CyberAbc

VMware today unveiled its first public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud product, putting the virtualization software vendor into direct competition with Amazon Web Services. When combined with its in-house software, VMware's cloud also provides an alternative to the virtualization/cloud synergy Microsoft is trying to achieve with Hyper-V, Windows Server, and Windows Azure. Like Amazon and other IaaS providers, VMware's public cloud will offer access to virtual computing resources hosted in data centers in four US regions (with non-US data centers coming next year). VMware's biggest opportunity probably isn't in stealing customers away from Amazon or Microsoft, however. Rather, the VMware cloud will likely appeal the most to businesses with big VMware deployments—this is a strategy to wring more money out of customers already paying a premium for virtualization software. VMware's cloud could be used by customers without any VMware software in-house, but it will be more useful to businesses that can use the cloud as a logical extension of their own VMware-driven data centers. The VMware cloud's name, "vCloud Hybrid Service," reflects the customer base it will most likely attract. VMware's US-based services will be available to early access customers in June and will be generally available in the third quarter of this year from data centers in Santa Clara, CA; Dallas, TX; Las Vegas, NV; and Sterling, VA. Services will be offered from data centers in Asia and the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) sometime in 2014. Customers outside the US aren't prohibited from using the US-based services, but they would have to handle some latency. Compute capacity will be offered in two varieties, one on dedicated hardware and another on shared hardware. Minimum configurations for multi-tenant instances (called a "Virtual Private Cloud") are 20GB of virtual RAM, 5GHz CPU power (with a "burst" to 10GHz), 2TB of storage, 10Mbps bandwidth, and two public IP addresses. Customers can manage this capacity from a Web interface using management tools similar to what's found in VMware's on-premises software. Pricing for customers who sign contracts of three to 12 months is as follows: That's discounted pricing for subscriptions. Customers will have to pay more for shorter-term deals or one-time uses. VMware's "Dedicated Cloud" instances require 1- to 3-year contracts and start at 120GB of virtual RAM, 30GHz of CPU power, 6TB storage, and 50Mbps bandwidth. Pricing is as follows: The pricing does not include the cost of operating system licenses and looks to be less flexible than Amazon's, but that's likely not a problem when it comes to attracting users already locked in to VMware's vSphere virtualization and data center management platform. By using vSphere in combination with vCloud Hybrid Service, customers will be able to spin up new applications in the cloud using vSphere, or they can add capacity to applications without buying more hardware for their own data centers. Applications can draw from resources both in a customer's data center and in a VMware data center and appear to be on the same network. On its own, VMware's vCloud Hybrid Service is more analogous to Amazon's cloud than Microsoft's because it offers pure infrastructure rather than a platform optimized for developers to build and host new applications. Windows Azure began as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud only, just recently expanding to include infrastructure-as-a-service. "You don't actually have to buy vSphere unless you were going to deploy an on-premises environment. You could just buy the off-premises vCloud Hybrid Service," VMware Director of Partner Strategy Mercer Rowe told Ars. However, the real value is derived by combining on-premises and cloud-based deployments and managing them from the same interface, he said. That's similar to how Microsoft's on-premises software can be used in conjunction with Azure. "You can stretch your Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks seamlessly from your data center to vCloud Hybrid Service without the need for manual configuration changes," a VMware product sheet states. "Network virtualization enables you to configure your firewalls and network as if they were in your own data center so that you can replicate the network your applications need to operate. The service provides common identity and access management across your onsite and offsite cloud locations." VMware said there are 3,700 applications certified to run on vSphere and vCloud Hybrid Service. vCloud Hybrid Service can run any of the "more than 90 operating systems" already certified to run on vSphere. Rather than sell virtual machines preloaded with operating system images, VMware "sells pools of compute resources (RAM and CPU) to the customer and allows them to create VMs based on their needs," a company spokesperson told Ars. Customers can use their own OS images or use templates from VMware's catalog, which includes Windows and Linux configurations. "VMware will be reselling OS and application licensing for VMs generated out of the global VMware catalog where needed," the company said. In other words, the prices can't be easily compared to Amazon's, which sells VMs preloaded with operating systems and includes the licensing cost in the advertised price. VMware said it is also teaming with SAP to offer hosted versions of the company's enterprise applications, including the HANA database. VMware’s other competition—its own partnersWhile this is the first IaaS cloud offered by VMware directly to customers, it's not the first cloud service based on VMware software. VMware has been selling cloud infrastructure software to service providers for several years, meaning the vCloud Hybrid Service is potentially a competitor to VMware's own partners such as AT&T and Verizon's Terremark. VMware is trying to soften the blow by working with partners to help them offer add-on services for vCloud Hybrid Service, such as consulting and management. VMware will also make the underlying vCloud Hybrid Service technology available to providers so they can build new cloud services of their own, perhaps targeted to specific industries or geographic regions. VMware partners also offer network and colocation services that might differ from VMware-branded-services, Rowe said. "We don't expect a significant movement [of customers from VMware partners to vCloud Hybrid Service]," Rowe said. "We believe the customers obtaining value from VMware products with our service provider partners will continue to be customers of theirs." VMware also has a hosted platform-as-a-service cloud called Cloud Foundry, which is mostly for creating new applications rather than putting existing ones in the cloud. VMware and its owner, EMC, recently spun out Cloud Foundry and several other cloud and big data business units into a new subsidiary called "Pivotal." VMware has plenty of cloudy competition in addition to Amazon and Microsoft. Besides longstanding IaaS vendors like Rackspace and GoGrid, Google offers App Engine and Compute Engine to cover both the PaaS and IaaS markets.

