broadband-connection | Andy Roberts

Fibre Optical Broadband

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2012/04/29/fibre-optical-broadband

I’ve had a new fibre optical broadband and telephone service installed. The BT Openreach vans have been busy in our area for months. The fibre optic cables were laid under the streets and up the telegraph poles, ready for anybody who wants to take advantage of the higher data speeds available with fibre optics, and to future proof homes connectivity. I’ve always had a pretty good service through the copper wires though, and since reliability rather than speed is my most important criteria, I elected to remain with my current sluggish and expensive but very reliable broadband provider. Well I would have done if I could have, but they had been taken over by another company, and then another in turn. So I was left on a legacy system yet again. Finally, BT made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Six months totally free broadband and landline phone usage, including up to £5 worth per month calls to mobiles, no setup fee, no line rental, no charge for the modem, free to opt out again at any time. Supposedly it’s a trial to test the new voice over fibre service. Whatever. I notice Sky TV are offering similar broadband deals so it’s probably more of an enticement, because we all know how powerful the force of inertia can be, once you’ve plumped for one service or another. Fibre Optical Broadband I’m happy to have my house cabled up with fibre optics, all the way to the modem. The old copper wire system is still there, and working as I type, so I have a choice of two broadband connections, luxury. The fibre optic system is about two or three times as fast for downloads and browsing, but more like six or ten times as fast for uploads, which is great when I have a series of half a gigabyte music videos to upload to YouTube for example. Even running in the background, the three or four hour uploads used to degrade the general internet access quality for everybody else on the network, but that’s no longer the case. And I can watch live streaming HD TV channels such as the BBC iPlayer at the same time as uploads and other stuff going on simultaneously. Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogFibre Optical Broadband

April 29 2012, 6:47am | Comments »

I posted to distributedresearch.net

The cyberplague that threatens an internet Armageddon

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/01/the-cyberplague-that-threatens-an-internet-armageddon

The unchecked rise of malware could culminate in a massive global event that would change forever the way we use the broadband internet

