Why, When, and How?,” where “proponents and dissenters” are encouraged to contribute ideas.

The argument for 400 Gbit/s is that it’s clearly reachable. Not all the technology exists yet, but key elements are in the works: 25 Gbit/s optics and electronics, for instance. Speaking at an Ethernet Alliance event in September, Finisar Corp. (Nasdaq: FNSR) director of engineering Chris Cole outlined how 25-Gbit/s componentry could feasibly bring 400-Gbit/s Ethernet into being. (See The 400-Gig Vision.)

Terabit, on the other hand, sounds harder to develop. Remember Bob Metcalfe, the Father of Ethernet and now a Polaris Venture Partners partner, saying two years ago that Terabit Ethernet might require a rethinking of everything, down to the glass used in fiber-optics? (See Metcalfe Pitches Terabit Ethernet.)

Why talk Terabit at all, then? Because the power users say they don’t want to be stung again. (See Facebook: Yes, We Need 100-GigE.)

For example, officials at the Amsterdam Internet Exchange B.V. (AMS-IX) , one of the largest Internet peering points in the world, say they needed 100-Gbit/s Ethernet two years ago and have been in scramble mode while waiting for the equipment to catch up. “We are not going to make the same mistake again,” chief executive Job Wittemen tells Light Reading.

The dividing line has cropped up at recent gatherings by the Ethernet Alliance and the Optoelectronics Industry Development Association (OIDA) .

“What you had was those of us who had to build the stuff saying 400 Gbit/s was the more practical leap, while those who were using it said they need Terabit,” D’Ambrosia says.

But vendors say they’ve been stung too, in the form of a prolonged downturn that’s extended well beyond the telecom crash circa 2001. Put simply: They’re worried that demand for Terabit Ethernet will start in low volumes, and that the high price of early equipment could keep those volumes low. That’s not much reward for what promises to be an expensive R&D undertaking.

“If you’ve got one guy saying he’s going to buy 10 ports tomorrow, that’s not going to help you,” says the Ethernet Alliance’s Booth (who used to be at Quake Technologies but says he’s now working on a “new project”). Likewise, 100 interested customers won’t help if none are willing to pay what’s likely to be a hefty price for the first terabit modules.

Vendors are having a tough time gauging the potential hunger for Terabit Ethernet. “At one of the meetings, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) got up and said they need Terabit Ethernet in 2013. The curve we’re using from our charts at 802.3ba [the IEEE group developing the 100-Gbit/s Ethernet standard] says 2015. And someone else said 2020,” D’Ambrosia says. “There seems to be a big differential.”

Another factor to consider is that component and equipment vendors are still busy with this generation’s research. Those that complete 100-Gbit/s devices and interfaces this year will immediately need to work on increasing the density of 100-Gbit/s ports and on lowering the cost. Same for 40 Gbit/s.

So regardless of what speed grade comes next, “the timing is going to be brutal,” D’Ambrosia says. “I think I’m going to be a busy boy for the next few years.”

The implication here, according to Booth, is that amid all that Ethernet work, the truly important issue right now is in the interconnects. If they’re speedy enough, for example, then future generations of optical modules can be kept at a reasonably small size.

That kind of work is better done now, rather than waiting for the Terabit discussion to firm up.

“The discussions that are happening right now are about whether there’s something we can do at 100 Gbit/s that would lay down the foundation for the next generation,” Booth says.

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‘Uncrackable’ DRM lasts 24 hours

Ubisoft’s recently announced that a new DRM scheme for PC games that many claimed would be uncrackable. It appears that this DRM has been busted in 24 hours.

The DRM mechanism in question, rolled out initially in Silent Hunter 5 and Assassin’s Creed 2, took a new approach in that it relied on having a constant internet connection in order that the game files could be checked continuously for modifications or tampering. If modified files were detected or the internet connection dropped (or for that matter if Ubisoft’s servers went down), the game would shut down.

