Morning Broadband Bytes 6/01/07

Around The Industry:

BT Fusion is a dud:
BT conceded yesterday that it had made mistakes with a flagship mobile service, as it emerged that the product has amassed just 40,000 customers in two years. BT Fusion – a combined fixed and mobile phone – was supposed to reinvigorate BT’s mobile offering and contribute to BT’s growth. It promised to cut consumers’ bills by offering the features of a mobile phone with cheaper landline prices. Steve Andrews, head of BT Mobility, admitted that take-up of the product, which uses wi-fi technology, had been set back by the timing of the launch. “There was a lack of wi-fi devices as early as we would have liked them,” he said.

Hillary Woos Silicon Valley:
Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to woo Silicon Valley campaign contributors and voters with an ambitious plan to create more high-paying jobs and maintain U.S. dominance as an “innovation superpower” in the technology sector. “I believe that we ought to hit the restart button on the 21st Century,” Clinton said. Among other things, Clinton said would provide tax incentives to increase the number of U.S. homes with broadband Internet connections.

New app promises to route multi-media over Wi-Fi:
Streaming video across a household wireless network is something that’s generally not recommended. D-Link is trying to change that by putting 802.11n technology to work. As you may know, 802.11n is the new longer-range, high-speed Wi-Fi specification, a significant upgrade from traditional 802.11b/g devices. D-Link’s Xtreme Duo MediaBridge device, called the DAP-1555, connects to existing routers, enabling them to stream multimedia content over 5 GHz, a channel that is freer and clearer than the crowded 2.4 Ghz, that traditional Wi-Fi devices share with cordless phones. D-Link has only just announced the device and it’s not expected to ship until fall so we’ve not had a chance to try it out. The price has not been determined as yet.

Politics, conflicts of interest muddy future of Toledo’s network:
The city of Toledo set the record straight after The Toledo Blade misleadingly reported that “Toledo taxpayers could pay up to $2.16 million over five years” if the city council approves a license agreement with MetroFi and a city councilman jumped on the story to make political hay. Councilman Frank Szollosi, longtime opponent of Mayor Carty Finkbeiner, used the claim to attack the project in general (one of the mayor’s key initiatives) and its choice of MetroFi, in particular, to do the job, saying “If they’re (MetroFi) going to be asking council to approve money out of the city budget, why not go with a local union firm that is already doing it?” By doing so, Szollosi no doubt curried favor with Block Communications which not only owns Buckeye Communications, the company that lost the bid to MetroFi, it also owns The Blade. MetroFi has not asked the council to budget a cent of new money toward the network.

UK Regulator Extends Broadband Opportunities In Rural Areas:
UK regulator Ofcom introduced new regulations to extend wireless broadband access across the country, including in rural areas. The regulations cover the 5.8 GHz band, currently used by a number of operators to provide fixed wireless broadband services in the UK. Under the new regulations, which come into effect today, the operators will be able to increase power levels, potentially extending the range and variety of services into parts of the country that were previously not covered. This is likely to have its most marked effect in rural areas.

Clampdown on VoIP mis-selling:
Ofcom has announced that rules protecting consumers from the mis-selling of fixed-line voice call services will now also cover providers that offer voice and broadband services using full Local Loop Unbundling technology. Mis-selling refers to inappropriate sales and marketing activities including ‘slamming’, where customers can be switched from one company to another without their express knowledge and consent. Ed Richards, Chief Executive of Ofcom, commented “Mis-selling causes problems for consumers. We want competition and choice to continue to grow, and we want consumers to benefit from these changes. Consumers need to be able to shop around with confidence. Extending these rules and our enforcement activity will protect consumers from inappropriate sales and marketing techniques.”

Rolling out VoIP:
Once upon a time, voice services delivered to cable subscribers using voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology were considered possible add-ons to standard cable offerings. Fast-forward to 2007, and these services have survived the proving ground of the top cable providers. Voice, video and data service bundles have emerged as a powerful triple-play that has been effective in gaining customers. Comcast alone added 571,000 digital voice subscribers in the first quarter of 2007. The presence of voice in the bundle has also served to stem the turnover of video and broadband data subscribers. While it is true that traditional voice carriers are beginning to roll out video, it is also true that their reach is still limited – a fact that is putting cable operators in an ideal position to seize the strategic advantage of VoIP and establish an early foothold in the growing market for bundled voice, video and data services. Now the question is: how can an operator with limited resources add VoIP technology to its existing set of services?

Teleworkers Continue to Multiply:
The virtual workplace is becoming a reality. A recent Nemertes Research survey of 120 IT executives found that 62 percent plan to increase the number of their branch-office locations. The research firm says branch offices will grow 11 percent in 2007, up 8.9 percent from 2006. Survey respondents also said close to 20 percent of their employees telecommute. And respondents said that some 80 percent of companies are virtual workplaces, which means some of the employees work at a different location than their supervisors or workgroups. “On average, organizations classify 27 percent of their employees as virtual,” said Robin Gareiss, executive vice president of Nemertes Research.

NPR, others challenge online royalties:
National Public Radio is teaming up with online radio broadcasters to appeal new music royalties that they say would put smaller operators out of business and force others to sharply scale back their online music offerings. NPR filed a notice with the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington Wednesday signaling that it would challenge the ruling by a panel of copyright judges that would sharply raise the amount of royalties that NPR stations and others have to pay record companies for streaming music over the Internet. NPR also said it was filing a request with the same court on Thursday along with other Webcasters for an emergency stay blocking the adoption of the new rates, which are set to go into effect July 15. Separately, a bill seeking to block the new royalties and implement a different payment system is gathering steam in Congress. The Internet Radio Equality Act has 100 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives and has also been introduced in the Senate, says Kurt Hanson, who operates a small online radio company called AccuRadio.

SecurityBits:

Patched Macs Vulnerable to Samba Bug:
Symantec’s DeepSight Threat Analyst Team recently discovered that Mac OS X includes Samba 3.0.10. Samba hasn’t been updated on the Mac platform since that version, according to a May 26 team journal entry. On the same day, the team managed to exploit the heap-corruption vulnerability on a fully patched Mac OS X 10.4.9 system that was running the default Samba 3.0.10 program. The team is advising Mac OS X users to upgrade to the latest Samba version, 3.0.25, from Samba’s official site. Otherwise, users can disable the Windows Sharing service until Apple has an official update available via its Software Update service. The team also advised users to select the lock function to avoid inadvertent re-enabling of the service.

Hardware, Software, and other TidBytes:

Broadcom, Qualcomm Promise Further Legal Action

Ex-Cisco Bigwig Volpi to Head Joost?

New RealPlayer downloads web videos

U.S. Soldiers Face Tough VoIP Call

NY Assembly Calls Senate’s Pointless Video Game Ban Bill And Raises It

Whose Burden Of Proof Is It When Accused Of Unauthorized Uploading?

EMI buries hatchet with Youtube

Britannica sues TomTom over map patents

Broadband Reports is DSL · Cable · VOIP · Security · Satellite · Fiber · News · Tips · Reviews · Community · Tools

Morning Broadband Bytes 5/31/07

Around The Industry:

Wireless LINC begins rural wireless broadband pilots in Vermont and New Hampshire:
The Wireless LINC initiative, a public-private partnership in Vermont and New Hampshire, has launched a series of pilot projects which are just the first step in building broadband infrastructure throughout Carroll, Grafton and Coos counties in New Hampshire and Orleans, Essex and Caledonia counties in Vermont. Tetherless Access, Inc. founded by Dewayne Hendricks, has been hired to get the wireless pilots up and running. The rural broadband project is managed by the North Community Investment Corporation (NCIC), a non-profit created in 1975 to promote economic development in northeastern Vermont and northern New Hampshire. The counties to be served by this broadband network are, like many rural regions around the world, forgotten by the large commercial broadband service providers.