A Congressional survey of utility companies has revealed that the country's electric grid faces constant assault from hackers, with one power company reporting a whopping 10,000 attempted cyberattacks per month. US Reps. Edward Markey (D-MA) and Henry Waxman (D-CA) sent 15 questions to more than 150 utilities and received replies from 112 of them. Only 53 of those actually answered all the questions—the others provided incomplete responses or only "a few paragraphs containing non-specific information" without answering any of the questions. Results from those who did answer show utilities are under continuous assault: The electric grid is the target of numerous and daily cyberattacks. More than a dozen utilities reported “daily,” “constant,” or “frequent” attempted cyberattacks ranging from phishing to malware infection to unfriendly probes. One utility reported that it was the target of approximately 10,000 attempted cyberattacks each month. More than one public power provider reported being under a “constant state of ‘attack’ from malware and entities seeking to gain access to internal systems.” A Northeastern power provider said that it was “under constant cyber attack from cyber criminals including malware and the general threat from the Internet…” A Midwestern power provider said that it was “subject to ongoing malicious cyber and physical activity. For example, we see probes on our network to look for vulnerabilities in our systems and applications on a daily basis. Much of this activity is automated and dynamic in nature—able to adapt to what is discovered during its probing process.” The good news is that none of these utilities reported damage to any of their computer systems. "However, there did not appear to be a uniform process for reporting attempted cyberattacks to the authorities; most respondents indicated that they follow standard requirements for reporting attacks to state and federal authorities, did not describe the circumstances under which these requirements would be triggered, but largely indicated that the incidents they experienced did not rise to reportable levels," Markey and Waxman wrote. The utilities are a mix of investor-owned entities, municipal power companies, rural electric cooperatives, and "federal entities that own major pieces of the bulk power system." Reps want Congress to boost grid securityMarkey and Waxman revealed the results of their survey yesterday in a report titled "Electric Grid Vulnerability: Industry Responses Reveal Security Gaps." The report examines threats from both cyberattacks and geomagnetic storms. Markey and Waxman noted that "numerous security experts have called on Congress to provide a federal entity with the necessary authority to ensure that the grid is protected from potential cyber-attacks and geomagnetic storms. Despite these calls for action, Congress has not provided any governmental entity with that necessary authority." The survey found that nearly all responding utilities comply with mandatory standards issued by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), but most haven't implemented NERC's voluntary recommendations. The report states: For example, NERC has established both mandatory standards and voluntary measures to protect against the computer worm known as Stuxnet. Of those that responded, 91% of IOUs [investor-owned utilities], 83% of municipally or cooperatively owned utilities, and 80% of federal entities that own major pieces of the bulk power system reported compliance with the Stuxnet mandatory standards. By contrast, of those that responded to a separate question regarding compliance with voluntary Stuxnet measures, only 21% of IOUs, 44% of municipally or cooperatively owned utilities, and 62.5% of federal entities reported compliance. Markey and Waxman also found cause for concern in the power companies' readiness for geomagnetic storms. "Most utilities have not taken concrete steps to reduce the vulnerability of the grid to geomagnetic storms and it is unclear whether the number of available spare transformers is adequate," they wrote. "Only 12 of 36 (33%) responding IOUs, 5 of 25 (20%) responding municipally or cooperatively owned utilities, and 2 of 8 (25%) responding federal entities stated that they have taken specific mitigation measures to protect against or respond to geomagnetic storms. Most utilities do not own spare transformers." There are numerous types of cyberattacks targeting the utility industry. Two US power generation facilities were infected by malware spread by USB drives plugged into critical systems used to control power equipment, we noted in a story in January. Last year, a provider of software that helps the energy industry remotely monitor and control sensitive equipment was targeted by "a sophisticated hacker attack that managed to penetrate its internal defenses." Markey and Waxman noted that "Cyberattacks can create instant effects at very low cost and are very difficult to positively attribute back to the attacker. It has been reported that actors based in China, Russia, and Iran have conducted cyber probes of US grid systems, and that cyberattacks have been conducted against critical infrastructure in other countries." In 2010, Markey and US Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) introduced the GRID Act to boost security of the electric grid. It passed the House but not the Senate. The bill would have authorized the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission "to issue orders for emergency measures to protect the reliability of either the bulk-power system or the defense critical electric infrastructure whenever the President issues a written directive or determination identifying an imminent grid security threat." Markey is still pushing for passage of the act.

