Networking Reviews

Fujitsu Flepia – The new Kindle

Fujitsu got jealous of Amazon and created the color version of Kindle ! The new product is designed to read newspapers electronically, and is being tested these days by Fujitsu in various cafes in Japan. It is a very thin display device with e-ink technology (electronic ink) that consumes minimal battery energy (50 hours of operation time), while the reading experience is very relaxing as the screen is illuminated by the light of the environment like a normal book. The big difference from the Kindle is that it has a larger display size of 12 inches and 4096 colors so you can see color photos as well.

The screen of the Fujitsu device does not work with video since the screen turns off slowly, however, it is very relaxing to the eyes for reading static pages. The device is called the Fujitsu Flepia, it has WiFi and accepts 1-4GB memory and its thickness is only 12 mm. The Fujitsu e-book device will be running Windows CE 5.0.

Which are the biggest companies in the Antivirus arena

Everyone in the United States has heard of the leading antivirus vendors such as Mcafee, Trend Micro, Symantec, Computer Associates etc. These companies have market-leading presence in the United States.

Microsoft, as well, has plans to become a key player in this market. Microsoft acquired intellectual property and technology from GeCad software in 2003, a company based in Bucharest, Romania. They also acquired Pelican Software, which had a behavior based security as well as Giant Company Software for spyware and Sybari Software, which manages virus, spam, and phishing filtering.

A lot of discussion has centered on whether Microsoft will come to own a dominant position in the antivirus market by simply bundling its technologies with its operating systems at no charge. This is a similar technique applied in other markets such as word processing and Internet browsers. This started to happen in Windows Vista edition with the built-in windows defender to some extend.

Of course there are a number of other antivirus vendors who also play in this market. There are many companies with great market presence in other countries that are beginning to become more widely known. These vendors include:

  • GriSoft out of the Czech Republic
  • Sophos in the united Kingdom
  • Panda Software out of Spain
  • Kaspersky in Russia
  • SoftWin in Romania
  • F-Secure in Finland
  • Norman in Norway
  • Arcabit in Poland
  • VirusBuster out of Hungary, and
  • AhnLab in South Korea.

It is not clear where the industry is heading and everyone in this market faces a rapidly changing landscape. The amount of effort to find and provide fixes for viruses is staggering. Malicious programs are getting more complex and the number of them is increasing. Many companies may find themselves without the resources to match the efforts of those truly bent on creating havoc. Some virus companies are getting of hundreds of new samples a day! Moreover, the new viruses are getting “smarter” in that they propagate themselves quickly and they often hide themselves and are smart enough to move around in a system by renaming themselves in an effort to make it hard to remove them.

What is a Torrent – All about the Torrent Protocol

A Torrent is a peer-to-peer technology that uses small files containing information about a specific (usually large) file. This information is about the users having the file, and essentially plays the role of liaison between users. The size of torrent files is very small and has an extension of .torrent. The protocol used to exchange files, is the BitTorrent protocol. Basically we are sharing files that are not in a central server, but rather on the computers of other users. What is important to stress out here is that when we download a file we also upload it the same time (if there is a demand for this file).

Torrent Clients

Torrent clients are the programs we use to connect with other users and to manage the torrents. There are several different options. The most popular (free) torrent client programs are:

uTorrent (www.utorrent.com)
This is a very light client that does not even need installation (although there is also a version that you can install) with several features. Recently has become very popular as a client and has also introduced a public beta version of uTorrent WebUI, which allows users to control downloads from any computer.

Azureus (http://azureus.sourceforge.net)
It is a powerful client with great potential and a very large set of parameters. You need java installed to work and is very popular. The disadvantage of this client is that its too heavy as a program.

BitComet (http://www.bitcomet.com)
It is a very powerful and light client. It is built in C++ and incorporates a browser as well. It is considered to be very quick in downloading.

