Asian undersea cable disruption slows Internet access

A segment of the Asia-Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN2) undersea cable network between China and Taiwan suffered a serious cable fault on Wednesday, causing Internet traffic to be rerouted onto other undersea cables and slowing Internet access for some users in Southeast Asia.

At about 10:50 a.m. on Wednesday, local time, an alarm signaled a cable fault on Segment 7 of APCN2, which connects Hong Kong and Shantou, China. The disruption caused a temporary loss of service on the undersea link but all customers that use the cable were soon shifted to capacity on other cables, according to a source familiar with the situation.

The APCN2 cable is owned by a consortium of 26 telecom operators from 14 different countries. The cable links Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, South Korea and Japan.

The exact cause of the APCN2 fault was not immediately known. The alarm indicated the disruption was caused by a "single point of failure," which suggests a variety of possibilities, including a technical failure or a cable cut, the source said.

The incident was likely the main reason that Internet access appeared slower for some users in Singapore on Wednesday, the source said.

Undersea cables are used to transport much of the world's Internet traffic and can be easily damaged by natural disasters or other causes. In 2006, a powerful earthquake off the southern coast of Taiwan damaged several cables and slowed Internet access to a crawl for users in Southeast Asia.

To what extent Singaporean users were affected by the latest disruption was not immediately clear. Singaporean Internet service provider Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel), which is an investor in APCN2, did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Starhub, another Singapore ISP that holds a stake in the cable, did not return a phone call seeking comment.

The fault that hit APCN2 on Wednesday follows two other service disruptions that recently hit the network. One disruption affected APCN2 Segment 7, between Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the other affected APCN2 Segment 1, which connects Singapore and Malaysia. However, both of these disruptions were deemed to be "relatively minor" compared to the disruption that took place Wednesday morning, the source said.

The cause of the two earlier faults on APCN2 was not immediately clear.

APCN2 isn't the only Asian undersea cable currently suffering from a service disruption.

Efforts are currently underway to repair the East Asia Crossing (EAC) undersea cable after it experienced "double faults" off the coast of Taiwan last weekend, according to Roland Lim, a spokesman for Pacnet, which owns EAC.

Windows 7 improves its graphics with hardware

Microsoft is trying to improve the visuals in Windows 7 by working with hardware makers on a software interface that maximizes the use of graphics cards.

The OS will support a new API (application programming interface) called DirectX 11 that enables better gaming through more realistic graphics and faster playback of multimedia files. The software giant is working with top graphics chip makers Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) on those features.

The DirectX 11 graphics drivers are designed to help Windows 7 effectively break up tasks over multiple cores to boost application and graphics performance. For example, Windows 7 will process video faster by unloading the task from the CPU to graphics processor cores. 

Nvidia has been able to use DirectX compute capabilities in Windows 7 to accelerate tasks like manipulating images or playing DVDs via its graphics processing unit, said Ned Finkle, vice president of strategic marketing at Nvidia, in a video posted on Microsoft's Windows 7 Web site. 

"Microsoft did a number of things within the operating system that allow us to take the computing horsepower we developed for visual computing and apply it to a range of tasks that have never been seen before," Finkle said.

Beyond simple multimedia tasks, AMD said DirectX 11 harnesses the massive parallel processing capabilities of GPUs to improve gaming on PCs, said Neal Robison, director of independent software vendor relations at AMD. 

"We're going to see gaming at a whole new level of realism that you've never been able to experience before because it just hasn't been possible," Robison said.

He also said that Windows 7 could speed up conversion of video for playback on portable devices. Users will be able to drag and drop video from PCs to portable devices, with DirectX 11 enabling video conversion on the fly.

While Microsoft has built native DirectX 11 support in Windows 7, users will benefit only with capable hardware. AMD in June showed off a prototype DirectX 11 graphics processing unit, but is yet to formally announce a product. 

