EVE Online’s Battle of Asakai: who was involved, the stakes, and the aftermath

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The cause

A single misclick.

No, really: A Titan pilot beneath the Cluster banner was attempting a “bridge”—using a ship to act as an artificial warp corridor for other ships—to Asakai VI when he accidentally warped himself straight into a very surprised Pandemic Legion fleet. The pilot, named Dabigredboat, immediately came under heavy attack as the Legion pounced on the extremely valuable ship.

via EVE Online’s Battle of Asakai: who was involved, the stakes, and the aftermath | News | PC Gamer.

I sometimes find the drama in these MMORPG fascinating and Eve Online usually has the best stories.  The cynical side of me suspects this might have been staged as a marketing promotion.   I hear nothing but good things about Eve Online however.

5 years after major DNS flaw is discovered, few US companies have deployed long-term fix

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Network World – Five years after the disclosure of a serious vulnerability in the Domain Name System dubbed the Kaminsky bug, only a handful of U.S. ISPs, financial institutions or e-commerce companies have deployed DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC ) to alleviate this threat.

via 5 years after major DNS flaw is discovered, few US companies have deployed long-term fix.

DVR Insecurity

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tl;dr; A whole slew of security dvr devices are vulnerable to an unauthenticated login disclosure and unauthenticated command injection.

via consolecowboys: Swann Song – DVR Insecurity.

Interesting read.  Obviously, a device like a DVR should be placed inside a NAT and possibly have its traffic monitored at the firewall.  Then if port 9000 is open for telnet you just have to worry about an attack from with access to the LAN — not the entire Internet.

New video codec to ease pressure on global networks

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The new codec will considerably ease the burden on global networks where, by some estimates, video accounts for more than half of bandwidth use. The new standard, known informally as ‘High Efficiency Video Coding’ (HEVC) will need only half the bit rate of its predecessor, ITU-T H.264 / MPEG-4 Part 10 ‘Advanced Video Coding’ (AVC), which currently accounts for over 80 per cent of all web video. HEVC will unleash a new phase of innovation in video production spanning the whole ICT spectrum, from mobile devices through to Ultra-High Definition TV.

via New video codec to ease pressure on global networks.

Docsis 3.1 Rides the Wireless Wave

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OFDM will provide Docsis with a new order of bandwidth efficiency, but it also offers some sound business reasons for cable to adopt it. OFDM, already used for Wi-Fi and Long Term Evolution (LTE), could lead to better economies of scale and get more vendors interested in the cable market, explained Daniel Howard, the SVP of engineer and CTO at Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE), during a webcast earlier this month on the topic (SCTE is tasked with helping the cable industry get trained up for Docsis 3.1). (See Setting the Stage for Docsis 3.1.)

via Light Reading – Docsis 3.1 Rides the Wireless Wave.

Lots of interesting info on OFDM in this article.  I find it amazing how creative people get in squeezing not just more bandwidth, but orders of magnitude more bandwidth, using the same physical outside plant infrastructure.

DOSBoxWiki

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DOSBox emulates an Intel x86 PC, complete with sound, graphics, mouse, joystick, modem, etc., necessary for running many old MS-DOS games that simply cannot be run on modern PCs and operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux and FreeBSD. However, it is not restricted to running only games. In theory, any MS-DOS or PC-DOS (referred to commonly as “DOS”) application should run in DOSBox, but the emphasis has been on getting DOS games to run smoothly, which means that communication, networking and printer support are still in early development.

via DOSBoxWiki.

Not sure if I’ll ever need to use this but it’s nice to know it exists.  I read that they even ported this onto an Android platform.  I encountered DOSBox from this slashdot article.  Someone is running Windows 3.1 on their Android tablet so they can run a 1996 version of  Photoshop.

How Newegg crushed the “shopping cart” patent and saved online retail

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Soverain isn’t in the e-commerce business; it’s in the higher-margin business of filing patent lawsuits against e-commerce companies. And it has been quite successful until now. The company’s plan to extract a patent tax of about one percent of revenue from a huge swath of online retailers was snuffed out last week by Newegg and its lawyers, who won an appeal ruling [PDF] that invalidates the three patents Soverain used to spark a vast patent war.

via How Newegg crushed the “shopping cart” patent and saved online retail | Ars Technica.

The first patent troll story of the new year.  I like Newegg.  If I didn’t live so close to a brick and mortar Microcenter I’d probably use them a lot.

Intel to leave desktop motherboard business by 2016

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Intel will continue rolling out desktop motherboards that are currently in production, in addition to the fourth-generation Haswell desktop boards that are in the design and development phase and due to be released later this year. These products will have a typical lifecycle of about 18 months, said the Intel spokeswoman, adding that Intel customers will continue to be supported with a full warranty during that time.

via Intel to leave desktop motherboard business by 2016 | ZDNet.

The way I read this it’s just the motherboards themselves, not the chips included in desktop motherboards.

New server can be parachuted into extreme environments

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“This equipment, in a transit case, will likely be parachuted into service in tactical deployments,” said John Callahan, director of marketing at NCST. The Bunker XRV-5241 can withstand a free-fall drop of around 1 meter, but for parachute deployment it needs to be packaged into the case for additional protection.

via New server can be parachuted into extreme environments.

The server is priced starting at US$3,699. It will be sold directly into the vertical markets.

I found it interesting how servers have become as important as rations and ammunition nowadays.  Lots of hardware info in the article but nothing on OS or services.