Sierra Wireless Introduces Intelligent Modems Certified for the Verizon Wireless EV-DO Rev. A:
Sierra Wireless announced that the AirLink PinPoint X and Raven X have been certified and are commercially available for use on the Verizon Wireless Evolution-Data Optimized, Revision A (EV-DO Rev. A) network. The devices support the latest in high speed data and are backward compatible to existing EV-DO Rev. 0 and 1x networks. AirLink X Platform customers will benefit from download speeds averaging 600 to 1.4 Mbps and upload speeds averaging 500 to 800 kbps.

Apple’s DRM free music has poison tip:
Apple iTune’s “DRM free” music has a large amount of user details embedded in the track. Songs sold without an DRM will have a user’s full name and account e-mail embedded in them. The big idea is that if you stick the DRM-free song on your favourite P2P network it could come back to get you. While this could be seen as a good thing, it appears that the details embedded in the file include some scary amount of personal data including all your iTunes account information.

Top 30 broadband countries with prices per megabit:
Alex Moskalyuk posts a chart of the top 30 broadband countries, according to ITIF. The top five are Korea, Japan, Iceland, Finland, and the Netherlands. The US clocks in at number 12, behind France (7) and Canada (10). Surprisingly, Australia (for all the broadband fireworks going on over there) ranks at number 14… above the UK, who is at number 17. The bottom of the broadband barrel includes Hungary, Greece, the Slovak Republic, Mexico, and Turkey.

Broadband Dominates 83% of UK Net Connections:
The UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) has issued its latest quarterly Internet access report to the end of March (Q1-2007). Broadband now accounts for 82.8% of all Internet connections, up by 3.3% from 79.5% in December 2006. New Internet connections have also been going up, with an increase of 2.6% seen over the quarter. Dial-up connections have continued to decline and now account for less than one in five of all connections. The ONS also includes a very rough guide to average Internet access speeds. By March 2007 some 55.3% of people were connecting at 2Mbps or less, compared with 60.9% in December 2006.

Wi-Fi Positioning Comes to Mac, Windows Mobile:
Skyhook Wireless built the Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) to turn an access point into an 802.11-based GPS, but the downside was that it was only available for Windows — until now. Today, the company announced that its Loki software, a location-aware toolbar for Web browsers, is ready for MacOS as well as Windows Mobile. In addition, Web developers can now use the new Loki JavaScript API to build WPS into Web sites and applications. The WPS database of access points used to pinpoint a person’s location has grown to cover 70% of U.S., Canadian and Australian population centers. International expansion is continuing, specifically in cities like London, Amsterdam and Barcelona in Europe — Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong in the Asia Pacific region are coming soon.

Beijing set to test Olympic wireless information service:
Beijing will put a state-of-the-art wireless information service designed for visitors to the city during the 2008 Olympics to the test in the second half of 2007, according to the service operator China Netcom. The wireless service will be available in the form of a portable electronic device, similar in appearance to a mobile phone, which visitors can rent for a fee from airports, hotels and tourist sites. The cost will not be determined until the trial period ends. The service, available in the seven languages of Chinese, English, Japanese, Russian, French, Spanish and German, will provide general Games and city information, and information on tourist sites, transport, dining and business.

Presidential candidate John Edwards calls for more accessible Web:
Presidential candidate John Edwards chose the technological nexus of Google headquarters to propose a way to make the Internet more affordable and more accessible to poor Americans. Edwards said he sent a letter to the FCC proposing that it set aside a part of the broadband spectrum that is to be sold at an upcoming auction for wholesalers to lease to smaller start-ups in an effort to improve service to rural and underserved areas. He said the United States has a huge stake in bringing technology to more people. “For this democracy to work it needs to be from the ground up, not the top down,” he said.

Broadband Battle: Cool Web Sites:
Telephone companies and cable operators in the U.S. are developing new weapons in their battle over the high-speed Internet business: cool Web sites. The Web-site competition is the latest front in the war between cable and telephone companies for the multibillion-dollar broadband business. Operators also are trying to beat each other by offering faster speeds and attractive prices, and phone and cable operators are competing to offer consumers the most attractive packages of TV, phone and high-speed Internet services. The race is tight. At the end of March, cable operators were ahead with 30.7 million broadband subscribers, compared with 25.4 million for telephone companies, according to Leichtman Research Group Inc. But the top telephone companies are slowly catching up, having attracted 54% of net new subscribers in 2006, Leichtman reports. In the first quarter of 2007, phone companies had 51% of the net additions.

SecurityBits:

Akonix: IM Attacks So Far Increased 73% over 2006:
Akonix Systems, a provider of instant messaging security and compliance products, have uncovered 170 IM threats this year—an increase of 73 percent from the same time period in 2006. It is not clear exactly why the number of IM attacks is increasing, but security researchers have their theories. Don Montgomery, vice president of marketing at Akonix, speculated the increase in the number of attacks reflects the increase in the use of instant messaging, particularly on corporate networks.

Commenraty: The Internet security business is a big fat con:
What [people] are forced to do is continually fork out for spam-busting protection, for “secure” operating systems, for funky firewalls, malware detectors or phish-sniffing software. All this junk clogs up their spanking new PC so that they continually have to upgrade to newer chippery clever enough to have a processing core dedicated to each of the bloatsome security routines keeping them safe while they surf. It’s a con, gentlemen. A big fat con. No one has a business interest in catching identity thieves or malware writers. There’s no money in it, so no-one’s bothered.

Germany declares hacking tools ‘verboten’:
Updates to Germany’s computer crime laws banning so-called “hacking tools” have been criticised as ill-considered and counterproductive. The revamp to the German criminal code is designed to tighten definitions, making denial of service attacks and attempts to sniff data on third-party wireless networks, for example, clearly criminal. Attacks would be punishable by a fine and up to 10 years imprisonment. “Forbidding this software is about as helpful as forbidding the sale and production of hammers because sometimes they also cause damage,” Chaos Computer Club spokesman Andy Müller-Maguhn told Ars Technica. “Safety research can [now] take place only in an unacceptable legal gray area.”

F-Secure hit with anti-virus vulnerabilities:
F-Secure has patched several vulnerabilities in its security products, the most critical of which could be used to run unauthorized software on a victim’s computer. The most critical of these bugs affects F-Secure’s anti-virus products. A flaw in the way the software unpacks files that have been compressed using the LHA archiving format could allow an attacker to crash the system, or even run unauthorized software on the computer, F-Secure said in an advisory. Secunia rates the bug as highly critical.

Hardware, Software, and other TidBytes:

Google privacy policy ‘is vague’

Alleged top world spammer arrested in Seattle

StarOffice, Linux Fly High on Singapore Airlines

Apple Says YouTube To Be Available On Apple TV

Mozilla Update Ends Support For Firefox 1.5

Apple to pipe YouTube to its TV

eBay makes $75m bid for StumbleUpon

TiVo posts first-ever quarterly profit

Broadband Reports is DSL · Cable · VOIP · Security · Satellite · Fiber · News · Tips · Reviews · Community · Tools

Morning Broadband Bytes 5/30/07

Around The Industry:

Storing music files online illegal even if you own them:
A servie letting people store their music online has been ruled an infringement of copyright by a Tokyo district court. According to the Everyday Newspaper, the service run by an outfit called ‘Image City’ enabled the punter to store their CD in an off-site server. It could then be downloaded to a mobile phone when the customer was on the move. However the cunning plan was attacked by the Japanese music copyright association (JASRAC) who claimed that it was an infringement of copyright. It has demanded that the service be switched off.

