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- Intel and Fujitsu show off photonics server
- Google’s giant barges are nothing to do with aliens
- US spying is killing its own cloud industry
- Healthcare.gov may not have been hit by DoS attack
- Hackers took more from Adobe than claimed
- Twitter share price soars after float
- Spy agencies don’t monitor plebs
| Intel and Fujitsu show off photonics server Posted: 08 Nov 2013 02:49 AM PST Intel and Fujitsu have been showing off a new server which uses Intel silicon photonics technology with an Optical PCI Express (OPCIe) design. The gear will allows the storage and networking to be split up and moved away from the CPU motherboard which will mean that components are easier to cool. Fujitsu has now built something which includes all the cables and connectors optimised for photonics, with the first Intel Silicon Photonics link carrying PCI Express protocol. According to a press release the Photonics allows components to communicate using fiber optic cabling rather than electrical wiring and the new Fujitsu server relies on a field-programmable gate array. As far as the hardware is concerned Fujitsu took two bog standard Primergy RX200 servers and added an Intel Silicon Photonics module into each along with an Intel designed FPGA. This made the PCI Express "optical friendly" and then they were able to send PCI Express protocol optically through an MXC connector to an expansion box with several solid state disks and Xeon Phi co-processors. All this gave designers the chance to increase the storage capacity of the server, to increase the effective CPU capacity of the Xeon E5′s, and cooling density. Photonic signally creates less electromagnetic radiation noise and the cables are a bit lighter. |
| Google’s giant barges are nothing to do with aliens Posted: 08 Nov 2013 02:48 AM PST Google has finally come clean on its use of a giant barge floating in the San Francisco Bay. Google Barge has had many people speculating on what it might be used for. These ranged from a floating data centre to a place where aliens were cryogenically frozen while waiting for the return of the Mother Ship. Others had suggested, somewhat hopefully, it was a place for a decadent Christmas party where Google and members of the press would met up for an orgy the like of which had not been seen since the days of the Roman Emperor Caligula. More cynical members of the TechEye staff sniffed and bet us a fiver that it would probably be something very dull. Tragically it looks like we owe them a fiver. Google has announced that the barge, docked at a pier on Treasure Island, houses a four-story structure made from shipping containers. These do not contain aliens, or vampires, but an interactive space where people can learn about new technology. It looks like the barge would house a floating showroom for the company's Google Glass connected eyewear and other products. Google plans to build a small fleet of luxury event spaces designed to be disassembled and transported via barge or train to other locations. Apparently this will upstage Apple in terms of coolness and make up for the fact that Google does not have stores to peddle its specs from. |
| US spying is killing its own cloud industry Posted: 08 Nov 2013 02:46 AM PST US mass internet spying is killing off its chances to be seen as a world player on the cloud internet scene. Cloud based systems are tipped to be the next big thing in business, but the founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales has warned that the US has disqualified itself before the race is run. He told the Economic Times that the revelations of US mass spying is going to have a big impact on the cloud computing industry as people are afraid to put data in the US. Wales said that BMW is not going to be at all happy about putting its data into US cloud companies where the can be sniffed out by US spooks and could find their way under the bonnet of competitors. But the spying allegations will also harm operations like Wikipedia, Wales warned. It will be difficult to convince oppressive regimes to respect basic freedoms and privacy as Wikipedia seeks to limit censorship of its content. The allegations of spying give the Chinese every excuse to be as bad as they have been. He said that the disclosures had been really embarrassing. After all the US could not lecture China about press freedoms and censorship while it was monitoring the Internet. China and countries in the Middle East have been most active in filtering Wikipedia content to restrict access to certain information, Wales said. Now they can say that they need to do that for the same reasons that the Americans need to readour emails. |