Where do I find Torrents

Torrents can be found at various sites offering such content. Usually these site are called trackers and are either open to everyone (which reduces the credibility of their content) or closed (communities) with limited members. In the second case, usually the content is more remarkable and trusted, while the speeds achieved are also better. For example I would mention only one tracker, the linuxtracker.org, where you can find open-source software, Linux distributions, etc.

Torrent Terminology

Seeders
These are users who have in their possession the entire file which we want to download, and they make the file available to others.

Leechers
These are users not having in their possession the entire file but part of it and are in the process of downloading.

Please note here that when someone is a leecher, and downloads a file, then at the some time he also uploads the file to other leechers interested for the particular file.

Ratio
The ratio is a number that comes out of the division of the Mbytes that the user has uploaded divided by the Mbytes that the user has downloaded. So if a user has uploaded to the community a total of 1.8 GB and has downloaded 3 GB, then he has a ratio of 1.8 / 3 = 0.6. From the above we can get the golden rule of torrents, that for each file we download, we must hold it (seed it) at least until its ratio becomes 1 so that we offer to the community as much as we received.
Some communities have rules on the ratio of users and there are several «punishments» for low ratio, such as getting banned from the site, lower speeds and / or major delays. Open torrent sites usually do not have such restrictions.

How does Trackers Work
Let us see into more detail of how trackers work.
A tracker hosts only the files ending in .torrent, not the files that are being downloaded. These files exist only on the computers of users. The process of communication is as follows. The A user visits a tracker and selects among the many available records a file to download, lets say the ubuntu.iso. He requests the tracker to obtain the .torrent file which describes ubuntu.iso. From the torrent file, user A learns that users B and C have the whole ubuntu.iso file and that user D has only 25% of the file. Now is the turn of the client (e.g of utorrent) to do its job. The program sends requests to users B, C and D for ubuntu.iso, and once the clients of these users respond, the transfer of the file begins.

FireTorrent – Download Torrents with Firefox

One of the drawbacks of Firefox was that it didn’t support downloading torrents as the Opera browser. With FireTorrent, we can add this functionality to download torrents without having to have a separate client. The Firefox add-on is still in alpha test version, but is fully operational. The FireTorrent can be very useful for people who do not need the full capabilities of a separate client, but just want simplicity.

Because it is still in alpha version it is therefore not customizable yet, something that will change when fully developed. Another issue for the alpha version is the upload speed which is locked at 15kB / s. The FireTorrent is integrated in Wyzo, the browser based on Firefox and is dedicated for torrents.

Telecom Companies issue lawsuits for municipalities

Several Telecommunication companies in USA started filing charges for municipalities that build their own high speed data networks based on fiber optics or DSL lines, and offer telephony and cable TV to distant communities.

In this way, telecom companies manage to stop the progress of these networks until the lawsuit case is finalized in court. Therefore they manage to gain time and money.

To support their case, telecom companies claim that as municipalities are able to easily borrow low interest money for such investments, they cause unfair competition in the industry.

Twitter denies takeover proposal from Facebook

Facebook, the well known social networking site, offered 500 million dollars in stock shares for the acquisition of the popular Twitter. The offer included 100 from the 500 million in cash and the remaining amount in stock shares. Twitter refused the offer for several reasons. Firstly, according to the actual Facebook estimated price and its share value, the amount of the acquisition falls to 150 million dollars since Facebook’s share vaue is over-priced in relation to its real value.

Of course these are not little money for a company which is just two years old and has no income and no business model yet, but Twitter hopes to make money from its own business model to be announced next year. Finally, Twitter investors want cash in exchange, something that Facebook does not intend to give in easily.

USB 3.0 will replace Firewire IEEE 1394

USB 3.0 Specifications are finalized by the USB promoter group. The new interface gives ten times higher speeds than its predecessor USB 2.0 and is expected to be incorporated into future computer peripherals and consumer devices. Of course, even if the hardware manufacturers immediately adopt the new technology, we do not expect new products to incorporate the new standard soon.

