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MTC Coming to Michigan

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) will expand its Michigan operations by creating a business consulting center in Southfield, MI. Crains reports that the Redmond, WA-based software company will be creating a Microsoft Technology Center, one of nine in the country, in the Southfield Town Center. Microsoft has used the concept in other markets to help businesses use its products to solve problems, but also as a way for the companies to help each other,  Drew Costakis, director of the Southfield technology center told Crains.

“Our new Technology Center is another expression of Microsoft’s longstanding commitment to the Detroit community, and we believe it will become a valuable resource for metro Detroit businesses,” said Costakis .“Because of its central location in southeast Michigan, the new facility is in an ideal location for customers throughout the region, enabling them to take advantage of all our technology offerings closer to home,” Costakis told the Oakland Press.

“We can do things at the high level to envision what to do with our software, we can collaborate on product designs, or even how to work from home,” he said.  “At the same time, we have a large partner ecosystem with companies such as HP, EDS and Siemens. We can help our customers make connections as well.” Costakis explains “In Chicago, for example, where we’ve been there for a long time, it’s constantly booked.” Microsoft said its lease of the space began Aug. 1, and the opening of the Microsoft Technology Center opening is planned for late fall.

Currently, there are eight Microsoft Technology Center in the U.S.

  • Atlanta
  • Boston
  • Chicago
  • Dallas
  • Irvine, CA
  • New York
  • Reston, VA
  • Silicon Valley

Costakis would not comment on how many employees might be added for the expansion. Microsoft has 200 employees in Southfield and now occupies approx. 40,000 square feet in the 1000 building of the Southfield Town Center office complex. The MTC will occupy space next to Microsoft’s existing Southfield office on the 19th floor of 1000 Town Center Drive and occupy an extra 17,000 square feet. Microsoft has been a tenant of Southfield Town Center for 19 years

Costakis, a former automotive engineer, said it would be ideal to have a relationship with Lawrence Technological University across the Lodge Freeway.

Posted 22 August 2010 † RB § Business § Michigan ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

NASA Robot Has Links to GM

NASA recently had a coming out party at the Space Station Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center for one of its newest project, a human-like robot called the Robonaut 2 (R2). The R2 robot has a human shape, weighs about 300 pounds, runs on a battery and will join the team of the space shuttle Discovery on  STS-133 mission to the International Space Station. STS-133 is scheduled for takeoff on November 1, 2010 . Although it will initially only take part in operational tests, upgrades could eventually allow the robot to realize its true purpose, helping spacewalking astronauts with tasks outside the space station.

The dexterous humanoid astronaut helper is now tweeting at www.twitter.com/AstroRobonaut.

With the help of its team, R2  sent its first tweet on July 26.

I liked the big blue GM logo on R2. This is another example of the value of a domestic auto industry for the good of the U.S.  Alan Taub, vice president of GM’s global research and development said in a press release, “Partnerships between organizations such as GM and NASA help ensure space exploration, road travel and manufacturing can become even safer in the future,” Taub said.

GM’s manufacturing engineering team is already working to find potential applications for R2’s array of vision, motion and sensor technologies that will aid workers in manufacturing operations. According to Taub, “The work done by GM and NASA engineers also will help us validate manufacturing technologies that will improve the health and safety of our GM team members at our manufacturing plants throughout the world.”

“For GM, this is about safer cars and safer plants,” says the GM VP for global research and development. “When it comes to future vehicles, the advancements in controls, sensors and vision technology can be used to develop advanced vehicle safety systems. The partnership’s vision is to explore advanced robots working together in harmony with people, building better, higher quality vehicles in a safer, more competitive manufacturing environment.”

Maybe it will be a reminder to politicians like Dick Shelby of AL who opposed loans to GM to further the interests of the foreign car assemblers in Alabama.

Posted 21 August 2010 † RB § Business § Michigan ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Norlight Bought by Windstream

Windstream (NASDAQ: WIN), the independent ILEC is going to acquire Q-Comm Corporation, a privately held regional fiber transport and CLEC based in Overland Park, KS for about $782 million. Norlight, a wholly owned subsidiary of Q-Comm has a fiber network in Michigan. The addition of Norlight to the Windstream market will expand its presence as a competitive force in the SMB market. Norlight currently has  about 5,500 SMB customers.

Also included in the deal was Windstream’s purchase of Kentucky Data Link (KDL), another wholly owned subsidiaries of Q-Comm. Analysts suggest that the KDL addition by Windstream will complement its ongoing effort to upgrade and expand the fiber network in its own 16-state ILEC territory. KDL provides  an additional 30,000 fiber route miles to the Windstream network. KDL has about 400 employees and provides fiber services for bandwidth-intensive customers such as wireline and wireless carriers — in 22 states.

“This transaction builds on Windstream’s strategy to become a next-generation telecom provider focused on broadband and enterprise customers,” Windstream CEO Jeff Gardner said in a release.