This article titled “The cyberplague that threatens an internet Armageddon” was written by John Naughton, for The Observer on Saturday 30th April 2011 23.04 UTC In 1971, Bob Thomas, an engineer working for Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the Boston company that had the contract to build the Arpanet, the precursor of the internet, released a virus called the “creeper” on to the network. It was an experimental, self-replicating program that infected DEC PDP-10 minicomputers. It did no actual harm and merely displayed a cheeky message: “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” Someone else wrote a program to detect and delete it, called – inevitably – the “reaper”. Although nobody could have known it 40 years ago, it was the start of something big, something that would one day threaten to undermine, if not overwhelm, the networked world. For as we became more and more dependent on information and communications technology, we were also subjected to a plague of what came to be called “malware”. It’s an ugly term, as befits something that covers a multitude of sins, all involving computer code designed with destructive or malevolent intent. It includes not only viruses, which are programs that replicate by copying themselves into other programs, but also worms (self-replicating programs that use a network to send copies of themselves to other machines on the network, with or without human assistance) and Trojans (similar to viruses but instead of replicating they infiltrate a computer and perform some illicit activity, possibly under remote control). Malware also refers to other evils: the junk mail we call spam; “phishing”, or trying to hoodwink internet users into revealing bank account passwords etc; page-jacking, which makes it difficult or impossible for a victim to get rid of a web page; and other scams. The malware plague has gone through several phases. It began in a harmless and experimental way with the creeper and a worm released on to the internet in 1988 by Robert Morris, a student from New York State’s Cornell University. Morris wanted to find out how many computers were connected to the internet so he wrote a small program that would install itself on every machine it found and send back a “present and correct” message. But there was a flaw in his code that meant the worm replicated. On 2 November 1988, network administrators realised something was up because their machines – and the network itself – had slowed to a crawl. In the end, the culprit was identified and carpeted, though it doesn’t seem to have done him any lasting harm: Morris is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Malware began on the internet, but its next phase involved the stand-alone machines we now call personal computers. In 1982, a Pennsylvanian teenager named Rich Skrenta created the “elk cloner” virus that infected the Apple II, then the most popular personal computer in upmarket US households. Skrenta’s virus covertly altered the floppy disk needed to boot up the computer, displaying some doggerel on the screen on start up. It was annoying but harmless. Early PC malware tended to be like that – irritating but not terribly destructive. And malware spread slowly, because most of these PCs were not networked; infections spread by “sneakernet” – ie users sharing floppy disks. The real trouble began when domestic internet use exploded in 1993. From then on, an infected PC was a potential menace not just to its owner, but to other machines with which it communicated. For many people, early malware was a baffling phenomenon. It was seen as something akin to physical vandalism in the real world – hooligans despoiling an environment for no obvious reason. What motivated them? Nobody knew, though several psychologists had a go at explaining it. The notion that malware was motiveless destructiveness was fuelled by the fact that much of it was imitative, carried out by “script kiddies” – non-programmers who downloaded DIY virus-construction kits. In the 1990s, malware development accelerated. When Microsoft released Windows 95, it rapidly became the de facto standard for the PC industry and the world’s IT systems came to exhibit the characteristics of a monoculture: millions and millions of PCs across the globe, all running the same software, all sharing the same security vulnerabilities. At the same time, domestic broadband connections became common. Suddenly, there were millions of machines, operated by people with little understanding of computer security, with shared vulnerabilities and fast connections to the network. Most importantly, malware found a business model in the late 1990s. The fragility of the monoculture could be exploited for profit. Spamming – junk emailing – could now be done on a truly gigantic scale. Hitherto, it had required identifiable servers with broadband access to the net. But the new broadband environment offered a better infrastructure. All you had to do was find machines with fast connections, unpatched security vulnerabilities and non-savvy owners and infect them with a Trojan that would turn them into relay stations for spam (and which could be turned off just as easily, to avoid detection). Spamming works because it can be very profitable. It costs very little more to send 10m emails than it does to send 100. If you’re selling a packet of Viagra for $20 and you have a response rate of 0.1%, you’ll make $20 from 1,000 emails. But if you send out 10m and have the same response rate you’ll be earning $200,000 a day. This is the kind of serious money that makes organised criminal gangs sit up. The idea of covertly suborning networked PCs was a critical breakthrough for malware because it enabled malefactors to set up “botnets” – networks of compromised machines that could be remotely controlled. Nobody knows how many of these botnets exist, but there are probably