Faster Music Downloads With Beatnik:
U.S. software company Beatnik Inc. is approaching mobile phone operators with a new music download system that compresses songs up to 10 times more than the MP3 format, allowing for faster downloads on lower-end mobile phones equipped with the company’s software. Beatnik hopes the system will make music download services more appealing in developing markets. The faster download capability it offers is good for markets that haven’t upgraded to 3G and where users have less expensive phones. The company is in talks with operators, handset manufacturers and content providers about adopting the system and expects to announce a partnership in a month.

Market pioneers still hold dominant market share position for WiMAX equipment:
According to In-Stat, while better known equipment vendors like Samsung, Nokia Siemens, and Motorola received extensive press coverage in 2006 due to their high-profile service provider wins, it was still the original market entrants – Alavarion, Aperto, Redline, and Airspan that held the dominant market positions. The high-tech market research firm does expect that will change as Sprint starts its network deployment. The company has not selected any of those early market pioneers as an infrastructure partner.

Sky will take Virgin with triple play (I know, I know, but sometimes these things just write themselves…):
UBS, the Swiss investment bank, predicts Sky will come out on top in its dispute with Virgin. The investment bank said that Virgin was suffering an “identity crisis” as Sky’s launch of broadband and voice services had taken its unique selling point as a “triple-play” provider. Thus it argued that Virgin is exposed to competitive pressures with customers surveyed perceiving that Sky offered better customer service and product. Virgin Media dismissed the research as out of date, sensationalist and unrealistic.

Scotland tops UK broadband charts:
BT Scotland director, Brendan Dick, said: “It says a great deal for Scotland and its people that it now boasts the five most switched-on local authority areas in the UK. Fast internet access is now making a huge contribution to the economic success of Scotland, as businesses find new markets and work more efficiently.” In the ADSL broadband take-up league table Aberdeenshire is in first place, with 50.9% and Shetland close behind with 50.7 percent. Third is Stirling with 48.4% and then Aberdeen with 47.9 percent. The Scottish national average of 33.3% is ahead of the UK average of 31.2 percent.

Merger between Avaya and Nortel could create leading vendor of Web-based phone systems:
A merger between Avaya and Canada’s Nortel Networks could create a leading vendor of Web-based phone systems, analysts said as talk swirled over a possible buyout bid for the U.S. telecommunications equipment maker. Avaya has long been the subject of takeover speculation because of its small size compared to rivals like Cisco and due to a growing number of companies vying to sell IP phone systems to businesses. Yet it is also rumored that Cisco is interested in Avaya, along with private equity firm Silver Lake.

Southern California Edison Company gets ready to greenlight southern cal muni projects:
Southern California Edison Company is proposing changes to its tariff schedule, a move that should finally pave the way for a long-delayed Wi-Fi project in Diamond Bar, California. The Los Angeles Times made an issue of this bottleneck last year in an article about how local electric utilities in general, and Southern California Edison in particular, were blocking the deployment of municipal wireless broadband networks. The problems delayed Diamond Bar’s project for more than a year. SCE originally suggested that the city pay as much as $2,000 per month per pole, the same as commercial cellphone carriers to attach antennas to utility poles.

And you thought US broadband was screwed up…:
The Broadband Rumble Down Under makes the US look like a broadband utopia. The broadband issue in Autralia has become a real political sticking point as incumbent Telstra and Aussie regulator Australian Competition and Consumer Commission continue to catfight and bitchslap each other every chance they get. This week ACCC chairman Graeme Samuels said of Telstra, “There is an enormous amount of spin-doctoring going on and an enormous amount of part-information, misinformation that you couldn’t correct in a short period of time.” Meanwhile, Telstra public policy director Phil Burgess earlier this month said it was time for the government to get the ACCC out of the way of the company’s broadband plan. This is getting more entertaining by the moment.

WildBlue gets innovation award:
WildBlue has been busy telling rural America that the company has the solution for broadband access in hard-to-reach places. It seems that the industry is listening, because WildBlue and it’s satellite-delivered high-speed internet has now received the 2007 International Satellite Communication exchange (ISCe) Innovation and Technology Award. The ISCe’s advisory board chose WildBlue “in recognition of their development of innovative technologies which have advanced significantly the satellite and communications industry.”

SecurityBits:

Mac OS X Exploit Rapidly Follows Patch:
Security research firm Immunity released exploit code for a serious bug affecting Mac OS X less than 24 hours after Apple released a patch for it. The flaw is a buffer overflow vulnerability in the UPnP Internet Gateway Device Standardized Device Control code used to create port mappings on home NAT gateways in the OS X mDNSResponder implementation. A software and security engineer at Arbor Networks said it was unusual for an exploit of a Mac vulnerability to be released so quickly. “I don’t know of any others that have been quite that fast, within a day or two,” Jose Nazario said, adding that Mac OS X has increasingly become a source of interest for hackers and security researchers alike.

Java Proxy Server Crack Can Let in Superuser Attackers:
Sun Microsystems says two buffer overflows in the SOCKS module of its Sun Java System Web Proxy Server 4.0 can give a remote attacker the privileges of a superuser. Sun says that Sun Java System Web Proxy Server 4.0.4 or earlier versions are susceptible to the vulnerability and that a successful exploit won’t demonstrate any predictable symptoms. The company has released an update to address the problem in all affected platforms: SPARC, x86, Linux, Windows, HP-UX and AIX.

Apple plugs two QuickTime holes:
Apple has plugged two holes in its QuickTime media player that could create serious security problems for people tricked into visiting malicious websites. The release, which is available for both Windows and Mac platforms, is Apple’s second security patch in less than a week. The most serious of the two vulnerabilities involves QuickTime’s implementation of Java, which could allow for the manipulation of objects outside what should be allowed by the allocated heap. The other vulnerability also resides in the way QuickTime works with Java and could allow a maliciously crafted applet to read a web browser’s memory. That could allow an attacker access to potentially sensitive information, Apple said. QuickTime has emerged as one of the more vulnerable Apple packages, with at least four security updates this year. QuickTime’s susceptibility is due in part to its ability to run on both Windows and OS X and its wide use (and occasional abuse) on sites such MySpace.

DC++ flaw sees massive data storms:
A flaw in the design of P2P network DC++, which is based on Direct Connect, has given attackers the ability to create massive DoS attacks that can easily overwhelm corporate websites according to security solutions provider Prolexic Technologies. Older versions of the hub server software have a flaw that allows an attacker to direct clients to get information from another server, said Fredrik Ullner, a developer for the DC++ project. Maliciously redirecting those client results in a large number of computers continuously demanding data from the victim’s web server, overwhelming it with requests. Over the past three months, more than 40 companies have endured attacks emanating from hundreds of thousands of IPs, with many of the attacks producing more than a gigabit of junk data every second. A general solution is unlikely to appear from the DC++ project. While the problem has already been fixed in the DC++ hub software, it’s hard to force everyone to adopt the fix, said developer Ullner.

Hardware, Software, and other TidBytes:

Mac Users Face Hurdles with New Office Versions

Google Buys Antivirus, Anti-Spam Company

Linux Foundation To Microsoft: Touch One Of Us, Fight Us All

Firm turns PS3 into print server

Microsoft to unveil coffee-table-shaped computer

Quanta Mum on Possible Son of iPhone

Qualcomm Infringed Broadcom Patents, Jury Says

Linux Foundation To Microsoft: Touch One Of Us, Fight Us All

Broadband Reports.com is DSL · Cable · VOIP · Security · Satellite · Fiber · News · Tips · Reviews · Community · Tools

A Long Weekend….

