FCC green lights first white space broadband device

FCC green lights first white space broadband device

The authorized model in question is the KTS Agility Data Radio. “The ADR is a software-defined radio that offers unparalleled flexibility,” KTS literature promises. “It can access more spectrum and support more throughput than any radio product on the market today.”

Agility Data Radio
Agility Data Radio

The black 3.5 x 5.0 x1.4-inch machine weighs almost three quarters of a pound, can take on channel sizes up to 5MHz, and services data rates up to 4Mbps.

Ostiary

If you leave such programs running all the time, you take the risk that someone is going to use an exploit on you before you have a chance to apply a patch. For some purposes, this is an acceptable – even necessary – tradeoff, but it would be nice to enable them only when actually needed, to minimize the risk. And for other purposes, ssh et. al. are overkill. Perhaps you only really need to remotely initiate a limited set of operations. In this case, you don’t need a shell prompt, just a way to securely kick off scripts from elsewhere.Enter ‘Ostiary’. It is designed to allow you to run a fixed set of commands remotely, without giving everyone else access to the same commands. It is designed to do exactly and only what is necessary for this, and no more. The only argument given to the command is the IP address of the client, and only if the authentication is successful.

via Ostiary.

OLPC Bitfrost – OLPC

There are five broad categories of “bad things” that running software could do, for the purposes of our discussion. In no particular order, software can attempt to damage the machine, compromise the user’s privacy, damage the user’s information, do “bad things” to people other than the machine’s user, and lastly, impersonate the user.

via OLPC Bitfrost – OLPC.

An MIT Magic Trick: Computing On Encrypted Databases Without Ever Decrypting Them

An MIT Magic Trick: Computing On Encrypted Databases Without Ever Decrypting Them – Forbes.

Now the Google- and Citigroup-funded work of three MIT scientists holds the promise of solving that long-nagging issue in some of the computing world’s most common applications. CryptDB, a piece of database software the researchers presented in a paper (PDF here) at the Symposium on Operating System Principles in October, allows users to send queries to an encrypted set of data and get almost any answer they need from it without ever decrypting the stored information, a trick that keeps the info safe from hackers, accidental loss and even snooping administrators. And while it’s not the first system to offer that kind of magically flexible cryptography, it may be the first practical one, taking a fraction of a second to produce an answer where other systems that perform the same encrypted functions would require thousands of years.