thousands of them worldwide and some are very large. A list of the 10 largest in the US in 2009, for example, estimated that they ranged in size from 210,000 to 3.6m compromised machines. In addition to spamming, botnets can be used for a wide variety of purposes. They can, for example, launch “distributed denial of service” (DDOS) attacks on e-commerce or other web sites. Each machine in the botnet bombards the targeted site with simultaneous requests, repeated incessantly, to the point where the site’s servers buckle under the load or the site becomes unusable by legitimate customers. More sinisterly, botnets can be used for blackmail, effectively extracting protection money from retail sites to ward off the threat of a DDOS attack. Nobody talks about this in public, but it goes on. Domestic PCs that have been compromised by Trojans can be put to other uses too. For example, they can covertly monitor their user’s keystrokes when logging into banking and other sites, thereby stealing passwords and credit card details. At a recent presentation by officers from Soca (Serious Organised Crime Agency), I was struck by a slide that showed how highly developed the online market in stolen credit card data had become. It showed a marketplace for “USA 100% APPROVED TRACK2 DUMPS” in which Visa debit card details were going for $8 and American Express details were $10. On another such marketplace, American MasterCard details cost $15 while European credit card details were going for $40 a pop. “Buying large quantities,” it said, “prices are negotiable for every customers.” (Grammar and spelling are not a speciality in this particular netherworld.) We’ve come a long way from the creeper and elk cloner. The driving forces behind contemporary malware are financial gain and organised crime, much of it with its headquarters in Russia and other parts of eastern Europe. One of the most blatant examples of an online marketplace in stolen credit card data was CarderPlanet.com, a website ostensibly based in Vietnam, but operated by people based in Russia and Ukraine, and now shut down. A senior US secret service official described CarderPlanet as “one of the most sophisticated organisations of online financial criminals in the world” which had been “repeatedly linked to nearly every major intrusion of financial information reported to the international law enforcement community”. Some of the principals behind CarderPlanet were arrested after an intensive campaign by the US authorities. But one of them, Dmitry Ivanovich Golubov, was subsequently released by the Ukrainian authorities and has allegedly started a political organisation called “the Internet Party of the Ukraine”. The latest round in the malware saga came in June last year when the Stuxnet worm finally broke cover. Stuxnet infects Windows computers and spreads mainly via infected USB sticks, so it doesn’t require the internet for dissemination. Once a USB stick infects a machine, it uses a variety of tricks to infect other machines on the local network and to take control of them, but with an added twist. It looks for a special kind of programmable logic controller (PLC) made by the German company Siemens. If a PLC is found, the worm infects it using a vulnerability in the controller’s software and changes its code and thus its behaviour. This is scary because these Siemens controllers play a critical role in virtually every industrialised plant in the world, including water treatment plants, electricity grids and oil refineries, and nuclear reprocessing facilities. One target of Stuxnet was Iran’s controversial nuclear weapons programme, specifically the gas centrifuges it uses to enrich uranium. It is claimed that the worm reprogrammed the Siemens PLCs to cause over 900 centrifuges to spin uncontrollably while at the same time feeding back “normal” data to the plant’s operators, thereby concealing the problem until it was too late. The fact that this has set back Iran’s nuclear programme by several years has led to speculation that the worm was the creation not of criminal hackers, but of a state agency (possibly Israeli or American). This hunch was supported by the fact that Stuxnet seems a pretty sophisticated piece of malware. Bruce Schneier, a leading security expert, estimates that it would have taken eight to 10 accomplished programmers six months to design, implement and test it under laboratory conditions. It’s difficult to imagine the criminal hacking fraternity having the resources to do that. Why has malware become so pervasive and so difficult to combat? The main reason is that malevolent innovation is the downside of the open architecture of the PC and the internet. The combination of an open, programmable PC and a network that is open to anyone created a “generative system” which was uniquely hospitable to what has come to be called “permissionless innovation”. This had some amazing benefits – it gave us the world wide web, for example, Wikipedia, the Linux operating system and the Apache web-server software that powers a majority of the world’s web sites. But it has also given us the malware plague. There is another, deeper, fear – that the mysterious botnets that have been assembled by the merchants of malware may one day be used in some co-ordinated way to engineer a massive global event – cyberspace’s equivalent of 9/11, if you will. If something like that were to happen, then the response of governments everywhere would be draconian. Just as civil liberties in western democracies were massively eroded by the aftermath of 9/11 and the ensuing “war on terror”, so the freedoms we have hitherto taken for granted in cyberspace would be correspondingly curtailed. The day might come when you’ll need a government licence to connect to the internet. Bob Thomas’s creeper could have a creepy inheritance.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

