Junosphere Lab

Junosphere Lab is a first-of-its-kind offer from Juniper Networks that can reduce the costs of network planning and modeling by as much as 90%. Junosphere Lab provides a virtual environment where you can create and run elements and networks running the Junos operating system. You can use these networks to model your network, plan for new services, or examine “what-if” scenarios.

via Junosphere Lab – Juniper Networks.

Diameter Signaling Router (DSR), 3GPP DRA

Tekelec’s Diameter Signaling Router centralizes routing, traffic management and load-balancing tasks to create an architecture that enables your IMS and LTE networks to grow incrementally to support increasing service and traffic demands. The Diameter solution provides protocol mediation and interworking functions that allow you to manage 2G/3G-to-LTE and LTE-to-LTE roaming seamlessly.

via Tekelec – Diameter Signaling Router (DSR), 3GPP DRA.

Highly charged – the US Navy’s electromagnetic railgun programme

Railguns consist of two parallel metal rails, between which a projectile held in an armature is loaded, completing a circuit between them. A massive electrical current of the order of one million amperes is applied, creating an electromagnetic field, which in turn produces a force that accelerates the projectile along the rails.

via Highly charged – the US Navy’s electromagnetic railgun programme – Naval Technology.

Railgun projectiles are generally non-explosive, relying on their enormous speed to destroy the target and thus reducing the risk of a fire on board a ship, and comparatively small and lightweight, so they can be more readily transported and stored. The kinetic energy they deliver could do as much damage as a Tomahawk missile, enabling them to travel clean through a ship.

Kinetic Energy = 1/2 * mass * velocity squared.   KE=1/2mv^2

Disable NetBIOS in W2K/XP/2003

NetBIOS is an ancient session-level interface and transport protocol developed by IBM to network together PCs. It is a broadcast-based, non-routable and insecure protocol, and it scales poorly mostly because it was designed with a flat namespace. Since the late 1980s Microsoft has adopted NetBIOS for their LAN Manager product, and from there it found its way into early versions of Windows and all the way into Windows NT.

via Disable NetBIOS in W2K/XP/2003.

Works with Windows 7 and got rid of all NBNS traffic for me on a per interface basis.  I have netbios disabled on the wireless interface  because wireless should be considered insecure and this NetBios traffic likes to broadcast to everyone your position which IMHO is not good.  Run silent, run deep.

A group of Finnish math teachers write an open textbook in a weekend hackathon

A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a booksprint. The event started on Friday 28th September at 9:00 (GMT+3) and the book will be (hopefully) ready on Sunday evening. The book is written in Finnish.

via Vesa Linja-ahon blogi: A group of Finnish math teachers write an open textbook in a weekend hackathon.

New Android Malware Is A Burglar’s Best Friend

Newly released malware PlaceRaider sounds like science fiction: It’s Android malware designed to build 3-D models of users’ apartments for burglars and assassins. But PlaceRaider–developed by a team at Indiana University–is very real. The new malware was built as an academic exercise, and it exposes security flaws that government agencies would love to use. More importantly, it also exposes unintended mobile functionality that large companies like Google could easily monetize.

via New Android Malware Is A Burglar’s Best Friend | Fast Company.

Note again that this is a proof of concept and not actual malware in the wild.  It does inspire me to cover any phone or tablet camera with some kind of opaque tape.

Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol

The Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Protocol (WPAD) is a method used by clients to locate a URL of a configuration file using DHCP and/or DNS discovery methods. Once detection and download of the configuration file is complete it can be executed to determine the proxy for a specified URL. The WPAD protocol only outlines the mechanism for discovering the location of this file, but the most commonly deployed configuration file format is the Proxy auto-config format originally designed by Netscape in 1996 for Netscape Navigator 2.0.[1] The WPAD protocol was drafted by a consortium of companies including Inktomi Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, RealNetworks, Inc., and Sun Microsystems, Inc.. WPAD is documented in an INTERNET-DRAFT which expired in December 1999.[2] However WPAD is still supported by all major browsers.[3][4] WPAD was first included with Internet Explorer 5.0.

via Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Tellabs Finds New PON Frontier

The manufacturer claims to be the first company to convert its GPON platform into an enterprise switch, back in 2009, to enable enterprises to take advantage of the bandwidth capacity and lower costs of passive optics, and considers itself a global leader in optical LANs. Tellabs is getting competition in the field from Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT) and newer fiber-to-the-desktop players such as Zhone Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: ZHNE) are also exploring how to use their PON expertise in what is expected to be a growing market. (See Moto Expands PON Family.)

Other companies capitalizing on this market are fiber management firms, such as 3M Co. (NYSE: MMM) and TE Connectivity (NYSE: TEL).

via Light Reading – Mobile Backhaul – Tellabs Finds New PON Frontier: The Desktop – Telecom News Analysis.

Tellabs has had success selling its optical LAN technology into enterprises through Value Added Resellers, and into federal government agencies. One of its new pushes is to encourage telecom service providers, especially those in rural areas, to look to optical LAN technology as something they can sell to their business customers, as part of a hosted or managed service they deliver, says Van Horne.

Disk drive shipments rebound from Thai floods

HDD shipments in 2012 for the overall computer market, including PCs, are forecast to reach 524 million drives, up 4.3% percent from 502.5 million units last year, according to an IHS report.

Hard drive prices, however, will remain high, and prices are not expected to fall to pre-flood levels until 2014, IHS stated in a report earlier this year.

via Disk drive shipments rebound from Thai floods – Computerworld.

Hard drives sales will also get a boost from ultrabooks, including machines that use hybrid drives, which combine spinning disk with solid state storage. Those drive shipments are flat now but will take off in the fourth quarter of this years, according to IHS.