A proposal to extend the DNS protocol

A proposal to extend the DNS protocol: "Today a group of DNS and content providers, including Neustar/UltraDNS and Google are publishing a proposal to extend the DNS protocol. DNS is the system that translates an easy-to-remember name like www.google.com to a numeric address like 74.125.45.104. These are the IP addresses that computers use to communicate with one another on the Internet.

By returning different addresses to requests coming from different places, DNS can be used to load balance traffic and send users to a nearby server. For example, if you look up www.google.com from a computer in New York, it may resolve to an IP address pointing to a server in New York City. If you look up www.google.com from the Netherlands, the result could be an IP address pointing to a server in the Netherlands. Sending you to a nearby server improves speed, latency, and network utilization.

Currently, to determine your location, authoritative nameservers look at the source IP address of the incoming request, which is the IP address of your DNS resolver, rather than your IP address. This DNS resolver is often managed by your ISP or alternately is a third-party resolver like Google Public DNS. In most cases the resolver is close to its users, in which case the authoritative nameservers will be able to find the nearest server. However, some DNS resolvers serve many users over a wider area. In these cases, your lookup for www.google.com may return the IP address of a server several countries away from you. If the authoritative nameserver could detect where you were, a closer server might have been available.

Our proposed DNS protocol extension lets recursive DNS resolvers include part of your IP address in the request sent to authoritative nameservers. Only the first three octets, or top 24 bits, are sent providing enough information to the authoritative nameserver to determine your network location, without affecting your privacy.

The Internet-Draft was posted to the dnsext mailing list today, and over the next few months our group hopes to see this proposal accepted as an official Internet standard. We plan to continue working with all interested parties on implementing this solution and are looking forward to a healthy discussion on the dnsext mailing list.

By Wilmer van der Gaast and Carlo Contavalli on behalf of the Google Public DNS team

"

Worst USB gadget yet: Dead Mouse flash drive!

Worst USB gadget yet: Dead Mouse flash drive!: "

Some dude built a USB flash drive into a taxidermied (i.e. dead) mouse. He even replaced the eyes with flashing red lights! (Props to MAKE)

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Movie Made By Chimpanzees To Be Broadcast On TV

Movie Made By Chimpanzees To Be Broadcast On TV: "wdef writes 'The world's first film shot entirely by chimpanzees is to be broadcast by the BBC as part of a natural history documentary. The apes created the movie using a specially designed chimp-proof camera given to them by primatologists. The film-making exercise is part of a scientific study into how chimpanzees perceive the world and each other'.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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PL: Police considers moving to open source

PL: Police considers moving to open source: "The Polish Police force wants to increase its use of free and open source software in order to cut costs, announces Andrzejem Trelą, Deputy Chief of Police and responsible for logistics, in an interview in the Police force's monthly newsletter, published on 15 January."

Why open source marketing is so bad

Why open source marketing is so bad: "

With the tech press queuing up at its equivalent of Super Bowl Sunday — an Apple launch — it’s a good time to ask again why open source marketing is so bad.

Open source offers great value, it has tons of developers, it has dedicated followers, even political support. But its marketing, and thus its mind share, still lag behind.

In this Ubuntu is Exhibit A. You can sell a server operating system like Red Hat through speeds and feeds, facts and features. This is not true in the mass market.

Ubuntu’s continued failures at cracking the mass market — Canonical’s failures on Ubuntu’s behalf — make one worry if open source has a chance.

Over at TechRepublic, Jack Wallen says they’re at it again. Ubuntu Version 10.4 is going to have something like iTunes in it, he writes. “When this boxed operating system is placed on the same shelf (selling at $19.99 or $29.99) as Apple OSX and Windows 7, people are going to give Ubuntu a look and many people will purchase Ubuntu.”

Sorry, but I’m getting that Wile E. Coyote feeling again. One reason is the price — you don’t know what it is? Another reason is further down in Wallen’s piece, where he talks at length about depending on “the community” for marketing.

