Nov 7th, 2008 · The reports earlier today on WPA's TKIP key type being cracked were incorrect. I spoke at length with Erik Tews, the joint author of the paper that discloses a checksum weakness in TKIP that allows individual short packets to be decrypted without revealing …
Nov 2nd, 2008 · Reader Ostracus informs us of research led by Michael Ehlers of Duke University that has identified a molecule, myosin Vb (five-b), that seems to be a critical component in the formation of memory. "A major puzzle for neurobiologists is how the brain …
Sep 15th, 2008 · DragonFire1024 lets us know that Wikileaks has obtained 10 years of messages and interviews by Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda. The documents were translated and the messages and interviews were authenticated by the US CIA. "The nearly three hundred …
Aug 12th, 2008 · dstates sends news coming out of the letters the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent to a number of broadband and Internet companies about their policies and practices on user tracking. The committee has now made public 25 responses to its queries, …
Aug 2nd, 2008 · Placid nores that the EFF has announced Switzerland, a tool for testing if your ISP is interfering with your Net connection (e.g. by resetting BitTorrent transfers). It's command-line only at this point. Of course the tool is FOSS, and you can contribute …
Jul 25th, 2008 · The Washington Post reports that Sprint-Nextel spin-off Embarq, currently the US's fourth largest DSL provider, monitored Internet activity on some 26,000 customers in Kansas using deep-packet inspection technology NebuAd in order to deliver targeted …
Jul 14th, 2008 · Kris Kaspersky will demonstrate how attackers can target flaws in Intel microprocessors to remotely attack a computer using JavaScript or TCP/IP packets, regardless of OS. The demo will be presented at the Hack In The Box Security Conference in Kuala …
Jun 30th, 2008 · New research could allow ISPs to selectively block or slow down your encrypted traffic even if they cannot snoop on your transmitted data. Italian researchers have found a way to categorize the type of traffic that is hidden inside an encrypted SSH session …
Jun 30th, 2008 · Multiple sites reported a while ago that Comcast was using Sandvine to do tcp packet resets to throttle BitTorrent connections of their users. This practice may be a thing of the past as it's been found a simple rule in the Linux firewall, iptables, can …
Jun 28th, 2008 · Lawrence Roberts is just another guy with the title: 'Inventor of the Internet' in news articles. According to Wikipedia, he's the father of networking through data packets. And he's turned his attention to everyone's favorite data packet topic: Peer-to-Peer …
Jun 28th, 2008 · By all indications and against all odds, it appears as though most, if not all federal agencies will have met the mandate issued back in 2005 that their network backbones become capable of passing IPv6 packets by June 30, 2008. NetworkWorld quotes Pete …
Jun 21st, 2008 · Khalid Baheyeldin writes in with a CBC interview with the CEO of Sandvine, Dave Caputo (bio here). Sandvine is the Waterloo, Ontario-based company that provides the technology that Comcast and other ISPs use to overrule Net neutrality by, for example, …
Jun 20th, 2008 · alphadogg points us to a NetworkWorld story about the search by ISPs for new ways to combat the web traffic issues caused by P2P applications. Among the typical suggestions of bandwidth caps and usage-based pricing, telecom panelists at a recent conference …
Jun 13th, 2008 · Security researchers at Johns Hopkins report that a variable bit-rate compression scheme being rolled out on VoIP systems leaves encrypted calls vulnerable to bugging. Simpler syllables are squeezed into smaller data packets, with more complex ones taking …
Jun 2nd, 2008 · Two Polish researchers say they have developed a system to hide secret steganographic messages in the packets of a VOIP connection. It exploits the fact VOIP uses UDP, not TCP; it is designed to tolerate some packets going missing so hijacking a few to …
Jun 1st, 2008 · Sivar recommends an article by George Ou examining why BitTorrent affects performance so much more than other types of file transfer and a recommendation on how to fix it. The suggestion is to modify P2P clients so that, at least on upload, they space …
May 31st, 2008 · Doofus brings us a CNet story about a discussion from Google's Jeff Dean spotlighting some of the inner workings of the search giant's massive data centers. Quoting: "'Our view is it's better to have twice as much hardware that's not as reliable than …
May 30th, 2008 · If you think your ISP is sniffing packets, or worse yet, sending reset packets to stop torrents, there's now a beta Network Measurement Tool to detect them, courtesy of Lauren Weinstein of the Net Neutrality Squad. It's released under the LGPL and runs …
May 12th, 2008 · An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Procera Networks is launching a new weapon on the deep packet inspection (DPI) front. At $800,000 these 80 Gbps tanks aren't going to be sitting in everyone's closet, but it could mean that more traffic shaping …
May 2nd, 2008 · According to Wired, universities in the US are experiencing a "20-fold increase" in the number of takedown notices from the RIAA in the last ten days. Indiana University reports 80 notices a day, but they say their traffic hasn't increased significantly …
