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Turkey Revenge
The turkeys are pissed this Thanksgiving they are seeking revenge.
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60% of Americans sleep with their phones, harboring germs. Cleaning regularly with UV sanitizer or alcohol wipes can help keep your phone and bed germ-free.
Smartphone Sanitizing: A Practical Guide
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Why Soft Skills Matter in Today’s Job Market
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May the Fourth Be With You
Romania Leads IPv4 Market
I first wrote about the grey market in IPv4 addresses when Microsoft (MSFT) bought Nortel‘s IPv4 IP block back in 2011. A recent article from CircleID proves the market has caught up with Bach Seat. In the CircleID article, Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at Dyn reports that the market for IPv4 addresses is heating up especially in Europe.
RIPE’s IPv4 transfers
According to Dyn, statistics from RIPE, the European registrar, show that the IPv4 market has heated up. RIPE’s table of transfers of provider aggregatable (PA) IPv4 address clearly shows a rapidly increasing rate of transfers of IPv4 address blocks and unique IPv4 addresses. In fact:
February 2015 saw the most organizational transfers (373).- November 2014 saw the most unique address transfers (nearly 2 million).
- The number of transfers in the RIPE region far outpaces any other region.
Romania is a key player in IPv4
An analysis of the RIPE data by the author finds that Romania is a key player in the IPv4 market.
During 2014/15 1,069 (58%) transfers came from Romanian organizations.- 947 (51%) of all the blocks transferred in the RIPE region were from a single Romanian organization, namely, Jump.ro.
- Jump is willing to sell large blocks of IPv4 address space (around $10/address) or lease smaller blocks for $0.50/address/year.
- Of the 4,656 routed prefixes that make up the Saudi Arabia part of the Internet, 1,498 or almost a third of them were Romanian just a few months ago.
- The Syrian state telecom got 5.155.0.0/16 from Romania’s Nav Telecom last August and Iranian telecoms bought over 1 million unique IP addresses in 85 transfers over the past year (80% from Jump.ro).
- Saudi Telecom received 17 IPv4 transfers since September last year representing over 1.5 million IP addresses: 14 were from Romanian sources and the other 3 were from
- Ukraine. At $10/address, those addresses would have cost Saudi Telecom $15 million.
A side-effect of the IPv4 gray market is abetting the growth of global routing tables to dangerous levels. The first effects of this were seen in August 2014 when BGP routing tables grew to over 512,000 routes when many older routers could no longer properly track the routes. ZDNet explains that routes are typically kept in a specialized kind of memory called Tertiary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) which has a limited capacity which fails when it is full.
The author asks what are the implications of all this? Now that the Romanians have demonstrated that there is a lucrative business to be had in selling off IPv4 address space, will we see ISPs in developing countries rush to sell off their address space for some quick cash? If such sales result in the IPv4 space getting sliced more and more thinly, we can surely expect the global routing table to increase in size, perhaps dramatically, as a result.
Will this cause more router meltdowns?
Related articles
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Wi-Fi Marches On
Kevin Fitchard at GigaOm lays out where Wi-Fi is headed. Now that the second wave of 802.11ac Wi-Fi equipment is hitting the market, new pans are happening. The Wi-Fi Alliance and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) have begun to look ahead to 802.11ac successor. This time around, the wireless industry is turning its focus away from overall network capacity to real connection speed to the device.
Mr. Fitchard explains that the huge gigabit-plus numbers often attributed to 802.11ac can be a bit misleading. They represent the overall capacity a Wi-Fi network can support. For instance, 1.3 Gbps in today’s most advanced routers, but only in the rarest of circumstances would any single device actually be able to connect at such high rates. The author argues that 802.11ac technologies improvements will be able to pack more high-speed connections into a single router and take advantage of bigger swaths of unlicensed spectrum.
Fair share
However, individual connections are still peaking at just over 300 Mbps. Assuming the broadband connection that can even support those speeds. Typical connection speeds are far slower. 
With 802.11ax, though, wireless engineers are making sure the individual, not just the network, gets its fair share of attention, said Greg Ennis, VP of Technology for the Wi-Fi Alliance.
Though the IEEE is still in the early stages of developing the 801.11ax specifications (we likely won’t have a ratified standard until at least 2018), it has begun setting priorities for the new technology, the Wi-Fi Alliance’s Ennis said. And at the top of that list is a 4X increase in speed to the device, possibly pushing individual device connections into the gigabit range.
MIMO-OFDA
GigaOm speculates that the IEEE is hoping to do this with a new radio technology called MIMO-OFDA. MIMO, or multiple input-multiple output, uses multiple antennas to send multiple streams of data to the same or different devices, while OFDA is a variant of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technologies used in 4G mobile and earlier Wi-Fi standards. The idea is to create a more powerful and efficient radio that can shove more bits into the same transmission. That would create a bigger data pipe to the individual devices, which would, in turn, add up to greater overall network capacity and better Wi-Fi performance even in the sketchiest of conditions, Mr. Ennis said. “The goal here is not just to increase average throughput, but the average throughput users would actually see in the real world, even in the densest environments,” Ennis said.
Chinese equipment maker Huawei (002502) — which is heading up the IEEE 802.11ax working group — is already doing trials of MIMO-OFDA systems and it’s hitting 10.53 Gbps in the lab using Wi-Fi’s traditional 5 GHz band. Whether that means a 10 Gbps to your smartphone or tablet remains to be seen, but it hardly seems relevant given it’s difficult to comprehend what any device could possibly do with a 10 Gbps connection (much less a home broadband connection capable of supporting a high-capacity link).
