Oh, the stories it might tell. But since even the tower’s days of facilitating talk are behind it, a writer for The Atlantic has taken up the task of telling its story … or at least piecing one together as best as possible. From that account, which has better pictures:
We were somewhere in Kansas when we found the second microwave tower. We’d found the ruins of one somewhere else in Kansas earlier during that day. This other one still had its pyramidal horn-reflector antennae intact. One abandoned microwave tower is a coincidence; two is probably an omen. Especially when that second one has AT&T Long Lines signage out front.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
RememberingThe networking and computing world, as well as the worlds of science and inventions, lost well-known pioneers as well as younger movers and shakers during 2015. Here’s a brief look back at these people and their contributions.(IDG News Service contributed to this report.)LOOK BACK: 2014’s notable deathsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
128 Technology, a stealthy software startup that "is on a mission to fix the Internet," has quietly and cleverly filed an SEC form regarding a fresh $20M in funding on, of all days, 12/8.The Burlington, Mass., startup has also jazzed up its website since I looked at it last week while prepping to attend the Xconomy "Enterprise Tech Strikes Back" event in Boston at which 128 CEO and Co-founder Andy Ory took part on a panel discussing "Building the Next Great Infrastructure Company."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google Fiber could be coming to Chicago and Los Angeles, where more than 6 million people live, Google announced Tuesday.The company invited the two cities to get the 1Gbps service, then plans to work with city leaders to collect detailed information on factors that would affect construction, such as topography and city streets.“While we can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to bring Fiber to Chicago and L.A., this is a big step for these cities and leaders,” said Jill Szuchmacher, director of Google Fiber Expansion, in the blog.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 5 free Ethernet tools you should check out
Google Fiber currently serves three metro areas: Kansas City (in both Kansas and Missouri), Austin, Texas, and Provo, Utah. Six more cities are listed by Google as “upcoming” Fiber cities and 11 others are potential cities, including L.A. and Chicago.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Juniper Networks this week upgraded its edge routers with hardware and software designed to boost performance and enable network automation. Juniper Networks
Juniper's MX2020 edge router
The enhancements to Juniper’s MX series 3D Universal Edge routers are aimed at improving the port density and operational efficiency of the systems as businesses and consumers demand HD video, cloud services and network-based collaboration from their service providers. Larger enterprises building hybrid cloud networks and placing more emphasis on IT as a competitive differentiator are also targets for the upgraded routers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While the power of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks has decreased in recent months, their number has spiked, a trend that could signal trouble for smaller companies and websites.The number of DDoS attacks recorded in the third quarter of this year has grown by 180 percent compared to Q3 2014, exceeding 1,500, Akamai said in the latest edition of its State of the Internet report published Tuesday.Despite their large number, the attacks were shorter in duration, had lower bandwidth and smaller volumes compared to both the same period last year and the previous quarter.Smaller companies' websites are increasingly at risk due to the rising popularity of DDoS-for-hire services and are also a prime target for attackers that use DDoS as an extortion tool.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Unintentional interference from radios and space can cause problems for the GPS system, as can intentional jamming and spoofing of signals. But communications companies aren't prepared to protect the GPS system from these threats, according to a 2012 Homeland Security report that was recently released under the Freedom of Information Act, as reported by EE Publishing.The communications sector is "vulnerable to potential long-term GPS disruptions" of a few days or more "that could cause sector-wide service degradations," the report says.Jamming
That Global Positioning Systems are vulnerable to interference and disruptions isn't news. However, the apparent lack of preparedness in civilian systems noted by DHS should be an eye-opener.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Flickering lights, tripping breakers, and discolored outlets are among the ways one can guess that wiring is overloaded. Add visual access, and you can tell if the sheathing may appear discolored.But some of us who've been around electricity for a while have also developed an acute sense of smell for wiring trouble. There's a distinctive acrid odor that can be caused by melting components on a PCB, the plastic around a part, or the polyvinyl chloride (PVC) covering on the wire emitting vapor.That odor on its own, even without visible smoke, is a heads-up to troubleshoot the wiring.Nasal range?