Hey there… hope you all had a good weekend. Sorry the MBB won’t be available today. A couple reasons why thats so. Its always slow for news the morning after a holiday, so there’s a lack of stories. It was a long weekend for me as my oldest was visiting home after finishing a tour of duty in Iraq, and I wanted to spend some time with him. He just left Monday night to go back to his base in South Carolina to await his next assignment. It was definitely nice to see him in person, safe and sound. In between everything going on this weekend, I had to try to iron out a new project Justin has me working on for BBR and get the Morning Links done too. Add to that some other things going on in RL, and I’m kinda tired. The MBB will be back tomorrow, though. Thanks to all of you who have continued to read the MBB. As long as your interested, I’ll keep doing them.

Anyway, here’s a couple pics of my oldest… Out in the field in Iraq, and home snoozing with his little sister.

Morning Broadband Bytes 5/25/07

Around The Industry:

Broadband and LLU narrows UK digital divide; Bundling not a popular option
The digital divide between England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales is narrowing as more homes connect to broadband. Broadband take-up in homes in England reached 45% by the end of 2006, while 42% of homes in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales had broadband, according to research from Ofcom. Two-thirds of the UK’s households were able to get broadband and phone services through local loop unbundling (LLU) by the end of 2006 – compared with only two-fifths of homes able to connect by LLU at the end of 2005. Interestingly, Less than three-tenths of UK households (29%) opted to bundle services from a single telecoms provider in 2006.:

Stating the obvious: True fixed/cell phone convergence seen years off:
It will be years before the much-hyped blending of services that run seamlessly over both fixed and cell phone networks will allow consumers to communicate freely on any device, industry executives say. Operators have trouble finding customers for combined deals offering fixed and mobile services, which are complicated to set up and lack choice in handsets, industry executives said at a convergence conference in Amsterdam. Many operators that offer such a service see it simply as a way of binding customers closer to their fixed-line networks, and are reluctant to offer additional services that span other devices and networks.

Comsys baseband processor awarded ‘Best WIMAX Product’ at Wireless Broadband Innovation Awards:
Comsys Communication and Signal Processing, a leader in wireless baseband solutions, announced that its ComMAX(TM) processor has been awarded the title of ‘Best WIMAX Product or Service’ at the Wireless Broadband Innovation Awards ceremony in London. ComMAX is a flexible multimode OFDMA baseband processor that enables service continuity between cellular and Mobile WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e) networks. The winners of this year’s Wireless Broadband Innovation Awards were selected from over 170 qualified entries by an independent panel of world-leading experts, and the awards were announced in front of more than 400 industry professionals at a ceremony associated with The Wireless Event.

Qwest faces opposition to IPTV in Colorado:
Denver-based telcom Qwest is facing opposition from city council members in its attempt to bring IPTV to Broomfield, a Colorado community. Local officials have qualms about IPTV’s availability, which is limited to areas with a reported higher likelihood of affording the service. They also believe IPTV isn’t quite ready to cater to even those customers, and are dissatisfied with the slow roll-out of its high speed DSL service in the area.

Opinion: Azulstar could give EarthLink a run for the muni market:
Carol Ellison reorts for MuniWireless: “While EarthLink re-evaluates its position in the muni market, Azulstar is quietly upping the ante. Yorke Rhodes II, Azulstar’s new CEO states, “We are looking at Azulstar as a viable, national broadband player that can be very easily propelled into the same echelon as companies like Earthlink.” As I’ve said before, the mistake that many headline writers make is in making EarthLink the sole barometer of the market. In many ways, Azulstar and other smaller WISPs are more representative. Where EarthLink faces the challenge of what do to about its rapidly eroding base of dial-up customers, Azulstar (and other companies that are not saddled with converting customers from yesterday’s technologies) can focus its energies on the specific challenges of the deployments at hand.

Verizon says Vonage should have cited obviousness issue before Supreme Court even said they could:
Mike Masnick writes for TechDirt: “As the Verizon/Vonage patent trial moves onto the next phase, Vonage is clearly trying to use the Supreme Court’s new ruling on patent obviousness to get Verizon’s patents tossed out. However, Verizon is claiming that this is unfair and that since Vonage didn’t bring up these issues at the lower court level it can’t use the new obviousness test in the appeals court either. It is true that the appeals court is supposed to focus on the arguments that were made at the lower court, but the situation gets trickier when the fundamental rules have changed in between the cases. Still, it’s amusing to have Verizon claiming that Vonage should have known about this new obviousness ruling before the Supreme Court even made the ruling.”

3G score: UMTS/HSPA 68% – EV-DO 32%; 614% UMTS growth in US and Canada:
The GSM technology global coverage footprint has provided the foundation for UMTS/HSDPA to become the most widely deployed 3G technology and market leader. According to Informa‘s World Cellular Information Service quarterly subscriber reports, UMTS/HSDPA, with 117 million subscribers, is commercially available through twice as many operators as other 3G technologies – 167 operators in 69 countries, compared to 71 operators in 44 countries with CDMA EV-DO. Of the 172 million true mobile broadband 3G subscribers worldwide as of 1Q 2007, 68% use UMTS/HSDPA. Worldwide, the greatest quarterly growth of UMTS/HSDPA took place in the US and Canada, where UMTS experienced an unprecedented 614% growth, rocketing from 350,000 subscribers to 2.5 million subscribers in three months ending March 2007.

Q1 sets record for DSL equipment, despite nosedive in North American market:
Global shipments of DSL equipment in the first quarter increased 5% sequentially to a record 25 million ports, according to market research firm Dittberner. However, North American shipments declined for the third quarter in a row and will continue to decline due to the slowdown in AT&T’s buildout, Verizon’s shift to Fiber-to-the-Home and the absence of alternative service providers. Market consolidation continues and will likely speed up if DSL subscriber growth slows, as the firm expects.

ISPs charging people in rural areas more to get broadband:
Millions of broadband customers across Britain are being penalised just for living in the ‘wrong’ area, reveals uSwitch.com. The independent price comparison and switching service said depending on where someone lives can mean they can pay a minimum of £10 a month more for broadband services. It named internet service providers (ISPs) such as TalkTalk, Sky, UK Online and Virgin Media as guilty of differentiating both the price and speed of their broadband services for some areas in the UK. This ‘two-tier’ pricing system is particularly evident in the more sparsely populated rural areas because these customers often fall outside an ISPs local loop unbundling (LLU) network.

SecurityBits:

MS nixes potential IIS 6.0 flaw:
Microsoft concluded an investigation into a potential IIS 6.0 flaw that researchers said may lead to a DoS attack and which researchers said “definitely” allows attackers to access special DOS devices (COM1 in this case). The verdict: The claims are wrong, the public proof of concept code doesn’t take advantage of an IIS 6.0 vulnerability, and the code in question, although it claims to use IIS 6.0, actually uses ASP.NET. Posters on the BugTraq mailing list maintained that the flaw could be used to read data from a device attached to COM1—a PC’s first serial port. The flaw can also prevent another application from accessing the port, since access to ports is exclusive, according to a poster with the handle “3APA3A.”

Panda unveils new web-based malware detector:
Antivirus vendor Panda Software released a Web-based product, Malware Radar, that it claims will spot malware that normally goes undetected by traditional security programs. The company said it has developed a new methodology for detecting malware that’s embedded in Malware Radar called Collective Intelligence. As an online, security-as-a-service feature, Collective Intelligence can detect ten times more virus files than traditional products, Panda claimed. Panda said Malware Radar is designed to complement, not replace, existing client-side antivirus software offered by vendors like Symantec and others.