Windstream operates in 23 states, where it provides service for 3.3 million phone lines, 1.27 million Internet customers and 420,000 digital television customers. It has 9,500 employees and annual revenue of about $4 billion.

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Windstream says it will “increase success-based capital expenditure investments in the near term” with a concentration on “the wireless backhaul and enterprise businesses.”  Lets hope so, because the broadband in Michigan is terrible. According to theory, at least, increased competition for the telco and cableco should drive down prices and increase services.

Posted 19 August 2010 † RB § Broadband § Michigan ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

2009 SPAM results

PC World chronicles how analysts at the a California-based security company FireEye executed a plan to shut down the Mega-D (or Ozdok) botnet in early November 2009. At one point the Mega-D botnet reportedly accounted for 32 percent of all spam. In order to shut down this threat, Afit Mushtaq and two FireEye colleagues went after Mega-D’s command infrastructure.

According to the article, the botnet’s command infrastructure was its weak-point. The Mega-D owned bots infesting PC’s were directed from online command and control (C&C) servers throughout the world. If the bots could be separated from their controllers, the researchers found that the undirected bots would sit idle on the PC’s not delivering their malware. Mushtaq found that every Mega-D bot had been assigned a list of destinations to try if it couldn’t reach its primary command server.  Taking down Mega-D would need a carefully coordinated attack.

To coordinate the attach the FireEye team contacted the Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) that hosted Mega-D control servers. Mushtaq’s research showed  that most of the Mega-D C&C servers were based in the United States, with others in Turkey and Israel. The FireEye team received cooperation for the U.S. based IPS’s but not the overseas ISPs. The FireEye team took down the U.S. based C&C servers.

Since the ISP’s in Israel and Turkey refused to cooperate, PC World reports that Mushtaq and company contacted domain-name registrars holding records for the domain names that Mega-D used for its control servers. The registrars collaborated with FireEye to point Mega-D’s existing domain names to no­­where. This cut off the botnet’s pool of domain names that the bots would use to reach the overseas ISP based Mega-D C&C servers.

As a last step, PC World says that FireEye and the registrars worked to claim spare domain names that Mega-D’s controllers listed in the bots’ programming and pointed them to “sinkholes” (servers FireEye had set up to sit quietly and log efforts by Mega-D bots to check in for orders). Using those logs, FireEye estimated that the botnet consisted of about 250,000 Mega-D-infected computers.

MessageLabs reports that Mega-D had “consistently been in the top 10 spam bots” for the earlier year. The botnet’s output fluctuated from day-to-day, but on November 1 Mega-D accounted for 11.8 percent of all spam that MessageLabs saw. Three days after FireEye’s operation, Mega-D’s share of Internet spam to less than 0.1 percent, MessageLabs states.

Mushtaq recognizes that FireEye’s successful offensive against Mega-D was just one battle in the war on malware. The criminals behind Mega-D may try to revive their botnet, he says, or they may abandon it and create a new one. But other botnets continue to thrive. “FireEye did have a major victory,” says Joe Stewart, director of malware research with SecureWorks in the PC World article, “The question is, will it have a long-term impact?”

Mushtaq says that FireEye is sharing its method with domestic and international law enforcement,  “we’re definitely looking to do this again,” Mushtaq says. “We want to show the bad guys that we’re not sleeping.”

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The take down of Mega-D by FireEye has had a noted decrease in the level of SPAM I observed. During the 10 months before the Mega-D take down, the daily average of SPAM messages (DASM) received 49. After the November 2009 Take down, DASM rate dropped to 33. A step down in to the numbers reveals that the November 2009 DASM was 35 and the December DASM was 29.


The overall DASM trend line for 2009 was down. In order to keep the trend going down, firms should investigate the Shadowserver – ASN & Netblock Alerting & Reporting Service. This free reporting service is designed for organizations that directly own or control network space. The service provides reports detailing detected malicious activity to aid in their detection and mitigation program.  Shadowserver has provided this service for over two years, and now generate over 4,000 reports nightly.  The reporting service monitors and alerts the following activity:

  • Detected Botnet Command and Control servers
  • Infected systems (drones)
  • DDoS attacks (source and victim)
  • Scans
  • Clickfraud
  • Compromised hosts
  • Proxies
  • Spam relays
  • Malicious software droppers and other related information.

Detected malicious activity on a subscriber’s network is flagged and included in daily summary reports detailing the previous 24 hours of activity. These customized reports are made freely available to the responsible network operators as a subscription service.

Posted 16 August 2010 † RB § Malware § Security ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,

The Internet As A Subway Map

The good folks over at Simply Zesty released this cool diagram of the inner-web tube thing.

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Check out their site and give them a thumbs-up. A good network diagram is always a helpful tool.

Posted 14 August 2010 † RB § Networking ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,