Displaying items by tag: Internet

Sunday, 19 August 2012 15:47

What is happening with OnLive?

Onlive-Logo

Cloud gaming platform, OnLive, was a very promising project, but never fulfilled its potential. The idea behind the project was to run all types of games on computers hosted in OnLive data centers and stream the video back to the end user. That way a customer can have a low-end PC and still play high-end games. The only thing required for it is to be able to play video and a decent internet connection (5 Mbit/s or faster). All games were available in 720p format, provided by over 50 publishers (Sega, Ubisoft, Epic Games, Atari, THQ, Eidos Interactive, Take-Two Interactive etc.).

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animal farm-pigs

With the introduction of the Internet as a consumer product the world was changed forever. I am not just talking about new levels of communication and new revenue streams for companies that burst onto the scene, but the way that files were moved back and forth between systems. Although the sharing of applications, music and files was happening long before the internet existed this new medium made things easier to pass these files between users. The first of the sharing sites started to show up and the rest was history.

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dotcom

Kim Dotcom, the besieged Megaupload CEO, is taunting the MPAA and RIAA even as he waits for his extradition hearing (now slated for early 2013). Dotcom has not been one to sit back and wait as the industry tries to dismantle the company that he built and since access to the internet was returned to him by a New Zealand court (something we are sure Hollywood was not happy about) he has been engaging in a PR battle with the people he feels are responsible for his arrest.

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GoogleGoogle has made an interesting statement on their blog. It is not one that will surprise anyone or something that is a revelation, but it was interesting to see Google (who is under pressure from the government on many fronts) actually spelling it out. Oh yeah, the statement is basically saying that it is not just countries like China that are trying to censor the web pages available on the internet; it is democratic governments too (including the US).

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90After watching the Department of Homeland Security try to force new amendments allowing them very expanded powers to police and control the Internet it seems the FBI wants to get in on some of this too. You see The FBI and law enforcement are having a hard time doing their job (according to them) and their current methods for gathering information with a warrant are just not enough. They would like Mandatory backdoors into online communication services like Skype, MSN, Gmail etc.

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News_manstealingdataThis morning as a powered up the systems I use to get on the internet and research the day’s articles I found that I was not able to get anywhere although everything appeared to be working the way it should. My Cable modem was working, my edge firewall had an valid IP address, and DNS all looked ok. Still no traffic was being routed out. I flushed the IP address and DNS resolvers internally and externally to no avail. Finally I power cycled the modem, after an unusually long period of time the modem came back up, but with an IP address that was nothing like the ones I have be receiving from RoadRunner for the past several years. It was not even close to the same subnet.

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Tuesday, 28 February 2012 09:57

Can the Internet ever really be secure?

broken-lockThe internet is not a safe and secure place (I know this is a HUGE surprise to everyone), but many do not know just how insecure the system is and how continued legislation to “make it more secure” is actually hurting. Although we could write a small novel about the dangers of allowing corporate interests and government officials who have no working knowledge of how the internet works to change things, we will concentrate on one issue here and one that many people do not even know is broken.

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anonIn what has to be one of the most unusual “Get-The-Vote-Out” campaigns that I have personally seen it appears that Anonymous and the Occupy group are urging people to hold politicians accountable for their actions by voting them out of office.  While some in the media are calling this a first it is not the in reality. In multiple messages Anonymous has called on the public to hold their political leaders accountable. Their methods might be different at times, but this is also the beginning of the voting season in the US so the move really comes as no surprise.

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anonAnonymous is preparing to “shut off the internet” on March 31st. The move is in protest to things like SOPA, ACTA, and according to their statement; “irresponsible leaders and the beloved bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs out of sheer sadistic fun”. Now while Anonymous typically goes after targets with something along the lines of a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack they are looking to do something different here. Anonymous plans to take all 13 Root DNS servers offline in a single day. Is this possible? Well let’s take a look at some of the facts behind how DNS works and some evidence that Anonymous might already have broken into the system.

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Sunday, 12 February 2012 09:31

Anonymous has a busy weekend

broken-lockAnonymous had a rather big weekend starting off with taking down the CIA’s public website cia.gov. This was done through an interesting trick that appeared to be a combination of a DDoS and some DNS tinkering. On the day of the outage the CIA’s website resolved to 192.81.129.107 which when looked up showed as an address belonging to an IP pool in the UK. Once the attack was completed the site resolved to 192.81.129.130 which is undeniably part of the same range, but now shows as a US IP range.  Looking at the evidence this could possibly be a new form of attack from the collective. Unfortunately we just do not have enough information on the subject to be sure and the CIA is not releasing any new information.

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