comments to – barryweaver@smartinfotech.co.uk  www.smartinfotech.co.uk

This is quite an interesting article because faster broadband is a huge enabler for businesses that have remote workers. There are lots of ways to still deliver good quality services through conventional broadband connections to remote users like terminal services for instance but it’s always good to know that connectivity services are going to keep getting better.

When a broadband product is described it is only ever really sold on the download speed which is significantly higher than the upload speed. In a nutshell broadband is slower transmitting data than downloading data by a long way. For example, when a user connects on an 8mb broadband connection to another broadband connection they connect to the upload portion which might only be 1 tenth of their download ability. This causes people connecting to the upload portion of the broadband connection or connecting from a remote site to a site hosting a service to experience a much slower speed no matter how fast their download is. So in other words you could have the fastest connection known to man connecting to a broadband hosted service and experience poor performance.

With the advent of cheaper and faster broadband we believe that many smaller companies will adopt a cloud computing model once the price of hosted services begin to become more competitive. If it’s delivered for when the article states I for one will be very surprised however. Read on -

Based around fibre optic cables, BT said the Infinity service could change the way that people use broadband. It will give some customers an upload speed of up to 10 mbps. Trials has been held in London’s Muswell Hill, Whitchurch and Glasgow. BT said 4 million homes and businesses would be able to get it by 2011. The current highest speed service from BT available to homes is 20 megabits per second (mbps), though not all homes can get this headline speed. BT Retail said the basic 40mbps service will be offered for £19.99 per month on an 18 month contract. It will also charge an installation fee of £50 for those on the lowest tariff. Only those who opt for BT’s most expensive tariff, £24.99 per month, will get the 10mbps upload speed. With the basic package upload speed is up to 2mbps. BT said the higher speed would make it easier to share broadband among multiple computers and improve video streaming and net TV services. As with lower speed services only those closest to BT’s exchanges are likely to get the full 40mbps. A spokesman for Virgin Media wondered why anyone would buy a service from BT that has yet to launch when it could get higher speeds via cable already. He said Virgin was already trialling future technology that could see cable speeds reach 200mbps. Fast future The fibre service is being rolled out by BT’s Openreach arm and will be offered to other ISPs to re-sell. “Other providers may have differing prices,” said Andrew Ferguson of Think Broadband. “Some higher if their fair use policy is more lenient, perhaps offers with lower prices if usage amounts are lower.” BT Retail said customers of the cheaper Infinity service would be limited to downloads of 20GB per month. Those paying more will get an unlimited service. “The Openreach products that Infinity is based on, are available to the LLU providers, so we can expect to see products from TalkTalk and Sky in due course,” he said. “As for when depends on whether they see customers moving.” Think Broadband is maintaining a list of exchanges that are fitted with the fibre technology so people can check if it has come to their area. Mr Ferguson described the launch as a “step in the right direction”. “There is a chance for those in areas where these products and Virgin’s 50meg is available to show that there is demand for products like this,” he said. “That will encourage investors to put up more money so that the commercial led roll-outs can enlarge on their current plans.”

Smart Info Tech Ltd are an IT services company based in Chester. They provide IT support Chester, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Cheshire as a whole.

The cloud computing section will be uploaded some time today fingers crossed.

Keep coming back, its bound to have changed.

it support liverpool

That’s why VMware created the freebie VMware Go service to manage the freebie ESXi embedded hypervisors. VMware announced the Go service last summer at the VMworld extravaganza and put it into beta then; today, the service went into production.

As El Reg explained when VMware Go was announced, this is not a product you download and use but rather a service you engage through the Web. Go is used to manage the embedded hypervisors from VMware – that’s ESX Server 3i, ESXi 3.5, and ESXi 4.0 – and it works by scanning your networks, sniffing out ESXi instances or deploying new ESXi instances if you want them, managing them. VMware doesn’t actually host the Go service, but has outsourced the job to Shavlik Technologies, a VMware partner that sells online patch and configuration management tools.

VMware brags that the Go service, combined with its embedded hypervisor, makes deploying server virtualization a snap, just a few mouse clicks and you are done. The service can do the initial ESXi setup, guiding users with a set of wizards and doing an automatic hardware compatibility check.

