Category Archives: Networking

Issues and news relating to networking.

Splinternet Behind the Great Firewall of China

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GFW is not perfect, however. Some Chinese technical professionals can bypass it with a variety of methods and/or tools. An arms race between censorship and circumvention has been going on for years, and GFW has caused collateral damage along the way.

via Splinternet Behind the Great Firewall of China – ACM Queue.

VPN (virtual private network) and SSH (secure shell) are the most powerful and stable tools for bypassing all surveillance technologies, although the basic ideas are the same as with the aforementioned tools: proxies and encrypted channels. The only difference is that VPN and SSH depend on a private host (or virtual host) or an account outside of China, instead of open, free proxies. Only technical professionals are able to set up such hosts or accounts, and most of them are not free. Commercial or public VPN services will be blocked by IP address and/or domain names if they are popular enough. In fact, the domain names *vpn.* are all blocked (such as vpn.com, vpn.net, vpn.org, vpn.info, vpn.me, vpn.us, vpn.co).

Happy bday! SMS txt msgs turn 20

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The approval was finally given and the systems interconnected, then Papworth, sitting in front of a personal computer, tapped out the greeting “Merry Christmas” and sent it via SMS to Vodafone Director Richard Jarvis.

The text-messaging era was born.

via Happy bday! SMS txt msgs turn 20 – Computerworld.

Perhaps it’s no surprise then that in late 1995, three years after Papworth’s first text message, users were only sending an average of one text every two and a half months.

Extracting Data from Network Captures pcap with Perl

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When I am analyzing network activity generated by malware, I am most interested in HTTP get/posts, the addresses the malware is communicating with, and the data that was actually sent or received.

via Extracting Data from Network Captures pcap with Perl « Mick’s Mix.

Chaosreader is a Perl script that takes a pcap file as its argument and will create communication summaries in a report format. It will also pull data from the tcp streams (within the pcap) and re-assemble the actual files.

Optical SDN Gets a Test Run

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Building an OTS boils down to adding two things to an optical transport box: a virtual switch and the software hooks to receive commands from OpenFlow or some similar protocol. Infinera outfitted its gear accordingly, and ESnet provided a home-built SDN controller to talk to it.

via Optical SDN Gets a Test Run – Optical Networking – Telecom News Analysis – Light Reading.

The OTS used in the tests is nowhere near commercial viability, both sides tell Light Reading. The software doesn’t have operational niceties such as alarms or debugging tools, for instance.

OTS=Optical Transport Switch

Syrian Internet Is Off The Air

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Starting at 10:26 UTC (12:26pm in Damascus), Syria’s international Internet connectivity shut down. In the global routing table, all 84 of Syria’s IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the Internet.

via Syrian Internet Is Off The Air – Renesys Blog.

These five offshore survivors include the webservers that were implicated in the delivery of malware targeting Syrian activists in May of this year.

Alcatel-Lucent Takes SDN to the Enterprise

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AlcaLu wants to see policy infused into SDN early on. Ideally, the network would tap a user profile — or a virtual machine’s profile — to help it make on-the-fly decisions about what to do with traffic coming from (or being sent to) a virtualized application.

via Alcatel-Lucent Takes SDN to the Enterprise – IP & Convergence – Telecom News Analysis – Light Reading Service Provider IT.

.mobi

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The domain name mobi is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System of the Internet. Its name is derived from the adjective mobile, indicating it’s used by mobile devices for accessing Internet resources via the Mobile Web.

The domain was approved by ICANN on 11 July 2005, and is managed by the mTLD global registry. It was originally financially backed and sponsored by Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Ericsson, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telefónica Móviles, Telecom Italia Mobile, Orascom Telecom, GSM Association, Hutchison Whampoa, Syniverse Technologies, and Visa, with an executive from each company serving on mTLD’s board of directors.[1][2][3]

In February 2010, Afilias acquired mTLD Top-Level Domain Ltd. (known publicly as “dotMobi”).[4]

via .mobi – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

“Anonymous” File-Sharing Darknet Ruled Illegal by German Court

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A court in Hamburg, Germany, has granted an injunction against a user of the anonymous and encrypted file-sharing network RetroShare . RetroShare users exchange data through encrypted transfers and the network setup ensures that the true sender of the file is always obfuscated. The court, however, has now ruled that RetroShare users who act as an exit node are liable for the encrypted traffic that’s sent by others.

via “Anonymous” File-Sharing Darknet Ruled Illegal by German Court | TorrentFreak.

Quantum cryptography conquers noise problem

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Physicists have attempted to solve the problem by sending photons through a shared fibre along a ‘quantum channel’ at one characteristic wavelength. The trouble is that the fibre scatters light from the normal data traffic into that wavelength, polluting the quantum channel with stray photons. Andrew Shields, a physicist at the Toshiba Cambridge Research Laboratory, UK, and his colleagues have now developed a detector that picks out photons from this channel only if they strike it at a precise instant, calculated on the basis of when the encoded photons were sent. The team publishes its results in Physics Review X.

via Quantum cryptography conquers noise problem : Nature News & Comment.

Still, 90 kilometres is a “world record that is a big step forward in demonstrating the applicability of quantum cryptography in real-world telecommunications infrastructures”, says Vicente Martín, a physicist at the Technical University of Madrid.