Over the past ten years or so, Chinese telecoms firms such as Huawei and ZTE, another telecoms-equipment provider, have expanded from their vast home market to become global players.
via Huawei: The company that spooked the world | The Economist.
Development Release: Damn Small Linux 4.11 RC1
Nearly four years after the last stable release, the Damn Small Linux distribution is once again being actively developed. Yesterday John Andrews announced the availability of the first release candidate version 4.11: “Here is the first release candidate for Damn Small Linux DSL 4.11. The changes in this release are a step toward making DSL a friendly alternative for older hardware. I’ve fixed some bugs, updated some applications, and replaced others.
via Development Release: Damn Small Linux 4.11 RC1 DistroWatch.com News.
Download here.
E Ink: E Ink Agrees to Buy SiPix Shares
The combined company will offer a vast portfolio of ePaper products that will allow it to expand its existing markets and diversify into newer applications. E Ink’s ePaper offers the best digital reading experience. It is easier on the eyes, consumes a fraction of the power compared to traditional displays. It is readable in sunlight, lightweight, rugged and field proven with over 50 million ePaper displays being used worldwide.
Apple patent filing looks a lot like Microsoft Surface
A patent application submitted by Apple last year — and made public just this morning — describes a flexible, magnetically attached cover for a tablet device. It’s similar to Apple’s existing smart cover for the iPad, except that this cover can also function as an input and display device. And one of the concepts described by Apple in the patent filing is an idea for using the cover as a keyboard.
The end result looks very similar to the signature feature of Microsoft’s Surface tablet computer.
via Apple patent filing looks a lot like Microsoft Surface – GeekWire.
How graphics card supercomputers could help us map the universe
Over three decades video cards have transformed computer graphics from monochrome line drawings to near photo realistic renderings.
But the processing power of the GPU is increasingly being used to tame the huge sums of data generated by modern industry and science. And now a project to build the world’s largest telescope is considering using a GPU cluster to stitch together more than an exabyte of data each day.
via How graphics card supercomputers could help us map the universe | TechRepublic.
Sex, Lies and Cyber-crime Surveys
Much of the information we have on cyber-crime losses is derived from surveys. We examine some of the difficulties of forming an accurate estimate by survey. First, losses are extremely concentrated, so that representative sampling of the population does not give representative sampling of the losses. Second, losses are based on unverified self-reported numbers. Not only is it possible for a single outlier to distort the result, we find evidence that most surveys are dominated by a minority of responses in the upper tail (i.e., a majority of the estimate is coming from as few as one or two responses). Finally, the fact that losses are confined to a small segment of the population magnifies the difficulties of refusal rate and small sample sizes. Far from being broadly-based estimates of losses across the population, the cyber-crime estimates that we have appear to be largely the answers of a handful of people extrapolated to the whole population. A single individual who claims $50,000 losses, in an N=1000 person survey, is all it takes to generate a $10 billion loss over the population. One unverified claim of $7,500 in phishing losses translates into $1.5 billion.
hype-free: Parsing pcap files with Perl
Recently I was reading the blogpost on the BrekingPoint labs log about parsing pcap files with Perl and I immediately said to myself: it is impossible that there isn’t a module on CPAN, because Perl is great. Turns out I was right, there is Net::TcpDumpLog which can be combined with the NetPacket family of modules to parse the higher level protocols. Because example code is rather sparse on the POD pages of the respective modules, here is a small example to illustrate their use:
Over 3 Million Americans Now on IPv6
In the U.S. the latest numbers for IPv6 are impressive. APNIC’s global survey as of August 1st has IPv6 penetration in the U.S at 1.35 percent. That translates into an estimated IPv6 user base of 3.3 million users, the largest base of IPv6 users in the world.
via Over 3 Million Americans Now on IPv6.
“There are Tier 1 ISPs out there that refuse to go and get either transit or peering with other ISPs,” Nygren said. “So there are places on the IPv6 Internet, in particular in parts of Europe, where there is no path between point A and B.”
Are China’s Multinational Corporations Really Multinational?
While ranking on the Fortune Global 500 list indicates the growing clout of Chinese corporations, it does not mean that a company is internationally active or even that it is a real multinational. When these companies are ranked by foreign assets and sales, it becomes clear that, with few exceptions, they all operate predominantly within China. In other words, despite the government’s directives and financial incentives to ‘go global’, many leading Chinese corporations have yet to do so.
via Are China’s Multinational Corporations Really Multinational? | Brookings Institution.
Second, the Achilles heel of Chinese multinationals is human resources—particularly management. Multilingual and multicultural managers are few and far between, and all assessments of Chinese corporations note this to be a fundamental weakness.
Hackers reveal critical vulnerabilities in Huawei routers at Defcon
The vulnerabilities — a session hijack, a heap overflow and a stack overflow — were found in the firmware of Huawei AR18 and AR29 series routers and could be exploited to take control of the devices over the Internet, said Felix Lindner, the head of security firm Recurity Labs and one of the two researchers who found the flaws.
via Hackers reveal critical vulnerabilities in Huawei routers at Defcon – Computerworld.
According to the Huawei website, the AR series routers are used by enterprises and AR18 in particular is marketed as product intended for small and home offices.