Then Go can take the software guts of an existing physical server and pour them into a virtual machine container, or it can install a pre-built virtual appliance on a machine or deploy a squeaky clean VM with nary a bit in it. Go is also used to monitor the performance and resource utilization of VMs running atop ESXi and updates the hypervisors as patches become available.

If you want more sophisticated features – such as VirtualSMP, VMotion, disaster recovery, and so on – you need to shell out dough to get the real ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor and its related vCenter management console.

VMware says that over 1,000 beta testers using the Go service have created more than 3,000 VMs during the testing phase. There are many tens of millions of potential customers in the SMB space who have no chosen a server virtualization platform as yet. It is hard to imagine that many tens of thousands of companies won’t give Go a try very soon, and the base could grow to millions in short order.

Here’s why this matters to VMware: Many Go service users could eventually shell out the $500 per year it costs to get a support contract for each ESXi instance they have in production, and a reasonable percentage of these companies – now customers, not just users – could opt to put some or all of their VMs on the real vSphere 4.0 stack, making real money for VMware.

As far as Smart IT is concerned we think this is great news!

The statement, from Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu, is Beijing’s first response to Google’s threat to stop filtering content in China.

Google said late on Tuesday that Chinese cyber-attacks aimed at human rights activists might force it to close its Chinese operations.

Ms Jiang said the internet was “open” in China.

Google announced that it was no longer willing to censor its Chinese search engine – google.cn.

The search engine subsequently said it would hold talks with the government in the coming weeks to look at operating an unfiltered search engine within the law in the country, though no changes to filtering have yet been made.

At a regular foreign ministry news briefing, Ms Jiang said: “China like other countries administers the internet according to law.

“China’s internet is open and the Chinese government encourages development of the internet.”

She was responding to a reporter’s question on Google and US concerns about the business environment in light of Google’s reported cyber-attacks.

“Chinese law proscribes any form of hacking activity,” she said.

Source – www.bbc.co.uk

Google Chrome OS will be aimed initially at small, low-cost netbooks, but will eventually be used on PCs as well.

Google said netbooks with Chrome OS could be on sale by the middle of 2010.

“Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS,” the firm said in its official blog.

The operating system, which will run on an open source license, was a “natural extension” of its Chrome browser, the firm said.

For Microsoft the news comes just months before it launches the latest version of its operating system, called Windows 7.  “We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds,” said the blog post written by Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Google’s engineering director Linus Upson.

Both men said that “the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web” and that this OS is “our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be”.

To that end, the search giant said the new OS would go back to basics.

“We are completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates.

“It should just work,” said Google.

Google already has an operating system for mobile phones called Android which can also be used to run on netbooks. Google Chrome OS will be aimed not just at laptops but also at desktops for those who spend a lot of time on the web. 

The announcement could dramatically change the market for operating systems, especially for Microsoft, the biggest player with around 90% share.

“This announcement is huge,” said Rob Enderle, industry watcher and president of the Enderle Group.

“This is the first time we have had a truly competitive OS on the market in years. This is potentially disruptive and is the first real attempt by anyone to go after Microsoft.

“Google is coming at this fresh and, because it is based on a set of services that reside on the web, it is the first really post web operating system, designed from the ground up, and reconceived for a web world,” Mr Enderle told the BBC.

Last year Google launched the Chrome browser, which it said was designed for “people who live on the web – searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends.”

Stephen Shankland at CNET said the move had widespread implications.

“One is that it shows just how serious Google is about making the web into a foundation not just for static pages but for active applications, notably its own such as Google Docs and G-mail.

“Another: it opens new competition with Microsoft and, potentially, a new reason for anti-trust regulators to pay close attention to Google’s moves.”

Some commentators said Google’s motivation in all this was pretty clear.

“One of Google’s major goals is to take Microsoft out, to systematically destroy their hold on the market,” said Mr Enderle.

“Google wants to eliminate Microsoft and it’s a unique battle. The strategy is good. The big question is, will it work?”

At the popular blog, TechCrunch, MG Siegler said “Let’s be clear on what this really is. This is Google dropping the mother of all bombs on its rival, Microsoft.”

