It was indeed, according to The Register, thirty years ago that MS-DOS hit the market:
MS-DOS is 30 years old today. Well, kind of. On 27 July 1981, Microsoft gave the name MS-DOS to the disk operating system it acquired on that day from Seattle Computer Products (SCP), a hardware company owned and run by a fellow called Rod Brock.
SCP developed what it at various times called QDOS and 86-DOS to run on a CPU card it had built based on Intel’s 8086 processor.
Strategy Page looks at some interesting developments in the electronic weapons area:
A U.S. government report (from the National Ground Intelligence Center) indicates that China has developed useful weapons for disabling the electronics on American aircraft and warships. This is done using high-powered microwave (HPM) devices to create something like the EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) put out by nuclear weapons, which damaged or destroys microelectronics.
[. . .]
Then there’s the EMP bomb, a legendary weapon that is much talked about, but has never actually been seen. Throughout the 1990s, information came out of Russia that a weapon had been developed that could generate a short range EMP (electromagnetic pulse) similar to that created by nuclear explosions. All computers within the range of the EMP bomb would be ruined. This is a truly devastating capability. Microprocessors are found everywhere these days; in automobiles, appliances, industrial equipment, medical devices and many other devices. Military microprocessors are often shielded to protect them against EMP, but the shielding is not thoroughly tested and even some military equipment will probably be disabled by an EMP attack.
A decade ago, a British military research team announced that they had duplicated the rumored Russian device and produced an EMP bomb that can fit in a 155mm artillery shell, small rockets or bombs. Such a device was supposed to be inexpensive and could be used to destroy civilian electronics that might be useful to nearby enemy troops. What is particularly worrisome about this new development is that, in the hands of terrorists, it could do a new kind of damage. While not killing people directly, the destruction of all electronics within an urban area could cause casualties and much economic loss. But none of these EMP bombs has ever actually reached the stage where they were actually ready to use. There was always some kind of flaw discovered in testing. Naturally, China is thought to have developed an EMP bomb.
Declan McCullagh discusses a potentially precedent-setting case in Colorado that may determine whether the 5th amendment applies to your personal passwords:
The Colorado prosecution of a woman accused of a mortgage scam will test whether the government can punish you for refusing to disclose your encryption passphrase.
The Obama administration has asked a federal judge to order the defendant, Ramona Fricosu, to decrypt an encrypted laptop that police found in her bedroom during a raid of her home.
Because Fricosu has opposed the proposal, this could turn into a precedent-setting case. No U.S. appeals court appears to have ruled on whether such an order would be legal or not under the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which broadly protects Americans’ right to remain silent.
I’d hope that the protections against self-incrimination would apply in this case, but government power has been expended so far in the last ten years that it would not surprise me if the courts gut this right in their deference to the executive (just like every other time, it seems).
As you may remember, June 8th is World IPv6 Day, where hundreds of major players including Google, Facebook, and Yahoo will all turn on IPv6 access (but then turn it off again at the end of the day). It seems odd to make a big to-do about IPv6 Day then go back to business as usual after 24 hours. Most end users will not notice the change, as most of us connect through our various ISP networks using IPv4 addresses anyway.
So, what happens if IPv6 isn’t taken up by the movers and shakers of the networking world?
Proponents of IPv6 make dire predictions about the fate of the Internet if usage of IPv6 doesn’t rise dramatically in the next few years. They say the complexity of the Internet infrastructure will increase, network operations costs will rise, and innovation will be hampered. This is due to the multiple layers of network address translation (NAT) devices that will be required to share limited IPv4 addresses among a rapidly growing base of users and devices.
“If IPv6 fails to catch on, then the Internet will include nesting of NAT upon NAT,” says Russ Housley, chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet standards body that created IPv6. “I hope this is not our future because it would be a very fragile Internet, making innovation more difficult. On the other hand, IPv6 will greatly reduce the need for NAT, restoring the opportunities for innovation that were envisioned by the original Internet architecture.”
Dorian Kim, vice president of IP engineering, Global IP Network at NTT America, a leading provider of IPv6 services in the United States, says that without IPv6 the Internet “will be even more heavily NATed than it currently is, but life will mostly go on. Unfortunately, such an Internet likely will have a negative effect on potential development of application or service innovation due to inherent issues with NATs. Additionally, should service providers become more and more reliant on NATs, this will probably change the cost and scaling trajectories of Internet services over time due to high cost and limited scalability of large-scale NAT solutions.”
A report at The Register talks about HP’s new leads in the development of the “memristor”:
HP scientists have made a breakthrough in the development of memristors, a fundamental circuit type that looks increasingly likely to replace NAND flash and possibly DRAM.
Essentially, they’ve figured out the physical and chemical mechanisms that make memristors work.
“We were on a path where we would have had something that works reasonably well, but this improves our confidence and should allow us to improve the devices such that they are significantly better,” the leader of the HP research team, R. Stanley Williams, told IDG News.
