Bizarre and Annoying Causes of Fiber Cuts

Aug10
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Brandon Sims

An interesting post showed up last week on the Level 3 Communications blog. We often hear of fiber cuts taking out circuits and service to individuals and companies all over, but it’s not often that we find out why.

Fred Lawler, Senior Vice President of Global Field Services at Level 3, wrote a blog post entitled “The 10 Most Bizarre and Annoying Causes of Fiber Cuts“:

With over 57,000 miles of intercity and 27,000 miles of metro fiber, our footprint is a grand design of both buried and aerial paths.  It makes us unique, but with that also comes one of the worst things about our network, and that is the different types of damage we see to our fiber plant.  From errant excavators to crazed squirrels, there are so many different ways to wreak havoc on our network, it boggles the imagination!

The most interesting case was of a landowner, unhappy with the State of Florida for forcefully obtaining some of his property, who intentionally dug trenches and cut ducts and the fiber that was in them. When the Level 3 field technicians arrived to repair the fiber, the landowner was waiting for them — with a shotgun! Fortunately, the situation ended well enough and the fiber was repaired.

Posted in Networking - Tagged ,

LulzSec and Anonymous Post 10GB of Hacked Law Enforcement Passwords, Email, and more

Aug06
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Brandon Sims

A week ago, over 70 law enforcement websites were hacked and defaced by members of the Antisec Movement as part of Operation Antisec. They claimed to have stolen gigabytes of law enforcement data, including “hundreds of private email spools, password information, address and social security numbers, credit card numbers, snitch information, training files, and more.”

The “booty” allegedly contained:

  • Over 300 mail accounts from 56 law enforcement domains
  • Missouri Sheriff account dump (mosheriffs.com) – 7000+ usernames, passwords, home addresses, phones, and SSNs
  • Online Police Training Academy files (PDFs, videos, HTML files)
  • “Report a Crime” snitch list compilation (60+ entries)
  • Plesk plaintext server passwords (ftp/ssh, email, cpanel, protected dirs)

Many of the Sheriff’s of the affected law enforcement organizations claimed that the data had not been stolen (here, here, here, and here). It isn’t clear if they were simply trying to downplay the incident or if they really were just oblivious.

To back up their claims, the 10 gigabytes of stolen law enforcement data has been posted to a website on Tor, but is reachable through a gateway at the link above. Check it out and decide for yourself who’s lying: Anonymous/LulzSec or the Sheriff’s.

Posted in Government, Hacking, Security - Tagged , ,

Internet2 Lights Up 100 Gbps Circuit Between New York and Washington DC

Aug05
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Brandon Sims

The Director of Operations and Engineering at Internet2, Chris Robb, posted today that network engineers have lit up a 100 Gbps circuit between New York and Washington, DC.

Internet2, as part of the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), received a $62.5 million federal stimulus grant to to upgrade the network to an amazing 8.8 Tbps of capacity. They decided to “skip over” 10 Gbps waves and jump straight to 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps wavelengths across a total of 15,000 miles of dark fiber.

Ciena’s ActiveFlex 6500 platform is being used for the optical transport and Juniper is providing some bigass T1600 routers to replace the existing MX960s which will be repurposed.

Robb writes that “no real network traffic” is running over the circuit just yet, as they have more testing and training to perform first. They hope to turn up the next circuit, 100 Gbps to Chicago, within the next month.

Be sure and check out the screenshot of 64-byte pings traversing the “massive circuit” all by themselves.

Posted in Networking - Tagged

QuickTime 7.7 Fixes 14 Security Issues

Aug04
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Brandon Sims

Apple updated KB article HT1222 and HT4826 yesterday, fixing a total of 14 security issues with QuickTime 7.7 for XP, Vista, 7, and OS X.

In most cases, the impact of the security vulnerabilities is “unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution”, although in one case “the disclosure of video data from another site” is possible.

QuickTime 7.7 is available for download from Apple.

Posted in Security, Software - Tagged ,

HTC to Offer Unlocking via Web-Based Tool

Aug04
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Brandon Sims

A couple of months ago, via HTC’s Facebook page, CEO Peter Chou issued the following statement:

“There has been overwhelmingly customer feedback that people want access to open bootloaders on HTC phones. I want you to know that we’ve listened. Today, I’m confirming we will no longer be locking the bootloaders on our devices. Thanks for your passion, support and patience.”

In July, HTC announced that software updates necessary to enable unlocking would begin rolling out in August for the HTC Sensation, followed by the HTC Sensation 4G (T-Mobile) and the HTC EVO 3D (Sprint). At that time, HTC said it was committed to “unlocking bootloaders and supporting the developer community.”

Yesterday, HTC, in response to inquiries asking how the unlocking process would work, released more details:

“The Web tool, which will launch this month, requires that you register an account with a valid e-mail address and accept legal disclaimers that unlocking may void all or parts of your warranty. Then plug in your phone to a computer with the Android SDK loaded to retrieve a device identifier token, which you can then enter into the Web tool to receive a unique unlock key via e-mail. Finally, apply the key to your device and unlocking will be initiated on your phone.”

Because not every user wants to or is interested in unlocking their bootloader and unlocking “provides extensive control over the device and modifications may cause operation, security, and experience issues,” new devices will continue to be locked, but “will support user-initiated unlocking”.

I hope that other mobile phone companies will follow HTC’s lead.