Now, I don’t condone software piracy in any shape, way or form, and I’m a firm believer in the idea that you should pay your way in this world. That said, this DRM scheme comes across as awfully heavy-handed and annoying. This DRM sounded so annoying that it was unlikely to stand for long.

And it didn’t.

A team of crackers going by the name of Skid-Row have managed to circumvent the DRM mechanism on Silent Hunter 5 in under 24 hours, releasing a crack for the game.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that I don’t condone game cracks either. Not so much on ethical grounds (you know if you’re using them responsibly or not), but because searching for them can lead you into some of the darker alleys of the internet, putting your PC at risk.

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Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie: Computing, Naturally

Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie sees technologies converging to transform how humans and computers work together.

It’s safe to say that computers have become a bit more powerful over the past 15 years.

Cellular technology untethered our phones. The Internet brought the world into our homes and offices. And the power of microprocessors has kept leaping forward. Now we’re embarking on a new era, where all kinds of powerful computers, in all shapes and sizes, will work hand in hand with vast online databases. Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, calls this the “client plus cloud” era

Mundie, whose job is to interpret the impact of emerging technology trends, says that changes under way in the tech industry today have the potential to completely change the technology world as we know it.

“We’re approaching an imminent sea change in technology that will transform everything we know today,” Mundie says. “A combination of the cloud plus very powerful client machines, along with a revolution in how people interact with computers, will define the next era of technology — and have a vast impact on society.”

Recent, significant advances in microprocessors, up to 100 times as powerful as the machines we’re using today, are emerging at every level — chip, device and data center — and are enabling our everyday client devices including PCs, phones, e-books, game systems and more to take on very complex computing tasks. At the same time, the cloud is scaling up its service capacity thanks to massive data centers. Taken together, they form a new programming paradigm, the seamless client-plus-cloud platform.

And if that’s not enough, we’re also seeing new ways to interact with computers, via a natural user interface or “NUI” that embraces gestures, anticipatory computing, expressive response, contextual and environmental awareness, and 3-D or even immersive experiences. These new forms of input, Mundie says, will create a startling transformation in how humans and computers interact.

“The transition to a natural user interface will change everything from the way students write term papers and play computer games to how scientists study global population growth and its impact on our natural resources,” Mundie says. “In the healthcare field, physicians and patients alike will also benefit from simpler and more effective tools with which to communicate and share information.”

The NUI Revolution

Continue: Computing, Naturally Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie sees technologies convergi

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Microsoft: 90 million copies of Windows 7 sold

It was just over a month ago that Microsoft officials said the company had sold 60 million copies of Windows 7. On March 2, they updated that tally, claiming 90 million copies of Windows 7 have been sold to date.

Microsoft released Windows 7 to manufacturing in July 2009 and kicked off consumer sales of the product in October of last year. Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein shared the new Windows sales figures during a March 2 presentation at the Morgan Stanley Technology Media & Telecom Conference.

Continue At Source

source:  blogs.zdnet.com

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Windows MultiPoint Server 2010

Microsoft announced the release of Windows MultiPoint Server 2010, a new Windows product that increases access to affordable computing in educational scenarios such as classrooms, labs and libraries by allowing multiple users to simultaneously share one computer using multiple screens. Windows MultiPoint Server 2010 is now globally available to OEMs and will be rolling out to Microsoft academic volume licensing customers on March 1. In addition, Microsoft is announcing new partnerships that create a strong global ecosystem of hardware companies that give customers a breadth of choices to buy and use Windows MultiPoint Server solutions.

We heard clearly from our customers in education that to help fulfill the amazing promise of technology in the classroom, they needed access to affordable computing that was easy to manage and use,” said Anthony Salcito, vice president of worldwide education at Microsoft. “That’s why we developed Windows MultiPoint Server — a solution that meets these needs and delivers an up-to-date, trusted Windows experience.”

