Technologies at issue relate to electronic devices for wireless communications and data transfer including Radio Frequency (RF) technology and in some cases standardized communication protocols including GSM, GPRS, EDGE, W-CDMA, LTE, and 802.11 Wi-Fi standards, Ericsson said in the filing.
Splinternet Behind the Great Firewall of China
GFW is not perfect, however. Some Chinese technical professionals can bypass it with a variety of methods and/or tools. An arms race between censorship and circumvention has been going on for years, and GFW has caused collateral damage along the way.
via Splinternet Behind the Great Firewall of China – ACM Queue.
VPN (virtual private network) and SSH (secure shell) are the most powerful and stable tools for bypassing all surveillance technologies, although the basic ideas are the same as with the aforementioned tools: proxies and encrypted channels. The only difference is that VPN and SSH depend on a private host (or virtual host) or an account outside of China, instead of open, free proxies. Only technical professionals are able to set up such hosts or accounts, and most of them are not free. Commercial or public VPN services will be blocked by IP address and/or domain names if they are popular enough. In fact, the domain names *vpn.* are all blocked (such as vpn.com, vpn.net, vpn.org, vpn.info, vpn.me, vpn.us, vpn.co).
Why Groupon and Living Social Are Doomed
This effect has been confirmed empirically by a team of marketing researchers who tracked three businesses for a year after they offered a social coupon. All three companies lost money the month they offered the coupon and will have difficulty earning it back. According to analysis done by the two researchers,
V. Kumar and Bharath Rajan, the companies would need 15, 18, and 98 months (almost eight years) to earn back their lost profits. The reason? “The three businesses had difficulty retaining most of the new customers who were attracted to the coupon offers,” the two researchers wrote in the MIT Sloan Management Review.
via Why Groupon and Living Social Are Doomed – The Daily Beast.
Security Researcher Discloses New Batch of MySQL Vulnerabilities
The first MySQL vulnerability, a stack-based buffer overflow, would allow an authenticated database user a chance to cause the MySQL daemon to crash, and then execute code with the same privileges as the user running MySQL. A heap-based overflow vulnerability, separate from the previous flaw, could be used to do the same thing – again the damage could be caused by an authenticated database user.
via Security Researcher Discloses New Batch of MySQL Vulnerabilities | SecurityWeek.Com.
Windows XP Drops Below 40% Market Share, Windows 8 Passes 1%
While the 1 percent share for Windows 8 is completely expected, it’s interesting to note that less than half of users have chosen to stick with the default IE10 browser: just 0.51 percent. Everyone else appears to be using Chrome, Firefox, or yet another browser.
via Windows XP Drops Below 40% Market Share, Windows 8 Passes 1%.
Happy bday! SMS txt msgs turn 20
The approval was finally given and the systems interconnected, then Papworth, sitting in front of a personal computer, tapped out the greeting “Merry Christmas” and sent it via SMS to Vodafone Director Richard Jarvis.
The text-messaging era was born.
via Happy bday! SMS txt msgs turn 20 – Computerworld.
Perhaps it’s no surprise then that in late 1995, three years after Papworth’s first text message, users were only sending an average of one text every two and a half months.
Theresa Christy of Otis Elevator: Making Elevators Go
Here is a typical problem: A passenger on the sixth floor wants to descend. The closest car is on the seventh floor, but it already has three riders and has made two stops. Is it the right choice to make that car stop again? That would be the best result for the sixth-floor passenger, but it would make the other people’s rides longer.
via Theresa Christy of Otis Elevator: Making Elevators Go | Creating – WSJ.com.
Dig pcap File For Fun and Productivity
To solve the problem I used Perl (feel free to use your favorite language) to open a pcap file and do some analysis. Let us look at finding sessions where the client sent data but the server didn’t send any data in response. To make it easy I’ve included all the steps I took and, where appropriate, the code. Since the point is to illustrate how to use script language like Perl to do the job, the code is greatly simplified. For the convenience of reader, the complete code is listed at the end.
Extracting Data from Network Captures pcap with Perl
When I am analyzing network activity generated by malware, I am most interested in HTTP get/posts, the addresses the malware is communicating with, and the data that was actually sent or received.
via Extracting Data from Network Captures pcap with Perl « Mick’s Mix.
Chaosreader is a Perl script that takes a pcap file as its argument and will create communication summaries in a report format. It will also pull data from the tcp streams (within the pcap) and re-assemble the actual files.
A Light Bulb with a Computer and Projector Inside from the MIT Media Lab Augments Reality
The LuminAR device, created by Linder and colleagues at the Media Lab, can project interactive images onto a surface, sensing when a person’s finger or hand points to an element within those images. Linder describes LuminAR as an augmented-reality system because the images and interfaces it projects can alter the function of a surface or object. While LuminAR might seem like a far-fetched concept, many large technology companies are experimenting with new kinds of computer interfaces in hopes of discovering new markets for their products (see “Google Game Could Be Augmented Reality’s First Killer App” and ”A New Chip to Bring 3-D Gesture Control to Smartphones”).