Microsoft releases Windows 7 later this year to replace Windows Vista and Windows XP which is eight years old.

The Redmond based company claims that 96% of netbooks run Windows to date. 

In a separate announcement Google also revealed that many of its most popular applications had finally moved out of trial, or beta, phase.

Gmail, for example, has worn the beta tag for five years.

“We realise this situation puzzles some people, particularly those who subscribe to the traditional definition of beta software as being not yet ready for prime time,” wrote Matthew Glotzbach, the director of product management in the official Google blog.

The decision to ditch the beta tag was taken because the apps had finally reached the “high bar” mark, he wrote.

More than 1.75 million companies use Google apps, according to the firm.

source: BBC

Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram.

The free program aims to answer questions directly, rather than display web pages in response to a query like a search engine.

The “computational knowledge engine”, as the technology is known, will be available to the public from the middle of May this year.

“Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime,” said Dr Wolfram at the demonstration at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The tool computes many of the answers “on the fly” by grabbing raw data from public and licensed databases, along with live feeds such as share prices and weather information.

People can use the system to look up simple facts – such as the height of Mount Everest – or crunch several data sets together to produce new results, such as a country’s GDP.

Other functions solve complex mathematical equations, plot scientific figures or chart natural events.

“Like interacting with an expert, it will understand what you’re talking about, do the computation, and then present you with the results,” said Dr Wolfram.

As a result, much of the data is scientific, although there is also limited cultural information about pop stars and films.

Dr Wolfram said the “trillions of pieces of data” were chosen and managed by a team of “experts” at Wolfram Research, who also massage the information to make sure it can be read and displayed by the system.

Nova Spivak, founder of the web tool Twine, has described Alpha as having the potential to be as important to the web as Google.
Developers say Wolfram Alpha can simplify language to remove ‘linguistic fluff’

“Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain,” he wrote earlier this year. “It computes answers – it doesn’t merely look them up in a big database.”

The new tool uses a technique known as natural language processing to return answers.

This allows users to ask questions of the tool using normal, spoken language rather than specific search terms.

For example, a relatively simple search, such as “who was the president of Brazil in 1923?”, will return the answer “Artur da Silva Bernardes”.

This technique has long been the holy grail of computer scientists who aim to allow people to interact with computers in an instinctive way.

Dr Wolfram said that Alpha has solved many of the problems of interpreting people’s questions.

“We thought there would be a huge amount of ambiguity in search terms, but it turns out not to be the case,” he said.

In addition, he said, the system had got “pretty good at removing linguistic fluff”, the kinds of words that are not necessary for the system to find and compute the relevant data.

Searching for ‘Blair Bush’ could give a different result…

However, he said, most users tend to stop using structured sentences fairly quickly.

“Pretty soon they get lazy, and they say ‘I don’t need all those extra words’.”

Instead they tended to use “concepts” similar to how most people use search engines today.

But Dr Boris Katz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a natural language expert, said he was “disappointed” by Dr Wolfram’s “dismissal of English syntax as ‘fluff”’.

For example, he said, suppose someone asks ”When did Barack Obama visit Nicolas Sarkozy?”

“Here, understanding the sentence structure is important if you want to be able to distinguish cases where it was Barack Obama who visited Nicolas from cases where it was Nicolas Sarkozy who visited Barack Obama,” he said.”

“I believe he is misguided in treating language as a nuisance instead of trying to understand the way it organises concepts into structures that require understanding and harnessing.”

Dr Katz is the head of the Start project, a natural language processing tool that claims to be “the world’s first web-based question answering system”. It has been on the web since December 1993.

Like Alpha, the system searches a series of organised databases to return relevant answers to search queries. However, it only uses public databases and runs on a much smaller scale than Alpha.

Dr Katz said, it answers “millions of questions from hundreds of thousands of users from around the world” on topics as diverse as places, movies, people and dictionary definitions.

It is also able to compute answers form several sources in a similar way to Alpha.

Web companies have also harnessed natural language processing.

For example, Powerset, uses technology developed at the Palo Alto Research Center, the former research laboratories of Xerox.

The company is attempting to build a similar search engine “that reads and understands every sentence on the Web”.