In a blog entry posted Thursday, 

AMD's Robin Maffeo, a Microsoft alliance manager, wrote "there are plans to make native DirectX 11 hardware from AMD in its ATI Radeon GPUs available when Windows 7 is released." 

Current graphics cards and integrated graphics on chipsets carry support for DirectX 10 or 10.1. 

The ability to break up tasks is an evolutionary step for Microsoft in developing operating systems, said Dan Olds, principal analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group. As users demand heavier graphics from PCs, it is in Microsoft's best interests to offer an operating system that breaks up tasks across multiple graphics cores and CPUs, he said. 

"In order to be able to get performance from succeeding generations, you have to have a multicore-aware operating system," Olds said. Execution of tasks on a single core isn't highly efficient, which was a problem that plagued earlier operating systems, Olds said.

The DirectX 11 enhancements could also encourage more developers to build games for Windows 7 and help the company keep pace with competition.

One company competing with Microsoft is Apple, which has changed the basic architecture of its upcoming Mac OS X 10.6 OS, code-named Snow Leopard, to include new features that divvy up graphics and other tasks over multiple CPU and graphics cores. It builds in support for OpenCL, a set of programming tools to develop and manage parallel task execution.

Nvidia and AMD have said they would support DirectX 11 and OpenCL. Intel, which offers integrated graphics on chipsets, in June released updated graphics drivers for Windows 7, but it carried support for only DirectX 10.

Ziilabs create Zii egg an android mobile the world's first stemcell computer

Singapore based Ziilabs a mobile computer like an andoid create a handphone that's like an iPod touch. It supports 3D high definition video. It is the first stem cell computer 

The new handheld with the mouth-filling name Zii (pronounced "zee") Egg StemCell Computer is, at present, essentially a showcase for ZiiLabs' innovative chip architecture, which runs either its own open Linux-based OS, dubbed Plaszma, or an "optimized" Android to exploit ZiiLabs' processor technology.

The Zii Egg specification:

-3.5" 320x480 capactive 10-point multi-touch display

• Up to 32Gbytes internal NAND flash

• 256 Mbytes RAM

• Support for 1080p high definition output via HD Cable

• Two cameras: a forward facing VGA cam, and a rear-facing high def camera

• 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.1 + Enhanced Data Rate

• Hardware GPS receiver with antenna

• 3-axis accelerometer

• Full-size SDHC slot, which can take a corresponding card with up to 32Gbytes of storage

• Support for OpenGL ES, an open standard for embedded 2D and 3D graphics

The introductory offer of this model is bundled package of $399 but now this is only available for the developers.

DDOS attack to twitter ad also to facebook

denial of service attack or DDos atack twitter and facebook last aug. 6, twitter is shut down for 2 hours while facebook has been running too slow.
it would be dramatic incident for twitter to shut down and many ordinary people or professsional blogger will affect.

Facebook noted on its site this afternoon that it too was fending off a distributed denial-of-service attack that was slowing its site. Unlike Twitter, which was down for two hours this morning, Facebook remained online.

"You may have had trouble accessing Facebook earlier today because of network issues related to an apparent distributed denial-of-service attack," the company wrote. "We have restored full access for most people. We'll keep monitoring the situation to make sure you have the reliable experience you expect from us."

Web site performance monitor AlertSite reported that Twitter's site wasn't back 100% until 2 p.m. EDT. AlertSite also noted that Facebook appeared to suffer little more than a few sporadic errors. Facebook's availability was at 97% at 10 a.m. when the attack was underway, and it was up to 100% availability soon after that.

While there's little more than online chatter and guesswork about the origins of the attacks, security analysts say the incident raises red flags that two giant Internet companies, like Twitter and Facebook would be hit in the same assault.

Randy Abrams, director of technical education at ESET, an IT security company based in Bratislava, Slovakia, said his best guess is that a major botnet herder was offering a demonstration of the power of his botnet to a potential client with a major target in mind.

