TechEye |  |
- US nearly had an internet in 1965
- Huge DoS attack hits China
- Teens worried about internet privacy
- Wingnuts pushed telco towards censorship of Al Jazeera
- Apple tries to limit ebook punishment
- Intel enables SSD overcocking
- Intel to fire entire PR team
- NSA and China collaborated to spy on the UN
| US nearly had an internet in 1965 Posted: 26 Aug 2013 04:03 AM PDT The US could have had the beginnings of an Internet as early as 1965 it if it had had not been for Big Business not seeing the potential. According to Forbes, in 1965, Western Union developed a cunning plan for pioneering what it called a "nationwide information utility" which was supposed to provide "all the information service required and wanted by any and all kinds of customers". At the time the electric utilities were trying to come up with ideas to cope with competition from distributed power generation. If the plan had gone ahead, Western would have anticipated the beginning of the Information Age, and been at the forefront of making it happen. In fact, if the plan had gone ahead Western Union would have been the internet. To be fair, in the 1970s, Western Union International provided the US Department of Defense with high-speed telecommunications facilities between the US, Hawaii, Germany and Blighty. It was this project which was the test bed for the DOD's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and provided a proof of concept for packet switching technology. But it was nothing like the glorious plan that Western Digital had in 1965 because the outfit was relying on the electric power grid as its business model. The 1965 report found by Forbes said that Western thought that using an information utility could provide a service to consumers more economically than they could provide for themselves. However, what Western Digital was suggesting was building something using the business models of the industrial age which were centrally controlled and governed by standards and processes. As a result, the internet would be slow, controlled and very dull. It probably would never get the same traction as the decentralised, and rapidly evolving interweb we know and love. Ironically, it would be exactly the sort of business model that governments would like because it would be easier to control and spy on people. |
| Posted: 26 Aug 2013 03:48 AM PDT A massive denial-of-service attack took down much of China’s internet on Sunday. The attack was described as the biggest DoS attack ever faced by the Chinese government. It began early Sunday and in a couple of hours it picked up to the point that it started to affect users. The attack targeted the .cn registry which was eventually knocked out for two to four hours. Lucliky, most .cn sites weathered the storm, relying on registry records stored by service providers. The attack appears to have stopped and Chinese users are now able to access all websites smoothly, apart from those that discuss democracy, dissidents, Tibet, the Tiananmen Square massacre and a few thousand other things communists don’t like to talk about. The big question is who was behind the attack. Although things are relatively quiet on the international front, China is embroiled in a few internal PR disasters, including the trial of Bo Xilai and a crackdown on social media. The Great Firewall of China is good at filtering embarrassing internet searches, but it was never designed with security in mind. Well, at least not this sort of security. CloudFlare says the attack could have been carried out by a single individual, despite its sophistication and apparent success, reports the WSJ. |
| Teens worried about internet privacy Posted: 26 Aug 2013 03:47 AM PDT A survey shows that teens are probably more worried about internet privacy than their parents. According to the 2012 Teens and Privacy Management Survey carried out by Pew Internet many teen apps users have taken steps to uninstall or avoid apps over concern about their privacy. Teen girls are more likely to delete location information as a majority of them have disabled location tracking features on cell phones and in apps because they are worried about others' access to that information. Pew said that the survey was conducted among US teens ages 12-17. More than half of all teens have downloaded apps to their mobile phone or tablet computer and 51 per cent of teen apps users have avoided certain apps due to privacy concerns. Over a quarter have uninstalled an app because they learned it was collecting personal information that they didn't wish to share. More than 46 percent have turned off location tracking features on their mobile phone or in an app because they were worried about the privacy of their information. |
| Wingnuts pushed telco towards censorship of Al Jazeera Posted: 26 Aug 2013 02:16 AM PDT Right-wing nuts leaned on AT&T to block an affiliation agreement with Al Jazeera America. The accusation comes in an ironically heavily censored description of the alleged "bad faith scheme" which has been presented to court. Al Jazeera said that the deal was blocked because of AT&T's subscriber base in conservative states such as Texas. Apparently AT&T was worried that honouring the contract to Al Jazeera would lose it the support of its conservative customers and began try and find an excuse to unilaterally terminate the Affiliation Agreement. Al Jazeera America launched last week but AT&T's U-verse pay-TV service did not carry the network. AT&T spokesperson Mark Siegel said that Al Jazeera has mischaracterised the facts. He said that Al Jazeera had messed around and AT&T terminated the agreement and will no longer carry Current TV on U-Verse. Al Jazeera has had a lot of trouble getting distributors in the US. This is because it was perceived by some as being anti-American during the Iraq war. During the war, while many US channels were treating the war like a fixed sports match, Al Jazeera was providing balanced coverage. Before AT&T's announcement, Al Jazeera America said it would be available to more than 40 million people and roughly half the reach of Time Warner CNN. Al Jazeera's lawsuit wants the court to declare AT&T to be in material breach of the affiliation agreement, ordered to honour the agreement and write a big cheque. It also said that AT&T was aware that Al Jazeera would be offering a new news and information service that would replace the Current service, and that it would be called 'Al Jazeera America'. |