In May 2008, the company released a tool that allowed people to search parts of Wikipedia. Two months later, it was acquired by Microsoft.

Dr Wolfram said he has been working on Alpha for several years. However, he imagines that it will continue to evolve.

“In a sense we are at the beginning,” he said.

OnLive, to be launched at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, aims to let players stream on-demand games at the highest quality level.

The service could provide competition for Playstation, Xbox, and the Wii.

“OnLive is the most powerful game system in the world,” said company founder Steve Perlman

“No high-end hardware, no upgrades, no endless downloads, no discs, no recalls, no obsolescence. With OnLive, your video game experience is always state-of-the-art,” he declared.

Mr Perlman said that the company has developed a data compression technology that allows games to be powered on remote servers rather than on game consoles.

Users download games instantly through the OnLive MicroConsole or straight onto a PC or Mac. The MicroConsole also connects to any TV. All that is required is a high speed connection.

Gamers will be able to select from an on-demand catalogue of video titles stored on these data servers. The Palo Alto based company promises that the service will provide instant access to the most advanced games in the world, solo and multiplayer.

To date nine publishers have signed up including familiar names like Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, THQ and Atari Interactive.

Initial reaction from the gaming press has been a mixture of the positive and the sceptical.

Sid Shuman of GamePro told PC World “When we finally got hands-on with OnLive, I gotta admit, I was impressed.”
OnLive screen shot
So far nine big game publishers have signed up to the service

Michael McWhertor of Kotaku.com admitted “We were a little suspicious of OnLive’s capability to deliver perceptually lag-free on-demand games. But then we played a hasty online game of Crysis Wars on the service and became a little less suspicious. It seemed to work.

“Will it work in the wild? It might,” concluded Mr McWhertor.

At VentureBeat, which is holding its own games conference called GamesBeat, Dean Takahasi said “OnLive’s technology could eventually sweep through all forms of entertainment and applications, providing the missing link in helping the internet take over our living rooms.”

“It remains to be seen if this is just vapourware,” said Cesar A. Beradini of TeamXbox.com.

“The real question is what would happen if this actually works as promised? Is it the end of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo as console manufacturers?” he asked.

From that standpoint Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan Securities told USA Today “OnLive shows the potential for a gaming world without consoles” if the pricing is right.

According to Mr Perlman a new era for gaming is here.

“We’ve cleared the last remaining hurdle for the video games industry: effective online distribution.

“By putting the value back into the games themselves and removing the reliance on expensive, short-lived hardware, we are dramatically shifting the economics of the industry. Delivering games instantly to the digital living room is the promise game fans have been waiting for,” he said.

source: BBC

The malicious program, known as Conficker, Downadup, or Kido was first discovered in October 2008.

Anti-virus firm F-Secure estimates there are now 8.9m machines infected.

Experts warn this figure could be far higher and say users should have up-to-date anti-virus software and install Microsoft’s MS08-067 patch.

In its security blog, F-Secure said that the number of infections based on its calculations was “skyrocketing” and that the situation was “getting worse”.

Speaking to the BBC, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant with anti-virus firm Sophos, said the outbreak was of a scale they had not seen for some time.

“Microsoft did a good job of updating people’s home computers, but the virus continues to infect business who have ignored the patch update.

“A shortage of IT staff during the holiday break didn’t help and rolling out a patch over a large number of computers isn’t easy.

“What’s more, if your users are using weak passwords – 12345, QWERTY, etc – then the virus can crack them in short order,” he added.

“But as the virus can be spread with USB memory sticks, even having the Windows patch won’t keep you safe. You need anti-virus software for that.”

According to Microsoft, the worm works by searching for a Windows executable file called “services.exe” and then becomes part of that code.

It then copies itself into the Windows system folder as a random file of a type known as a “dll”. It gives itself a 5-8 character name, such as piftoc.dll, and then modifies the Registry, which lists key Windows settings, to run the infected dll file as a service.

Once the worm is up and running, it creates an HTTP server, resets a machine’s System Restore point (making it far harder to recover the infected system) and then downloads files from the hacker’s web site.