"They could have been saying, 'Look what I can do to Twitter. I think my botnet can handle whatever you want it to do,'" said Abrams. "I'd put my money on this being a demonstration, a show of force, by someone looking to hire out their botnet."

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, told Computerworld that whoever launched the attacks should beware the clout of those he's going after.

"Anything is possible, and we could make guesses like this until the cows come home ... We simply don't have enough information yet to be certain as to what the motivation was," he said. "One thing is certain -- if they did do this as a demonstration of how powerful their botnet is, they've just made themselves some new and angry enemies in the shape of some major Web 2.0 companies. I wouldn't be surprised if the computer crime authorities put some serious effort into trying to track down whoever was responsible. After all, if they can bring down social networking sites they can bring down banking sites."

Cluley also said it's not yet clear why Facebook faired so much better than Twitter. It could have been that the bulk of the assault was aimed at Twitter or that their defenses simply weren't as tough.

The attack against Twitter brought the site down between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. EDT this morning. This afternoon, the microblogging site was still struggling with slowdowns and interruptions caused by the assault.

Google Chrome OS VS Microsoft VS Linux

guys! are you familiar with the new google chrome Operating system? yes! google chrome now has its new Operating System but i think this is intended now only for the netbooks. Google will launched this at the half of the 2010 for the desktop users. Google Chrome is'nt intend to challenge Microsoft Windows and Linux in operating system?Any new operating system must attract the developers who produce the applications to make it useful. The trouble Windows challengers have had is matching the wide spectrum of software available for Windows already.

The Speed and simplicity is the target of the google chrome OS. It is designed Operating System to be fast and lightweight, to startup and get you in the web in seconds. Like the Google chrome browser Google want it to be simple and go beyond in basic. They are still developing the Operating System underlying security architecture for the users dont deal on some serious viruses, worms, malware and more. Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips. Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google Chrome is designed for the people who spend most of their time in the web. (like me)

All of us want a computer that will set us fast and simple in just a click. We dont want to waste time to boot our computer and start-up the browser. 

We have alot of time to work on.

Google Chrome Operating System are challenging the new Windows 7 and the new Linux kernel.

Adobe Flash on Android, WinOS and WinMo

Adobe is set to introduce Flash Player 10 for most mobile operating systems later this year, including Google Android, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Nokia Symbian and Palm WebOS.

Adobe's CEO Shantanu Narayen said during a recent earnings call that multiple partners of the company have already received an early version of Flash Player 10. Developers will be able to get their hands on a beta version of Flash Player 10 mobile later this year, at Adobe's Max conference in October.

Flash Player 10 will enable smartphones running on the above-mentioned operating systems to benefit from a richer Internet browsing experience, including watching videos embedded on some websites. Web-based applications can also be built on this platform, theoretically freeing developers from any applications stores.

By now, some mobile platforms, including Nokia's Symbian, have been enjoying a simplified version of Flash 8, which users know better as Flash Lite. The new Flash Player 10 is set to bring an improved graphical and audio performance, across more mobile OSs.

Adobe Mum on iPhone Flash Specifics 

But one big name cannot be spotted in the mobile OSs crowd that Adobe will launch Flash Player 10 for: the Apple iPhone. Adobe has dashed hopes for an early iPhone version of Flash in February, when Shantanu Narayen said that his company and Apple are still collaborating on Flash for the iPhone, with no specific launch date in sight.

With the iPhone left out of the equation (so far), the other mobile platforms will have something to brag about until Apple jumps on board. Although with Apple's secrecy, who knows if the Cupertino company is actually bringing Flash to the iPhone?

The underdog and the winner

Google's Android should have the biggest advantage from the release of Flash 10, especially as a plethora of smartphones running this OS are expected to come within the coming months. A 2.0 version of the Android OS (aka Donut) is expected around the same time as the launch of Adobe Flash Player 10 mobile.

