As Microsoft gains, VMware insists that it maintains the upper hand

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“Everybody has a hypervisor today and everybody gives it away for free,” Maritz continued. “What it’s all about are the automation layers on top of it,” and extending the benefits of virtualization from servers to the entire network.

How is VMware achieving that? The company today explained it wants to make “virtual data center” a phrase just as commonly uttered as virtual machines. Instead of merely virtualizing CPU capacity, a virtual data center brings CPU, storage, network services, security, load balancing, and other characteristics together into a single profile that can be easily reproduced and provisioned.

via As Microsoft gains, VMware insists that it maintains the upper hand | Ars Technica.

Why your smart device can’t get WiFi in the home team’s stadium

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The only thing my boss said to me was, ‘Chip, the only thing that has to work is the cell phones.’”

That’s why stadiums across the country are partnering with cellular carriers to build Distributed Antenna Systems, or DAS. These are essentially a bunch of antennas spread throughout a building to make sure phones don’t lose their connections to the cellular network when fans walk in the door. But it’s not just phone calls and text messages filling up wireless networks during games. Fans are streaming video, whether from third-party sources or apps created by the home teams to provide replays, different camera angles, or action happening in other cities. Teams are concluding that cellular just isn’t enough, and are thus building WiFi networks to offload traffic from cellular and provide connections to devices that are WiFi-only.

via Why your smart device can’t get WiFi in the home team’s stadium | Ars Technica.

Distributed Antenna Systems connect to the service provider’s network either with a bi-directional amplifier, which uses an outdoor antenna to bring the cellular signal into the building, or a base transceiver station, which is installed inside and is the same type of radio used at cell sites, as explained by the Steel In The Air cellular consultancy. Signals are then distributed throughout the facility with a series of hubs, cables, and antennas.

Stanford researchers discover the ‘anternet’

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On the surface, ants and the Internet don’t seem to have much in common. But two Stanford researchers have discovered that a species of harvester ants determine how many foragers to send out of the nest in much the same way that Internet protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for the transfer of data. The researchers are calling it the “anternet.”

via Stanford researchers discover the ‘anternet’.

Application Development Now Worth More Than $9 Billion Globally

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According to Gartner’s “Market Trends: Application Development (AD) Software, Worldwide, 2012-2016” report, cloud is changing the way applications are designed, tested, and deployed, resulting in a significant shift in development priorities.

“The trend is compelling enough to force traditional AD vendors to ‘cloud-enable’ their existing offerings and position them as a service to be delivered through the cloud,” said Asheesh Raina, principal research analyst at Gartner.

via Application Development Now Worth More Than $9 Billion Globally | Dr Dobb’s.

Flat lens offers a perfect image

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Operating at telecom wavelengths (i.e., the range commonly used in fiber-optic communications), the new device is completely scalable, from near-infrared to terahertz wavelengths, and simple to manufacture. The results have been published online in the journal Nano Letters.

via Flat lens offers a perfect image — Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

“In the future we can potentially replace all the bulk components in the majority of optical systems with just flat surfaces,” says lead author Francesco Aieta, a visiting graduate student from the Università Politecnica delle Marche in Italy. “It certainly captures the imagination.”

 

Shor’s algorithm

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If a quantum computer with a sufficient number of qubits were to be constructed, Shor’s algorithm could be used to break public-key cryptography schemes such as the widely used RSA scheme. RSA is based on the assumption that factoring large numbers is computationally infeasible. So far as is known, this assumption is valid for classical (non-quantum) computers; no classical algorithm is known that can factor in polynomial time. However, Shor’s algorithm shows that factoring is efficient on a quantum computer, so a sufficiently large quantum computer can break RSA. It was also a powerful motivator for the design and construction of quantum computers and for the study of new quantum computer algorithms. It has also facilitated research on new cryptosystems that are secure from quantum computers, collectively called post-quantum cryptography.

via Shor’s algorithm – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Trusted Platform Module

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Software can use a Trusted Platform Module to authenticate hardware devices. Since each TPM chip has a unique and secret RSA key burned in as it is produced, it is capable of performing platform authentication.

Generally, pushing the security down to the hardware level in conjunction with software provides more protection than a software-only solution. However even where a TPM is used, a key is still vulnerable while a software application that has obtained it from the TPM is using it to perform encryption/decryption operations, as has been illustrated in the case of a cold boot attack.

via Trusted Platform Module – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

“Trusted Platform Module (TPM) Specifications”. Trusted Computing Group.

coreboot

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coreboot is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) found in most computers. coreboot performs a little bit of hardware initialization and then executes additional boot logic, called a payload.

With the separation of hardware initialization and later boot logic, coreboot can scale from specialized applications that run directly from firmware, run operating systems in flash, load custom bootloaders, or implement firmware standards, like PC BIOS services or UEFI. This allows for systems to only include the features necessary in the target application, reducing the amount of code and flash space required

via coreboot.

Apple-Samsung Jury May Have Leaned on Engineer, Patent Holder

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Jurors who zipped through more than 600 questions in three days to arrive at their verdict in the intellectual-property battle between Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) had as their leader an engineer with a patent to his name.

via Apple-Samsung Jury May Have Leaned on Engineer, Patent Holder – Bloomberg.

A nice summation of lots of links from all around the blogoshere can be found on Groklaw here.  Here’s a small tidbit from that summation:

Professor Michael Risch points out an even worse inconsistency:

How did the Galaxy Tab escape design patent infringement? This was the only device to be preliminarily enjoined (on appeal no less), and yet it was the one of the few devices to be spared the sledgehammer. And, by the way, it looks an awful lot like an iPad. Yet the Epic 4G, a phone I own (uh oh, Apple’s coming after me) — which has a slide out keyboard, a curved top and bottom, 4 buttons on the bottom, the word Samsung printed across the top, buttons in different places (and I know this because I look in all the wrong places on my wife’s iTouch), a differently shaped speaker, a differently placed camera, etc. — that device infringes the iPhone design patents….

Relatedly, the ability to get a design patent on a user interface implies that design patent law is broken. This, to me, is the Supreme Court issue in this case. We can dicker about the “facts” of point 2, but whether you can stop all people from having square icons in rows of 4 with a dock is something that I thought we settled in Lotus v. Borland 15 years ago. I commend Apple for finding a way around basic UI law, but this type of ruling cannot stand.

A Quantum Computer Finds Factors

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A quantum computer, on the other hand, promises to factor a number of any size in one operation and, if one can be built, the future of the PKI looks bleak and we would have to find encryption methods that were safe against a quantum attack.

via A Quantum Computer Finds Factors.

Of course, factoring 15 isn’t something that is going to threaten the PKI and cryptography in general, but factoring  larger numbers is just a matter of increasing the number of qubits and this approach does seem to be a scalable solid state approach.