Windows MultiPoint Server 2010 is an operating system that enables multiple people to connect to a single host computer with their own monitor, keyboard and mouse through USB or a video card. Each person individually controls his or her own station with an independent and familiar Windows computing experience. Windows MultiPoint Server 2010 is the flagship product in a family of shared resource computing technologies, the MultiPoint solutions, which provide teachers and students with greater access to educational technology. Shared resource computing is an emerging category that allows a customer to tap into more of a computer’s capability to enable a single host computer to support multiple users simultaneously.

“Shared resource computing can multiply the number of student workstations available to schools, delivering more value while staying within the same budget,” said Bill Rust, research director at Gartner Inc. “Teachers can better align computing resources with instructional strategies while deploying fewer fully configured computers and reducing workstation support liabilities.”

More information on how to buy Windows MultiPoint Server 2010 and the Windows MultiPoint family of solutions is available at http://www.microsoft.com/multipoint.

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Liftoff! A router blasts off into space…creates history

A few weeks ago on Jan 18th, 2010, a Cisco designed router achieved a major milestone in space by successful in-orbit testing of the onboard router and the Cisco IOS® Software’s networking capabilities. This was historic, it being the first-ever deployment of an Internet Protocol (IP) router aboard a commercial geosynchronous satellite. The entire IP routing system, the technology is dubbed Cisco Internet Routing in Space (IRIS) was launched via Intelsat’s IS-14 satellite on Nov 23rd, 2009.

The IRIS program has been in the works for a while, with the primary objective of building radiation-tolarant IP routers for satellite and related spacecraft. These would support network services for voice, video and data communications, in much the same way as routers on the ground do. IRIS provides the dynamic flexibility and adaptability of the Internet Protocol to help streamline communications flow, improve mobility, reduce the number of hops between end points etc. compared to conventional circuit switched satellite technology.

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How To Quickly Investigate A Fake BitTorrent Tracker

Seeding fake files on BitTorrent is nothing new and the practice has been carried out by anti-piracy groups and malware spreaders for a long time. While many of them choose to use various open and public BitTorrent trackers, others are setting up their own trackers. We take a look at an easy way to find out more about them.

Back in 2007 we published a series of articles on various dodgy practices targeted at BitTorrent users. Many people were downloading torrents only to be told that they needed to install software like DomPlayer and 3WPlayer to get them to work. Of course, the torrents were fake.

We also reported on BitTorrent clients such as Torrent101, BitRoll and GetTorrent, which also caused caused a whole load of trouble for those who installed them – even uTorrent and WinZip users were in the sights of malware offloaders.

In an email yesterday to TorrentFreak, a reader pointed us to a problem torrent located here (removed). The file is clearly labeled as ‘The Wolfman DVDrip 2010 aXXo’ but it is a fake, a fact which can be quickly learned by reading the comments underneath the torrent. Nevertheless, we thought it might be interesting to demonstrate how it’s possible to look a little deeper.

The file is tracked by a whole range of trackers but one sticks out immediately.

http://tracker.torrentq.com/announce.php currently lists 48,416 seeds and 37,496 seeders for the supposed ‘The Wolfman’ movie, a highly attractive proposition for those inexperienced in dealing with fake torrents.

Of course the stats are faked, and are run from a tracker set up especially to deliver fake torrents. Indeed, it’s run on a subdomain of TorrentQ, a bad client we featured in an earlier article. Here’s a quick step-by-step of the method we used to investigate the tracker. There are other ways, but this is pretty simple so anyone can try this out.

It’s possible to find information about the files indexed on many trackers by using ’scrape’. In the case of the TorrentQ tracker, the scrape URL is located at http://tracker.torrentq.com/scrape.php. So first off, go to this URL and you’ll get the option to download a file, in this case ’scrape.php’ – download it.

In this file will be information about the files being seeded on this tracker.

