Chinese space probe flies by asteroid Toutatis

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The flyby was the first time an unmanned spacecraft launched from Earth has taken such a close viewing of the asteroid, named after a Celtic god.

It also made China the fourth country after the United States, the European Union and Japan to be able to examine an asteroid by spacecraft.

Chang’e-2 came as close as 3.2 km from Toutatis and took pictures of the asteroid at a relative velocity of 10.73 km per second, the SASTIND said in a statement.

via Chinese space probe flies by asteroid Toutatis — Shanghai Daily | 上海日报 — English Window to China New.

The Difference Between a Firewall and an SBC

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If a firewall is a gate, a session border controller is a canal. Whereas a gate can only be opened or shut, canals have a series of trenches which are filled and then released. This buffer allows much more complex checks and adjustments than a simple open or shut gate. A Session Border Controller has some of the layer 2-4 port controls, but where they really shine is in their Layer 7 capabilities.

via 2600hz Blog • The Difference Between a Firewall and an SBC.

Why Legos Are So Expensive — And So Popular

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Lego goes to great lengths to make its pieces really, really well, says David Robertson, who is working on a book about Lego.

Inside every Lego brick, there are three numbers, which identify exactly which mold the brick came from and what position it was in in that mold. That way, if there’s a bad brick somewhere, the company can go back and fix the mold.

via Why Legos Are So Expensive — And So Popular : Planet Money : NPR.

The ICSI Certificate Notary

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Much of the Internet’s end-to-end security relies on the SSL protocol, along with its underlying X.509 certificate infrastructure. However, the system remains quite brittle due to its liberal delegation of signing authority: a single compromised certification authority undermines trust globally. The ICSI Notary helps clients to identify malicious certificates by providing a third-party perspective on what they should expect to receive from a server. While similar in spirit to existing efforts, such as Convergence and the EFF’s SSL observatory, our notary collects certificates passively from live upstream traffic at multiple independent Internet sites, aggregating them into a central database in near-realtime.

via The ICSI Certificate Notary.

Security Researcher Compromises Cisco VoIP Phones With Vulnerability

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As part of the demonstration, Cui inserted and removed a small external circuit board from the phone’s Ethernet port — a move he asserted could be accomplished by someone left alone inside a corporate office for a few seconds. He then used his own smartphone to capture every word spoken near the VoIP phone, even though it was still “on-hook.”

via Security Researcher Compromises Cisco VoIP Phones With Vulnerability – Dark Reading.

Ciena Still Struggling for Profitability

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That trend, naturally, shows up in its full-year numbers. For fiscal 2012, Ciena generated revenues of $1.83 billion, up about 5 percent year-on-year, and a net loss of $144 million. Its full-year non-GAAP loss was 23.5 million, or 24 cents per share, slightly worse than Wall Street had expected.

via Ciena Still Struggling for Profitability – Optical Networking – Telecom News Analysis – Light Reading.

Ciena’s not alone, of course, in feeling the effects of a shrinking optical market. (See Margin Misery for Alcatel-Lucent.)

FreedomPop Preps Open Wi-Fi, Launches Free Home Internet Challenging ISPs

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FreedomPop is now also entering the home market, with a free home broadband product called FreedomPop Hub Burst that uses Clearwire WiMax, the company is announcing today. FreedomPop is now accepting orders and expects to ship its home modem next month. The service is faster than DSL but slower than cable. Stokols says the service will disrupt incumbents like Time Warner Cable, AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. Users get free service of 1 gigabyte per month but they can “earn” unlimited free access by adding friends to their network or participating in partner promotional offers. That amount of data is fine for 70% of users, says Stokols, the former CEO of digital video company Woo Media and vice president at British Telecom.

via FreedomPop Preps Open Wi-Fi, Launches Free Home Internet Challenging ISPs – Forbes.

Security Hole in Samsung Smart TVs Could Allow Remote Spying

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ReVuln’s policy of disclosing security holes only to paying customers has met with disapproval from both vendors and security pros, who argue that companies should do what they can to eradicate dangerous software holes. However, the company is unbowed, maintaining that selling knowledge of software security holes is a legitimate business and helps the company recoup the costs of researcher the holes and developing proof of concept exploits for them.

via Security Hole in Samsung Smart TVs Could Allow Remote Spying | The Security Ledger.

A little short on details as I wondered how this could be done sitting behind a proper firewall.

How Skype & Co. get round firewalls

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Network administrators who do not appreciate this sort of hole in their firewall and are worried about abuse, are left with only one option – they have to block outgoing UDP traffic, or limit it to essential individual cases. UDP is not required for normal internet communication anyway – the web, e-mail and suchlike all use TCP. Streaming protocols may, however, encounter problems, as they often use UDP because of the reduced overhead.

via How Skype & Co. get round firewalls – The H Security: News and Features.