Meanwhile, Palm's WebOS managed to get on the Flash Player ship very early, even though the company has released its new smartphone, the Palm Pre, together with a new OS, just at the beginning of this month. Palm is yet to release a software development kit for WebOS (expected sometime at the end of the summer).

IBM for cloud services?

The new product line, dubbed IBM Smart Business, focuses on delivering hosted tools and services for two tasks: virtual desktop management, and application development and testing, according to IBM.

Services for both are available via IBM's network of cloud computing centers around the world or through cloud infrastructures built by IBM behind a customer's firewall.

In addition, IBM is offering CloudBurst appliances that are built to accommodate development and testing tasks.

IBM's goals are fairly obvious, said RedMonk analyst James Governor, via e-mail. "As far as the enterprise is concerned, cloud [computing] is the new VMware, and IBM wants a fat slice this time," he wrote.

For IT managers, a cloud-based application development service could significantly cut development costs, according to Governor. "Dedicated test and development servers are a real drain on enterprise computing resources," he wrote. "IBM is telling customers it can reduce the expense."

Mozilla Firefox launches add-on collection

Firefox announced the lauched of their add-on  collection. The ability of the user to bundle some extensions with the use of firefox browser to another users. The company hope that it will help expose the user in the niche content.

Some add-on kit created is the Web-developers kit, Traveler's pack, but some users can select their own add-ons and they can gave their own name.You can also subscribe to RSS feeds and more.

-aRCie-

MICROSOFT VINE 2009

Microsoft is launching a new product into a private beta with the aim of keeping friends and family in touch during emergencies. The idea for product, called Microsoft Vine, came to Microsoft GM Public Safety Initiatives Tammy Savage four and half years ago during Hurricane Katrina. Development started a year and a half ago.

Vine is designed to keep family and friends in touch when other communication methods are either broken or not particularly efficient. Times of crisis usually involve a breakdown in mobile phone or other key communication infrastructures, and Vine is designed to be as hardy as possible to keep people connected. Vine can be accessed via a desktop client (Windows only for now), text message or email.

Vine also gives you status updates from Facebook for close friends and family. Twitter and other social network news feeds will also be added over time. This lets you see what people are up to, as well as their location on a map if they share it.

Users view and post alerts to some or all friends/family. These can be quick messages to family in the case of emergency, or a church or sports club for meetings or practice. Each person defines how they want to receive alerts - the client, email and/or text message.

The product is very early and Microsoft is stressing that this is an early beta, designed to get feedback from a small number of users. Eventually the client will have some limited functionality even when offline (which is a likely scenario in a crisis), and new interfaces will be built on other platforms like Mac and Silverlight.

People tend to like stuff like this, and it may eventually turn into the place that you keep your true friends list - the people you absolutely want to be in touch with when things go badly.

-aRCie-

Microsoft to deliver free antimalware

Microsoft Corp. today said it will release a public beta of its free antimalware software, now called Microsoft Security Essentials, formerly "Morro," next Tuesday for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

Although Microsoft was vague about a final ship date -- saying only that it would wrap up sometime this year -- it was crystal clear that it will deny the program to PCs running counterfeit copies of Windows.

Microsoft pitched Security Essentials as a basic antivirus, antispyware program that boasts a simplistic interface and consumes less memory and disk space than commercial security suites like those from vendors such as Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc.

"This is security you can trust," said Alan Packer, general manager of Microsoft's antimalware team, when asked to define how it differs from rivals, both free and not. "And it's easy to get and easy to use."

He stressed the Security Essentials' real-time protection over its scanning functions, which are both integral to any security software worth its weight. "Rather than scan and clean, which it also does, it's trying to keep you from being infected in the first place," Packer said.

One of its most interesting features is what Microsoft calls "Dynamic Signature Service," a back-and-forth communications link between a Security Essentials-equipped PC and Microsoft's servers.

If Security Essentials detects something suspicious, whether code or behavior, but can't pin either to a specific piece of malware, the software "phones home" to Microsoft servers to relay a short burst of information.