Google has updated the stable version of Chrome to version 27. On top of the usual bug and security flaw fixes, the new version is claimed to load webpages about 5 percent faster on average. Finding a 5 percent improvement in a browser that's already fast is no mean feat. The better performance comes from making Chrome smarter about the way it uses the network: being more aggressive to download things in some instances and being less aggressive in others. HTML pages generally include references to many other files that the browser needs to download before it can show a complete page to the user: CSS, JavaScript, and images. These can themselves have dependencies; HTML files can embed other HTML files, CSS files can reference images or other CSS files, and scripts can cause other scripts to be loaded, for example. Although Google is switching to its own Blink rendering engine, Chrome 27 still uses the WebKit engine. WebKit detects the resources that are needed and puts them in a download queue. A component called the scheduler then sets about downloading all the resources. When doing this, it has to make various trade-offs. Some resources (like HTML itself) are needed more urgently than others (like images). Network bandwidth is finite, and browsers in general should not make too many connections to any one server. In WebKit, this scheduler is part of the rendering engine itself and as such, each tab (which has its own renderer) has its own scheduler. Chrome 27 moves the scheduler to be shared across the entire browser. This gives the scheduler a better view of the current network activity. Downloads belonging to background tabs, for example, can now be run at a lower priority than those of visible tabs. Chrome 27 also changes how the scheduler works. If it detects that the network is idle (something it can now do, thanks to its holistic view of the browser's network activity), it will try to pre-load resources that are probably going to be used. It also scales back some activity: the WebKit scheduler would try to fetch an unlimited number of images at a time. The new one limits this to ten concurrent images, which reduces bandwidth contention. This in turn means that the first few images download faster, and as these images tend to be the ones that are currently visible, it allows the page to render sooner. The new version also includes a bunch of more or less unspecified "improvements" to the built-in spell checking and predictions in the Omnibox. For developers, there's an extension to the HTML5 FileSystem API that enables files to be stored to, and synced with, Google Drive. Chrome 27 users will also see a new feature if they use Google as their search engine. The search box has picked up a microphone icon. Click it, and you can speak to the search engine and dictate your searches. It should even support Siri-esque conversational requests. That said, at the time of writing, this feature seemed extremely unreliable, most times telling us that we had no Internet connection and refusing to let us speak to the search engine.

Quantenna today announced an 802.11ac Wi-Fi chipset that pushes 1.7Gbps of data over four wireless streams. The first chips based on the 802.11ac standard hit 1.3Gbps last year by creating three streams of 433Mbps each. (With the older 802.11n standard, the maximum throughput for a single stream is 150Mbps.) Quantenna's QSR1000 chips based on 802.11ac are thus a minor evolution over what was already available, using Multi-user MIMO technology with four spatial streams to hit 1.7Gbps. The new Quantenna chips will be available to manufacturers in Q3 2013, but there's no word on availability of wireless routers using the chips. "The chip is designed for home routers as well as for enterprises in need of wire-like reliability," a Quantenna spokesperson told Ars. Quantenna's announcement said the chips will be "equally at home in access points, set-top boxes, and consumer electronics." Quantenna says its chipsets have been shipped in products from companies like Airties, Amper, Cisco, Datasat Technologies, Gemtek, Motorola, Netgear, Sagecomm, Sigma Designs, Swisscom, Technicolor, and Telefónica. The Wi-Fi chip market is generally dominated by Broadcom, however, with companies like Qualcomm, Marvell, MediaTek, and Samsung also making widely used Wi-Fi chips. 802.11ac support is starting to make its way into mobile devices like the Samsung Galaxy S4, and 802.11ac may be heading toward Mac computers in the near future. Even devices that only support one stream can get throughput of 433Mbps with 802.11ac. If you're in the market for an 802.11ac router, there are already many that support 1.3Gbps from the likes of Buffalo, Netgear, Linksys, and D-Link. 802.11ac is compatible with all your 802.11n devices. If you're looking for some ludicrous speed in your living room, you might want to wait until tri-band routers using the 60GHz band for 7Gbps transmissions start hitting the market. For most people, though, we suspect today's routers will do just fine.