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May 1 2011, 9:06am | Comments »

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BE Broadband ADSL2 – Best Broadband Deals

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2009/07/29/be-broadband-adsl2-best-broadband-deals

Best Broadband Deals BE Broadband ADSL2 My BE fast broadband box arrived today but I can’t start using it before the activation date on Friday, which is a bit frustrating on the one hand but on the other it’s great that they actually sent it out two days earlier than they said they would. I only actually got my home land line switched back to BT last Friday so that means only one week without home broadband while making the two-step switchover. It seems to be a good idea to do this at a time of year when most people are thinking about going away on summer holidays rather than upgrading their info telecomms systems.

The BE Broadband deal is the best for me because of the ADSL2 technology which allows speeds up to 24Mb and the Professional deal which has an option for faster uploading at the expense of a little bit of the huge download bandwidth. Upload speed is important to me when moving websites from one host to another, uploading high definition theatre breaks video or loads of pictures to Flickr. It should also be just the job for ensuring my Tuesday Night broadcasts on Ustream.tv run smoothly. Not everybody can get the BE broadband deal, you have to be lucky enough to live near a telephone exchange which is equipped with ADSL2 capability and that hasn’t been rolled out all over the country yet. Well neither has ADSL1 yet! So location is still very important for getting the best broadband deals. Mobile Broadband Dongle Deals

In the interim we’ve been making do mostly with a couple of T-Mobile pay as you go mobile ‘broadband’ dongles. It’s the only deal we found that doesn’t tie you into a 12 month or longer contract but hasn’t been as successful as I’d hoped due to the 3Gb monthly data transfer limit which I quickly used up in less than a week. All the dongle deals have that though, even the longer contracts After that I expected to get progressively capped the following month, but no – the service just stopped working until the next calendar month which is no use to me. In fact the realisation that mobile broadband just isn’t good enough yet for business use makes the whole idea of location independent living seem more like a dream for the future than a practical reality for here and now. Getting by temporarily without Broadband I found it much harder than I expected to adapt to offline working with sporadic broadband access. After a few days I’d resorted to installing google gears for offline gmail reading, re-installed an old client RSS reader and installed WordPress Turbo (google gears again) on quite a few blogs for faster updating when I did get through. I finally got around to looking back through some old mini-dv tapes to capture some old video clips – very time consuming, and I tidied up my apllications and downloads folders a bit. I couldn’t really settle down to proper ‘flow state’ work though, and I suspect it would take weeks or more to really get back into the habit of working mainly in batch mode offline, if at all. The conclusion therefore is that a good, fast and 99.99% reliable broadband connection is absolutely essential to the conducting of any business even with just an online element to it. I would happily pay upwards of £100 per month for such a system if it existed, so the difference between a £9.50 a month cheap broadband deal service and a £24 one is not the price but the vital quality of service which needs to be the best.

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July 29 2009, 6:41am | Comments »

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Ustream.tv Tuesday Nights Andy Roberts Music 7.00pm

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2009/07/27/ustream-tv-tuesday-nights-andy-roberts-music-7-00pm

Andy Roberts Music on Tuesday Nights I’ve been trying out ustream.tv for making live broadcast videos and I think it’s something I’d like to experiment with further. So I decided to pick a day and time to see if I can persuade a few people to tune in for some simultaneous music and chat. I decided on Tuesday Evenings at 7.00pm UK time for now, but that could always change if turns out not to be a good choice. I have broadband issues right now, so this may not start with immediate effect but I’m intending to broadcast most Tuesdays throughout August and then resume mid September. It should be easy enough to notify anybody of schedule changes once we get going.

Ustream.tv Ustream.tv is essentially a narrowcast media, allowing anybody to start up a channel and ‘broadcast’ live from a computer. All you need is a webcam, and built-in microphone to start with, and a decent broadband connection, which I intend to have very soon. So what’s going to happen on Tuesday Evenings on the Andy Roberts Music channel? Well that depends who turns up, but the intention is to busk a load of songs, as the whim takes me, and keep an eye on the chat room at the same time. Maybe there’ll be somebody else, who knows. The technology allows for the show to be transferred across to other hosts, so in theory we could end up with a series of ‘floor spots’ as it were, all the while keeping the same crowd connected. Bands, ustream and youTube One of the big advantages with the ustream system is the way the live shows can also be recorded and saved, and instantly uploaded to youTube as well. Bands can do this quite successfully by building up support for a ‘live internet gig’ weeks in advance, then performing in a room with a webcam placed in the corner to pick up the whole band. The online audience an get a real sense of being present at a live event. But me , I’ll just be sitting at my iMac with a guitar and keyboard, generating lots of song files and interacting with whoever turns up. I hope by making it a regular event that some kind of build up might happen over the weeks, to amass a small group of regulars from amongst the billions of internet users out there who might be interested in acoustic music with me. Andy Roberts Music Video from Ustream to YouTube As an example, here’s a video that originated in ustream as part of the prototyping session and is now embedded here from youTube. It’s a song that I always thought was a Wizz Jones song because he likes to play it a lot and recorded it but it turns out to be by Mose Allison You can count on me to play my part Click here to view the embedded video. So there you go – just one last reminder then:- >>Tuesday Nights at 7.00pm<<

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July 27 2009, 9:48am | Comments »

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