With the advent of Google Fiber in Kansas City, we’re all now wanting a world with faster Internet. The traditional ISPs in the U.S. are slowly expanding their services, but some may think that they’re not moving fast enough. There’s also the issue of consumers in the U.S. paying way too much for much too little.
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The global launch of IPv6 last month went without a hitch. All the companies involved can pat themselves on the back for a job well done. While some of the companies haven’t fully detailed their involvement in the launch, Netflix has been surprisingly open about the challenges of dealing with IPv6.
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During Google’s I/O keynote today, the company announced that businesses and governments are now more than ever “Going Google.” By “Going Google,” the company means that these organizations and groups are utilizing Drive, Gmail and the Google Docs suite of software to run their business. Read More…

Apple announced two Thunderbolt accessories for the new Macbook Air and Macbook Pro at the companies annual World Wide Developer Conference: The FireWire 800 and Gigabit Ethernet adapter. The MacBook Pro will have an SD Card, HDMI, USB2/3, MagSafe 2, and two Thunderbolt ports. Those Thunderbolt connections will need these adapters if you plan on using FireWire or Ethernet connections. Read More…

A couple weeks ago I was sitting on my PC at home, and began downloading a software update. Immediately I was confused. “1.5 megabytes per second?”, I thought, staring at the download window. “That cant be right. We pay for an 8 megabit line.” Turns out our ISP had upgraded us from our 8Mbps connection to 15Mbps, at no additional cost. Where 8meg was their fastest rate previously, they now offer plans up to 25Mbps, with no discernible data limit (or at least one so high my manic downloading has not hit yet).

This seems to be a growing trend worldwide, as it should be. Moore’s law dictates that our processing power doubles every couple of months, so it stands to reason that our network infrastructure would become more robust over time as well. Every quarter Akamai takes a look at global Internet connection speeds, attack traffic, network connectivity, and more. They take the data from the latest state of the Internet and compile it into an infographic form.

Their report for this quarter shows of the 100 cities with the fastest Internet connections in the world, the United States and Canada came in second place with 24 of them. The Asia Pacific region held the highest number at 69 cities. Not too surprising when you realize those countries are smaller than Texas, while being just as capable technologically. It costs them much less to implement a more powerful network infrastructure. Seven of the top 100 were in Europe, with 3 in Sweden, two in Switzerland, and one each in Romania and Latvia. Overall the average worldwide Internet speed is up 19% over this time last year.

The report also contains information about the highest average connection speed on a country-wide level. South Korea leads the game with a whopping 17.5Mbps (a 28% increase over last year). The United States came in 10th place at a 5.8Mbps average, a 14% increase over the last year.

The Netherlands has claim to the fastest Internet connections in Europe, with an average connection speed of 8.2Mbps. 19 out of 21 surveyed European countries increased their average connection speeds over the last year, with some of the biggest gainers being Ireland (a 39% increase to 6.8Mbps average) and Austria (a 28% increase to 5.2Mbps). Just three European countries grew less than 10%, those being Denmark, Sweden, and France (7.4%, 9.4%, and 5.1% respectively) with Umea, Sweden having the fastest average connection speed for an individual European city, at 11.3Mbps, and ranking number 15 in the top 100 fastest average city connections in the world.

So if my calculations are right, and Internet speeds continue increasing at this steady rate, I only have to wait 15 years for my 15Mbps connection to be upgraded to 100Mbps at the same price. Awesome!

I think we can all agree that knowing your network is everything. The more you know about how it works on a normal basis, the better you can detect and investigate anomalies. Current analytics work, as Stacy Higginbotham, writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, puts it, as snapshots of network activity. One company is seeking to change that, however, offering what Higginbotham describes as a Pixar cartoon compared to viewing a flip book.

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Skype announced today that it’s looking into a new tool that retains a user’s last known IP address. The tool, for which instructions were posted on Pastebin last Thursday, reveals a person’s IP address without the need to add the targeted person as a contact first.

According to ComputerWorld, the privacy-breaching tool can uncover the IP address of a Skype user by simply looking at the user’s general information and log files. Skype, which was acquired by Microsoft last year, assured the user community that they were on the case and said in a statement:

We are investigating reports of a new tool that allegedly captures a Skype user’s last known IP address. This is an ongoing, industry-wide issue faced by all peer-to-peer software companies. We are committed to the safety and security of our customers and we are takings measures to help protect them.

While knowing a last known IP address won’t reveal the Skyper’s name or physical address, it’s still a privacy concern nonetheless. As ghacks points out, the IP address can be used to pinpoint the general location (such as the city) of the Skype user, which could be concerning for the paranoid and can-never-be-too-carefuls.

Given that Skype’s seen a swell of users this year, it’s not likely that the exploit will remain unattended to for too long. Having recently crossed the milestone of 40 million concurrent users, Skype doesn’t want to see that number take a dip. They may already have a solution in the works for this exploit given that a research paper was published last October in which details of how to secretly determine a user’s IP address were explained.

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A research team led by University of Toronto Professor Hoi-Kwong Lo has found a new quantum encryption method to foil even the most sophisticated hackers. The discovery is outlined in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters. Read More…

Network Administrators play a delicate game of balancing uptime and security. Increased security often comes at the sacrifice of accessibility and/or performance. Steps to increase accessibility and uptime often create security issues. Thus, measures that can potentially bolster performance, uptime, and security are sought out as holy relics in network administration. The Pareto principle suggests that, in a majority of cases, 80% of the problems will arise from 20% of the sources. If it is possible to identify the 20% of countries causing 80% of our security problems, it is possible to ban the complete ip blocks from those countries and effectively eliminate 80% of our problems? Is this a reasonable solution, or just plain overkill?
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