Wireless advances could mean no more Cell Towers

As cell phones have spread, so have large cell towers — those unsightly stalks of steel topped by transmitters and other electronics that sprouted across the country over the last decade.

Now the wireless industry is planning a future without them, or at least without many more of them. Instead, it's looking at much smaller antennas, some tiny enough to hold in a hand. These could be placed on lampposts, utility poles and buildings — virtually anywhere with electrical and network connections.

If the technology overcomes some hurdles, it could upend the wireless industry and offer seamless service, with fewer dead spots and faster data speeds.

Some big names in the wireless world are set to demonstrate "small cell" technologies at the Mobile World Congress, the world's largest cell phone trade show, which starts Monday in Barcelona, Spain.

"We see more and more towers that become bigger and bigger, with more and bigger antennas that come to obstruct our view and clutter our landscape and are simply ugly," said Wim Sweldens, president of the wireless division of Alcatel-Lucent, the French-U.S. maker of telecommunications equipment.

"What we have realized is that we, as one of the major mobile equipment vendors, are partially if not mostly to blame for this."

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Top 10 uncracked codes

Although the internet has spawned a multi-billion dollar industry in creating and cracking codes, crypologists have yet to solve some of the oldest riddles.

Below are ten of the most notable:

1. The Phaistos Disk is considered the most important example of hieroglyphic inscription from Crete. Discovered in 1903, both sides of the clay disc are covered with hieroglyphs arranged in a spiral zone, impressed on the clay when it was damp. Forty five different types of signs have been distinguished, of which a few can be identified with the hieroglyphs in use in the Proto- palatial period.

2. Linear A is one of two linear scripts used in ancient Crete discovered and named by Arthur Evans. Linear B was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris and was used to write Mycenaean Greek. Linear A is partially understood but parts of it produce works unrelated to any known language.

3. Kryptos is a sculpture by the American artist James Sanborn, located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia. Since its dedication in 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the encrypted messages it bears.

4. Chinese Gold Bar Cipher. In 1933, seven gold bars allegedly issued to a General Wang in Shanghai, China. These gold bars, which contain pictures, Chinese writing, some form of script writing, and cryptograms in Latin letters, appear to represent metal certificates related to a bank deposit with a U.S. Bank and the Chinese writing has been translated, and discusses a transaction in excess of $300,000,000.

5. Beale Ciphers are said to be three encrypted messages which pinpoint where a man named Beale buried two wagons-full of treasure at a secret location in Bedford County in the 1820s. It is claimed one of the messages has been solved, which detailed the tons of gold, silver and jewels that were buried, along with a general location. The still unsolved messages supposedly give exact directions, and a list of who the treasure belongs to.

6. Voynich Manuscript is at least 400 years old and is a 232-page illuminated manuscript entirely written in a secret script. It is filled with copious drawings of unidentified plants, herbal recipes of some sort, astrological diagrams, and many small human figures in strange plumbing-like contraptions. In 2004 there were some compelling arguments which described a technique that would seemingly prove that the manuscript was a hoax, but to date, none of the described techniques have been able to replicate a single section of the Manuscript, so speculations continue.

7. The Dorabella Cipher was written by the composer Elgar in 1897. He sent a letter to a young friend, Miss Dora Penny, the 22 year-old daughter of the Rev. Alfred Penny, Rector of St Peter’s, Wolverhampton, and with it a cipher which to this day has remained unsolved.

8. Chaocipher. John F. Byrne invented Chaocipher in 1918 and tried unsuccessfully for almost 40 years to interest the U.S. government in his cipher system. He offered a reward to anyone who could break his cipher but the reward was never claimed. It has latterly been re-examined by members of his family to determine whether there is any commercial value in it.

9. The D’Agapeyeff cipher is an as-yet unbroken cipher that appears in the first edition of Codes and Ciphers, an elementary book on cryptography published by the Russian-born English cartographer Alexander D’Agapeyeff in 1939. Offered as a “challenge cipher” at the end of the book, it was not included in later editions, and D’Agapeyeff is said to have admitted later to having forgotten how he had encrypted it. It has been argued that the failure of all attempts at decryption is due to D’Agapeyeff incorrectly encrypting the original text. However, it has been argued that the cipher may still be successfully attacked using computational methods such as genetic algorithms.

10. Taman Shud. An unidentified male body was found on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia in 1948 wearing a sweater and coat despite the hot day, carrying no identification. There were no clues as to his identity and dental records and fingerprints matched no living person. An autopsy discovered bizarre congestion, blood in the stomach and enlarged organs but no foreign substances. A suitcase found at the train station that may have belonged to the man contained a pair of trousers with a secret hidden pocket, which held a piece of paper torn from a book imprinted with the words “Taman Shud”. The paper was matched to a very rare copy of Omar Khayyam’s ‘The Rubaiyat’ that was found in the backseat of an unlocked vehicle and on the back of the book was scrawled five lines of capital letters that seem to be a code. To this day, the entire case remains one of Australia’s most bizarre mysteries.

via telegraph 

IPv4 Address Depletion Won`t Cause Stampede to IPv6

News Analysis: Despite the depletion of IPv4 address blocks, you don’t have to worry about running out of new addresses just yet. But you should start planning to make sure your computer systems are IPv6-capable.

When the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) issued the last blocks of IPv4 addresses to the Regional Internet Registrars, it wasn’t the end of the world, or even the end of the Internet. In fact, it’s not even the end of the world for IPv4 addresses. Chances are, you’ll still be able to use IPv4 addresses for a long time, probably for years.

What’s actually exhausted is the supply of new IPv4 addresses that the IANA can issue to the five regional Internet registries around the world. Those regions can still issue addresses to organizations that need them, and will continue to do so for the next few months.

In fact, the vast number of users of all types on the Internet will likely not notice any changes in their addressing. The major Internet providers all have IPv4 address pools which they can issue as needed and most of them are using private addressing pools and may never need to change. But there are some networks that will see the effects eventually. They include large businesses and other major organizations that act as their own ISPs and have their own pool of addresses. When those run out, they’ll need to find a way to react.

But right now, there’s no reason to rush madly into IPv6. For one thing, there’s virtually no place on the public Internet that is using IPv6, so you will have few choices of destinations. One estimate I saw recently puts the number of IPv6 sites on the global Internet as less than two tenths of a percent. While there are a few Web sites that do allow connectivity using IPv6, those also allow IPv4 connections.

So what’s all the fuss about? Eventually, large organizations are going to burn through their pools of IPv4 addresses, and will need to start moving to private networks that use NAT (network address translation) or they’ll need to start using IPv6 where they can. As demand for IPv4 addresses continues to grow and supply dwindles IPv6 networking will become more useful. Likely, businesses will find that some types of communications, such as between data centers, or between data centers and cloud providers or even within the data center, that are able to use IPv6 with little or no disruption to other activities.

A move to IPv6 will free up IPv4 addresses for end-users, for devices that can’t use IPv6 and for network infrastructure that isn’t or can’t be enabled for IPv6. Eventually, portions of the public Internet will start supporting IPv6, but it’s not going to happen overnight. And even when it does start to happen, the change won’t be all at once.

credit eweek

WikiLeaks Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by a Norwegian politician.

A Norwegian lawmaker has nominated WikiLeaks for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, stating that the secret-spilling website is one of the most important contributors to freedom of speech in the 21st century.

Lawmaker Snorre Valen said that by disclosing information about corruption, human rights abuses and war crimes, WikiLeaks is a "natural contender" for the peace prize.

WikiLeaks, founded by Australian Julian Assange, has released hundreds of thousands of classified documents leaked to the website. The documents have included thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables, as well as confidential material on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Members of parliament from all nations, political science and law professors, and previous winners may all submit nominations to the Nobel Peace Prize.

Assange is currently free on bail in Britain, while he fights extradition to Sweden for questioning on charges of sexual misconduct.

via voanews 

Google & Facebook will test IPv6

The new standard offers many trillions of new web addresses, but cannot be accessed from modems and routers that only use IPv4

Web addresses are likely to run out as soon as November and to raise public awareness Google and Facebook have decided to switch their websites to a new system for one day in June.

On June 8, a whole bunch of web giants, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, will turn on a new way of running web addresses, reports the Telegraph.

Read Also | RIM taps Web technology to drive mobile developments

The system, called IPv6, has been designed to stop the world running out of the web addresses that underlie the locating of websites and devices.

As of now, only 0.2 per cent of web users have access to the new protocol, however. 'World IPv6' Day is designed to encourage its adoption.

Vint Cerf, one of the web's founding fathers, is leading a global campaign to encourage web service providers and IT managers to switch from the current system, IPv4, to IPv6.

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The new standard offers many trillions of new web addresses, but cannot be accessed from modems and routers that only use IPv4.

It is likely, however, that most of the changes needed will take place without consumers losing access to any part of the web because they will be part of the standard software and hardware upgrade cycle.

The availability of new web addresses will, it is hoped, allow more connected devices, such as tablet computers, as well as permitting more mundane devices to gain web addresses.

via The Times of India