In particular, ABI said, DOCSIS 3.0 device shipments are spiking. The report found that equipment vendors shipped 37 million DOCSIS 3.0 home devices last year, representing 67 percent of all cable CPE shipments. That portion is up from 65 percent in 2011.
The Locust Economy
Once locusts acquire an informed kind of market mobility through better discovery mechanisms, they can range over a much larger area of wheat fields or restaurants. You can continuously derive savings at the expense of other economic actors wheat farmers or restaurant owners.
via The Locust Economy.
To take coffee shops as an example, an unending supply of idealistic wannabe cafe owners enters the sector every year, operates at a loss for a few years, and exits. The result is that even under normal business conditions, without swarming locust consumers, this is a loss-making business with an extinction rate of around 90% at the 5 year point in the US. Starbucks has the scale to be profitable and resilient. Locust coffee drinkers happily drink the excellent, loss-making coffee from small, local Jeffersonian coffee shops and callously retreat to Starbucks or DIY homebrew if the prices go up.
Starbucks survives, coffee drinking grasshoppers survive, small coffee shops go in and out of business.
TCP ex Machina
Remy is a computer program that figures out how computers can best cooperate to share a network.
Remy creates end-to-end congestion-control algorithms that plug into the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). These computer-generated algorithms can achieve higher performance and greater fairness than the most sophisticated human-designed schemes.
via TCP ex Machina.
Introduction to Hyper-V Network Virtualization (HNV)
Microsoft announced a solution to the limits of VLANs in the cloud using a new feature that was codeveloped for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Windows Azure. This new feature was called Hyper-V Network Virtualization (HNV). This is based on a more general concept called Software Defined Networking (SDN).
via Introduction to Hyper-V Network Virtualization (HNV).
SDN and HNV abstract IP address spaces. This is done using two types of address:
-
Consumer Address (CA): This is the IP address that the tenant uses in their virtual network. This address is set in the guest OS of the virtual machine as normal; it’s the only address that the tenant is normally aware of.
-
Provider Address (PA): This is the address that is assigned to the NIC of the virtual switch network to allow virtual machines to communicate at the physical layer.
As far as I can tell from this article a CA is just a private IP and a PA is simply a MAC address, renamed. To the cloud user however none of this should matter. I’m struggling to understand the innovation here. Some of the networking concepts mentioned later in the article seem to add a lot of complexity to the IP layer.
MIT Moves to Intervene in Release of Aaron Swartz’s Secret Service File
MIT claims it’s afraid the release of Swartz’s file will identify the names of MIT people who helped the Secret Service and federal prosecutors pursue felony charges against Swartz for his bulk downloading of academic articles from MIT’s network in 2011.
MIT argues that those people might face threats and harassment if their names become public. But it’s worth noting that names of third parties are already redacted from documents produced under FOIA.
via MIT Moves to Intervene in Release of Aaron Swartz’s Secret Service File | Threat Level | Wired.com.
Mobile VoIP: No Profits, Big Problems
But in joining the OTT VoIP crowd, mobile operators are quickly discovering that being popular doesn’t make mobile VoIP profitable — far from it. Infonetics’ estimation of the revenue per mobile VoIP subscriber is a mere US$7.13 annually.
For the OTT VoIP crowd, that reality means looking for other ways to make money — possibly through ad insertions or by providing the voice segment of a mashup that pulls in other third-party apps for which people will pay, such as presence or gaming, or by charging extra for video-conference or multi-party video.
Separating You and Me? 4.74 Degrees
Adding a new chapter to the research that cemented the phrase “six degrees of separation” into the language, scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported on Monday that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74.
Alcatel-Lucent Breaks Record with 31Tbps Over a Single Fibre Optic Cable
The experiment itself, which was carried out at by the firms R&D focused Bell Labs division on the Innovation City campus in Villarceaux (Paris), is understood to have used 155 lasers. Each laser was operating at different frequencies and carrying 200Gbps of data (single-carrier data channels) over a 50GHz frequency grid.
Normally such signals suffer from distortions and noise, which limit performance, but it’s understood that Alcatel-Lucent were able to resolve this by using an enhanced version of Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) that works by splitting light up into different wavelengths so that it can carry more data (a variety of other methods were also used).
via Alcatel-Lucent Breaks Record with 31Tbps Over a Single Fibre Optic Cable – ISPreview UK.
CSRF Still Armed And Dangerous
Designed to exploit the domain cookie trust model, CSRF attacks essentially take advantage of the trust the Web application has in its authenticated users, says Subu Ramanathan, principal consultant with Security Compass.
“In order to execute this attack, a user would have to navigate to a malicious website while logged into the victim Web application,” says Ramanathan. “The malicious website, being designed to attack users of the victim application, would make [requests] to complete sensitive transactions on the victim application on behalf of the user behind the scenes.”
Open Source IaaS Software offering a real alternative to commercial clouds
With commercial cloud systems, there is no investment in hardware required. This enables start-up businesses to easily test out a new business idea. Whilst commercial cloud services are popular, they charge for CPU usage by the hour, storage, and bandwidth consumed. In a large organization, where many users need to be served, it may be cheaper to purchase hardware to create a private cloud. This article showcases the finest open source projects that provide a key alternative for those who wish to avoid using a commercially provided cloud.