Skype worm leaps onto MSN, ICQ:
Malware miscreants have created the first worm targeting Skype that’s also capable over other instant messaging networks, such as MSN and ICQ. The unnamed worm poses as a chat message linking to a website, as with other example of Skype-spreading malware before it. Users tricked by this simple ruse will find themselves infected by the Stration worm, a mass mailer that also attempts to foil attempts to remove it by blocking access to security-related websites, and other items of malware. The twist comes via an attempt by VXers to hedge their bets. One of the files dropped onto infected PCs checks to see if a number of different instant messaging programs are installed. FaceTime speculates that the cross-network IM worm is probably the work of the same VXers who created early Skype worm. The latest IM malware menace once again emphasises the importance for users to think before they click.

Strange spoofing technique evades antiphishing filters:
A Reg reader has produced screen shots that demonstrate a powerful phishing technique that’s able to spoof eBay, PayPal and other top web destinations without triggering antiphishing filters in IE 7 or Norton 360. Based on the description, Roger Thompson, who tracks web exploits for Exploit Prevention Labs, guesses those experiencing this attack have inadvertently installed an html injector. That means the victims’ browsers are, in fact, visiting the PayPal website or other intended URL, but that a dll file that attaches itself to IE is managing to read and modify the html while in transit.

Cisco patches security flaws in number of products:
Cisco Systems has released a security patch to fix vulnerabilities in a number of its products that are at risk of a DoS attack. The vulnerabilities are found in a third-party cryptographic library in Cisco IOS, Cisco IOS XR, Cisco PIX and ASA Security Appliances, Cisco Firewall Module and Cisco Unified CallManager products, according to a security advisory issued by Cisco. The vulnerabilities can be exploited without a valid username or password, given some of the older Cisco products have the cryptographic library set to default. And while attackers may be able to launch a DOS attack, they are not known to gain access to information that has already been encrypted, Cisco noted. Although the vulnerabilities affect a wide range of Cisco products, no exploits have yet surfaced.

Hardware, Software, and other TidBytes:

CNN to stop charging for video

Connecticut Attorney General: “Best Buy treated its customers like suckers”

Tech Support Needs To Improve Or Bloggers Will Report You

Nvidia, AMD conspired to fix prices, say customers

Nissan warns U.S. cellphones can disable car keys

Microsoft offers its Zune team ‘iPod Amnesty Bin’ to drop their iPods into; claims its a joke (What? The bin, or the Zune?)

In Pictures: The Top 20 Products of the Year (Is it me, or is it a little early for this?)

Microsoft: Oops, XP SP3 still set for ‘08

Americans spend half their free time online – What is this ‘outside’ thing you speak of?Questions about your service? Check out the forums at Broadband Reports!

Morning Broadband Bytes 5/24/07

Certification shelved for voice QoS over wireless:
Some age-old networking arguments never die–they just get rolled into new technologies. Just ask the wireless vendors working on the 802.11e standard for wireless QoS. A battle between random versus predictable access has played out, sounding remarkably similar to the battles between Ethernet and Token Ring. EDCA (Enhanced Distributed Channel Access), the more Ethernet-like contender, has largely trounced the HCCA (HCF Controlled Channel Access), the predictable, more Token-Ring-like alternative. HCCA was more suitable for high-density, Vo-Fi deployment than EDCA and its loss could set off alarms among IT pros. The Wi-Fi Alliance claims it’s addressing the problem by enhancing the EDCA portion of 802.11e to support a high number of voice calls; it expects to complete this work in early 2008. But despite the Wi-Fi Alliance’s ongoing efforts surrounding EDCA, that work won’t entirely replace HCCA.

PSP to handle video and VoIP calls:
Using a soon-to be-released camera and microphone, gamers will be able to call other PSP owners and some BT phones. The software has been developed by BT and will eventually allow PSP users to call PCs, fixed lines and mobiles. Initially the service will only be available in the UK and will only work on home or BT wireless hotspots. According to BT, the software will eventually be distributed to telecoms companies in 100 other countries. More details of the BT service will be released at the Leipzig Games Convention in August, whilst Sony’s add-on camera and microphone for the PSP, known as the Go camera, will hit shelves in the UK on 25 May.

Half of Wi-Fi hotspot money is wasted:
Wireless hotspot usage is climbing, but more than half of the money spent on ad-hoc hotspot access is wasted, according to a survey by Wi-Fi roaming company Trustive. The company said its research showed that half of the users surveyed were connected for 30 minutes or less per session, and more than a quarter of sessions were 15 minutes or under. With most hotspots charging by the hour, “basically you’re wasting half your money”, said Trustive’s co-founder and managing director. The problem is even more acute for businesses, because most hotspots require payment by credit card, which means the IT manager has no control over expenditure as the user simply pays it themselves and then charges it as expenses. The answer, says Trustive, is to use an aggregator – which not only lets you roam across hotspot networks, but which charges by the minute or second, so you don’t pay for unused time.

Uk regulator fills Local Loop Unbundling loophole:
UK regulator Ofcom has extended its rules protecting consumers from mis-selling to Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) voice and broadband service providers. Although rules that protect consumers from mis-selling already apply to fixed-line voice call services, LLU providers’ marketing and sales techniques have escaped this scrutiny. But Ofcom stepped in after it received thousands of complaints from disgruntled consumers who had been switched to another operator without prior knowledge or consent, a mis-selling tactic known as “slamming”.

Napster to cellcos: We need new plans for heavy downloaders; Cellcos: They’ll swamp our networks:
How many songs have you downloaded? The average number is 375 songs, according to Napster, but the online music subscription service also knows that some users have downloaded an astounding 70,000 songs to their PCs. However, tremendous future growth is expected in over-the-air downloads of songs to cell phones and handhelds. As a result, Napster and other online music providers are in the midst of trying to persuade U.S. cellular network providers to offer cellular pricing plans that will allow over-the-air downloads capable of supporting heavy users. While over-the-air music downloads are common in Asia, U.S. cellular providers “are not as far along, and there is fear [for some carriers] about what it all means,” Pence said. “We believe in an all-you-can-eat model, but carriers say there is a potential for swamping the network.”

UK providers will duke it out for WiMax, 3G, and 4G spectrum in 2008:
Ofcom has revealed more details on its timetable for auctioning off the spectrum that could be used to introduce WiMax on a large scale to the UK. The regulator’s director of strategic resources said at the Wireless Event in London that the auction of 192MHz of spectrum, situated around the frequency of 2.6GHz, would happen in the first quarter of next year. The terms for the auction will be published in October or November of this year. The spectrum in question is highly contentious as it could be used for WiMax, which has thus far failed to gain a significant foothold in western Europe due to spectrum availability issues. However, the spectrum could also be used as an expansion band for 3G and its descendent technologies (such as the as-yet-undefined 4G). Ofcom’s firm stance is one of technology neutrality, which represents a break from the old days of mandating that a certain frequency can only be used for a certain technology.

NextHop proposition: Build your own Wi-Fi hub:
NextHop Technologies has an interesting offer: take their software-only Wi-Fi networking and access point control platform and embed it the networking box of your choice. NextHop is clearly hoping to ride the convergence bandwagon, targeting a world where networking is network — be it hard-wired or wire-free. The vendor isn’t pushing it’s software so much to IT departments but OEM vendors who want to quickly add wireless functionality to their existing networking solutions. The company said it has supplied Wi-Fi technology to other vendors including D-Link and 3Com, which use NextHop capabilities to create integrated wired/wireless platforms, particularly for small enterprises and branch offices.