There are, however, flaws in the sniffing method of overloading detection. What happens if the overloading occurs in an overhead crawl space, for example? Or at a remote, non-staffed installation?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The FCC's net neutrality rules go on trial Friday as oral arguments begin in 10 lawsuits that could dramatically change the way Internet service providers are regulated.In February, the Federal Communications Commission voted to ban service providers from giving some content preferential treatment. It also reclassified broadband as a communications service, similar to old-fashioned telecommunications except with exemptions from pricing and other regulations.The rules went into effect in April but soon faced a barrage of lawsuits by carriers and industry groups that want to see them gutted. The suits were combined into one proceeding in the federal appeals court in Washington, where opening arguments will start Friday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Long gone are the days of the colorful enterprise networking industry I knew filled with provocative personalities like Cabletron Systems President Bob Levine and 3Com’s Bob Metcalfe. But at this week’s Xconomy Enterprise Tech Strikes Back event held at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology in Boston, I actually detected some real-life individuality and swagger to go along with good business ideas being touted by the industry’s latest batch of young companies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The fact that circuits are not designed to flex hinders product design, causes maintenance issues in the field, and is slowing the move towards bendable, rollable gadgets.However, some scientists think they've got a solution. Researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin say they've invented a healing gel that doesn't need an application of light or heat to fix a broken connection.Until now, you'd need "external stimuli" to mend cracks or breaks in circuits, Guihua Yu, the UT Assistant Professor who developed the gel, said in an article at UT News.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has developed a new type of "composable' hardware that it claims will cut data center costs and slash the time it takes to spin up new applications.Called HPE Synergy, it combines storage, compute and network equipment in one chassis, along with management software that can quickly configure the hardware automatically to provide just the resources needed to run an application, HPE said."HPE Synergy's unique built-in software intelligence, auto discovery capabilities and fluid resource pools enable customers to instantly boot up infrastructure ready to run physical, virtual and containerized applications," the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Processing power may be more important than horsepower in future cars, consultant firm KPMG said in a recent report on the rapidly changing auto industry.KPMG's report on automotive innovation, released last week, says that many "aggressive players are now entering the connectivity space."That list includes "not only makers of chips, pipes, receivers, and software, but also data aggregators and content providers."Changing landscape
Two big ones are Apple and Google. Their investment capacity and economies of scale are significantly larger than the incumbent automakers, KPMG thinks. That means auto-makers risk being trampled.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Thousands of routers, modems, IP cameras, VoIP phones and other embedded devices share the same hard-coded SSH (Secure Shell) host keys or HTTPS (HTTP Secure) server certificates, a study found.By extracting those keys, hackers can potentially launch man-in-the-middle attacks to intercept and decrypt traffic between users and millions of devices.Researchers from security firm SEC Consult analyzed firmware images for over 4,000 models of embedded devices from more than 70 manufacturers. In them they found over 580 unique private keys for SSH and HTTPS, many of them shared between multiple devices from the same vendor or even from different ones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Just because you love your privacy doesn’t mean you can’t make kids of all ages smile with a holiday light show. It’s not like they will be peering into your house. I’m excited to be having my first light show this year, having recently purchased a Light-O-Rama controller and software. As word leaked out about my light show, I warned people it’s not going to be all that this year. What kind of silly soul gets the hardware, tries to learn the software, how to program songs, learns about circuits, makes their own props, sets up and kicks off a show in a mere 30 days? Yes, my adventure was more like how not to do a light show.The fault is mine as I set a goal of getting it up and running by Thanksgiving night, thinking kids don’t have school the next day. Although I told only one person, when I went to vote on Election Day he was spreading the word. Then a lady approached me about bringing a bus load of kids to the show as a Thanksgiving treat. Great; I’m a total noob who doesn’t know what I’m doing yet and it’s only the first Continue reading
If you want to have a holiday light show that will back up traffic and make people of all ages smile (except Grinches and Scrooges), then you might be interested in Light-O-Rama. It’s been used by contestants in the Great Light Fight and was running behind the scenes of the first viral video of Christmas lights to Wizards in Winter. Incidentally, it took the electrical engineer who set up that light show about two months and 16,000 lights; for each minute of the song, it took him about one hour to sequence 88 Light-O-Rama channels. One LOR hardware controller generally has 16 channels.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Depending upon your line of work, you might be looking at a long holiday weekend. If you like to tinker with code and hardware, and also like holiday light shows, then instead of purchasing some pre-made kit, you might consider LightShow Pi.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Tick. Tick. Tick. Clang! That was the sound of an intergovernmental conference kicking the leap-second can down the road. Sysadmins will be dealing with the consequences for the next eight years.Just as adding an extra day in leap years helps us keep our calendars in step with the rotation of the earth around the sun, adding occasional leap seconds to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) allows us to keep this time reference in step with the earth's gradually slowing rotation. Without adjustment, there would be about a minute's difference between the two by 2100. Leap seconds are great if you're using your time reference to note exactly when the sun should be directly overhead, or when certain stars should be in view, but for keeping a bunch of servers or Internet routers in sync around the world, continuity matters more than your place in the universe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Light-based data communications, or Li-Fi, which uses LEDs to create networked communications, can be integrated into a solar panel to create a self-powered Li-Fi receiver.The solar panel receives light from the LED to create power, and also receives light from the network to act as the broadband receiver, thereby powering itself, the technology's inventor says.Solar cells
The currently prototyped solution allows "a solar cell to be tightly integrated into communication nodes, to then receive relatively high bandwidth data while also providing electrical power for the nodes' operation," the University of Edinburgh's Edinburgh Research and Innovation subsidiary says on its website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An Egyptian company that launched North Korea's first 3G cellular network and attracted as many as 3 million subscribers has revealed that it lost control of the operator despite owning a majority stake.The plight of Orascom Telecom and Media Technology in North Korea takes place against a backdrop of rapid telecom modernization and a public eager to adopt a new technology. It's ultimately a lesson in the perils of getting into bed with a government that's not known for respecting international law.When Orascom announced plans to launch the 3G service in 2008 it met with skepticism. The North Korean government severely limits its citizens' ability to communicate and has jailed or killed anyone who speaks out against the regime. The regime has regularly threatened war against its foes and was under sanctions at the time for a 2006 nuclear test.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here