This has fail written all over it. Marketing is not just a creative, inherently proprietary process. It requires money and a coherent strategy to work. By its very nature it’s top-down, not bottom-up.

Open source fails this test because, as I’ve written here many times, there is a price lower than free. The best price includes cash to push the product through the channel — identifying prospects, delivering them the message, supporting the retailer with collateral, and front-line support.

All these things take a coherent strategy. Everything you do must sing the same song in the same key. People want to know that if they’re putting their hard-earned money and time into something new, that there’s not a bunch of cats being herded just behind the curtain.

Steve Jobs mastered this art over three decades ago, while I was still in college. I compared him to Springsteen in another blog post because, like The Boss, he’s still working, it’s still the same act, yet it’s better than ever.

Marketing a device or operating system is an exercise with a lot of moving parts to it. There are lots of publics you need to relate to — the press, the developers, the retailers, the buyers. All of them are taking a risk. All must be convinced it’s a risk worth taking, that it’s not really a risk at all.

This requires centralized budgeting, it requires a big, scaled investment up-front. You have to build an army, a bandwagon, everyone moving forward as one. When it works, no matter the industry, it’s a beautiful thing.

It’s something open source has yet to master.

I wonder if Google can do it?

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EU To Explore Legality Of Virgin Media's Copyright Cop Software

EU To Explore Legality Of Virgin Media's Copyright Cop Software: "With the entertainment industry pushing hard to turn ISPs into copyright cops, some are quite reasonably concerned about privacy rights. Over in Europe, a human rights group has asked the European Commission to do an assessment of Virgin Media's new copyright cop software, and the EC has agreed to 'monitor' it. Virgin Media insists there are no privacy issues, though it does seem worth mentioning that the maker of Virgin's software, Detica, has a strong relationship with government and intelligence agencies, working with them to 'reveal actionable intelligence,' so it seems pretty reasonable to question just what Virgin's software really does.

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EU has doubts as ISP rolls out DPI for copyright enforcement

EU has doubts as ISP rolls out DPI for copyright enforcement: "

Back in November, UK ISP Virgin Media announced that it would start using deep packet inspection gear to start riffling through user traffic. The goal was to search some of the leading P2P networks in order to measure copyrighted material passing through them. Today, the European Commission indicated that the plan is problematic, and it will keep a close eye on the trial.

In the middle of last year, Virgin announced a stunning music plan: unlimited streaming and downloads of non-DRMed music files from Universal (with deals hopefully to come from other labels). The music would be part of your ISP subscription fee, and downloads would be yours to keep forever.

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Shell Scripts and Here Documents

Shell Scripts and Here Documents: "Tip of the Trade: 'A here document (or heredoc) is a way of getting text input into a script without having to feed it in from a separate file. If you've got a small quantity of data you don't expect to change often, it's a quick and tidy way of keeping script and data together.'"

Ubuntu's default search engine to change in deal with Yahoo

Ubuntu's default search engine to change in deal with Yahoo: "

Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, revealed today that it has established a revenue sharing agreement with Yahoo. As part of the deal, the Firefox Web browser that is shipped in Ubuntu will be configured to use Yahoo as the default search engine.

Rick Spencer, the leader of Canonical's desktop team, announced the search engine change today on a public Ubuntu mailing list. The specific terms of the agreement have not been disclosed. According to Spencer, the new default will appear in the development version of the distribution 'as soon as reasonably possible' and will be in place in time for Ubuntu 10.04, which is scheduled for release in April. They have not indicated whether the change will be applied retroactively to existing installations of the current stable version, but they have confirmed that it will be changed for existing users who upgrade from the current stable version to 10.04.

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Obama enforces trade embargo against open source

Obama enforces trade embargo against open source: "

The Obama Administration has forced Sourceforge to deny service to its anti-terrorism sanction list.