"If it sees something new, like a new binary, the client queries the back end," Packer said. "The server can then ask for a sample, which the client sends as a hash." At that point, if Microsoft has created a signature for the threat, that signature is immediately pushed to the PC. Security Essentials will ask the user's permission before sending a sample, Packer noted.

Security Essentials is the first Microsoft antimalware product to use Dynamic Signature, and the feature will be added early next year to the enterprise-grade Forefront line. "We actually identify [the things that trigger a 'phone home'] fairly loosely," Packer said. "We have a list of known good software, of course, but outside that, if a program is doing things like hooking Autostart points in the registry, or trying to kill other processes, Essential will query the servers."

Normally, signature updates are sent to Security Essentials daily via the Microsoft Update service, a superset of the better-known Windows Update.

In late 2008, this software, then codenamed "Morro," was described as the replacement for Windows Live OneCare, the for-a-fee security software that will be put to pasture at the end of this month. OneCare was never able to gain more than a toehold in the consumer security software market.

Reports last week by the Reuters news service quoted a Microsoft spokesman as saying a beta would ship "soon," and that Morro was being tested internally by company employees.

DreamWorks: 3D movies to double data storage requirements

DreamWorks Animation SKG is releasing all of its films in stereoscopic 3D, more than doubling the amount of data storage capacity required to store its movies.

The move to 3D animation also requires the company's IT shop to migrate away from tape-based storage systems to disk systems in order to keep archived films online for animators to use as references for future sequels, which is the company's mainstay.

DreamWorks recently released its first 3D animated moviem Monsters vs. Aliens, which packed its newly installed disk array from Hewlett-Packard Co. with 93TB worth of images. The company plans to release five feature films every two years. In the past, each animated film averaged less than 25TB, according to Derek Chan, head of digital operations for DreamWorks Animation.

The creation of three-dimensional movies means for every film frame there will be two images instead of one: one image for the left eye and one for the right eye of a viewer. Those cheap plastic or cardboard bi-colored glasses handed out at the theater polarize the images on the screen and combine in order to give the perception of depth.

DreamWorks' philosophy on feature-length animated films is to build franchises. There are three Shrek movies, for example, Madagascar has two and Kung Fu Panda will also have a sequel, Chan said.

"Think about Shrek. We're working on the fourth version now. There are three previous versions to reference for historical accuracy and inspiration. Then you increase the amount of data with stereoscopic imaging, and you've got a much larger data archiving tier," Chan said.

Two months ago, DreamWorks installed a new online reference library for its films. The disk array, an HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System (ExDS9100), has 170TB of capacity - enough to store about 36,000 DVDs. But DeamWorks' goal is to keep everything, so the ExDS9100 storage system was configured to be able to scale out to 820TB.

HP introduced a new version of its ExDS9100 this week, increasing the configuration options on the array so that the smallest capacity point is now 82TB. Previously, the array started at 246TB of raw space, according to Michael Callaghan, chief technologist for HP's Enterprise NAS Group. The ExDS9100 uses an HP C7000 server blade chassis, offering from four to 16 blades. The blade chassis can't store the data itself, but also includes "storage blocks" or arrays of disks, each of which contain 82 1TB hard drives. Each storage block is fronted by a pair of controllers configured for RAID 6 protection.

The ExDS9100 can be configured independently for CPU power and networking bandwidth depending on how many server blades are used in the C7000 chassis, and storage capacity can be increased by adding 82TB blocks. The base configuration of the ExDS9100 starts with two server blades, each of which can deliver up to 200MB/sec. of I/O performance, and can scale to a maximum 3.2GB/sec. Chan said DreamWorks paid under $2 a gigabyte for the new digital archive library.

