Teknovis

Google is developing a set of tools that will enable users to determine if their ISPs are interfering with their packets. That should be very useful, especially if more users become aware of the fact that some ISPs might do this!

More details about this are described in Google Introduces A New Weapon In The Fight For Net Neutrality: Measurement Labs.

I am not necessarily an advocate of Net Neutrality. I do not think that a very small proportion of users should be allowed to negatively impact the majority of users. However, this can be ensured through network management without necessarily compromising on Net Neutrality. However, I do think that ISPs should clearly state their network management policies. This enables consumers to make the final decision!

Tags: Google, ISP, Net Neutrality

UCD students will soon be able to enjoy an improved YouTube experience, thanks to the fact that its Internet connection is being upgraded from 1Gbps to 10Gbps :)

OK, I am joking when I write that the purpose of this increased bandwidth is to improve the YouTube experience :P

I wonder how much of this increased bandwidth is needed to keep pace with users’ requirements. I also wonder what sort of new and exciting projects can be undertaken to utilise this increased bandwidth.

For more details about this see UCD gains super-fast connectivity via HEAnet.

Tags: UCD, YouTube

The publishers of the Irish Entrepreneur magazine have launched a competition for 250,000€. To be included you must subscribe to their magazine, as described in ‘You Can Do Anything’ Competition.

This competition is part of a wider campaign to encourage people to become more entrepreneurial during the current economic downturn. In order to promote this campaign the publishers invited The Naked Cowboy to Dublin. The Naked Cowboy’s story is perfect for this caimpaign, and he has given some really great advice such as:

Just do something you love and find a way to make money from it.

More details about the Naked Cowboy’s visit are described in Naked Cowboy here to give recession the boot and Nakedly optimistic star says we can do anything. He also did interviews on both the Tubridy Tonight show, and the Xposé show, both of which are available to view online :)

Tags: Irish Entrepreneur

I was supposed to participate in a conference call today, and this conference call was hosted by a large and well known organisation. I was really surprised to see from the invite email that the call bridge was being provided by Skype!

This is the first time that I have seen Skype being used within the corporate market. There certainly was, and perhaps still is, a perception that Skype is only suitable for individuals.

Roll on Skype!

Yes, I am a big fan of it ;)

Tags: Skype

In an effort to reach out to the masses, the Vatican has launched its own official channel on YouTube. You can see it at www.youtube.com/vatican. Apparently, it is not getting much attention :o

On a slightly related note, I never realised that the Vatican’s ccTLD was .va, although not many domain names appear to use it!

Tags: YouTube

Yesterday the Irish Minister for Communications announced details of the all Ireland broadband Internet access roll-out scheme. The essence of this is that every part of Ireland will have broadband Internet access by 2010, thanks to an investment of 223€ million by the Irish Government.

At the moment 10% of the population do not have broadband Internet access, and these 10% live in areas that represent 33% of the area of the country.

Three has won the contract to supply this broadband Internet access, and it will do this using 3G technology. I might be incorrect, but I think that BT actually installed, commissioned, and operates the 3G network in Ireland for Three.

More details about this can be read in Plan to bring broadband to entire country by 2010.

The Irish Minister for Communications seemed quite ecstatic when he was announcing this yesterday. He seems to have the opinion that this will enable significant numbers of new companies to develop, and that these companies will employ many people, and this will lift Ireland out of recession. Yes, really!

I have a more sceptical view :o

From the maps that I saw in the television interviews it seems that the areas in Ireland that will benefit from this scheme are all in really rural locations (mostly the West and South-West). The population densities are very low in these areas! Also, the existing levels of business activity in these areas is extremely low! I do not think that broadband Internet access will change any of this!

So ultimately I think that this scheme means that the majority of Irish tax payers will subsidise a very small minority. I also think that people who live in these rural areas must accept that they cannot expect to have the same levels of service as people who live closer to metropolitan areas. (This of course works both ways.)

Damien Mulley also got some air-time to comment on this government initiative on the RTE news yesterday. I am not sure why, but I feel that he gave a more positive response to it in the television interview than he does on his blog article National Broadband Scheme Launch. Maybe I am wrong about this, because I only saw the television interview once.

Tags: BT, Damien Mulley, Ireland, RTE, Three

There is lots of news these days about Barack Obama’s attempts to bring Web 2.0 to the White House. Perhaps most obvious is the fact that the web site got a face-lift, and it now includes an official blog! That is impressive! Is this the first ever official blog of a political leader?

Another change is that Macon Philips has been appointed as the director of New Media at the White House. I understand that this role is another first!

According to White House plans open government, Barack Obama’s main aim is to improve openness and transparency.

In one memo he spelled out his desire for an “an unprecedented level of openness in Government”. The other said government bodies should err on the side of clarity when considering if information should be disclosed. “In the face of doubt, openness prevails,” he wrote.

I really like the contract between the new approach and the old approach!

The moves were welcomed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which said the memoranda stood in stark contrast to a memo issued by John Ashcroft soon after 9/11. This called on government bodies to only release information after exhausting all strategies, including legal action, to withhold it.

This article also describes how the robotos.txt file has been modified to allow all of the White House web site to be crawled. However, I have read other articles that suggested the old robots.txt blocked access to some content, such as printable versions of web pages, to prevent their contents from being indexed twice.

However, not everything is going so smoothly within the White House from a technology point of view, according to New job challenges in the White House.