| Healthcare.gov may not have been hit by DoS attack Posted: 08 Nov 2013 02:45 AM PST The US press is full of reports that the troubled US Healthcare.gov website appears to have been hit by a Denial of Service attack. Despite huge amounts of dosh thrown at the site, Healthcare.gov has been plagued with problems since launching on October 1. This week Security software provider Arbor Networks commented that there were rumors of a new denial-of-service attack crashing the federal online healthcare exchange site but wondered why anyone would say that. But to be fair to Arbor, a DoS attack is the sort of thing that it was expecting and it had lots of defenses in place to stop it. It is not even sure that a DoS attack is actually happening. Writing in their bog Arbor researchers said that this particular attack is "unlikely to succeed in affecting the availability of the healthcare.gov site." The outfit had recently found one tool that is designed to overload the webpage. The standalone tool is written in Delphi and performs layer seven requests to get the healthcare.gov webpage. The tool alternates between requesting https://www.healthcare.gov and https://www.healthcare.gov/contact-us. But this was also unlikely to work. Marc Eisenbarth, a research manager for Arbor Security Engineering and Response Team, suggested that there are political motivations behind making the site appear under attack. He wrote that ASERT has seen site specific denial of service tools in the past related to topics of social or political interest. This application continues a trend ASERT is seeing with denial of service attacks being used as a means of retaliation against a policy, legal rulings or government actions. Given that the site might be just crashing anyway, it is possible that those who want to see the whole Obama care are stirring up FUD that a DoS attack will steal their data. |
| Hackers took more from Adobe than claimed Posted: 08 Nov 2013 02:23 AM PST In a move which will be a blow for Adobe’s subscription software system, a computer security firm has uncovered data it says belongs to some 152 million Adobe Systems user accounts. According to the Verge this means that a breach reported a month ago is far bigger than Adobe has so far revealed and is one of the largest on record. All this is happening while Adobe is hoping to make a killing selling its software on the cloud, something which depends on a reputation for some brilliant security. LastPass, a password security firm, said that it has found email addresses, encrypted passwords and password hints stored in clear text from Adobe user accounts on a dodgy hacker site. Adobe last week admitted attackers had stolen data on more than 38 million customer accounts, on top of the theft of information on nearly three million accounts that it disclosed nearly a month earlier. All this is well short of the 152 million figure, which would seem to indicate the bad guys have most of Adobe’s client list and passwords. Now Adobe has confirmed that LastPass had found records stolen from its datacentre but downplayed the significance of the security firm's findings. Adobe said that it was inaccurate to say 152 million customer accounts had been compromised because the database attacked was a backup system about to be decommissioned. Records include some 25 million records containing invalid email addresses, 18 million with invalid passwords. The spokesman said that a huge percentage of the accounts were fictitious, having been set up for one-time use so that their creators could get free software. Adobe said that it had told some 38 million active Adobe ID users and is now contacting holders of inactive accounts. However LastPass Chief Executive Joe Siegrist was more scathing. He said that Adobe failed to use best practices for securing the stolen passwords. The passwords in the database were not protected with a technique known as "salting," which means adding a secret code to every password after it is scrambled and before it is stored. This stops encrypted versions of the same password looking identical. Siegrist could spot the most frequently used password in the group, which was used 1.9 million times. The database has 108 million email addresses with passwords shared in multiple accounts. If the 152 million figure is correct, then it breaks all records. The The largest cyber breach previously reported was a 2009 attack on Heartland Payment Systems in which more than 130 million credit card numbers were stolen. |
| Twitter share price soars after float Posted: 08 Nov 2013 02:18 AM PST Shares in Twitter (tick: TWTR) soared by 72 percent after it floated on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) yesterday. |
| Spy agencies don’t monitor plebs Posted: 07 Nov 2013 07:18 AM PST The three heads of the UK intelligence agencies gave an account of themselves to a parliamentary committee today and sought to re-assure people that our secrets are safe with them. Sir Iain Lobban from GCHQ, Sir John Sawers from MI6, and Andrew Parker from MI5 sought to defend criticism that their powers were too great and that peoples’ privacy was threatened. MI5's Andrew Parker said: "Secret is not sinister." GCHQ head Sir Iain Lobban said: “We do not spend our time listening to the telephone calls and reading the emails of everyone. The internet is a great way to anonymise information.” |
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