In practical terms this means people in Cuba, North Korea, the Sudan, Syria and Iran get “403 forbidden” messages when they try to access sourceforge.org addresses. (Here’s how the Armenian Private School in Toronto, Canada displays 403 errors.)

Sourceforge is not happy about it, noting that Section 5 of the open source definition prohibits discrimination “against any person or group of persons.” Neither is anyone else in the open source movement.

A more important question may be how far is the State Department willing to go in order to enforce this restriction and how far is the open source movement willing to go to fight it?

That’s because Sourceforge is no longer the only open source repository. Microsoft has a big one. Google has a big one. Many open source projects now run their own forges. Will the U.S. government now censor Google while it ostensibly fights alongside it against Chinese censorship?

Also, neither open source nor the Internet are entirely American any longer. Just as Iranian dissidents can use anonymizers to hide their tweets from the Mullahs, so Iranian hackers working for the mullahs can use the same technology to bypass any block.

Sites like ArabCrunch, or open source advocates in places like India, now have an opportunity to mirror Sourceforge content in the name of Internet liberty. And how delicious would it be for China to allow content mirrors and enable access to those whom the U.S. Internet authorities are oppressing?

The law of unintended consequences is about to come down hard.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

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Configuring Active Directory Or LDAP Authentication And Defining User Or Group Based Access With SafeSquid

Configuring Active Directory Or LDAP Authentication And Defining User Or Group Based Access With SafeSquid: "

Configuring Active Directory Or LDAP Authentication And Defining User Or Group Based Access With SafeSquid

This tutorial explains how you can integrate an Active Directory or
LDAP with SafeSquid for user authentication, and create granular user or group based access
policies. This tutorial applies to both, Linux and Windows editions.

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Security hole in Gmail used by Chinese hackers was created by U.S. law enforcement

Security hole in Gmail used by Chinese hackers was created by U.S. law enforcement: "

In a breath of fresh, rarefied (but no doubt contested) air, China states that it was not involved in the attacks on Google and other Silicon Valley corporations. They have even gone as far as to defend their regime of censorship and firewalling! The 'accusation that the Chinese government participated in (any) cyberattack, either in an explicit or inexplicit way, is groundless and aims to denigrate China,' a spokesman from the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology told the Xinhua Chinese news agency.



If China isn't behind these sophisticated, masterful attacks... who -- or what -- is?



In further news, there's a brilliant (but very opinionated) piece over on CNN by Bruce Schneier. We didn't cover it here on Download Squad yet, but it seems that the hackers used a backdoor in Gmail to gain access -- a backdoor required by U.S. law enforcement agencies. It's not uncommon for such rear entries to exist -- they started to appear in Western nations around the same time as anti-terrorism laws -- but the fact that such backdoors are easy to hack is a concern.



Basically, all major online services have such backdoors programmed into them. It's not crazy to assume that similar attacks were used on the other 30 Silicon Valley businesses. It's not such a problem that these backdoors exist -- it's a problem that once in place, someone will discover them -- they will be hacked.



Schneier finishes his CNN Opinion pieces with a poignant and chilling thought about the current state of technology and the things to come:

'The problem is that such control makes us all less safe. Whether the eavesdroppers are the good guys or the bad guys, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in. And it's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state.'

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Security hole in Gmail used by Chinese hackers was created by U.S. law enforcement originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google - United States - China - Bruce Schneier - Silicon Valley"

Does French Three Strikes Law Also Mandate Movie Release Windows?

