Why Your Phone, Cable & Internet Bills Cost So Much

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In his new book, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use ‘Plain English’ to Rob You Blind, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston highlights these astounding facts:

  • Americans pay four times as much as the French for an Internet triple-play package—phone, cable TV and Internet—at an average of $160 per month versus $38 per month.
  • The French get global free calling and worldwide live television. Their Internet is also 10 times faster at downloading information and 20 times faster uploading it.
  • America has gone from #1 in Internet speed (when we invented it) to 29th in the world and falling.
  • Bulgaria is among the countries with faster Internet service.
  • Americans pay 38 times as much as the Japanese for Internet data.

via Why Your Phone, Cable & Internet Bills Cost So Much | Daily Ticker – Yahoo! Finance.

Air Force sets first post in ambitious Space Fence project

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The Space Fence will use multiple S-band ground-based radars — the exact number will depend on operational performance and design considerations — that will permit detection, tracking and accurate measurement of orbiting space objects. The idea is that the Space Fence is going to be the most precise radar in the space situational surveillance network and the S-band capability will provide the highest accuracy in detecting even the smallest space objects, the Air Force stated. The Fence will have greater sensitivity, allowing it to detect, track and measure an object the size of a softball orbiting more than 1,200 miles in space. Because it is an uncued tracking system, it will provide evidence of satellite break-ups, collisions or unexpected maneuvers of satellites, the Air Force said.

via Layer 8: Air Force sets first post in ambitious Space Fence project.

iSNS: Technical overview of discovery in IP SANs

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The three main protocols for IP SANs are Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP), Internet Fibre Channel Protocol (iFCP), and Internet SCSI (iSCSI). As shown in Figure 1, the iSCSI, iFCP, and FCIP protocols support a serial SCSI-3 interface to the standard SCSI command set expected by the operating system and upper-layer applications. This allows conventional storage I/O to be performed over a high-performance gigabit transport. Serial SCSI-3 transactions are carried over TCP/IP, although only iFCP and iSCSI leverage native TCP/IP for each storage end device. Each IP storage protocol has unique requirements for discovery.

via iSNS: Technical overview of discovery in IP SANs.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook HD Tablets Face iPad, Kindle Fire HD

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The Nook HD features a 7-inch display (1440 x 900 resolution), a dual-core 1.3GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, expandable microSD storage, an 11.1-ounce weight, and advertised battery life of 10.5 hours of reading and 9 hours of video. In its publicity materials, Barnes & Noble didn’t exactly pull its punches against archrival Amazon, claiming the Nook HD is 20 percent lighter, a half-inch narrower, and armed with a sharper-resolution screen than the Kindle Fire HD.

via Barnes & Noble’s Nook HD Tablets Face iPad, Kindle Fire HD.

WhatsApp threatens legal action against API developers

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However, the popular texting alternative WhatsApp still has a major security problem. Attackers can compromise other users’ accounts with relative ease, and send and receive messages from another user’s account. In this respect nothing has changed – heise Security was able to successfully repeat its test this morning (Tuesday).

via WhatsApp threatens legal action against API developers – The H Security: News and Features.

WhatsApp Inc. has, however, been in touch with the developers behind the GitHub project WhatsAPI, an open source implementation of the WhatsApp protocol written in PHP and Python. The company has threatened to take legal action against the developers if they do not take the project offline. heise Security has been told by one of the developers that they have decided to acquiesce to this request and to cease working on the API.

Trade group exposes 100,000 passwords for Google, Apple engineers

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“It is certainly unfortunate this information was leaked out, and who knows who got it before it got fixed,” Dragusin wrote. Elsewhere in the post he said: “If leaving an FTP directory containing 100GB worth of logs publicly open could be a simple mistake in setting access permissions, keeping both usernames and passwords in plaintext is much more troublesome.”

via Trade group exposes 100,000 passwords for Google, Apple engineers | Ars Technica.

Update: An IEEE spokeswoman emailed the following statement: “IEEE has become aware of an incident regarding inadvertent access to unencrypted log files containing user IDs and passwords. We have conducted a thorough investigation and the issue has been addressed and resolved.

Of all groups that have membership websites which store passwords, IEEE would be the last on a list I would suspect to have something like this happen.

phpMyAdmin Back Door

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On September 25th, SourceForge became aware of a corrupted copy of phpMyAdmin being served from the ‘cdnetworks-kr-1′ mirror in Korea. This mirror was immediately removed from rotation.

The mirror provider has confirmed the attack vector has been identified and is limited to their mirror; with exploit having occurred on or around September 22nd.

via phpMyAdmin Back Door | SourceForge Community Blog.

This corrupted copy of phpMyAdmin included a backdoor which permitted execution of arbitrary commands by the web server user. The notice from phpMyAdmin may be seen at:
http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/security/PMASA-2012-5.php

Simplify the Home, Protect Fiber’s Value

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“We need to collaborate as a group to help create a simple and seamless experience in the home,” Mudge said. In a conversation after the presentation, he added that this could include routers or residential gateways that enable a consistent experience and stability for the home technology user over a period of years, not months.

via Light Reading – Cable – Verizon: Simplify the Home, Protect Fiber’s Value – Telecom News Analysis.

A failure to continue to deliver on integration of in-home devices and technologies into the broadband service will cause customers to “lose faith” in their service providers, Mudge said

These service providers will hold a monopoly over FTTH so why would they care about a customer’s “faith?”

ARM Information Center

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Welcome to the ARM Infocenter. The Infocenter contains all ARM non-confidential† Technical Publications, including:

Via ARM Information Center.