Memristors are the fourth fundamental type of passive circuitry, along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor. Like flash, memristors are nonvolatile — they “remember” their state when power isn’t applied to them.
The core advantage of memristors is that they can theoretically achieve speeds 10 times that of flash at one-tenth the power budget per cell. They can also be stacked, enabling exceptionally dense memory structures.
Of course, this is all still in the research lab, so don’t expect to see memristor technology show up in your next tablet or smartphone. It could be several years before the new tech becomes widely available.
Dark Water Muse does the math for you:
In this piece DWM does not explore other possible ways that a tablet does things differently to a smart phone, net book, laptop or desktop computer. This is not a general review of tablet capabilities. It can be considered an update to DWM’s eReader versus Book piece [Ed: linked to from this post last week] with emphasis on the cost of the use of the tablet as an eReader.
Since DWM is focused on eReading then cost is an influential factor when considering any eReader device.
If you trust DWM to do the math and you don’t want to review DWM’s work (included further below in the section entitled “The Math”) then you can read the results in the Table #1: comparison of relative eReading costs below.
If we assume the average book price is $20 and eBooks are discounted by 40% (a gracious discount from DWM’s experience) then we get the following equation for N, the number of eBooks you must purchase and read on your new device to ensure you’re not paying more for the content you could have read as a book:
N = cost of device / $8
Table #1: comparison of relative eReading costs: The following table indicates the number of books N you must read on the corresponding eReader on the market today (prices taken from the web as of May 15, 2011) in order that the cost of the device does not drive up the cost of eBooks you read.
There’s been a short cycle of “we’re running out of internet addresses” articles over the last few months, as the available free blocks of IPv4 addresses are allocated. By now, we were all theoretically supposed to have moved on to the successor addressing scheme, IPv6:
On the 8 June, it’ll be World IPv6 Day — a coordinated effort by major services on the internet, including Google and Facebook, to provide their services using the new version of the Internet Protocol. It’s part of the plans to cope with internet addresses ‘running out’. But just what is IPv6 — and what does it mean for most users?
At its most simple, IPv6 is the successor to IPv4 which has become the de facto standard for both local and global connectivity. It includes many extra features, including processing speed-ups, and enhancements to security and to quality of service, but the one that’s really driving the need to change is that there are many more internet addresses available with IPv6.
Most Reg Hardware readers will be familiar with the look of an IPv4 address: it’s 32 bits long, and typically written as a series of four eight-bit decimal numbers, separated by full stops, like 10.0.0.1.
An IPv6 address is 128 bits long, and usually represented by groups of four hexadecimal digits, separated by colons. Each of those four digits represents 16 bits, so there are up to eight groups, giving IPv6 addresses that look like 2001:0470:1f09:1890:021f:f3ff:fe51:43f8.
It won’t be a simple case of turning on IPv6 and turning off IPv4, however, as there’s still huge numbers of devices that depend on IPv4. Over time, more and more devices (not just computers, or not only what we tend to think of as “computers”) will work natively with IPv6 addresses.
You won’t just get a single IPv4 address from your ISP anymore: you’ll get a huge block of addresses (“you’ll receive more addresses for your home network [than the] whole of the IPv4 internet”).
Typically, a broadband customer will be given a set of IPv6 addresses for their network, and the router will also provide an IPv4 address and NAT (Network Address Translation) for devices that can’t use the new protocol. The big change for many people is that all their IPv6 devices will be publicly available to the net. That will make setting up many devices much simpler, but also reinforces the need for a proper firewall in the router.
Dark Water Muse looks at competing technology from different eras:
The tech world is all a-buzz with reviews of eReaders and tablets capable of rendering eBooks, each of these device types purported to be candidates as the preferred host for future textual content to dethrone the lowly book as the natural media form readers turn to for reading textual content. Technical reviews focus solely on the merits of individual tablets and eReaders or line them up in comparative reviews. In DWM’s opinion these reviews completely miss the whole context of what is to be critiqued.
This tablet versus eReader battleground isn’t the real competitive landscape. Tablets and eReaders aren’t merely duking it out between themselves to win the hearts of readers. DWM views tablets as equivalent to eReaders when used to access published textual content such as books and magazines. Throughout the remainder of this piece DWM will refer to tablets, and other computer hardware which support eBook formats, and eReaders as simply eReaders.
As noted earlier, eReaders aren’t merely fighting amongst themselves for market share. The eReader, collectively, is fighting to displace the printed book. Read on as DWM explores exactly how that fight is going.
At the moment, I don’t really have any strong urge to purchase an ebook reader. I have a few dozen books on my iPhone, and it’s able to display the text acceptably well for casual reading (those few times I have to wait and for some reason don’t have a real book with me). My big concern with ebooks is less the reader and more the content: unlike a real book, you don’t own your copy of the content, and it can (and has) been remotely removed by the licensor in more than one case already. I have very great reservations about paying money to “buy” when it turns out that I’ve just paid a license fee that can be revoked at the licensor’s discretion without warning or compensation.
