Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Lawrence Livermore Scientists Set a New Simulation Speed Record on the Sequoia Supercomputer

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The records were set using the ROSS (Rensselaer’s Optimistic Simulation System) simulation package developed by Carothers and his students, and using the Time Warp synchronization algorithm originally developed by Jefferson.

“The significance of this demonstration is that direct simulation of ‘planetary scale’ models is now, in principle at least, within reach,” Barnes said. “‘Planetary scale’ in the context of the joint team’s work means simulations large enough to represent all 7 billion people in the world or the entire Internet’s few billion hosts.”

via RPI: News & Events – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Lawrence Livermore Scientists Set a New Simulation Speed Record on the Sequoia Supercomputer.

Maybe they can get SimCity modeled correctly.

Ketchikan students trick teachers to access computers

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Students fooled teachers by asking them to enter account information to update their computer’s software, which they regularly do. Teachers were presented with a display that looked “exactly like” it does when prompted for a software update, but instead it was a request for administrative access, according to district technology supervisor Jurgen Johannsen.

via KETCHIKAN, Alaska: Ketchikan students trick teachers to access computers | State News | ADN.com.

Use a Software Bug to Win Video Poker? That’s a Federal Hacking Case

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It’s the latest test of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1986 law originally intended to punish hackers who remotely crack defense or banking computers over their 300 baud modems. Changes in technology and a string of amendments have pushed the law into a murky zone where prosecutors have charged people for violating website terms-of-service or an employer’s computer use policies.

via Use a Software Bug to Win Video Poker? That’s a Federal Hacking Case | Threat Level | Wired.com.

Under the relevant section of the CFAA, Kane and Nestor aren’t charged with hacking into the Game King from the outside, but rather with exceeding their otherwise legitimate access “to obtain or alter information in the computer that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain or alter.”

BT unleashes SIP licensing troll army

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VoIP-to-PSTN termination providers and SIP vendors will be watching their inboxes for a lawyer’s letter from BT, which has kicked off a taxing licensing program levying a fee on the industry, based on a list of 99 patents.

via BT unleashes SIP licensing troll army • The Register.

A useful comment from slashdot.

The IETF MMUSIC (Multiparty Multimedia Session Control) Working Group started working on Session Protocols [ietf.org] in 1993.

Initial Internet drafts for a Session Invitation Protocol and a Simple Conference Invitation Protocol were prepared in 1996, and merged to a single first draft of SIP by December 1996 (slide 10 [columbia.edu]), with further drafts (2-12) leading up to the publication of RFC 2543 in March of 1999 (slides 11-13, ibid.).

I don’t see anything that says BT had a hand in anything to do with SIP up to 1996. More than half the patents BT claims (Exhibit C [btplc.com]) were filed after RFC 2543 was published.

I hope this information is a useful starting point for some SIP vendor.

Belgian ISPs sued for providing Internet access without paying copyright levies

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ISPs over the years have profited from the switch to online media consumption and they have offered unlimited Internet access with very high download speeds in advertising campaigns, Sabam said. “The Internet access providers have never paid copyright levies for this activity. They hide behind their status as intermediary, without taking responsibility for the information transmitted over their networks,” the organization said.

via Belgian ISPs sued for providing Internet access without paying copyright levies | PCWorld.

HP Calls Out Cisco With Data-Center Switches

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The star of HP’s show, or at least the product with the biggest number, is the FlexFabric 12900 core switch, which can fit 768 10Gbit/s ports or 256 40Gbit/s ports. Cisco’s 18-slot Nexus 7018 claims to have the same 10Gbit/s density but only has cards to support 96 40Gbit/s ports.

via Light Reading – HP Calls Out Cisco With Data-Center Switches.

OpenFlow Inventor Martin Casado on SDN, VMware and Software Defined Networking Hype

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Casado noted that the term SDN was coined in 2009, and at the time, it did mean something fairly specific.

“Now it is just being used as a general term for networking, like all networking is SDN,” Casado said. “SDN is now just an umbrella term for cool stuff in networking.”

via OpenFlow Inventor Martin Casado on SDN, VMware and Software Defined Networking Hype [VIDEO].

I wondered this after seeing almost every other article in networking blogs like Light Reading with SDN in the title.  Click out the sdn tag to see all that made it here.

Possible Exploit Vector for DarkLeech Compromises

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The script attempted to exploit the Horde/IMP Plesk Webmail Exploit in vulnerable versions of the Plesk control panel. By injecting malicious PHP code in the username field, successful attackers are able to bypass authentication and upload files to the targeted server. These types of attacks could be one avenue used in the DarkLeech compromises. Although not as common as the Plesk remote access vulnerability (CVE-2012-1557) described in the report, it does appear that this vulnerability is being actively exploited. 

via Possible Exploit Vector for DarkLeech Compromises.

How Facebook Built Natural Language into Graph Search

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The engineers used a weighted context-free grammar (WCFG) to represent Graph Search’s query language. Think of a tree, with the root or base as the “Start” of a particular query. Facebook calls this the “parse tree,” and the various “limbs” branching from the root include verbs, objects, etc. The “leaves” at the top are the terminal symbols, or entities such as users, cities, employers, groups, and the phrases that link those entities together. It’s perhaps easier to diagram than explain:

via How Facebook Built Natural Language into Graph Search.

Time To Set Up That Honeypot

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Still not sure where to start? Take a look at the Active Defense Harbinger Distribution (ADHD) project, which is part of the Samurai family of Linux-based LiveCD distributions. ADHD provides a bootable ISO that contains the two previously mentioned tools and many others that are specifically focused on providing early warning detection of attacker activity. Some of those are more geared toward alerting, because, technically, no computers should be communicating with the honeypot so all traffic has the potential to be considered malicious.

via Tech Insight: Time To Set Up That Honeypot — Dark Reading.