The announcement of the USB promoter group follows the decision taken by Apple to abandon the Firewire technology, at least in some of its systems, knowing that USB 3.0 will exceed the bandwidth of Firewire (IEEE1394).

The main features of the new USB 3.0 technology include:

  • 5 Gbps transfer speed
  • Fast Sync-N-Go
  • Download 27 GB High Definition Movie in 60-70 sec
  • Optimized Power Efficiency
  • No device polling
  • Lower power requirements
  • Backward compatible with USB 2.0

Comparing the new USB 3.0 standard with the older one (2.0), we get ten times more speed (5 Gbps compared with 480 Mbps). Even though IEEE announced the new IEEE 1394-2008 specification, which increases the interface bandwidth of IEEE1394, also known as Firewire, to 3.2 Gb/s, major industry players such as Apple seem to have lost interest to Firewire.

New Increase Record for Firefox – IE Drops

New increase in usage for the popular Mozilla Firefox browser. For a long time now, Firefox reached and exceeded 20% in certain days. October ended with a Firefox usage rate of 19.97%, up 0.51 points from 19.46% in September, according to measurements from Net Application. On the other hand, Internet Explorer continues to fall, reaching 71.27% from 71.52% in September, but according to Net Applications, it continues to be the browser with the most rapid decline in usage rate.

This is also shown by the fact that since the beginning of the year, Internet Explorer has lost 4.2 points, while Firefox has gained 2.99 points, Safari of Apple 0.75, Opera 0.13 and Chrome of Google 0.74.
Finally, in October Opera climbed from 0.69 to 0.75, when the Safari fell slightly from 6.65 to 6.57 and Chrome climbed from 0.74 to 0.78.

In relation to operating systems, Net Applications found that the use of Windows increased from 90.29% to 90.46%, Mac fell to 8.21 from 8.23 and Linux fell to 0.71 from 0.91. Finally, the iPhone has increased from 0.32 to 0.33.

Obama won the Internet Battle in the US elections

Great superiority in the Internet battle appears to have had the new president of the United States Barack Obama over his opponent McCain. According to Trendrr, an online statistical tool, shows clearly the primacy of Obama in the use of technology. 500 million blog posts refer to Obama as opposed to 150 million blog posts referring to McCain. Of course we can not know how these numbers evolved during the election period, nor can we know which of these posts are positive or negative.

Myspace and Twitter
The “Friends” of Obama in MySpace were 844,927 as opposed to 219,404 of McCain. Only between 3rd and 4th of November Obama won 10,000 new friends while McCain had just 964. In Twitter, Obama won 2865 new followers among the 3rd and 4th of November (a total of 118,107) while McCain had a total of 4942 followers!

Car Internet Access from Chrysler

Chrysler will become the first car manufacturer which will begin to offer equipment for its cars that will allow passengers to have wireless Internet access. The connection will be facilitated through an extra device, which is manufactured by Mopar, a subsidiary of Chrysler, and will use a combination of EV-DO and Wi-Fi. The device will be compatible with Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge 2009 models and with earlier series. The installation option of the internet device, which was called Uconnect Web and costs around 500 dollars, will be made by the car dealers.

Autonet Mobile will be the Internet provider in the U.S., which already offers services to businesses dealing with car rentals. According to statistics from Autonet Mobile, the increase in demand for connecting to the Internet in cars is mainly due to the children, who are already “addicted” with Internet Connectivity and with the use of interactive services. Also, Car Internet Access will be helpful in using various additional functions of navigation systems, for example, to improve the route selection according to traffic jam information received from the Internet.

Uconnect Web will ensure data transmission bandwidth in the range of 400 – 800 Kbit / sec, and the radius of the Wi-Fi coverage will be 30 meters. To ensure the security of wireless connections, the use of WEP encryption and other protocols is recommended. Note also that the system can be modified to work with any mobile network or WiMAX.