An interesting legal precedent may not be as far-reaching as the headline might imply:
Breaking in to an encrypted router and using the WiFi connection is not an criminal offence, a Dutch court ruled. WiFi hackers can not be prosecuted for breaching router security.
A court in The Hague ruled earlier this month that it is legal to break WiFi security to use the internet connection. The court also decided that piggybacking on open WiFi networks in bars and hotels can not be prosecuted. In many countries both actions are illegal and often can be fined.
[. . .]
The Judge reasoned that the student didn’t gain access to the computer connected to the router, but only used the routers internet connection. Under Dutch law breaking in to a computer is forbidden.
A computer in The Netherlands is defined as a machine that is used for three things: the storage, processing and transmission of data. A router can therefore not be described as a computer because it is only used to transfer or process data and not for storing bits and bytes. Hacking a device that is no computer by law is not illegal, and can not be prosecuted, the court concluded.
The key here is the definition of a computer under the law: I expect the Dutch to update this definition in response to the outcome of this case.
If you’re wondering what the buzz about Near Field Communications (NFC) might be, you’ll want to read The Register‘s Beginner’s guide to NFC:
Near-field communications (NFC) will take off very quickly — once it’s clear who can make money from it.
From the look of it, 2011 is the year that it will all become clear.
Mobile handset vendors are rushing to incorporate NFC into their roadmaps, with several high profile NFC-enabled handset launches pencilled to lauch mid-2011.
RIM recently hinted at incorporating the technology into new BlackBerry devices, the iPhone 5 is widely expected to include an NFC chip, and Samsung and Nokia are understood to be planning several NFC-enabled phones.
Mobile operators are gearing up too. In the UK, for instance, O2 is building out an NFC team and forecasts that near field communications will enter the consumer mainstream in mid-2011. Orange UK is equally bullish, forecasting sales of 500,000 NFC-enabled phones this year.
So what’s the fuss all about?
If they’re right, expect to start seeing this symbol on lots of things in the near future:
The N-Mark standard defines an embedded tag, which can communicate and provide encrypted authentication using power induced by the reader – such a tag can therefore be embedded in a credit card or key fob without needing its own power supply.
An N-Mark device, such as a mobile phone, incorporates a reader as well as a tag, to enabling communication with passive tags and other N-Mark devices. That communication takes place at 13.56MHz, but as the power is magnetically inducted the range is extremely limited – 200mm at best.
I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser for a few years, and it generally works well for me. In the last month or so, however, I’ve noticed it being much slower. Some of that problem may have been caused by the Skype toolbar:
Mozilla has blocked a Skype toolbar add-on for its Firefox browser, after blaming the extension for causing 40,000 crashes last week.
The open source outfit said it vastly slowed down webpage-loading times.
The crash-prone add-on downed Firefox 3.6.13 — which is the current stable version of the browser — far too much, grumbled Mozilla.
“Additionally, depending on the version of the Skype Toolbar you’re using, the methods it uses to detect and re-render phone numbers can make DOM [document object model] manipulation up to 300 times slower, which drastically affects the page rendering times of a large percentage of web content served today (plain English: to the user, it appears that Firefox is slow loading web pages),” it said.
I started using Firefox as my default browser around the time they introduced tabbed pages (which every browser has offered for years now). I also use Opera, Chrome, and (unwillingly) IE for specific purposes. If the Firefox performance issues aren’t resolved when they release the new version 4.0 next month, I’ll consider switching to Chrome as my primary browser instead.
Having problems with your USB connections? Have faith! No, really:
A Brazilian Christian sect has allegedly sought to exorcise the Universal Serial Bus (USB) because its symbol resembles a pitchfork, favoured sinner-spiking implement of one Old Nick, esq.
Well, they do say the Devil has the best tines…
The cult in question, which calls itself Paz do Senhor Amado — “Peace of the beloved Lord” — says, not surprisingly, that this clearly Satanic symbol should be cast out. Or at least unplugged.
Bluetooth, however, is fine, Paz do Senhor Amado preacher Welder Saldanha, told Brazilian site Bobolhando, because blue is the colour of Jesus’ eyes.
Ever wanted to delete all the tracking cookies that your browser collects? Most browsers provide ways to do that for ordinary cookies, but did nothing for the Flash cookies. Adobe seems to have heard the demands to fix this:
Adobe has finally fixed a privacy weakness that threatened users of its ubiquitous Flash Player: the software’s storing of cookie-like files that many websites used to track visitors’ behavior against their wishes.
So-called LSOs, or local shared objects, are useful for storing user preferences, such as the preferred sound volume when visiting YouTube, but the Flash feature comes with a dark side. Unscrupulous websites can use them to restore tracking cookies even after a user deliberately deletes them. Files that do this have come to be known as Flash cookies.
Now, developers at Adobe have worked with their counterparts at Mozilla and Google on a programming interface that allows LSOs to be deleted from within the settings panel of compliant browsers. The API, known as NPAPI ClearSiteData, has already been approved for implementation in Firefox. It will soon appear on the Google Chrome dev channel.
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