Most malware uses one of a handful of sites to download files from, making them fairly easy to locate, target, and shut down.

But Conficker does things differently.

Anti-virus firm F-Secure says that the worm uses a complicated algorithm to generate hundreds of different domain names every day, such as mphtfrxs.net, imctaef.cc, and hcweu.org. Only one of these will actually be the site used to download the hackers’ files. On the face of it, tracing this one site is almost impossible.

Speaking to the BBC, Kaspersky Lab’s security analyst, Eddy Willems, said that a new strain of the worm was complicating matters.

“There was a new variant released less than two weeks ago and that’s the one causing most of the problems,” said Mr Willems

“The replication methods are quite good. It’s using multiple mechanisms, including USB sticks, so if someone got an infection from one company and then takes his USB stick to another firm, it could infect that network too. It also downloads lots of content and creating new variants though this mechanism.”

“Of course, the real problem is that people haven’t patched their software,” he added.

Technicians have reverse engineered the worm so they can predict one of the possible domain names. This does not help them pinpoint those who created Downadup, but it does give them the ability to see how many machines are infected.

“Right now, we’re seeing hundreds of thousands of unique IP addresses connecting to the domains we’ve registered,” F-Secure’s Toni Kovunen said in a statement.

“We can see them, but we can’t disinfect them – that would be seen as unauthorised use.”

Microsoft says that the malware has infected computers in many different parts of the world, with machines in China, Brazil, Russia, and India having the highest number of victims.

The emergency patch should be available from 1800 GMT on 17 December, Microsoft has said.

The flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser could allow criminals to take control of people’s computers and steal passwords.

Internet Explorer is used by the vast majority of computer users and the flaw could affect all versions of it.

So far the vulnerability has affected only machines running Internet Explorer 7.

According to Rick Ferguson, a senior security adviser at security firm Trend Micro, the flaw has so far been used to steal gaming passwords but more sensitive data could be at risk until the security update is installed.

MICROSOFT SECURITY ADVICE

Change IE security settings to high (Look under Tools/Internet Options)
Switch to a Windows user account with limited rights to change a PC’s settings
With IE7 or 8 on Vista turn on Protected Mode
Ensure your PC is updated
Keep anti-virus and anti-spyware software up to date

“It is inevitable that it will be adapted by criminals. It’s just a question of modifying the payload the trojan installs,” he said.

It is relatively unusual for Microsoft to issue what it calls an “out-of-band” security bulletin and experts are reading the decision to rush out a patch as evidence of the potential danger of the flaw.

Some experts have suggested that users switch browsers until the flaw is fixed.

Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Apple’s Safari system are not vulnerable to this current flaw.

But Graham Cluley, senior consultant with security firm Sophos, said no browser is exempt from problems.

“Firefox has issued patches and Apple has too. Whichever browser you are using you have to keep it up to date,” he said.

“People have to be prepared and willing to install security updates. That nagging screen asking if you want to update should not be ignored,” he said.

‘Koobface’ spreads by sending a message to people’s inboxes, pretending to be from a Facebook friend.

It says “you look funny in this new video” or “you look just awesome in this new video”.

By clicking on the link provided they’re then asked to watch a “secret video by Tom”.

When users try and play the video they’re asked to download the latest version of Adobe Flash Player.

If they do, that’s when the virus takes hold and attacks the computer.

Guy Bunker works for Norton AntiVirus and says there are two ways Koobface gets people’s credit card details.

“It can either wait for you to buy something online and just remember the details you type in on your keyboard.

“Otherwise it can search your computer for any cookies you might have from when you’ve bought something in the past, and take them from there.”

The Facebook case is the latest example of hackers using social networking sites to try to cash in.

MySpace was targeted by Koobface in August.

Security experts say people are far less suspicious about viruses on sites like Facebook because you need to be a member to log in.

Facebook won’t give any specifics on how many users have been hit by the virus, only saying it’s a small percentage.

But they have posted some advice on the site about what to do if you come across it.

“We’re currently helping our users with the recently discovered ‘Koobface’ worm and phishing sites.

“If your account has recently been used to send spam, please visit one of the online antivirus scanners from the Helpful Links list, and reset your password.”

Source: BBC News