The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora operating system has a bit of a checkered history with the Raspberry Pi. It was originally the recommended operating system for the device before being stripped from the Raspberry Pi Foundation's downloads page, replaced by a version of Debian optimized for the Pi's ARMv6 chip. But Fedora is back on the Pi in the form of a new build developed by the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology in Toronto. It's called "Pidora." "It is based on a brand new build of Fedora for the ARMv6 architecture with greater speed and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set," the Pidora team said today. The recommended OS for the Raspberry Pi these days is Raspbian, a version of Debian optimized for the ARMv6-based Broadcom BCM2835 chip's floating point unit, which as we've written is "important in robotics projects and various other types of math-intensive applications." Pidora likewise takes advantage of the floating point unit in the Pi. Nearly all of the thousands of packages in the official Fedora repository were rebuilt for Pidora. Pidora also comes with C, Python, and Perl programming environments included on the SD card image.

AMD is announcing today three new families of chips that it hopes will dominate the market of high-end tablets, low-end laptops, and converged hybrid devices. The chips—which will come to market variously as the A4 and A6 Elite Mobility series; the A4, A6, and E series; and the A6 and A10 Elite series—are close siblings to the processors found in both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles. Most of the processors are built around the same building blocks: two or four Jaguar CPU cores, paired with AMD's Graphics Core Next (GCN) GPU. They support AMD's heterogeneous uniform memory access technology, too, designed to make it easier to share data and computation between the CPU and GPU. The differences are their power usage, clock speeds, and number of GPU cores. Formerly codenamed Temash, the A4 and A6 Elite Mobility series are full systems-on-chip, adding PCI express, SATA, USB, and other I/O controllers to the CPU and GPU. SKUs range from a 3.9W dual-core 1GHz part with a 225MHz GPU to an 8W quad-core 1.4GHz (maximum)/1GHz (base) part with a 400/300MHz (maximum/base) GPU, the A6-1450. Temash's line-up. AMD is positioning these three chips up against Intel's Clover Trail and low-end Ivy Bridge Core i3 processors, hoping to ship them into what it calls "performance tablets": tablet devices with better performance than ARM chips currently offer, and capable of running the full range of traditional x86 software. Performance comparisons are thus far hard to come by. AMD's publicity materials include many, but due to their selective nature, it's difficult to make any direct comparisons. AMD believes that the Elite Mobility parts fill a hole in Intel's tablet line-up between the Atom and Core i3. They're a little more power-hungry than the Atom but less so than the Core i3, with performance that's more or less in between the two. The GPU and gaming performance of the Temash parts will pull significantly ahead of the Clover Trails, with AMD claiming a Left 4 Dead 2 frame rate of 6.7fps for the dual-core, quad-thread 1.5 GHz Atom Z2760, compared to 15.6fps for the A4-1200, 16.4fps for the A4-1250, and 22.8fps for the A6-1450 at a screen resolution not actually specified, but presumed to be 1366×768. Benchmarks on a leaked A6-1450 suggest a performance in the SunSpider browser benchmark that's approximately twice that of the Clover Trail. The A4, A6, and E series, formerly codenamed Kabini, share the design and integration of Temash but with higher power envelopes and higher clock speeds. There are three dual-core E-series parts, from 9W to 15W, and a pair of A-series parts, one at 15W, the other at 25W. Kabini line-up. AMD is aiming these chips at the mainstream laptop segment, putting them against Intel's Celeron, Pentium, and Core i3 branded parts. There aren't (yet) any good performance comparisons, with AMD's own numbers again focusing on GPU and gaming performance, claiming that an A4-5000 system achieves 120 percent of the frame rate in Batman Arkham City that a comparable Pentium 2117U system achieves (with the Pentium being a marginally more power-hungry 17W chip), and an A6-5200 system achieving 140 percent of the performance of the Pentium system. Finally, AMD is introducing some SKUs codenamed Richland. They range from a 17W dual-core 2.6/2.0GHz part with a 554/424MHz GPU, the A4-5145M, to a 35W quad-core 3.5/2.5GHz chip with a 720/600MHz GPU, the A10-5757M. These are not full systems-on-chips, but rather what AMD calls "APUs;" accelerated processing units. Rather than the Jaguar CPU cores, they use the more powerful Steamroller cores, and their GPUs are a previous generation design. Richland line-up. AMD is pitting these against Intel's Core i3 and i5 processors, and aiming them at the performance laptop market. Again its performance comparisons are GPU-focused, claiming a frame rate in Batman Arkham City of 27fps for the A10-5757M, compared to 16fps for a Core i5-3210M. In spite of the lack of concrete performance information, it's reasonable to believe these are all likely to be decent chips that will fill the needs of most computer users perfectly effectively. The Temash/Kaveri design is a flexible one; though the console processors double the number of cores to eight and likely have more substantial GPU resources (believed to be 12 GPU cores in the Xbox One and 18 in the PlayStation 4), they're fundamentally built from the same architecture with very similar performance profiles. The problem for AMD is one of positioning. While AMD is positioning them directly against various Intel models, the reality is that especially for the Elite Mobility parts, they fall between the gaps. Their major strength is their graphics performance, but while this is superior to Intel's GPU performance, sometimes by quite some margin, it rarely falls into the category of "good enough for actual gaming." And if you're not gaming, the GPU just doesn't matter that much; Intel's GPUs are perfectly adequate for desktop graphics and motion video. As such, AMD may struggle to turn that GPU superiority into something that buyers actually care about. To make a real success of these processors, AMD doesn't just need a few design wins: it needs to carve out an entirely new category of machines, where its performance profile provides tangible benefits to end-users. If the company can't do this, it may yet find some wins due to lower pricing, but it's difficult to see AMD upsetting Intel.