Philadelphia approves EarthLink’s test network; EarthLink has no idea who tested its system:
The wireless network that is expected to blanket Philadelphia by the end of next year is another step closer to completion. The city and Wireless Philadelphia, the nonprofit group set up to make Wi-Fi available to lower-income residents, have approved the network’s 15-square-mile test area built by Atlanta’s EarthLink Inc. That means the city and Wireless Philadelphia believe the system works well enough to proceed with building the rest of it. EarthLink said it did not know which outside company had been chosen by the city to test the system, and city officials did not return calls seeking comment, even though the project is one of Mayor Street’s major initiatives. Once completed, the network will span 135 sq mi.

AT&T loses Tennessee U-Verse fight – at least for this year:
AT&T’s costly yearlong effort to win approval of a bill in the state legislature to streamline its entry into Tennessee’s cable television market is dead for the year. The move came after continued fierce fighting over the issue among lawmakers, AT&T, the cable industry and the Tennessee Municipal League, which represents town and city governments. The cable industry opposed, TML and some individual cities — particularly Germantown — had waged a withering battle against the AT&T bill. AT&T had planned to start deploying its “U-verse” video and broadband technology over its existing telephone lines in Tennessee by the end of the year if the bill had passed.

SecurityBits:

One man’s Trojan is another’s legitimate app:
Spyware for Symbian version 9 is now available signed and verified through the Symbian Signed process, according to anti-malware specialist F-Secure. Though such applications track what the user is doing and automatically upload that information to a remote server, at least one application is carrying a Symbian Signed qualification; removing warnings that usually pop up when software is installed on a phone. It looks as though mobile phone users are just going to have to stick to installing software from known brands, and paying companies such as F-Secure to keep track of malware, rather than realising the potential digital signatures offered.

OpenDNS exec calls Google-Dell browser tool spyware:
Almost a year ago to the day, Google and Dell struck an agreement under which the latter installed several Google tools, including its Toolbar and Desktop, on outgoing computers. Dell also set Google as the default search engine in IE. Among the tools the two didn’t mention last year – the one which has David Ulevitch, CEO and founder of OpenDNS, hot under the collar – is a browser redirector that sends users who mistype a URL or enter a non-existent address to a Dell-branded page loaded with Google ads. “Dell and Google are now installing a program on computers that intercepts all sorts of queries that the browser would normally try to resolve,” said Ulevitch. “This program has no clear name and is very hard to uninstall. In some circles, people would call this ’spyware’.”

New antiphishing, antispam specifications unveiled:
Specifications for a new e-mail authentication tool to help fight against phishing and spam were published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), opening the way for software vendors and e-mail service providers to find better ways to protect e-mail recipients. Instead of using a traditional IP address to identify the sender of each message, DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) adds a digital signature associated with the organization’s domain name. That signature is then validated invisibly at the recipient’s end. “White lists” and “black lists” are then used by the e-mail infrastructure software to validate the reputation of the sender.

Hardware, Software, and other TidBytes:

Key U.S. senator urges rejection of XM-Sirius deal

DRM vs. Hackers: Time to Surrender?

Nvidia Graphics Chips Perform Double Duty as CPUs

Mozilla May Drop Firefox Support for Older Mac OS

Streamcast Continues Uphill Battle: Sues Joost For The Sins Of Its Founders

Microsoft “won’t buy Yahoo”

Lawyers warn of working from home pitfalls

Dell to sell at Wal-Mart

Got a question about your connection? Looking for a provider? Check out Broadband Reports

Morning Broadband Bytes 5/23/07

Around The Industry:

Spam deluge follows hack, forces UK ISP to permanently shut down email:
Customers of UK net provider Plusnet have been told to change the password for their account following a break-in by malicious hackers. In the attack, the hackers gained control of a Plusnet’s mail server and stole a list of e-mail addresses. Spammers used the list to deluge Plusnet customers with junk mail. Some customers may also have been exposed to a computer virus. The products director at Plusnet said: “After a full security audit, Plusnet’s webmail service was taken offline permanently at midday Wednesday, 16 May, as a precaution against a number of minor potential security vulnerabilities that had not been exploited.” In a separate note to customers, Plusnet said it was “impossible” to close these unexploited loopholes. A replacement webmail service had now been set up for customers to get at their online accounts.

Las Vegas is for VoIP lovers:
VoIP wares are front-and-center at Interop in Las Vegas this week. There’s Microsoft coming out with Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 and Avaya, Cisco Systems and others pushing their VoIP wares. Nortel Networks is showing off its its new Secure Router 4134, which integrates WAN routing, Ethernet switching, Security and IP telephony into a single platform. Startup Aerohive just came out of stealth mode and already its controllerless WLAN technology is getting attention from voice over Wi-Fi watchers. With Aerohive’s technology, intelligence resides in the HiveAP access points, eliminating the centralized switch. APs, though, still work together, with each discovering one another through mesh networking, automating RF management and supporting full-state roaming and best-path routing. Lose one AP and the others presumably pick up the slack so that your phone call never drops.

Trapeze announces 802.11n access point – with a difference:
Trapeze Networks announced an 802.11n-based wireless access point and emphasized a unique network architecture that the company claims will yield better performance and lower costs. Most significantly, according to the vendor, the access point works with existing WLAN controllers, rather than requiring a central controller, which lets IT deploy an 802.11n-enabled wireless network without having to rip and replace existing wireless gear. Trapeze also touted its RingMaster RF planning tools, which it says are crucial for mimimizing RF conflicts that may occur with the addition of higher-powered 802.11n access points into legacy wireless networks.

M2M: 3G taking on WiMax:
According to industry watchers ABI Research, as machine-to-machine communications move away from analogue, 2G and 2.5G many have predicted a wholesale transfer to 3G. The researchers believe, however, 3G will only reach 30 per cent penetration of M2M connectivity as third generation tech may mean greater potential cost for end-users and the likelihood that mobile operators will not be able to provide ubiquitous geographical coverage. Instead, WiMax and municipal wi-fi will also play a big part in M2M connectivity, the researchers believe. Others, including analysts Berg Insight, believe GSM will be the favored technology for M2M as mobile devices increasingly move to 3G.

Ovum blasts IEEE over 802.11n draft certification:
According to Ovum senior analyst, Mark Main, “In Ovum’s view the IEEE is now giving in to the commercial interests from the vendor community that has been pushing draft products for quite some time. This is bad for the credibility of the IEEE. If the WiFi alliance is so confident then we see few reasons why the final ratified specifications of 802.11n should differ from certified Draft 2.0. But the lengthened timescale to full ‘N’ revision suggests there will be differences.” He noted that “leading service providers are largely staying away from draft ‘N’ products for mass market wireless offerings and are sticking with ‘B/G’. Consumers might be best advised to do the same.”

Commentary: Do we really need broadband handouts?:
We’ve supposedly got cheap and standardised networking components that can allow countries to leapfrog generations of technology. We’ve got concepts like user-generated infrastructure where shared connections are being tied together to form one global hotspot. Competition between not only service providers but also different technologies should be bringing affordable and fast communications to everyone. So with all of this at our disposal, why does it sometimes seem that we’re regressing to a time when governments took the lead in providing communications infrastructure? Even in the most capitalist country in the world they’re calling for government intervention and more funding to improve the US’s poor showing in the broadband rankings. Has the market really failed so spectacularly that the only way to get communications infrastructure rolled out is for governments to throw money at the problem?

