The download feature, which lets Comcast adopt an iTunes-ish model without the incremental pay-per-view component (for now), is a nice add-on because it lets users watch shows and movies on planes and in other venues that usually don’t have a solid enough broadband connection for streaming.
via Light Reading Cable – The Bauminator – Who’s Behind Comcast’s Video Downloader?.
“You will see the World War I artillery acronyms are shorter, but, that is because, you have to remember, that, the primitive radio-transmitters that sent the Morse code were run by batteries, and, those didn’t last much more than a half-hour tops, probably less.
“Thus all World War I codes had to be S-n-S, Short-n-Sweet.
via BBC News – Has World War II carrier pigeon message been cracked?.
Kamailio™ (former OpenSER) is an Open Source SIP Server released under GPL, able to handle thousands of call setups per second. Among features: asynchronous TCP, UDP and SCTP, secure communication via TLS for VoIP (voice, video); IPv4 and IPv6; SIMPLE instant messaging and presence with embedded XCAP server and MSRP relay; ENUM; DID and least cost routing; load balancing; routing fail-over; accounting, authentication and authorization; support for many backend systems such as MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, Radius, LDAP, Redis, Cassandra; XMLRPC control interface, SNMP monitoring. It can be used to build large VoIP servicing platforms or to scale up SIP-to-PSTN gateways, PBX systems or media servers like Asterisk™, FreeSWITCH™ or SEMS. Kamailio and the SIP Express Router (SER) teamed up for the integration of the two applications and new development.
via Kamailio SIP Server.
In this short post, I’d like to show how hash-DoS can be applied to the btrfs file-system with some astonishing and unexpected success. Btrfs, while still in development stage, is widely considered as being a viable successor of ext4, and an implementation of it is already part of the Linux kernel. According to this page,
The flyby was the first time an unmanned spacecraft launched from Earth has taken such a close viewing of the asteroid, named after a Celtic god.
It also made China the fourth country after the United States, the European Union and Japan to be able to examine an asteroid by spacecraft.
Chang’e-2 came as close as 3.2 km from Toutatis and took pictures of the asteroid at a relative velocity of 10.73 km per second, the SASTIND said in a statement.
via Chinese space probe flies by asteroid Toutatis — Shanghai Daily | 上海日报 — English Window to China New.
If you decided not to go hosted and are thinking about implementing a premise-based VoIP solution or you already have a system in place, here are some of the methods which are used to secure PBX systems.
If a firewall is a gate, a session border controller is a canal. Whereas a gate can only be opened or shut, canals have a series of trenches which are filled and then released. This buffer allows much more complex checks and adjustments than a simple open or shut gate. A Session Border Controller has some of the layer 2-4 port controls, but where they really shine is in their Layer 7 capabilities.
via 2600hz Blog • The Difference Between a Firewall and an SBC.
Lego goes to great lengths to make its pieces really, really well, says David Robertson, who is working on a book about Lego.
Inside every Lego brick, there are three numbers, which identify exactly which mold the brick came from and what position it was in in that mold. That way, if there’s a bad brick somewhere, the company can go back and fix the mold.
via Why Legos Are So Expensive — And So Popular : Planet Money : NPR.
Much of the Internet’s end-to-end security relies on the SSL protocol, along with its underlying X.509 certificate infrastructure. However, the system remains quite brittle due to its liberal delegation of signing authority: a single compromised certification authority undermines trust globally. The ICSI Notary helps clients to identify malicious certificates by providing a third-party perspective on what they should expect to receive from a server. While similar in spirit to existing efforts, such as Convergence and the EFF’s SSL observatory, our notary collects certificates passively from live upstream traffic at multiple independent Internet sites, aggregating them into a central database in near-realtime.
As part of the demonstration, Cui inserted and removed a small external circuit board from the phone’s Ethernet port — a move he asserted could be accomplished by someone left alone inside a corporate office for a few seconds. He then used his own smartphone to capture every word spoken near the VoIP phone, even though it was still “on-hook.”
via Security Researcher Compromises Cisco VoIP Phones With Vulnerability – Dark Reading.