In a move to get approval of its acquisition of Sprint Nextel Corp., executives of Japanese telecom company SoftBank have agreed to give the US government veto power over the choice for Sprint's director responsible for oversight of national security issues, the Wall Street Journal reports. Government representatives involved in the negotiations with SoftBank also reportedly want to be allowed to approve Sprint's network hardware purchases. Additionally, the government is pushing for Sprint to pull radio base stations manufactured by Huawei already installed on the network of wireless broadband company Clearwire. Sprint is a partner in Clearwire and is in the midst of acquiring it. Clearwire markets wireless broadband in the US under the CLEAR brand. Details of the negotiation over network systems from Huawei and ZTE were first reported in March. The US government has expressed concerns about potential security threats posed by hardware and software from the two companies; a report from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence found that the companies' close ties to China's People's Liberation Army posed a risk to national security and urged US telecom companies to "seek other vendors for their projects" because of the risk of cyber espionage and cyberattacks through hidden back doors in the hardware. Huawei had offered to allow a third party to certify the security of its systems; in April, the company's executives announced they were no longer interested in the US market.

Yes, Virginia, there is a limit to what Verizon will let you do with FiOS' "unlimited" data plan. And a California man discovered that limit when he got a phone call from a Verizon representative wanting to know what, exactly, he was doing to create more than 50 terabytes of traffic on average per month—hitting a peak of 77TB in March alone. "I have never heard of this happening to anyone," the 27-year-old Californian—who uses the screen name houkouonchi and would prefer not to be identified by name—wrote in a post on DSLreports.com entitled "LOL VZ called me about my bandwidth usage Gotta go Biz." "But I probably use more bandwidth than any FiOS customer in California, so I am not super surprised about this." Curious about how one person could generate that kind of traffic, Ars reached out to houkouonchi and spoke with him via instant message. As it turns out, he's the ultimate outlier. His problem is more that he's violated Verizon's terms of service than his excessive bandwidth usage. An IT professional who manages a test lab for an Internet storage company, houkouonchi has been providing friends and family a personal VPN, video streaming, and peer-to-peer file service—running a rack of seven servers with 209TB of raw storage in his house. Just another home networkI asked what exactly he does with that hardware to generate so much traffic. "Lots of stuff," houkouonchi replied. " I do some VPN stuff for people and Web/FTP/SFTP servers. A lot of friends and family stream stuff off me from my huge media collection. And I also do some P2P and Usenet stuff." Most of the storage space is taken up by videos and other media. He's always had heavy storage requirements—in 2006, houkouonchi said he already had about 8TB of disk with no RAID. "In 2007 I went to 20x 1TB, then not too much later 20x 2TB, and then I started adding more disks and more chassis… but all the chassis that have a lot of hot-swap disk bays are rack-mount. And after having several rackmount machines, I finally decided to just buy a rack when I bought a house and got FiOS back in 2010." This Verizon FiOS customer's home network generated 77TB of traffic in one month. Here's what's in houkouonchi's personal data center, from top to bottom: A 1u server acting as router and VPN server with 4 1.5TB disks. A 1u testing server with two 1.5TB disks. A 2u server—formerly a "colo box"—with eight 750GB disks A 4u Solaris/ZFS backup machine with 24 1TB disks Another 4u server—houkouonchi's main server with 24 2TB disks and two 3u storage expansion units, each with 15 3TB disks. A 2u "Windows/miscellaneous" server with eight 1TB disks Two 2u uninterruptible power supplies Another 4u Solaris/ZFS server for backups with 24 1TB disks That's just on premises. Houkouonchi also owns a 2U server running in a colocation facility with 12TB of disk on dual gigabit connections, "which I push quite a bit from as well. It runs game-servers and hosts what used to be the only LA SpeedTest.net server and a bunch of other stuff." Saving a few bucksHoukouonchi switched from dual 150 megabit business class connections to a 300 megabit downstream/65 megabit upstream residential plan in