Microsoft looming Windows 7 licensing 'disaster' for XP users

Windows 7, due to ship on Oct. 22, has gotten good reviews as the OS that Vista should have been. And the large percentage of businesses that have held onto XP rather than go to Vista -- about half, according to Gartner -- are no doubt planning to migrate to Windows 7. But Microsoft may be making it harder and costlier for them to do so, notes Gartner analyst Michael Silver. "It's a disaster waiting to happen," he says.

Microsoft's potential XP downgrade trapUnder Microsoft's planned enterprise licensing rules, businesses that buy PCs before April 23, 2010, with Windows 7 preinstalled can downgrade them to Windows XP, then later upgrade them to Windows 7 when they're ready to migrate their users. But PCs bought on or after April 23 can only be downgraded to Vista -- which is of no help for XP-based organizations, Silver notes -- and could cause major headaches and add more costs to the Windows 7 migration effort.

Microsoft's PR firm tells InfoWorld, "It looks like Microsoft hasn’t made any announcements around timing for downgrade rights from Windows 7 to Windows XP yet." But Microsoft has discussed the six-month limit with Silver multiple times and characterized it him as a "pubic" policy. The policy is also clearly visible in a Microsoft PowerPoint slide.

Both Forrester Research and Gartner advise clients to wait 12 to 18 months after Windows 7 ships before adopting the new OS, so they can test compatibility of their hardware and software, as well as ensure their vendors' Windows 7 support meets their needs. But Microsoft's six-month downgrade restriction for XP means that the businesses that chose not to install Vista have to rush the migration process. Or they can spend extra money and enroll in Microsoft's Software Assurance program, which then lets them install any OS version at the price of the extra yearly fee (about $90) per PC. "Microsoft will probably get more money out of [this policy]," Silver says.

Could Opera Unite to be a botmaster's bestfriend?

Opera has alot of cool new features. Opera Unite gives developers access to powerful APIs to develop amazing Opera Unite services. Share your stuff with your friends over the Web without handing it over to anyone else — total privacy and complete control. introducing a new technology called Opera Unite, radically extending what you are able to do online. Opera Unite harnesses the power of today's fast connections and hardware, allowing all of us to help define the future landscape of the Web, one computer at a time. 

But it also makes a precious resource more readily available to the bad guys. 

In recent years, hacked Web sites have become the fastest-growing way for criminals to spread their malicious software. They have developed automated Web-hacking code, such as the recently reported Gumblar program, that can quickly hack into tens of thousands of Web pages in just a short period of time.

With Opera Unite, they may suddenly have a whole new crop of computers to attack.

Unite was just introduced as part of the Opera 10 beta this month, but it's only a matter of time until the criminals start playing with it, according to Don Jackson, a researcher with SecureWorks. "Bad guys always need Web servers," he said. "Anything that runs a Web server is prone to attack."

But because Opera Unite runs on the desktop, it may be easier to hack than most Web servers. "In this case it's a little worse, because instead of a machine that's managed in a data center, you may have someone on a machine in a hotel network that has no firewall on it," Jackson said.

Opera attack code is already included in the majority of browser attack tools that Jackson has studied. With Unite, he expects the hackers who write browser attack software to pay even more attention to Opera. "I think there will be a push to keep your exploit kit in marketable condition by developing exploits for Opera 10," he said. 

Opera says it will monitor sites for malicious or inappropriate content, but Jackson says it will prove extremely difficult to police content that's being served by smart hackers. They may, for example, send Opera sanitized versions of their Web pages and reserve the malicious stuff for all other visitors.

Botmasters might start using Unite as a platform for saving data, or for running the command-and-control servers that are the brains of their networks of hacked computers, Jackson said.

Jackson isn't the only security expert who's worried. On Thursday, Sunbelt Software Researcher Tom Kelchner said on his company blog: "According to the Opera Unite Developer’s Primer, 'Opera Unite features a Web server running inside the Opera browser, which allows you to do some amazing things.' We’re betting there [are] some other people who use the Internet who will be doing some amazing things with this too."