TechEye

Turks on back foot over Twitter
Delays hinder Microsoft Nokia deal
Nvidia, AMD and Intel push OpenGL
US put the backdoors in Huawei gear
Cisco charges onto the cloud

Posted: 24 Mar 2014 02:30 AM PDT

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is finding his war on Twitter is proving to be his Gallipoli.

Erdoğan's "war on Twitter" started as a plan to stop people talking about a government corruption scandal which was proving embarrassing.

After pledging to "wipe out Twitter," he ordered Turkish ISPs to block the social networking site, redirecting requests to a government webpage.

However that was quickly circumvented by Twitter users through the use of alternative DNS servers.

Now the government has ordering ISPs to block traffic to the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses assigned to Twitter. This move essentially erases Twitter from the internet within Turkey.

Twitter is now only available to those who do not have access to SMS messaging, a foreign virtual private network or Web proxy service, or the Tor anonymsing network. In other words, despite Erdoğan's best efforts, Twitter is still open to anyone who still wants it.

To make matters worse, the social media campaign against Erdoğan has continued to grow as ordinary Turks get jolly cross at his censorship antics.

Immediately following the ban, Twitter usage in Turkey rose 138 percent, so rather than fewer reading about Erdoğan's corruption scandal, more people are.

Now Erdoğan has ordered his cyber warriors to start attacking DNS providers in a bid to keep Turks inside their own restricted internet.

According to the Internet activist collective Telecomix, there also were reports that devices configured to use Google's DNS service or other DNS providers outside the country were being hijacked to a local DNS server by the Wi-Fi network at Istanbul's airport.

Business is booming for VPN services and the Tor anonymising network in Turkey. Telecomix has been providing a list of Tor gateways for Turkish users. Tor network metrics show a huge spike in users directly connecting to the Tor network over the past few days, growing from 25,000 users to 35,000 since March 19.

Downloads of VPN software have also exploded with VPN apps for Apple's iOS and Google's Android becoming the most downloaded apps from their respective app stores in Turkey.

Delays hinder Microsoft Nokia deal

Posted: 24 Mar 2014 02:28 AM PDT

Nokia has warned that its deal with Microsoft appears to have become bogged down and will be delayed at least until April.

The $7.5 billion sale of most of Nokia's phone business to Microsoft was expected to close in the first quarter.

Reuters said that Microsoft has also expects the deal to close in April.

The deal has been rubber stamped by the authorities in the US and EU but apparently some antitrust authorities in Asia are still conducting their reviews, it said in a statement.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, said on the company's bog that Vole was nearing the final stages of our global regulatory approval process.

"Currently we are awaiting approval confirmation in the final markets."

The company last week was given a new $414 million tax claim by Indian authorities, following a recent Supreme Court decision to order Nokia to give a $571 million guarantee before transferring its Chennai factory to Microsoft.

Nokia said its tax disputes in India would not have an impact on the deal schedule.

Observers are not too stressed at the delays. It took Vole five months to complete its purchase of online chat company Skype in 2011.

Nvidia, AMD and Intel push OpenGL

Posted: 24 Mar 2014 02:26 AM PDT

The normally spitting at each other graphics chips makers Nvidia, AMD and Intel shared the same stage at this year's Game Developers Conference to push OpenGL.

The unholy trinity wants developers to use OpenGL because they can easily get a boost of nearly 15 times the normal performance.

According to AMD's Graham Sellers, Intel's Tim Foley, Nvidia's Cass Everitt and John McDonald these high level OpenGL implementations can reduce the driver overheard up to 10 times.

They also mentioned during their presentation that with proper implementations of these high level OpenGL techniques, the driver overhead could be reduced to almost zero.

OpenGL is multi-platform and can easily reduce the workload for the developers to support multiple platforms at the same time, they said.

OpenGL is vendor independent which means that it is available for any hardware platform without the need of custom software or APIs.

Performance improvements are because OpenGL reduces the driver overhead associated on the desktop system, where the driver overhead results in lower frame rates, the trio agreed.

Performance improvements are because OpenGL reduces the driver overhead associated on the desktop system, where the driver overhead results in lower frame rates.

What is interesting is that the three managed to spend time together on stage without attempting to decapitate each other which probably defies some law of physics or biology.

US put the backdoors in Huawei gear

Posted: 24 Mar 2014 02:24 AM PDT

When the US was complaining that the Chinese firm Huawei had security backdoors, it knew this fact because it had put them there.

Huawei was banned from competing against US companies because these backdoors were apparently able to be used by the Chinese government to spy.

However according to papers discovered by Spiegel, the backdoors had been placed by the NSA as part of a major intelligence offensive against China.

The NSA made a special effort to target Huawei on behalf of US companies who were finding it hard to compete against the Chinese outfit.

At the beginning of 2009, the NSA began an extensive operation, referred to internally as "Shotgiant," against the company.

A special unit with the US intelligence agency succeeded in infiltrating Huwaei's network and copied a list of 1,400 customers as well as internal documents providing training to engineers on the use of Huwaei products, among other things.

NSA workers accessed the email archive, but also the secret source code of individual Huawei products. Beginning in January 2009 the NSA snuffled messages from company CEO Ren Zhengfei and Chairwoman Sun Yafang.

The NSA had such good access and so much data that it did not know what to do with it, states one internal document.

An NSA document said the justification for attacking Huawei was that "many of our targets communicate over Huawei produced products; we want to make sure that we know how to exploit these products".

It was also worried that "Huawei's widespread infrastructure will provide the PRC (People's Republic of China) with SIGINT capabilities". SIGINT is agency jargon for signals intelligence. The documents do not state whether the agency found information indicating that to be the case.

However, the NSA also indicates that that the Chinese were working to make American and Western firms "less relevant". That Chinese push is beginning to open up technology standards that were long determined by US companies, and China is controlling an increasing amount of the flow of information on the net.

The US was declaring that Huawei networks were unsafe while itself spying on the company.

In a statement, Huawei spokesman Bill Plummer criticised the spying measures saying that it was ironic that the US was "doing to us is what they have always charged that the Chinese are doing through us".

He also said that the US spying efforts prove that the NSA knew that the company is independent and has no ties to any government.

Cisco charges onto the cloud

Posted: 24 Mar 2014 02:21 AM PDT

Networking giant Cisco has said that it wants to offer cloud computing services and is writing a billion dollar cheque over the next two years.

Needless to say, Cisco has been running late and the market currently led by the world's biggest online retailer Amazon.com which does not seem to be giving up.

Cisco said it will build data centres to help run the new service called Cisco Cloud Services.

Rob Lloyd, Cisco's president of development and sales said that everybody is realising the cloud can be a vehicle for achieving better economics and lower cost.

However, he added that it did not mean that Cisco was planning to go head-to-head with Amazon, yet.

Microsoft cut prices for hosting and processing customers' online data in a bid to take on Amazon. So far, it has not made much headway.

Cisco said that it will start to discuss the new service today at a conference with its customers.