January (though he said he was getting 150 megabits upstream). "I only switched to residential simply because business pricing wasn't in line with residential anymore," he said. (Verizon prices the residential service at more than $200 a month for 300/65; business service for dual 150 megabit lines runs $340 a month, and 300 megabit service costs $259 a month.) Since the switch, he's used nearly 200TB in bandwidth—an average of 50TB a month. However, traffic most months is in the 30TB range. That sort of bandwidth would cost thousands of dollars per month in most colocation facilities—with the 77TB peak month jumping into the tens of thousands based on pricing plans I looked at from a variety of hosting vendors. Houkouonchi's network traffic—blue is outbound, green is inbound. But his bandwidth hogging eventually drew the attention of Verizon's engineers, who monitor usage for signs of unusual patterns in traffic. This practice is to watch for both abuse of the network (such as spam and denial of service attacks, for example) and for violations of the FiOS terms of service. Those terms exclude the use of FiOS for "high volume purposes" and forbid customers to "host any type of server. Violation of this section may result in bandwidth restrictions on your Service or suspension or termination of your Service." Houkouonchi got a call from a Verizon representative this week. "Basically he said that my bandwidth usage was excessive (like 30,000 percent higher than their average customer)," houkouonchi said. "[He] wanted to know WTF I was doing. I told him I have a full rack and run servers, and then he said, 'Well, that's against our ToS.' And he said I would need to switch to the business service or I would be disconnected in July. It wasn't a super long call." "I don't mind upgrading to business if that's really all the problem is," houkouonchi told me. "It just surprises me they would bother going after people just to get them to pay a little bit more per month. I know that when I switched to GPON (FiOS' Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Network) about six months after a serving hub came up in my area—it took six months fighting with Verizon to get switched over—there was only one other guy on the GPON ports on the serving hub. A lot of people in my area go with Time-*****W because it's cheaper."

welcome to our family bro Njoy sharing...........

People who do lots of work... make lots of mistakes People who do less work... make less mistakes People who do no work... make no mistakes People who make no mistakes... gets promoted That's why I spend most of my time sending e-mails & playing games at work Now its time to get that promotion.......

It was a hot meeting at the conference hall, all the people from the dept were called in, the VP was looking much tensed. The mood was so bad my friend asked "Hey, What is this meeting about?" I told him may be the would decide when to have another meeting and chuckled. People though nervous smiled at each other, then the VP started talking. He said about the recent attrition rate was so high around 10 people had put in their papers, all experienced guys. It was the quarter end and so work was huge. If we do not complete the work on time, we need to be paying heavy penalty said the VP. The VP then turned to the manger and told "Hey take how much ever resources you want recruit or take them from other departments, but complete the work in another 25 days. Take people and complete it man.

It was the days of the Old West when an Indian walks into a cafe with a shotgun in one hand, pulling a male buffalo with the other. He says to the counter guy, "Want coffee." "Coming right up," is the reply, and he gets the Indian a tall mug of coffee. The Indian drinks the coffee down in one gulp, turns and blasts the buffalo with the shotgun, causing parts of the animal to splatter everywhere, tosses down a coin for the coffee, and walks out.... The next morning the Indian returns. He has his shotgun in one hand pulling another male buffalo with the other. He walks up to the counter and says again, "Want coffee." This time the guy is ready. "Whoa there, fella!" he says. "We're still cleaning up your mess from yesterday! What was all that about, anyway?" The Indian smiles and proudly says, "Training for upper management position." Not surprisingly, "Huh?" came the reply. "Yuh," he says. "Come in, drink coffee, shoot the bull, leave mess for others to clean up, disappear for rest of day."

The Cute Secretary came angrily out of boss cabin.. Here friend asked what happened? Secretary: He asked are you free tonight?? I said ya... and that rascal gave me 50 pages to type!

