Inside Obama’s ambitious plan to make your Internet suck less

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“The impact of these laws is that a community that moves forward opens itself up to years of litigation as courts will have to figure out what such poorly conceived laws mean,” Mitchell added. “So the danger isn’t so much the cost of additional dollars but the exposure to years of court room wrangling.”

Here is a map showing all the states with anti-municipal broadband laws Obama wants the FCC to go after, along with brief descriptions of the restrictions in place in each state.

via Inside Obama’s ambitious plan to make your Internet suck less.

About Anousheh Ansari

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Anousheh is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder and chairman of Prodea Systems, a company that will unleash the power of the Internet to all consumers and dramatically alter and simplify consumer’s digital living experience. Prior to founding Prodea Systems, Anousheh served as co-founder, CEO and chairman of Telecom Technologies, Inc.  The company successfully merged with Sonus Networks, Inc., in 2000.

via Anousheh Ansari – About Anousheh Ansari.

This is an amazing story of accomplishment.  It appears from her Prodea Systems website the company sells home automation and now Internet of Things which is a popular buzzword nowadays.  This company made her enough money so she could  buy a trip to ISS in 2006.

The importance of deleting old stuff—another lesson from the Sony attack

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Saving data, especially e-mail and informal chats, is a liability.

It’s also a security risk: the risk of exposure. The exposure could be accidental. It could be the result of data theft, as happened to Sony. Or it could be the result of litigation. Whatever the reason, the best security against these eventualities is not to have the data in the first place.

via The importance of deleting old stuff—another lesson from the Sony attack | Ars Technica.

IBM Introduces z13, a Mainframe for the Smartphone Economy

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These real-time applications, according to Donna Dillenberger, a distinguished engineer at IBM’s Watson lab, can be done in a mainframe environment. They are not yet possible on clusters of smaller, industry-standard computers, she said. But there are several open-source software projects, like Apache Spark, that focus on real-time data processing across large numbers of computers.

via IBM Introduces z13, a Mainframe for the Smartphone Economy – NYTimes.com.

He estimates the total cost of ownership including hardware, software and labor will be 50 percent less with a mainframe than on his “sprawling server farm,” given the growing complexity of managing hardware and software from several suppliers.

Obama wants to help make your Internet faster and cheaper. This is his plan.

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Frustrated over the number of Internet providers that are available to you? If so, you’re like many who are limited to just a handful of broadband companies. But now President Obama wants to change that, arguing that choice and competition are lacking in the U.S. broadband market. On Wednesday, Obama will unveil a series of measures aimed at making high-speed Web connections cheaper and more widely available to millions of Americans. The announcement will focus chiefly on efforts by cities to build their own alternatives to major Internet providers such as Comcast, Verizon or AT&T — a public option for Internet access, you could say.

via Obama wants to help make your Internet faster and cheaper. This is his plan. – The Washington Post.

Root command execution bug found across wireless router range

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The vulnerability that Drake outlines rises from a poorly coded service, infosvr, which is used by ASUS to facilitate router configuration by automatically monitoring the local area network (LAN) and identifying other connected routers. Infosvr, Drake explains, runs with root privileges and contains an unauthenticated command execution vulnerability. In turn this permits anyone connected to the LAN to gain control by sending a user datagram protocol (UDP) package to the router.

via Root command execution bug found across wireless router range.

This seems more like a designed in feature not implemented correctly.  Transferring config information on an unsecure network is difficult to implement without some kind of flaw.

This kind of hack is well above the capability of your average hacker.  Very unlikely they could do much more than Man In the Middle which they could do anyway without hacking the router.  I do not chase updates on SOHO routers because it’s pointless, a waste of time that possibly introduces different bugs.

HTTP/2.0 – The IETF is Phoning It In

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The reason HTTP/2.0 does not improve privacy is that the big corporate backers have built their business model on top of the lack of privacy. They are very upset about NSA spying on just about everybody in the entire world, but they do not want to do anything that prevents them from doing the same thing. The proponents of HTTP/2.0 are also trying to use it as a lever for the “SSL anywhere” agenda, despite the fact that many HTTP applications have no need for, no desire for, or may even be legally banned from using encryption.

via HTTP/2.0 – The IETF is Phoning It In – ACM Queue.

History has shown overwhelmingly that if you want to change the world for the better, you should deliver good tools for making it better, not policies for making it better. I recommend that anybody with a voice in this matter turn their thumbs down on the HTTP/2.0 draft standard: It is not a good protocol and it is not even good politics.

This Robot Is the Best Limit Texas Hold’Em Player in the World

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Poker being what it is, the robot, named Cepheus after a constellation in the northern hemisphere, will lose if it’s dealt an inferior hand, but it will minimize its losses as best as is mathematically possible and will slowly but surely take your money by making the “perfect” decision in any given scenario. Heads-up limit Hold’Em, it can be said, has been “solved.”

via This Robot Is the Best Limit Texas Hold’Em Player in the World | Motherboard.

And it was solved by computer scientists at the University of Alberta who don’t actually play the game. That’s because solving the game is more of a math problem than anything else.

This development is like when they discovered Basic Strategy for blackjack.

The unbelievable benefits of the USG CIO’s bottomless bucket of bandwidth

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Our private cloud configuration allows our CIOs the luxury of not focusing on bandwidth because it always works. We’ve been able to layer value-added services on top of it — more traditional services like bandwidth as a service, software as a service, backup as a service, and virtual data centers as a service. Our institutions now can focus on students and the value they add to our schools, not on IT as a standalone commodity.

via The unbelievable benefits of the USG CIO’s bottomless bucket of bandwidth | The Enterprisers Project.