I am a happy Verizon FIOS fiber-to-the-home customer in Connecticut, I admire the long view Verizon took to build its FIOS infrastructure, and I appreciate the substantial punishment that Verizon took from Wall Street until it became obvious that FIOS would be a huge success. But Verizon is not building FIOS in all of its territories! Verizon is unloading land lines in eighteen states because they don't want to keep building FIOS there... more
Contrary to previous security reports suggesting compromised machines remain infected for 6 weeks, experts at Trend Micro say these estimates are far from accurate. In its recent blog post the company said: "During the analysis of approximately 100 million compromised IP addresses, we identified that half of all IP addresses were infected for at least 300 days. That percentage rises to eighty percent if the minimum time is reduced to a month." Additionally the study also indicates that while three quarter of the IP addresses were linked to consumer users, the remaining quarter belonged to enterprise users. more
The UK's regulator has undertaken much commendable work in recent years, which has helped to establish the country's telecom sector as one of the most competitive and vibrant in the world. The regulator stood up to BT's intransigence in the early days of Local Loop Unbundling (LLU), enforcing the creation of BT Openreach in January 2006 to operate as the company's wholesale division. The results have been very impressive... more
Security experts at RSA Research Lab have reported the discovery of a new type of phishing attack targeted against online banking customers that combines a typical phishing website with a live change session initiated by fraudsters. The technique dubbed "Chat-in-the-Middle" not only attempts to trick customers into entering their usernames and passwords into a phishing site but obtains further sensitive information (such as answers to secret questions used by banks to authenticate customers). According to the report, this attack is currently targeting a single U.S.-based financial institution, however operators of all online banking websites are cautioned. more
Today, four years after the launch of the Catalan linguistic and cultural registry, Google reports that there are 90 million pages of Catalan content under the some 36 thousand .CAT domains. As imperfect as Google's tools are as a metric, the correct observation is that the use of .CAT by Catalans vastly exceeds the expectations of its initial proponents... more
According to a new security report released today by SANS Institute, TippingPoint and Qualys, the number of vulnerabilities found in applications in the last few years is far greater than the number of vulnerabilities discovered in operating systems. "On average, major organizations take at least twice as long to patch client-side vulnerabilities as they take to patch operating system vulnerabilities. In other words the highest priority risk is getting less attention than the lower priority risk." more
An open letter from nearly 150 individual and organizational members of ICANN's Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) has been submitted to ICANN's board of directors and CEO. The letter has expresses serious concern over a recent ICANN Board decision regarding the restructuring of the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO). From the letter: "We believe that the Noncommercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG) chartering process has been seriously flawed on both procedural and substantive grounds. We appeal to you to address these problems before permanent damage is done to ICANN's reputation, to the GNSO reform process, and to the interests of noncommercial users of the Internet." more
Over the next five years, the number of mobile cloud computing subscribers worldwide are expected to grow rapidly, "rising from 42.8 million subscribers in 2008, (approximately 1.1% of all mobile subscribers) to just over 998 million in 2014 (nearly 19%)," according to the latest study by ABI Research. "From 2008 through 2010, subscriber numbers will be driven by location-enabled services, particularly navigation and map applications. A total of 60% of the mobile Cloud application subscribers worldwide will use an application enabled by location during these years,” says senior analyst Mark Beccue. more
Over the last year I have become deeply involved in the debate in the USA regarding the future of their telecoms sector, which is proceeding very much along the lines of the trans-sector approach towards infrastructure (using it for other sectors such as healthcare, education, energy), open networks and a separation between infrastructure and applications. While many of the issues are universal it was also interesting to observe the specific elements that make the USA so unique. more
Oh, Internet. You had such potential when you were born — darling of the research community, supported by the wealthiest military the world has ever known. And you married well, into a powerful merchant family. Why are you so lost? Is it a midlife crisis? You were born, some say, 40 years ago this week in a lab at UCLA — one of ARPA's many children. It wasn't until nearly two months later that you first spoke, transmitting the letters "L" and "O" before crashing... more
Hardly a week goes by without a press release touting how soon we'll be using a Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless network. Verizon has promised a major commercial launch in 2010 and a two-city trial before the end of 2009. Let me show you a little chart I put together for my 3G Tutorial and have repeatedly updated... more
According to a recent research, European Internet traffic peaks in the early everning and drops off soon after until the next business day hours while in the United States, internet traffic reaches its peak at 11 p.m. EDT and stays relatively high until 3 a.m. in the morning. "The question is what are Internet users doing after dark?" Craig Labovitz of Arbor Networks reports. more
Government are recognising that healthcare is one of the last paper-based sectors of the economy. It has been estimated that, quite apart from the costs involved, this leads to then of thousands of deaths each year. There is no doubt that a fully integrated computerised e-health system will bring with it its own challenges, and will undoubtedly on occasions also deliver its share of problems. But, as has been the case with all other sectors of society and the economy, integrated computerisation in this sector will improve the situation. more
In India we saw the Department of Telecommunications take action. Late July the Telecom Engineering Centre organized a seminar where the recommendations for IPv4 to IPv6 transition put forward by the regulator (TRAI) were adopted. The highlights of the plan reflect a traditional Indian non aggressive but nonetheless forceful persuasion. more
The FCC is seeking public comments to help create a better definition of "broadband". The effort is in relation to its development of a National Broadband Plan by February 2010 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Accurately noting that "broadband can be defined in myriad ways" and "tends to center on download and upload throughput," the FCC seeks a more robust definition. The definition will be part of the governance over those receiving funding for broadband development as part of the Recovery Act. This could get interesting. more
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