¶ WASHINGTON — Three months after hackers working for a cyberunit of China’s People’s Liberation Army went silent amid evidence that they had stolen data from scores of American companies and government agencies, they appear to have resumed their attacks using different techniques, according to computer industry security experts and American officials. ¶ The Obama administration had bet that “naming and shaming” the groups, first in industry reports and then in the Pentagon’s own detailed survey of Chinese military capabilities, might prompt China’s new leadership to crack down on the military’s highly organized team of hackers — or at least urge them to become more subtle. ¶ But Unit 61398, whose well-guarded 12-story white headquarters on the edges of Shanghai became the symbol of Chinese cyberpower, is back in business, according to American officials and security companies. ¶ It is not clear precisely who has been affected by the latest attacks. Mandiant, a private security company that helps companies and government agencies defend themselves from hackers, said the attacks had resumed but would not identify the targets, citing agreements with its clients. But it did say the victims were many of the same ones the unit had attacked before. ¶ The hackers were behind scores of thefts of intellectual property and government documents over the past five years, according to a report by Mandiant in February that was confirmed by American officials. They have stolen product blueprints, manufacturing plans, clinical trial results, pricing documents, negotiation strategies and other proprietary information from more than 100 of Mandiant’s clients, predominantly in the United States. ¶ According to security experts, the cyberunit was responsible for a 2009 attack on the Coca-Cola Company that coincided with its failed attempt to acquire the China Huiyuan Juice Group. In 2011, it attacked RSA, a maker of data security products used by American government agencies and defense contractors, and used the information it collected from that attack to break into the computer systems of Lockheed Martin, the aerospace contractor. ¶ More recently, security experts said, the group took aim at companies with access to the nation’s power grid. Last September, it broke into the Canadian arm of Telvent, now Schneider Electric, which keeps detailed blueprints on more than half the oil and gas pipelines in North America. ¶ Representatives of Coca-Cola and Schneider Electric did not return requests for comment on Sunday. A Lockheed Martin spokesman said the company declined to comment. ¶ In interviews, Obama administration officials said they were not surprised by the resumption of the hacking activity. One senior official said Friday that “this is something we are going to have to come back at time and again with the Chinese leadership,” who, he said, “have to be convinced there is a real cost to this kind of activity.” ¶ Mandiant said that the Chinese hackers had stopped their attacks after they were exposed in February and removed their spying tools from the organizations they had infiltrated. But over the past two months, they have gradually begun attacking the same victims from new servers and have reinserted many of the tools that enable them to seek out data without detection. They are now operating at 60 percent to 70 percent of the level they were working at before, according to a study by Mandiant requested by The New York Times. ¶ The Times hired Mandiant to investigate an attack that originated in China on its news operations last fall. Mandiant is not currently working for The New York Times Company. ¶ Mandiant’s findings match those of Crowdstrike, another security company that has also been tracking the group. Adam Meyers, director of intelligence at Crowdstrike, said that apart from a few minor changes in tactics, it was “business as usual” for the Chinese hackers. ¶ The subject of Chinese attacks is expected to be a central issue in an upcoming visit to China by President Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas Donilon, who has said that dealing with China’s actions in cyberspace is now moving to the center of the complex security and economic relationship between the two countries. ¶ But hopes for progress on the issue are limited. When the Pentagon released its report this month officially identifying the Chinese military as the source of years of attacks, the Chinese Foreign Ministry denied the accusation, and People’s Daily, which reflects the views of the Communist Party, called the United States “the real ‘hacking empire,’ ” saying it “has continued to strengthen its network tools for political subversion against other countries.” Other Chinese organizations and scholars cited American and Israeli cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities as evidence of American hypocrisy. ¶ At the White House, Caitlin Hayden, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said Sunday that “what we have been seeking from China is for it to investigate our concerns and to start a dialogue with us on cyberissues.” She noted that China “agreed last month to start a new working group,” and that the administration hoped to win “longer-term changes in China’s behavior, including by working together to establish norms against the theft of trade secrets and confidential business information.” ¶ In a report to be issued Wednesday, a private task force led by Mr. Obama’s former director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, and his former ambassador to China, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., lays out a series of proposed executive actions and Congressional legislation intended to raise the stakes for China. ¶ “Jawboning alone won’t work,” Mr. Blair said Saturday. “Something has to change China’s calculus.” ¶ The exposure of Unit 61398’s actions, which have long been well known to American intelligence agencies, did not accomplish that task. ¶ One day after Mandiant and the United States government revealed the P.L.A. unit as the culprit behind hundreds of attacks on agencies and companies, the unit began a haphazard cleanup operation, Mandiant said. ¶ Attack tools were unplugged from victims’ systems. Command and control servers went silent. And of the 3,000 technical indicators Mandiant identified in its initial report, only a sliver kept operating. Some of the unit’s most visible operatives, hackers with names like “DOTA,” “SuperHard” and “UglyGorilla,” disappeared, as cybersleuths scoured the Internet for clues to their real identities. ¶ In the case of UglyGorilla, Web sleuths found digital evidence that linked him to a Chinese national named Wang Dong, who kept a blog about his experience as a P.L.A. hacker from 2006 to 2009, in which he lamented his low pay, long hours and instant ramen meals. ¶ But in the weeks that followed, the group picked up where it had left off. From its Shanghai headquarters, the unit’s hackers set up new beachheads from compromised computers all over the world, many of them small Internet service providers and mom-and-pop shops whose owners do not realize that by failing to rigorously apply software patches for known threats, they are enabling state-sponsored espionage. ¶ “They dialed it back for a little while, though other groups that also wear uniforms didn’t even bother to do that,” Kevin Mandia, the chief executive of Mandiant, said in an interview on Friday. “I think you have to view this as the new normal.” ¶ The hackers now use the same malicious software they used to break into the same organizations in the past, only with minor modifications to the code. ¶ While American officials and corporate executives say they are trying to persuade President Xi Jinping’s government that a pattern of theft by the P.L.A. will damage China’s growth prospects — and the willingness of companies to invest in China — their longer-term concern is that China may be trying to establish a new set of rules for Internet commerce, with more censorship and fewer penalties for the theft of intellectual property. ¶ Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, said Friday that while there was evidence that inside China many citizens are using the Web to pressure the government to clean up industrial hazards or to complain about corruption, “so far there is no positive data on China’s dealings with the rest of the world” on cyberissues. ¶ Google largely pulled out of China after repeated attacks on its systems in 2009 and 2010, and now has its Chinese operations in Hong Kong. But it remains, Mr. Schmidt said, a constant target for Chinese cyberattackers. David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and Nicole Perlroth from San Francisco.

