Around The Industry:
The WiFi Alliance has announced the first list of products that meet its 802.11n Draft 2.0 specification. These products follow the preliminary specifications that were announced in March and should be upgradable to the final 802.11n specification when that is released in 2008, although such upgrades are not guaranteed by the WiFi Alliance. The products included in the WiFi Alliance’s list are both commercial products and reference designs and will be used as part of the Alliance’s testbed for interoperability testing.
The Computing Technology Trade Industry Association (CompTIA) has urged its members to send a letter stating that the Maine bill, LD 1675, would stall innovation of broadband services, stifle VoIP and IPTV development. The bill would prohibit ISPs from prioritizing access based on content or source. CompTIA warns that the bill would “heavily regulate innovative broadband services and keep computing technology companies, as well as Internet users, in the dark ages.” The group is lobbying legislators to vote against the bill.
The One Laptop Per Child project is no stranger to criticism, but it’s unusual to see disciples of Negroponte’s pet project dishing out the beatings instead of taking them. Of course, the subject is possibly the only technology even more maligned than the laptop itself, WiMAX. Michail Bletsas, comms man at the OLPC project, suggested that the major problem that the WiMAX chaps are facing is that they are trying to operate in licensed wireless bands, such as 2.5GHz. This means an awful lot of red tape to get devices to market. Bletsas suggested that devices would get made quicker, and cheaper, if they worked in unlicensed bands such as 5.8GHz, and would also have the advantage of playing nicer with the developing countries that are buying up OLPCs.
San Francisco’s plan to tap the resources of Google and EarthLink to blanket the city with free, sluggish Wi-Fi has faced another delay, as members of the Budget and Finance Committee voted to postpone proceedings until July 11. Since it was finalized in January, the plan has sharply divided San Francisco’s elected officials. It calls for EarthLink to pay the city $2m over four years for the right to build, own and maintain a Wi-Fi network that would be ubiquitous throughout the hilly, seven-mile by seven-mile city. EarthLink would be permitted to sell a 1 MBPS service for $22 per month, but would also be required to offer a free service that offers 300 KBPS speed.
Millions of broadband internet users across most of eastern Japan were unable to log on Tuesday evening after a problem at NTT East, the country’s largest broadband provider. The outage is one of the largest in years and took out both PC internet connections and IP telephone service across 14 of the 17 prefectures in which NTT East provides service. Of those affected, 1.2 million were on fibre-optic connections, 1.5 million on ADSL connections and 160,000 on ISDN lines, NTT East said. The cause of the outage is still being investigated, though all affected are now back online.
Robust Net access was enjoyed by 30% of U.S. households as late as 2005, mostly in white homes. Meanwhile, so-called broadband adoption by blacks was a mere 14%, according to data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The resulting “digital divide” between white and black was considered a lasting socioeconomic problem–like the protracted disparity between black and white unemployment. Surprise. In the past two years, African Americans have been devouring broadband technology–and the digital divide has shrunk significantly, at least for this group. The share of black households with a cable modem, DSL, or satellite Internet connection climbed to 40% this year, Pew says. That’s almost twice as fast as the growth of broadband penetration for the general population, which grew to 47%.
The CDMA Development Group (CDG) announced that 251 operators in 105 countries across all continents of the globe have selected CDMA2000 technologies to deliver 3G services, including more than 100 operators which have chosen CDMA2000 within the past three years. There are currently 215 CDMA2000 operators offering commercial 3G services and 36 more will launch within the next six months. Most of these operators are on the accelerated path to introducing CDMA2000 1xEV-DO mobile broadband services; 124 operators have already deployed or are introducing EV-DO Rel 0 and 30 operators have launched or are about to launch EV-DO Rev. “CDMA2000 is the most widely deployed 3G and mobile broadband technology worldwide, and continues to grow in developed markets and expand into emerging regions,” said Perry LaForge, executive director of the CDG. “This phenomenal growth creates enormous economies of scale, further strengthening the business case for 3G CDMA2000 services. With its strong performance, network flexibility and favorable economics, CDMA2000 will continue to play a leading role in the industry’s transition to 3G and mobile broadband data services.”
VictoryPark, a private $3 billion, 7 million square-foot retail and housing development in downtown Dallas will host the city’s first large-scale, ubiquitous Wi-Fi network. VictoryPark, which will include more than 4000 residences, is being developed by Hillwood Development, a subsidiary of Perot Systems, has teamed up with integration firm, Red One, to deploy BelAir Networks wireless broadband mesh network over the 75 acre area. When complete, the network will allow nearby buildings, including the W Dallas Fictory Hotel & Residences to provide access and, at the same time, maintain separate authentication services for security.
AT&T’s combination of being the largest U.S. broadband Internet provider, a wireless carrier and its nascent U-Verse video service delivered over broadband networks provides it with a unique opportunity to sell advertising, said John Stankey, AT&T’s president for operations support. “There is a great opportunity in advertising especially given the assets that our business has. We have a lot of wireless subscribers. We are the nation’s leading Internet service provider and of course now we are getting into TV,” said Stankey. “We think there is a unique opportunity to move beyond the linear advertising. It can be a billion dollar business over time,” he said.
SecurityBits:
The U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team is reporting a network evasion technique that uses full-width and half-width unicode characters to allow malware to evade detection by an IPS or firewall. The US-CERT note lists 92 vendors whose security products may be vulnerable; of those, as of the afternoon of May 15, only two—Apple and Hewlett-Packard—had verified that their security software isn’t vulnerable. The vulnerability concerns HTTP content-scanning systems that fail to properly scan full-width and half-width Unicode-encoded HTTP traffic. A remote attacker could exploit the vulnerability by sending specially crafted HTTP traffic to a vulnerable content scanning system. After sneaking malware past the firewall or IPS, the attacker can then wreak havoc on a system, scanning and attacking without being detected.
The makers of Samba have patched a serious flaw in their open-source software that could be exploited remotely by hackers to inject code with nobody user privileges. The bug, as well as two other vulnerabilities, are addressed in Monday’s release of Samba 3.0.25. In the case of the most critical flaw, Samba officials said in an advisory that unescaped user input parameters are passed as arguments to /bin/sh—a situation that allows for remote command execution. Samba is a suite of software for Unix and Linux OS’s that allows Windows clients to print files using a Linux or Unix machine.
Chris Eng, director of security services at Veracode, is questioning whether the IOS FTP Server vulnerabilities Cisco reported on May 9 may constitute an intentionally planted backdoor, as opposed to a series of programming errors that inadvertently led to a backdoor. Eng is suggesting that possibility given that a remote attacker would need one of the flaws—improper authorization checking in IOS FTP—in order to exploit the second flaw—an IOS reload when transferring files via FTP. In essence, an attacker can bypass authentication and avoid giving credentials because of the first flaw. The attacker then has to overwrite the critical startup configuration file, then has to cause the router itself to reboot in order to execute the rewritten configuration file.
Hardware, Software, and other TidBytes:
