Archive for the ‘Telecom and Networking’ Category

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Broadband using LED lamps

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

Broadband through LEDs tips up article tells that German Scientists believe the light coming in to your home could by encoded to receive a wireless broadband signal. The scientists think they can transport data at high bandwidths (currently 230Mbps) by generating a signal in a room by slightly flickering all the lights in unison. The theory is that lights will have to be LEDs to flicker quickly enough and only use the blue part of the LED spectrum to filter out noise. The only “new” idea here is replacing the last couple of meters of bidirectional cat5 delivery with a unidirectional flickering LED, the rest of the way the data would need to go through traditional ways, most probably using some data over mains technology to special LED light bulbs.

This does not sound very new idea. Free space optical broadband has been proposed many times before. It has been coming and going. The technology world is makes circles. Oldest application of optical free space communications has probably been flashing lamp with Morse code. Then there has been TV remote controllers, IrDA some wireless LAN ideas with optical components and various point to point free space optical communications ideas (I have seen demonstrations). Nothing very new in this idea. If you want to play with optical communications ideas more here are some pages worth to look: ePanorama.net optoelectronics, my serial data IR transmitter and receiver circuit and my experimental laser data link.

Posted in Electronics Design, Telecom and Networking | 2 Comments »

Fake phones from China

Monday, March 15th, 2010

Shanzhai ji gallery: Fake phones from China article looks into a Shanghai tech market to sort the fake from the real and to see how the fake iPhones stack up to the real thing. There are many brands of China Mobile Phones and almost of them are fake mobile phones with cheap price. This is an interesting gallery that includes also fake Nokia phones. According to news the market share of Nokia has dropped because of large number of fake Nokia phones on the market for example in China.

nokig

Posted in Mobile, Telecom and Networking | 3 Comments »

Researchers find weakness in RSA

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Nothing is perfect. The most common digital security technique used to protect both media copyright and Internet communications has a major weakness. RSA authentication is a popular encryption method. he RSA algorithm gives security under the assumption that as long as the private key is private, you can’t break in unless you guess it. Researchers find weakness in common digital security system tells that University of Michigan computer scientists have found they could foil the security system by varying the voltage supply to the holder of the “private key”.

They carefully manipulated the operating voltage of the computer electronics (FPGA). This causes it to make small mistakes in its communications with other clients (if it would make big mistakes it would crash). These faults reveal small pieces of the private key, and enough faults allows the researchers reconstruct the key offline. It takes considerable amount of time (100 hours) and many servers (

For more details read the whole FaultBased Attack of RSA Authentication paper. It describes an end-to-end attack to a RSA authentication scheme on a complete FPGA-based SPARC computer system and demonstrates that a fault-based attack on the RSA algorithm is possible.

It is highly unlikely that a hacker could use this approach on a large institution, so the risk of this to you could be pretty low. The researches say that a common cryptographic technique called “salting” that changes the order of the digits in a random way every time the key is requested, can help to fix this problem. There could also be other solutions as well (maybe better hardware more immune to error).

rsa_attack

Image source: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~valeria/research/publications/DATE10RSA.pdf

Posted in Computers, Electronics Design, Telecom and Networking | 2 Comments »

PC is not irrelevant

Friday, March 5th, 2010

Google says desktop PC is three years from ‘irrelevance’. Google Europe boss John Herlihy told a “baffled” conference audience that very soon the smartphone will completely eclipse the desktop. “In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant,” he said. “In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs.” Herlihy was trying to say that Google’s number one concern is now the mobile market.

For companies the number one concern is now the mobile market because mobile makes the world’s information universally accessible. This will create new opportunities for new entrepreneurs to create new business models – ubiquity first, revenue later. This is an interesting market.

PC will not be not irrelevant any time soon. At last month’s Mobile World Conference in Barcelona Eric Schmidt did not say that the desktop PC would be irrelevant in three years. The PC market might not be increasing at great rate, but is is not declining. I would expect that the PC will (in for or another) continue to be well for a long time. There has been many cases where PC has been said to be deaf because of different new things, and for some reason PC technology has survived almost 30 years on the market. PC will not go anytime soon. PC will be relevant for long time. PC will adapt over the time to form that is needed. PC is a flexible product that will live for long time.

Posted in Computers, Telecom and Networking | 2 Comments »

Web technologies for mobile applications

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

I visited yeasterday Mobile Dev Camp. Mobile Dev Camp is a one day event devoted to developing mobile applications on the latest mobile platforms such as iPhone, Android, Maemo. It is held in Helsinki Finland. The end result waht I got from the presentations I followed that web techniologies are coming more and more into use in mobile application development in the next few years.

Web applications are cheaper to make than native applications and can nowadays do many many things (and in the future more). Especially web applications are cheaper when you need the same application to work obn many devices (porting web application to different device is much much cheaper than porting native device, and many web applications work on many platform already without any extra porting work ).

HTML5 web applications are the way to go. Web technologies are nowadays integral part of modern communications devices and the web runtime is fully fledged application platform. Location based web applications are already possible with Android and iPhone. URL is an easy distribution model.

Mobile web application will be big in 5 years. Great growth of mobile web is not cannibalizing the traditional web but can affect the business models of today’s app shop centric mobile application world.

Apple crated downloadable mobile applications markets with marketing (lots of money spent). Now almost everybody seem to be following that model and device manufacturers are betting on at the moment very heavily.  But is that limiting application shop model locked to single manufacturer the best for mobile application business? I think this model will face problems when open cross platform web applications will take on. Other possible future is that web applications will be in the future sold on those same shops in the same way as native applications nowadays, just some applications are web applications and some native applications, without end user knowing how the application is made. Let’s see what happens in few years.

mobiledevcamp2010

Posted in Computers, Telecom and Networking | 2 Comments »

Most Dangerous Programming Errors

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

The 2010 CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors is a list of the most widespread and critical programming errors that can lead to serious software vulnerabilities. They are often easy to find, and easy to exploit. They are dangerous because they will frequently allow attackers to completely take over the software, steal data, or prevent the software from working at all.

The Top 25 list is a tool for education and awareness to help programmers to prevent the kinds of vulnerabilities that plague the software industry, by identifying and avoiding all-too-common mistakes that occur before software is even shipped. Software customers can use the same list to help them to ask for more secure software.  The list is the result of collaboration between the SANS Institute, MITRE, and many top software security experts in the US and Europe.

Cross-site Scripting, ‘SQL Injection and Classic Buffer Overflow are still on the top of the list.

bug_no_400

Image source: http://www.stevenbrown.ca/blog/archives/225

Posted in Computers, Telecom and Networking | 1 Comment »

MeeGo Linux

Monday, February 15th, 2010

According to news around Internet Intel and Nokia are combining their respective Linux operating environments to power future smartphones and tablets. The Intel-Nokia collaboration began in earnest in June when the two companies announced the beginning of a “long-term relationship,” focusing on developing new chip architectures, software, and a new class of Intel-based mobile computing devices. The goal for MeeGo is to put more flesh on the bones of last year’s announcement. The MeeGo software is expected to be released in the second quarter of this year and products are slated to emerge in the second half.

MeeGo project combine two disparate, unwieldy operating environments under one roof. The combined operating systems are Maemo from Nokia and Moblin from Intel. MeeGo will support both Intel and ARM processors. This means that Intel will be now sponsoring a mobile Linux distro which will have ARM as one of it’s main supported processors. The MeeGo will be hosted by the Linux Foundation as an open source project.

At today’s smartphones the biggest players are Symbian, Apple’s iPhone OS, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, and Google’s Android. The market stress from iPhone OS and Android could have ben part of why Intel and Nokia felt it was necessary to team up. MeeGo is also targeted to devices beyond today’s mobile phones: netbooks, tablets, and televisions.

maemo_overview

Moblin

Both companies stressed that applications that run on Moblin and Maemo will run on top of MeeGo. MeeGo will use Nokia’s Qt application development environment. Using Qt, developers can write once to create applications for a variety of devices and platforms (including Symbian that Nokia also continues to use), and market them through Nokia’s Ovi Store and Intel’s AppUp Center.

MeeGo is supposed to be the result of merging Maemo and Moblin, bringing together the best pieces of those (already quite similar platforms). For example both Maemo and Moblin started off Gtk-based, using the Clutter toolkit on top of Gtk. Now both have switched over to Qt.

Posted in Computers, Linux, Telecom and Networking | No Comments »

LackRack

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

This is a really neat trick I just read about. LackRack is the ultimate, low-cost, high shininess solution for your modular datacenter-in-the-living-room. Its low-cost and perfect fit are great for mounting up to 8 U of 19″ hardware, such as switches (see below), or perhaps other 19″ gear. Featuring the LACK (side table) from Ikea, the LackRack is an easy-to-implement, exact-fit datacenter building block. Installing hardware in your LackRack is easy! Screw all the screws that fit in the rack mount in the left and right leg. The table legs have just right dimensions for almost 9U of rack space for 19″ hardware.

Earlier some hifi people have built hi-fi stand made out of IKEA Lack side tables, but now the world is ready for 19″ networking equipment racks. Check LackRack home page for more information on how to build your own very cheap 19″ rack system. The page also tells that also Ikea LACK coffee table and Ikea ODDA night table have right dimensions and can be easily converted to cheap 19″ racks.

400px-LackRack

Image source: http://wiki.eth-0.nl/index.php/LackRack

Posted in Audio and Video, Computers, Products, Telecom and Networking, diy | No Comments »

Universal identification is futile

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

Bruce Schneier blog post Anonymity and the Internet has interesting points on Internet security. I can agree many of them.

Universal identification is portrayed by some as the holy grail of Internet security and that anonymity is bad. According to the blog this is not the case. The problem is that universal identification won’t work. Any design of the Internet must allow for anonymity. Universal identification is impossible. Even attribution is impossible. Attempting to build such a system is futile, and will only give criminals and hackers new ways to hide.

Imagine a magic world in which every Internet packet could be traced to its origin. Even in this world, our Internet security problems wouldn’t be solved. Mandating universal identity and attribution is the wrong goal. Accept that there will always be anonymous speech on the Internet. Accept that you’ll never truly know where a packet came from. Work on the problems you can solve:  software.

The whole attribution problem is very similar to the copy-protection/digital-rights-management problem. It’s impossible to make specific bits not copyable, it’s impossible to know where specific bits came from. Bits are bits. They don’t naturally come with restrictions on their use attached to them, and they don’t naturally come with author information attached to them. Any attempts to circumvent this limitation will fail. Business model developers and law enforcement and others need to learn understand this.

Posted in Telecom and Networking, WWW dev | 1 Comment »

Open Source Symbian

Friday, February 5th, 2010

When Nokia bought Symbian in 2008, nobody had any reason to believe their thoughts were anywhere near Open Source. Parts of the Symbian platform have been Open Source for quite some time and other portions have slowly been released.

Symbian, maker of the the world’s most popular mobile operating system, has just completed the transition to a completely open platform months ahead of schedule. While the kernel was opened up last year, the entire platform is now open source, primarily under the Eclipse Public License. By putting Symbian fully in the public domain, the Symbian Foundation is pitting it against Google’s Android.

symbian_logo

Sources:
Symbian Opens Up
Symbian Completes Transition To Open Source
Symbian.org

icbugs

Posted in Products, Telecom and Networking | No Comments »

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