Barack Obama also has plans for the wider Internet in the US, and these are described in Obama unfurls master plan for US cybersecurity. He really is not wasting any time!

Tags: Barack Obama

Cloud Computing is certainly a term that I keep hearing more and more about, but yet I am not really sure what it means. I certainly think that it is overused and abused ;) (I am going to resist all cloud related puns in this post!)

More importantly, I am not yet convinced that it will be the solution to as many problems as some people claim. Yes, I think that there are some areas that will benefit greatly from cloud computing, but I do not think that anybody really knows exactly which areas these are yet.

I read a good introduction to cloud computing recently in A crack in the madness of clouds. The author tries to identify the different application areas where cloud computing might make an impact, and he provides examples where possible. The application areas that he identifies are:

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service
• Storage-as-a-Service
• Data-as-a-Service
• Platform-as-a-Service
• Software-as-a-Service

Salesforce is perhaps the most widely known example of a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application. I think that it is quite significant because it started many people using SaaS applications without them actually knowing that they were doing this. I think that one of the dangerous of this has been that people do not realise the disadvantages of these types of applications. However, I think that people will quickly gain a negative perspective as incidents of these SaaS applications becoming unavailable occur more frequently. For example, over 900,000 customers were recently unable to use SalesForce for over an hour according to Salesforce.com outage exposes cloud’s dark linings.

Perhaps it is not surprising then that SalesForce are developing a new form of cloud computing, known as the Service Cloud! The idea of this appears to be to unify in a cloud all of the information that is exchanged with customers using the different interfaces that are supported by a company. For more details about this see Salesforce.com tackles customer service with the Service Cloud.

I wonder will 2009 be a decisive year in the life of cloud computing!

Tags: Buzzword, SaaS, Salesforce

I previously wrote about the Irish Companies involved in W3C, so today I am going to list the Irish companies (and organisations) that are involved in the TM Forum. Again, I am basing these lists on the online membership list.

The Irish companies that are currently members are:

• Amartus
• Arantech
• CommProve
• Dataduct
• DCU (There is nothing on DCU’s website about this!)
• Eircom
• Nomos Software
• Openet
• RedZinc
• Selatra (One of its founders is the President of the TM Forum)
• TCD
• TSSG

The non-Irish companies that have technical operations in Ireland that are currently members are:

• Accenture
• Agilent
• Alcatel-Lucent
• Amdocs
• Analysys Mason
• Arris
• Asidua
• BOC Group
• BT
• Cable and Wireless
• Cisco
• Deloitte and Touche
• EDS
• EMC Corporation
• Ericsson
• HERMES SoftLab
• HP
• IBM
• Martin Dawes Systems
• Microsoft
• Motorola
• Nortel
• O2
• Oracle
• Perot Systems
• RedKnee
• SAP
• Satyam
• Siemens (Also known as Nokia Siemens Networks)
• Sun
• Verizon (Due to its purchase of Cybertrust)
• Vodafone

At least I think that all of those companies have technical operations in Ireland. It can be very difficult to tell from their web pages.

Tags: Accenture, Agilent, Alcatel-Lucent, Amartus, Amdocs, Analysys Mason, Arantech, Arris, Asidua, BOC Group, BT, Cable and Wireless, Cisco, CommProve, Dataduct, DCU, Deloitte and Touche, EDS, Eircom, EMC Corporation, Ericsson, HERMES SoftLab, HP, IBM, Ireland, Martin Dawes Systems, Microsoft, Motorola, Nomos Software, Nortel, O2, Openet, Oracle, Perot Systems, RedKnee, RedZinc, SAP, Satyam, Selatra, Siemens, Sun, TCD, TM Forum, TSSG, Verizon, Vodafone

Today is supposed to be the most depressing day of the year. This is supposed to be due to a combination of credit card bills relating to Christmas shopping, pay-day still more than a week away, and bad weather :o

I am not sure how true this is, but the last few days were a bit depressing for me :o I think that one of my Windows 2000 computers might have become infected with a virus, and I cannot figure out how!

It all started when I noticed a file called a.exe that suddenly appeared in one of my folders. The creation time of this file was a few minutes before I noticed it. So my first reaction was to upload the file to VirusTotal. This is a really great web site that allows you to email or upload a file for free, and this file is then scanned by the most up-to-date versions of 39 different virus scanners. VirusTotal reported that 21 of the 39 virus scanners found a virus in my file :( You can read the full report.

VirusTotal most frequently identifies the worm as Pinit or Spamuzle. The best information I can find about these is from ThreatExpert and Symantec.

However, based on these descriptions my computer is not infected. This does not surprise me because only my administrator account has the privileges to make those changes. Furthermore, my hardware firewall would prevent the virus from communicating with the outside world. Blacknight also correctly identifies the file as a virus, and prevents it from passing through the email system.

So everything looks great, and it appears that I was not infected. However, the fact still remains that a.exe came from somewhere! This is really annoying me that I cannot find its source :|

The other aspect of this that is adding to my unease is the current rampage of the worm known as Conficker, Downadup, or Kido. See Windows worm numbers ‘skyrocket’ for more details about this worm. Is this a coincidence, or is my problem somehow related to this?

I would really appreciate if anybody can provide me with any insight in relation to any of this!

Tags: Blacknight, Conficker, Downadup, Email, Kido, Pinit, Smapuzle, Symantec, ThreatExpert, VirusTotal, Windows 2000