Does French Three Strikes Law Also Mandate Movie Release Windows?: "The EFF points us to a story claiming that the Blu-ray edition of the movie Avatar is being released earlier than the studio would like due to France's three strikes law. The article claims that, while most folks have concentrated on the three strikes part, the law also requires limited release windows, such that studios need to release films on DVD within a certain time period after theatrical release. I certainly had not heard this, and some challenged the claim in the comments, but the original blogger points to the specific language in the statute. While some others point out that the window for release is pretty large (longer than pretty much every other movie ever uses), it makes you wonder why France is legislating this at all. I'm all for shorter movie release windows -- and think studios should get rid of the windows for the most part -- but I can't fathom how it could make sense to mandate a specific time for release windows in the law.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

"

Building Kernel Modules With Module-Assistant On Debian Lenny

Building Kernel Modules With Module-Assistant On Debian Lenny: "

module-assistant is a tool for building Debian kernel modules from source, without having to rebuild the whole kernel. It fetches module-source packages that have been prepared for the Debian distribution via apt and produces .deb packages. More here

This tutorial shows how to use module-assistant in command-line mode and in interactive mode.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

"

8 Most Useful Firefox Plugins For Facebook Users

8 Most Useful Firefox Plugins For Facebook Users: "

Last week we discussed 5 Social sharing add-ons for Firefox and how you can use them to share links, news and updates with your network. Today we take at a look at specific Firefox add-ons that are built for the world’s largest social platform: Facebook. The open-source developer community at Firefox has built more than 170 of these add-ons for Facebook which are apparently also filling the gaps in Facebook’s features & functionality. For all Facebook & Firefox fans, we’ve compiled a list of the 8 most useful Firefox plugins.

Facebook Toolbar

This feature rich Facebook toolbar lets you access your favourite social networking site with ease and pops an alert whenever you receive a new message from your friends. It has quick links, photo upload function & its search-box makes it super easy to search for friends and you can also share a page from your profile. If you are one of those heavy Facebook addicts this add-on would certainly make life easier for you. You can install the Facebook Toolbar from here.

Boost for Firefox

As the name suggests, with the Boost Firefox add-on, you can completely enhance & customize your Facebook browsing experience. For e.g. it shows you a larger version of photos on doing a mouse-over, helps you to get rid of that silly ‘confirmation’ box when you poke a friend and also change the look-and-feel of your navigation bar skin.

Facebook Dislike

While you do not hesitate to click on the ‘Like’ button when you enjoy your friend’s status, there are some occasions when you think otherwise. This Firefox plug-in lets a user dislike feed stories or the news posted in fan pages. Although the visibility of dislike action is limited to the users who have installed this add-on, it has received immense popularity with over 586,034 downloads till date.

AdBlock Plus

Do you feel irritated by those big banner Facebook ads that appear in the side column? Thanks to the Adblock Plus plug-in, you can choose to now disable all the ads that you see in Facebook. There are two ways in which you can control the appearance of ads: By either enabling the filter subscription list which will block 99% of the ads or selectively disable the ads by doing a right-click on the ad and choosing the Adblock image option. While Adblock Plus may not be in compliance with Facebook’s Terms, it is an extremely popular plug-in and has been downloaded 68,924,364 times.

Yoono

Yoono has been developed as a one stop hub to manage all your social networking hangouts. Using a single interface, you can send status update to multiple social networks. Multi-network focus doesn’t mean that there is less emphasis on Facebook. Yonoo for Facebook has a slick design, doesn’t consume your CPU memory and provides complete control over Facebook through the sidebar.

FacePad

How many times have you felt like downloading your friend’s party album on Facebook and simply let it go because it is a time consuming process. The solution lies in FacePad with which you can download all pictures in the selected album by simply doing a right-click on the album and choosing ‘Download with FacePad’.

Firefox Universal Uploader

Firefox Universal Uploader which resembles a FTP (File transfer protocol) utility, helps you to upload multiple files in one go. You can manage multiple Facebook accounts and choose to upload a single file or an entire directory at once.

Firefox Facebook Video

While YouTube is the preferred public video sharing platform, many of us Facebook for uploading our personal videos. To manage the video downloading hassles, Firefox Facebook Video plug-in can be used. With it you can download videos, convert them to different file formats and embed them outside Facebook.

Are you a Firefox fan ? Do you use a Facebook extension which is missing from the above list?

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