Next use DeHackEd’s nice little online tool called DumpTorrentCGI. Browse to the ’scrape’ file on your hard drive, change output type to ‘/scrape’ and click the ‘decode’ button. You should get this report;

Immediately you can see that all the files are apparently hugely popular, but of course, all of these stats are faked. To prove that, one can use a site like Torrentz.com, which creates its torrent URLs by using a torrent’s hash value. Simply test each torrent by using http://www.torrentz.com/ followed by the hash value, as shown below, and check the comments.

http://www.torrentz.com/0366eb6bdbab88f2ccd9397a0b421b3947c82e06

The torrents TorrentQ tracks are for Wolfman, Legion, My Name is Khan, The Book of Eli, From Paris With Love, Ninja Assassin, Edge of Darkness, Shutter Island and Dear John.

Disclaimer:  Plates55.com does not support bittorrent downloading nor do we defend the practice/  We report the news only. 

Enjoy and as always be carefull on the internet. 

plates55.com

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How to replace default Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 Recovery Environment in Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset

Abstract

This guide describes how to replace the default Windows Recovery Environment (RE) with a Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset version 6.5 (new version of Winternals ERD Commander).

Introduction

Microsoft has been developed a new version of ERD Commander from Winternals, which Microsoft acquired while ago; Named Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset, or DaRT for short.

In order to replace Windows RE boot image with DaRT you’ll need to use account with administrative privileges (member of the local Administrators group at least).

It’s recommended to replace the default Windows RE within DaRT for getting wide local troubleshooting toolset such as LockSmith for passwords reset, restoration utility, etc.

In order to perform the replacement follows these steps:

Preparing the field…

1. Open Windows Explorer, click with Alt and choose Folder Options from the Tools menu.

2. Choose Show hidden files, folders and drives and deselect Hide protected operating system files (Recommended) and Hide extensions for known file types.

3. Then click OK.

4. Open C:\ Drive, right-click Recovery folder. Choose Properties from the menu.

5. Select Security tab, and click on Edit.

6. On the new windows, click on Add and find you user account, then click on OK.

7. Assign Allow: Full Control permissions for the specific account and click on OK.

Now, as you can see the C:\Recovery folder is accessible to your user account.

At C:\Recovery\<UID> you’ll find the Winre.wim image file. This is the Windows RE image that have been loaded every time you’re choosing to repair your computer from the F8 startup menu.

Creating ERD Commander ISO Image

1. Install DaRT 6.5 from Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack 2009 R2 (available to customers with active Software Assurance license) on your computer or on computer with DVD burner.

2. Open ERD Commander Boot Media Wizard from the Windows menu and follow these steps to create ERD ISO image:

2.1. On the welcome screen click Next.

2.2. Insert and navigate to Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 media and click Next.

2.3. On the Preparing files screen click on Next.

2.4. Select or exclude the tools that will be included in your ERD image and click on Next.

2.5. Locate the Windows Debugging tools and click on Next.

2.6. Choose if you want to update your ERD’s system sweeper and click on Next.

2.7. If you want to add additional drivers, click on Add. Then click on Next.

2.8. On the Additional Files click on Next.

Note: You can add useful applications and files to your ERD ISO image such as disk imaging utility, corporate antivirus, etc.

2.9. To create the ISO image click on Next.

2.10. If you want to burn the ISO into a media set the wizard to your media burner. Click on Next to proceed.

2.11. Click on Finish.

3. On the ISO navigate to the Sources directory; inside X:\Sources (when X: is the CD driver letter) you’ll find boot.wim image.

4. Copy boot.wim into C:\Recovery\<UID>\ and change the file name to Winre.wim.

Note: It’s recommended to rename the original Winre.wim file name to Winre.wim.old or delete it from the C:\Recovery directory.

Next time you’ll restart your computer and choose Repair your computer you’ll notice that DaRT has been added to the Windows RE menu (and there’s also network support at the start of Windows RE).

Note: My personal recommendation is to deploy Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 with a built-in DaRT recovery environment support.

Note that you will need an active Software Assurance (SA) license to each OS that deployed with DaRT.

Summary

This guide described how to create ERD ISO image by using Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset and then replacing the default Windows RE boot image with DaRT boot image on Windows 7 & Server 2008 R2.

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FBI Broke Law spying on Americans’ Phone recrods, Post reports

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