Critics slam SSL authority for minting certificate for impersonating sites

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Critics slam SSL authority for minting certificate for impersonating sites.

Over the past year, security experts have proposed a variety of alternatives to the complex web of trust now used to manage the net’s ailing SSL system. Among them is the Convergence project devised by researcher Moxie Marlinspike. The system, which would have flagged counterfeit certificates used to snoop on some 300,000 Gmail users, has already won the qualified endorsement of security firm Qualys. Google, meanwhile, has said it has no plans to implement Convergence in its Chrome browser.

HDD Pricewatch: Three Months Into the Thai Floods

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Some drives appear to have been more severely impacted than others. For example, the Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB is currently priced at $429.99, a 138% increase over its pre-flood price of $179.99. The Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 is selling for double the price at the beginning of October. Let’s check out similar data for mobile oriented hard drives.

via HDD Pricewatch: Three Months Into the Thai Floods – TechSpot Guides.

How Web giants store big—and we mean big—data

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The Great Disk Drive in the Sky: How Web giants store big—and we mean big—data.

The need for this kind of perpetually scalable, durable storage has driven the giants of the Web—Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and others—to adopt a different sort of storage solution: distributed file systems based on object-based storage. These systems were at least in part inspired by other distributed and clustered filesystems such as Red Hat’s Global File System and IBM’s General Parallel Filesystem.

And one more blurb…

Google wanted to turn large numbers of cheap servers and hard drives into a reliable data store for hundreds of terabytes of data that could manage itself around failures and errors. And it needed to be designed for Google’s way of gathering and reading data, allowing multiple applications to append data to the system simultaneously in large volumes and to access it at high speeds.

Data sharing with a GFS storage cluster

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GFS saves its file system descriptors in inodes that are allocated dynamically (referred to as dynamic nodes or dinodes). They are placed in a whole file system block (4096 bytes is the standard file system block size in Linux kernels). In a cluster file system, multiple servers access the file system at the same time; hence, the pooling of multiple dinodes in one block would lead to more competitive block accesses and false contention. For space efficiency and reduced disk accesses, file data is saved (stuffed) the dinode itself if the file is small enough to fit completely inside the dinode. In this case, only one block access is necessary to access smaller files. If the files are bigger, GFS uses a “flat file” structure. All pointers in a dinode have the same depth. There are only direct, indirect, or double indirect pointers. The tree height grows as much as necessary to store the file data as shown in Figure 1.

via redhat.com | Data sharing with a GFS storage cluster.

ARM Discloses Technical Details Of The Next Version Of The…

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“The current growth trajectory of data centers, driven by the viral explosion of social media and cloud computing, will continue to accelerate. The ability to handle this data increase with energy-efficient solutions is vital,” said Vinay Ravuri, vice president and general manager of AppliedMicro’s Processor Business Unit. “The ARM 64-bit architecture provides the right balance of performance, efficiency and cost to scale to meet these growing demands and we are very excited to be a leading partner in implementing solutions based on the ARMv8 architecture.”

via ARM Discloses Technical Details Of The Next Version Of The… – ARM.

MagicJack Reviews – You get what you paid for…

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A magicJack is a cheap and small device that allows you to make telephone calls for very, very low costs.

As of June 2011, magicJack costs $39.95 plus shipping and handling. You get a free year of calling to the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. Additional years cost $19.95.

via MagicJack Reviews – You get what you paid for… | voipreview.org.

When you follow the easy-to-use installation steps above, you’ll find that magicJack installs software on your computer.

The magicJack software is almost impossible to remove. magicJack software also will display advertisements on your computer, too.

Groupon scoops up Silicon Valley startup Adku

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Adku was founded in San Francisco a year and a half ago by a group of former Google employees. It specializes in using data to craft personalized shopping experiences on the Web and has financial backing from high-profile venture capital firms such as Greylock Partners and Battery Ventures. The latter firm is also an investor in Groupon.

via Groupon scoops up Silicon Valley startup Adku – chicagotribune.com.

From www.adku.com

Adku started a year and a half ago from our passion for big data and a desire to create products that would instantly and automatically give users a more personalized experience. We had ambitious goals and some of the most rewarding and busy days of our lives. We were also fortunate to assemble an amazing team of engineers and investors and create something special.  

Google to start hanging Internet cables today in KCK

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The BPU is owned by the Unified Government of Wyandotte County, which penned the original agreement that secured the Google Fiber project — something more than 1,100 American communities actively lobbied for — for Kansas City, Kan.

That agreement had made the unusual stipulation that Google would be able to hang its wires, for free, in the upper part of the utility poles typically reserved for electrical lines. Utility companies sometimes attach their own communication cables on that part of the poles, but rarely allow third parties access to the space.

via Google to start hanging Internet cables today in KCK – KansasCity.com.

Why the House spectrum bill should be ditched

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I’ve also read that the House bill bars the FCC from paying for spectrum and then opening it up for unlicensed use. Can you comment on that?

I was the guy who created the idea of unlicensed spectrum. Several technologists and economists came to me and said that we need spectrum for short hops between computers and cable connections. That technology became known as Wi-Fi and it completely transformed the Internet experience, as everybody who has a computer knows.

via Why the House spectrum bill should be ditched: Q&A with Reed Hundt.