Posted in Smartphones - Tagged

DOJ Warrantless Requests Quintuple in 2009

Aug04
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Brandon Sims

Christopher Soghoian wrote today that “the use of ‘emergency’, warrantless requests to ISPs for customer communications content has skyrocketed over 400% in a single year”, according to an official US Department of Justice report.

In years past, the number of these requests has been relatively low: 17, 9, and 17, in 2006, 2007, and 2008, respectively. Soghoian obtained the 2009 report via a FOIA request, however, and discovered that there were 91 such requests for that year — more than five times as many than in the previous year.

Posted in Privacy - Tagged

Connect Directly To Amazon AWS Via Equinix in Ashburn

Aug04
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Brandon Sims

For customers who make extensive use of Amazon Web Services, there was a huge announcement today that may make your life easier.

“The new AWS Direct Connect service allows enterprises to create a connection to an AWS Region via a dedicated network circuit. In addition to enhancing privacy, dedicated circuits will generally result in more predictable data transfer performance and will also increase bandwidth between your data center and AWS. Additionally, users of dedicated circuits will frequently see a net reduction in bandwidth costs.”

The new service allows you to establish a direct, high-speed connection (at either 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps) to Amazon’s datacenter via Equinix’s co-location facility in Ashburn, Virginia. Many customers may already have a presence in the facility, meaning that a simple cross-connect is all you need to take advantage of this new service.

In the next several months, Amazon plans to make the service available in San Jose, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, and Singapore “in the next several months”. Since Equinix also has facilities in each of these locations, it’s likely that the service will also be available through those facilities.

Posted in Cloud Computing - Tagged ,

Sony Awarded 5 Pwnies for Most Epic FAIL

Aug04
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Brandon Sims

Yesterday, at the BlackHat Security Conference in Las Vegas, Sony was given a total of five “pwnies” in the “Most Epic FAIL” category.

“Sometimes giving 110% just makes your FAIL that much more epic. And what use would the Internet be if it wasn’t there to document this FAIL for all time? This award is to honor a person or company’s spectacularly epic FAIL.”

  • After Fail0verflow and GeoHot published how to jailbreak the PS3, Sony got a bit miffed. Apparently unfamiliar with how the Internet works and how difficult it is to remove the piss from a swimming pool, Sony proceeded to try erase the information from the Internet and sue GeoHot et al. into oblivion. Needless to say, this was about as successful as the MiniDisc.
  • Speaking of piss in a swimming pool, that just happened to be how well Sony protected their Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) users’ account info and roughly 25 to 77 million account details were stolen by unknown hackers. That metaphor makes just about no sense at all, but you get the point: FAIL.
  • Sony is definitely good at one thing: keeping the hits coming and their fans entertained. Oh wait, did we say Sony? We meant LulzSec. I guess that counts as another FAIL for Sony.
  • After learning the hard way that their PlayStation Network was about as porous as air, Sony had to shut it down for over two months to rebuild it from scratch. In doing so, they made everyone from your 8-year old cousin to your barber learn about the importance of security. Hooray for us, sorry Sony shareholders.
  • Noticing a pattern here? But wait, it gets better. Sony might have been able to better repel the multitude of attacks if they hadn’t just recently laid off a significant number of their network security team. Great timing, guys.

Among the other winners were StuxNet (“Epic 0wnage”) and RSA (“Lamest Vendor Response”).

Posted in Hacking, Security - Tagged , , ,

VMware Backpedals, Changes vSphere 5 Pricing Yet Again

Aug04
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Brandon Sims

Last month, VMware pissed a lot of people off when they announced changes to vSphere 5 licensing (PDF).  The result of these changes was that a lot of people were going to be paying a lot more than they had been.

The feedback on the licensing changes was almost entirely negative, with comments such as these:

“We just purchased ten dual-socket servers with 192GB RAM each (enterprise license level) and we’ll need to triple our license count to be able to use all available RAM if allocated by VMs.” –waynej

“That is about 300% (yes, THREE HUNDRED PERCENT) increase in price. Good luck explaining the added cost to your boss.” –jbonicki

In addition, several VMware customers said they were looking into alternative hypervisors, such as XenServer and Hyper-V.

While VMware also announced performance improvements and new features, there really wasn’t a whole lot to be excited about. Even the new networking features were disappointing.

We don’t know if VMware just didn’t expect the huge negative reaction or if perhaps they simply didn’t realize how much of an impact the new pricing model would have on their customers, but they’ve now updated (again) the vSphere 5 licensing. They’re still going to charge based on vRAM, but customers can now allocate more vRAM per virtual machine.

“We remain confident that our vSphere 5 licensing model based on pooled vRAM is the right one for the cloud computing era.”

Bob Plankers has a great write-up on the “Revisions to VMware vSphere 5 Licensing” which details the changes and provides examples of the impact the changes will have, such as: “Each VM will only count up to 96 GB of RAM towards the license. So a 1 TB VM will now cost $3,495, not $38,445.”

Posted in Virtualization - Tagged

Linus Torvalds Dumps Gnome3 for Xfce

Aug04
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Brandon Sims

Users and developers around the world have been split on the decisions made by Gnome developers regarding Gnome3. In a recent post on Google+, Linus Torvalds mentioned that he has switched to Xfce:

I’m using Xfce. I think it’s a step down from gnome2, but it’s a huge step up from gnome3. Really.

I’m a big fan of minimalism and have been using Xfce (and awesome) for years. I really think the Gnome developers have made bad decisions with regard to Gnome3, but that’s their choice. Fortunately, those of us who don’t agree with them are free to use these other alternatives.

Posted in Open Source - Tagged , ,
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