| Apple tries to limit ebook punishment Posted: 26 Aug 2013 02:14 AM PDT Apple lawyers are flat out trying to prevent the US Department of Justice getting an injunction over its ebook antics. The DoJ wants an injunction to stop Apple fixing the price of ebooks and thus keeping the electronic book price high. Apple moaned that the DoJ injunction is designed to "inflict punishment" and must be rejected by the court, What the two sides are trying to sort out is how to stop Apple shafting its customers with its anti-trust antics. On 10 July, US District Judge Denise Cote ruled that Apple had conspired with five major publishers to undermine pricing by rivals including Amazon.com which dominates the market for electronic books. According to Reuters, the DoJ wants Apple to hire an external monitor, let ebook retailers add hyperlinks to their own websites in their apps without charge, and face limits on how it negotiates for other content including movies, music and TV shows. Apple says the government has no power to stop a successful company from making the sort of business decisions it likes. After all, Apple is a popular company and the government has no right to think it has the power to run the country. For some reason, the DoJ appears to be caving in to Apple in a way we didn't see with Microsoft. Already it has suggested halving the length of its previously proposed injunction to five years from 10, with leave to seek as many as five one-year extensions if needed. It was also recommended that Apple hold staggered negotiations with the publishers, starting in two years, hopefully minimising the chance of future collusion. The DoJ removed a demand about the management of Apple's App Store. However, that is not good enough for Apple which seems to think that it did nothing wrong and should be allowed to continue. The DoJ said that Apple wants to continue business as usual, regardless of the antitrust laws. It told the court that it should have no confidence that Apple effectively can ensure that its illegal conduct will not be repeated. There must be significant oversight by someone not inside Apple's culture of insensitivity to basic tenets of antitrust law, the DoJ said. |
| Posted: 26 Aug 2013 02:12 AM PDT Intel has had a chequered past when it comes to overcocking. First it didn’t care, then it kindly asked people not to torture its lovely processors and then it realised it could make a quick buck peddling unlocked processors for enthusiasts. Today it’s possible to overcock just about anything, phones, tablets, CPUs, graphics cards, smart toasters. SSDs are apparently the next step. According to Xbit Labs, Intel will demonstrate SSD overcocking at IDF next month. It’s not as straightforward as overcocking a CPU, but it sure does sound a bit easier than making a 7200rpm hard drive run at 10000rpm. SSD performance is generally dictated by two main factors, the speed and type of controller used and the speed of NAND chips. It is possible to tinker with both, although upping the controller clock sounds a bit easier. However, although it’s possible, it doesn’t exactly make too much sense. The SATA 6Gbps is the bottleneck right now, so high-end SSDs don’t stand much to gain from overcocking. It does, however, make more sense than Intel handbags. That said, Intel is planning to rollout SATA Express chipsets next year, effectively doubling the theoretical transfer rates and making overcocked SSDs a possibility. |
| Posted: 26 Aug 2013 01:25 AM PDT Impeccable sources inside Intel inform TechEye that its freshly hatched CEO Brian Krzanich is about to fire the entire PR team in a bid to turn the company’s public image round as the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) looms. |
| NSA and China collaborated to spy on the UN Posted: 26 Aug 2013 12:57 AM PDT It is starting to look like the book of spying etiquette will have to be rewritten after failing to deal with a very embarrassing situation in the UN. According to documents seen by Germany's Der Spiegel, the US National Security Agency (NSA) cracked the encryption protecting the United Nations' internal videoconferencing system and when it got there it discovered China was already there and listening in. What does one say? Do you politely ask to leave the room or continue on and pretend you haven't seen each other? Apparently the spooks hacked the UN, which has its headquarters in New York, in the summer of 2012. Within three weeks of initially gaining access to the UN system, the NSA had increased the number of such decrypted communications from 12 to 458. The US spooks found that there had been "hundreds of data breaches since 2004" to a Chinese military unit in Shanghai. Chinese authorities rejected the claims, following the etiquette laid down in Spying for Dummies (seventh edition) which says that if you are ever caught deny everything. The US however follows the advice of Jane's book of Spying for Girls which says that if you are ever caught, try to arrest the person who catches you and have them shot. Der Spiegel's report is a follow up from a story about the NSA spying on the EU. It also exposed a "Special Collection Service," which is jointly staffed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and NSA. The system exists in over 80 embassies and consulates around the world, often without the knowledge of the host country. All this was revealed by Edward Snowden, an American citizen and former NSA contractor. |
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