Faster simultaneous Wi-Fi connections
But if 802.11ax lives up to its promise, the author says it should be able to squeeze a lot more and a lot faster simultaneous connections out of a single router or hotspot, which would mean a far better experience for everyone on a crowded network. Though the IEEE won’t ratify 802.11ax until 2018 or later, we might see the Wi-Fi Alliance certify “draft-ax” devices and equipment beforehand just as we saw “draft-n” and “draft-ac” devices before their respective 802.11 standards were finalized. It all depends on how far the wireless industry has progressed with the underlying technology in the coming years, Ennis said. A range comparison for different Wi-Fi technologies. And long before we see the “ax” suffix stamped onto any gadget or router, other combinations of the Wi-Fi alphabet will make an appearance.
The Alliance will begin certifying the first 802.11ad, or WiGig, devices next year, supporting extremely close range but very high-capacity links between gadgets and peripherals. A bit further down the road is 802.11ah, which will take Wi-Fi to the 900 MHz band where it will provide narrowband but long-range connectivity to the internet of things.
rb-
Techie wireless alphabet – IEEE, N, AC, AD, AH, AX, MIMO, OFDM, EI, EIO, O!
Related articles
- Every Wi-Fi Router Should Look Like The USS Enterprise (gizmodo.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 10-gigabit, 2015, 802.11ac, 802.11ad, 802.11ax, Huawei, IEEE, Networking, OFDM, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Alliance
iPad Deal Haunts LAUSD
Readers of Bach Seat should remember the botched $1.3 Billion iPad deal the USA’s second-largest school district made with Apple (AAPL). rb- I covered the massive failure here and here. Well, it seems that buyer remorse has finally set in.
The LA Times is reporting that the Los Angeles Unified School District is now demanding a multi-million dollar refund from Apple or they may sue their former partner. In a letter obtained by LA public radio KPCC, to Apple’s general counsel, David Holmquist, LAUSD attorney wrote,
While Apple and Pearson promised a state-of-the-art technological solution for ITI implementation, they have yet to deliver it … the vast majority of students are still unable to access the Pearson curriculum on iPads … will not accept or compensate Apple for new deliveries of [Pearson] curriculum.
Others have called this deal an incompetent, unconscionable betrayal of LA by people who are so ignorant about technology it’s scary to imagine them responsible for anyone’s education.
Margot Douaihy documents the shameful history, which has included firings, resignations, an FBI investigation, an SEC investigation, and the $22 million “d’oh” moment when district officials realized for the very first time that iPads don’t come with keyboards.
The LA Times also reports that a top lieutenant of former LAUSD Supt. John Deasy and architect of the district’s flawed and now-abandoned $1.3 billion iPads-for-all and new online student records system is now taking the helm of the Burbank school district at $241,000 a year. Why?—because Burbank BoE believes they need someone with business savvy to sort out their technology.
rb-
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck while the FBI and SEC are investigating, it is probably a politician.
Related articles
- Los Angeles Schools Want Refund For Failed iPad Program (nbcnews.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
EDU- The Most Bot-Infested Sector
DarkReading confirms, what I have pointed out to Bach Seat readers for a while, education people are terrible at IT security. The latest evidence comes from a BitSight report which concludes that the more bots in-house, the more a company is likely to have reported a data breach. The report finds that the education sector harbors the most botnet infections, according to a new study. The study highlights how bot infections correlate with a higher rate of data breaches.
The DarkReading article says BitSight, a security ratings firm, studied public breach disclosure data between March 2014 and March 2015 across the finance, retail, healthcare, utilities, and education industries. The study concluded that organizations with a botnet grade of B or below had experienced data breaches at a rate of 2.2 times more than organizations with an A grade. The report says there is a correlation between botnet infestations and data breaches; “This does not mean the infections were the cause of the breaches; rather, it means that the infections and breach incidents are correlated.”
The education sector fared poorly. Only 23% of institutions got an A as their botnet grade, and 33% get an F. The main botnets dogging schools and universities:
- Jadtre (59.2%) – Downloads other malware and steals info;
- Flashback (22.1%) – The Java exploit targeting Apple OS X;
- TDSS (8.3%) – Discovered in 2011 It infects the master boot record of the target machine among other things it deletes other malware;
- Zeus (6%) – Financial credential-stealing malware, and
- Sality (4.4%) One of the longest-lived botnets. It was first discovered in 2003. Sality is considered to be one of the most complex and formidable forms of malware to date.
The report notes Flashback is malware that targets Apple computers by taking advantage of a Java vulnerability. Mac computers are popular among younger generations and educational institutions, intensifying the proliferation of this malware in education. Although the Flashback botnet itself has largely been shut down, the large number of infections that still exist indicates that people are running machines that have not been updated; thus, they are still vulnerable to other forms of infection.
Other industries received better scores better than Education.
• 74% of Financial Services firms got an A
• 57% of Retailers receive an A grade
• 53% of healthcare received an A grade
• 50% of Utilities received an A
The report concludes that organizations with bot-infected machines are more likely to report a data breach. “The implications for organizations across industries are that botnet infections cannot be ignored. Companies with poor botnet grades have been breached far more often than those with good grades, and actions should be taken to mitigate these risks.”
rb-
Been there done that … EDU people don’t get IT security. They don’t understand how much PII they collect and randomly hang onto. Their systems send data in clear text across the inter-tubes to change schools.
Someone is going to get breached and sued and maybe they will learn.
Related articles
- Trojan Horse, Zombies, and 15 Critical Cybersecurity Terms You Need to Know (coloradotech.edu)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.