Commentary: Why we shouldn’t doubt the viability of muni wifi:
Back at Broadband Reports, news editor Karl noted a sudden glut of articles featuring doubts on the viability of muni wifi, including 2 stories from the AP. Esme Voss at MuniWireless has this to say in rebuttal to the AP: “At the heart of all of these complaints is service. If you can’t get a signal or if the network is too slow, that’s not good for city employees, residents, businesses and visitors. What makes good service? You need good backhaul, equipment that’s up to the task, a sufficient number of nodes (in dense environments, more than the 25 mesh nodes people thought were sufficient), and mostly, the interface that people see when they log on. Central to good service is a service provider who does care about its customers. I don’t think it matters now if the city’s network was funded with taxpayer money or not. Question is: how competent is the service provider they’ve hired to run the network? We know of big publicly traded telecommunications companies who should be experts in delivering good telecoms service (they’ve been around for decades after all), but who consistently provide very poor, slow Wi-Fi service in closed environments like airports. Add to this the fact that citywide Wi-Fi is such a new thing, hardly anyone has any experience setting one up especially in a large city. So we’re bound to see a lot of glitches. But over time, as the DSL providers did with DSL access, they improve.”

Aussie IT Minister sticks foot in mouth over OECD broadband findings:
After slamming the OECD’s findings on global broadband rankings as inaccurate, and accusing the Labor party of misleading the Australian public on its broadband adoption, IT minister, Senator Helen Coonan, may have some pie to clean from her face after an OECD spokesperson claimed the Minister’s department had been directly involved in the formulation of the findings she was criticising. When questioned about the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts involvement, a spokesperson for Coonan denied the department had any involvement in working with the OECD on the statistics. Further enquiries to clarify the situation went unheeded.

Motorola: WiMax not good for backhaul:
Countering conventional wisdom, Motorola WiMax head Thomas Mitoraj said that while WiMax can do voice, video, and data well, it is less effective when used for a single high-throughput application such as backhaul. This is directly contrary to the viewpoint of many companies in the emerging WiMax market, who see the broadband-wireless technology as ideal for both wide-area access networks in rural areas, particularly in the developing world, and for backhaul.Sprint Nextel( S), for instance, which is building a nationwide WiMax access network, plans to use the system for backhauling traffic from its cellular networks as well. Mitoraj said that proprietary technologies – such as Motorola’s Canopy system, which uses point-to-point and point-to-multipoint connections running over the unlicensed U-NII spectrum – work far better than WiMax for transmitting traffic back to wired nodes.

Politicians weigh renewal of Net access tax ban:
With only months left on a moratorium restricting state governments from taxing Internet access, the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday began a debate over whether the ban should be made permanent or allowed to lapse. Previous attempts at renewing the ban for more than two to four years have failed, in part because of resistance from state and local government lobby groups. State government representatives caution against making the moratorium permanent, saying it would deprive states indefinitely of vital revenue sources and that its original purpose–boosting the nascent Internet to commercial viability–has essentially been accomplished.

SecurityBits:

U.S. House approves less stringent Anti-spyware Bill:
House lawmakers approved a bill providing for up to five years in jail for those who use spyware to commit fraud but stops short of regulatory requirements sought by some lawmakers. The bill, passed by the House on Tuesday, is supported by the software industry. It omits provisions in competing legislation endorsed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee that would require software distributors and advertisers to clearly notify and obtain consent from consumers before programs can be loaded onto a computer. Rep. Zoe Lofgren said those types of requirements could hurt innovation and technology investment.

Wrestling with malware, Google launches security blog; clarifies ‘1-in-10 websites are malicious’ statement:
In a continuation of its year-old effort to make the Web more secure, Google today launched an online security blog to keep Internet users informed about security threats. It makes no mention, however, of Google’s ongoing vulnerability to redirection exploits. The initial post by Google’s Anti-Malware Team attempts to clarify misinterpretation of the company’s own study about the prevalence of malware online: “Unfortunately, the scope of the problem has recently been somewhat misreported to suggest that one in 10 Web sites are potentially malicious. To clarify, a sample-based analysis puts the fraction of malicious pages at roughly 0.1%.” While Google may be glad to set the record straight that only about one in 1,000 Web sites are potentially malicious, it says something about the state of online security that some simply accepted the 1-in-10 figure.

First Open Office virus discovered – Oh boy, this one is odd…:
A proof of concept virus has been found by experts at Sophos that targets the open-source office package OpenOffice and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux computers. The SB/Badbunny-A worm first infects you when you open an OpenOffice Draw file called badbunny.odg. The worm attempts to download and display an indecent JPEG image of a man wearing a bunny suit performing a sexual act in woodland. Sophos says the worm has not been found in the wild but, in an odd move, was sent to their security labs for analysis directly by the makers.

Opera plugs torrent security hole:
Opera has updated its namesake browser to plug a critical hole that lets attackers hijack Windows PCs by feeding them a malicious torrent file. “A specially crafted torrent file can cause a buffer overflow in Opera,” said Opera in a security advisory. “This allows arbitrary code to be injected and executed.” An exploit can be triggered if a user right-clicks on a specially crafted torrent file entry in the browser’s built-in download manager. Secunia rated the threat as “highly critical,” it’s second-highest ranking. Opera credited VeriSign iDefense Labs with reporting the bug. Windows users should download Opera 9.21 immediately, the Norwegian company recommended.

Hardware, Software, and other TidBytes:

XM restores radio service after software glitch knocks out a satellite

Survey: Half of Windows Vista adoption driven by security… Wait, what?

Verizon To Build Modern Emergency 911 System For New York City

Microsoft promises not to sue Linux people.. at least not this month

Sony blames Internet for poor PS3 performance

Mozilla denies Firefox 3.0 is in danger of bloat

Cisco borgs BroadWare Technologies

CNN in deal to offer more local news on Internet

Joost signs Creative Artists to scout out programs

Hate your cell company? Start your own

Need help with your connectons? Have questions about your high speed services? Check out Broadband Reports.com!

Morning Broadband Bytes 5/22/07

Around The Industry:

Fujitsu: New WiMax chip has ’significant performance improvements’ over competitors:
Fujitsu is announcing the company’s first mobile silicon on chip WiMax product at Interop in Las Vegas. The baseband product, known as the MB86K21 802.16e, is designed to show significant performance improvements over competing products in the WiMax chip market. The new device meets all requirements for the WiMax Forum Wave 2 mobile device certification. It supports 5 and 10 MHz channel bandwidths, has a variety of adaptive modulations modes and has security support built in. The product will support USB 2.0 and Card Bus / PCI host interface support. The company will start shipping samples in August.

ARIN calls for a faster migration to IPv6:
The coming shortage of Internet Protocol addresses has prompted the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) to call for a faster migration to the new Internet Protocol, IPv6. The current version of the Internet Protocol, IPv4, allows for over 4 billion (2^32) Internet addresses. Only 19% of the IPv4 address space remains. Somewhere around 2012-2013, the last Internet address bloc will be assigned and the Internet will be full, in a manner of speaking. ARIN’s general counsel, and the body’s CEO/President see potential legal problems arising as address scarcity leads to a new black market in IP numbers. IPv6 promises some 16 billion-billion possible addresses.

Telstra forced to snip its copper?:
According to an internal email apparently leaked to The Inquirer, embattled Aussie incumbent telco Telstra bemoans the ACCC’s inquiry into whether or not vary the ULL service to ensure it encompasses ‘sub-loop unbundling’. Sub-loop unbundling enables other carriers to interconnect with Telstra’s customer access network at any point between the exchange and the customer premises. According to the email, “Should sub-loop unbundling go ahead, it could mean that competitors could simply build their own nodes right next to our existing Telstra nodes or any other physically accessible point of their choosing, and you, as members of Telstra Services, would be required to, at the beck-and-call of these competitors, go out and physically cut the copper wire from Telstra’s network and connect it to the competitor’s node.”

Internet pioneer tapped to oversee its redesign:
The National Science Foundation announced that BBN Technologies, a government contractor that played a key role in the Internet’s birth, will oversee efforts to redesign the network from scratch. The NSF said BBN will get up to $10 million over four years to oversee the planning and design of the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI. The NSF already has been funding several projects at universities and elsewhere through Future Internet Network Design, or FIND. It has been pushing to build GENI as a testbed for researchers to explore clean-slate ideas without damaging the current Internet. Many researchers want to rethink the Internet’s underlying architecture, saying a “clean-slate” approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since the Internet’s birth in 1969.

Competition – ain’t that a good thing:
Om Malik comments over at GigaOm: “Competition in broadband – and I mean real competition not what passes for competition in the US – is such a beautiful thing. It works so well for the consumers. UK broadband is a perfect example. NTL and Virgin merged to become Virgin Media, the largest broadband provider in the British Isles. They didn’t do such a good job of keeping their customers happy, and British Telecom surged ahead, leading to speculation that some private equity guys are going to buy out Virgin Media. And while these two are jostling for the top spot, the little players are trying to do their best to lure customers, and offering all sorts of interesting combinations.” But then, curiously, after citing all this great competition, Om adds, “I wonder if any of our readers are tracking the broadband prices in UK and if they are really heading south.”

Network capacity: A speeding train heading toward a brick wall:
“Be very, very afraid!” says Mike Saunders of Level 3 Communications expressing a dire warning to carriers and other purchasers of Atlantic capacity. His view? Prices must – and will – rise by at least three times by 2010. Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Cables, a major manufacturer of submarine cables, echoed the view that prices must rise. The cost of purchasing and installing a new cable is not going to go down any further. The industry has gone through a loss-making period and must now “return to profitability or die”. The component costs of cable construction, such as copper and fuel, have risen dramatically over the past two years. The supply chain implications are profound: until the retail user at the opposite end of the supply chain is prepared to pay for connectivity that had previously been regarded as “free”, the industry economic model will remain broken.

Keeping telco speeds honest:
Broadband measurer Epitiro expects to start monitoring the technical performance of New Zealand’s five largest ISPs by the end of this month. The company would monitor the broadband performance of Xtra, TelstraClear, Ihug, Slingshot and Orcon in the cities of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch by June. Epitiro provides benchmarks for UK Isps and the public with monthly releases of the top five providers. Mayhap US providers should volunteer for such a service. I bet the results would be interesting, to saythe least.

Poll: Verizon A-OK:
Is spending nearly one fifth of your market cap rolling out a 21st century fiber network a smart investment? Light Reading conducted a poll to see what letter grade our readers would give each carrier for the first quarter of 2007. About 100 readers responded and a convincing 60% gave Verizon Communications an A. Another notable result from the poll was the disagreement shown with our high marks for Qwest Communications. About 82% of the respondents gave a mark between C and F — 28% failed the carrier. As for AT&T, it seems that most people are taking a wait-and-see approach; most respondents gave it a B or C.

Qwest’s quest: Making believe DSL is faster:
Paul Kapustka comments for GigaOm: “After spending hard time covering last year’s net neutrality battles, it’s easy to get used to hearing telephone companies saying up is really down, and black is really white. That’s why we’re not going to even nibble at the pitch Qwest’s PR representatives sent our way Monday, an invitation to hear more about Qwest’s “broadband challenge,” a campaign “attacking the belief that cable broadband is faster than DSL,” says the email. Without even mentioning (OK, or ridiculing it more than once) the weak, home-baked “statistics” we’re sure the campaign is chock-full of, we offer just one word: Speedtest. That, and your checkbook, is all you need to determine which service is faster, or a better value, where the pipe connects to your ‘puter. Truly, you do not need a “broadband challenge” or more cooked demos or more empty promises of future improvements. All you need is proof: how many bits can your service deliver (down AND upstream) to where you live, now, at what price.”

South Korea busts attempt to sell Wibro high speed wireless technology to U.S.:
South Korean prosecutors have indicted four engineers for allegedly trying to sell Wibro, South Korea’s homegrown next-generation mobile Internet technology, to the U.S. for $190 million. The technology theft was checked and stopped before the “core” data was handed over to a U.S. technology firm, only identified by its initial “I”. Three of the four engineers are former employees of Posdata, which has spent 90 billion Won in developing the new technology, while the fourth was a current emplyee of the firm. Posdata filed a lawsuit with a US court last week. Prosecutors have arrested the incumbent Posdata employee, and are seeking the repatriation of the trio, believed to be in the U.S.

SecurityBits:

Key-logging worm wriggles out of Russia:
A newer and decidedly more dastardly version of the Russian Gozi virus, which uses key stroke logging capabilities to steal bank account details, has been loosed onto the Interweb, security experts have warned. The newer version includes a key stroke logging capability which appears to be activated when someone using an infected PC visits an e-banking website. It also includes a packing utility which manipulates parts of its own code to evade detection by standard signature-based anti-virus software.

Zango (formally 180solutions) sues Spyware Doctor for preventing its product from working:
Zango has sued PC Tools over the way that Spyware Doctor rated Zango’s software. PC Tools says that the legal efforts are an attempt by Zango to influence its re-classification process. PC Tools, which ships with Google Pack, gives Zango an elevated threat level rating. Zango wants $35 million in damages, because Spyware Doctor removes Zango’s software without warning users that it will be deleted. Zango, formerly known as 180solutions, in November paid $3 million to settle US Federal Trade Commission charges that its software was being installed deceptively on PCs forcing them to endure pop-up ads.

A trio of Symbian smartphone Trojans:
Malware profiteers have created a trio of smartphone Trojans that send out premium-rate SMS messages from infected Symbian S60 devices. The Trojans, all members of the Viver strain, pose as utility programs for Symbian phones and have been uploaded to at least one popular file sharing site, F-Secure reports. After infection, the Viver Trojans immediately start sending SMS messages to premium-rate numbers in Russia. The messages are sent with proper international area codes so they are able to reach their destination even from infected devices outside Russia. Although it represents an evolution in mobile malware techniques, let’s not get carried away. Infections for mobile malware are rare and ordinary Symbian users have little to fear.

Office 2007 left unprotected in update snafu:
Office 2007 users running Windows Vista may not have realized that their systems had not received several of this month’s patches, MS said last week when it acknowledged that its security update services had failed to deploy the fixes. Only Vista users with Office 2007 on their hard drives who rely on Microsoft Update or Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) for patches were affected. The updates that may not have been deployed two weeks ago included ones for Excel 2007 and Office 2007 in general. All were rated “important,” the second-highest ranking in Microsoft’s four-level threat system. MS urged users to run Windows Update or WSUS again to guarantee that Office 2007 is up to date.

Hardware, Software, and other TidBytes:

One Laptop per Child accuses Intel of undermining not for profit scheme

Dell employee doen’t expect Ubuntu PC’s to do well

Microsoft Says ‘EU Version’ Of Windows Vista A Dud

Police raid ends allofmp3.com vouchers

Apple hit with class-action lawsuit over grainy MacBook displays

Symantec screw-up leaves millions of Chinese XP users with a blue screen

iPhone prompts accelerated Cingular rebranding

“Excessive network traffic” caused a nuclear reactor to shut down in Alabama last year

Avaya adds low cost VoIP phones, new IP PBX system
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