Welcome to CyberPhoenix, our family. Enjoy !!!

Welcome to CyberPhoenix, our family. Enjoy !!!

Welcome to CyberPhoenix, our family. Enjoy !!!

Welcome to CyberPhoenix, our family. Enjoy !!!

welcome to our family bro enjoy

Police was investigating the mysterious death of a prominent businessman who had jumped from a window of his 9th-story office. Nancy, his voluptuous private secretary could offer no explanation for the action but said that her boss had been acting peculiarly ever since she started working for him, a month ago. "After my very first week on the job," Nancy said, "I received a raise. At the end of the second week he called me into his private office, gave me a lovely black nightie, five pairs of nylon stockings and said, 'These are for a beautiful efficient secretary.' "At the end of the third week he gave me a fabulous mink stole. Then, this afternoon, he called me into his private office again, presented me with this fabulous diamond bracelet and asked me if I could consider making love to him and what it would cost him." "I told him that I would and because he had been so nice to me, he could have it for just 500 bucks, although I was charging all the other guys in the office one thousand. That's when he jumped out the window."

welcome to CyberPhoenix bro

Yesterday the torrent world lit up with news that Demonoid had somehow been resurrected under the new domain D2.vu. However, the site was quickly taken offline by its host in the U.S. who claimed that it was serving up malware. With the site now back online with a new host, TorrentFreak caught up with its admins who tell us they have no malicious intent and simply want to bring a community back to together. While there is still uncertainty, one thing is absolutely clear – they do have the old Demonoid database. Yesterday morning’s chaos is not something we experience often. Relentless emails all telling us the same thing – the great Demonoid seems to be back, but is it some kind of trap? To try and discover more we spoke to a company called RamNode, the site’s host in the United States. Company owner Nick told us that D2.vu had been hosting malware, but by last evening his stance had softened a little. “The malware may not have been intentionally hosted on this VPS,” Nick told TorrentFreak in an update. “It is possible that one of the ad banners running on the site triggered the malware alert. The server will still be removed from our network to prevent any further issues related to my company.” Now, 24 hours later, D2.vu is back online with a new host outside the U.S. and fortunately some of our other inquiries have now paid off. So, with the owners of the site speaking with us directly, we put forward a few questions. “As we all know these communities of free file-sharing are currently under scrutiny by government and media powers so all involved wish to remain anonymous to avoid unnecessary complications and any further risk,” the D2 domain owner told us. Nothing particularly unusual there but what is somewhat strange is how D2.vu has somehow been able to launch with the database from Demonoid including user details, torrents and comments – how do they explain that? “It was, as we stated in the email to the user base, an unlikely set of events that flowed from the last Ukraine install. We kept the code safe waiting for Demonoid to return. When it didn’t return we purposely rebranded, to separate from Demonoid’s past and related issues, with the main goal of maintaining the community,” we were told. TorrentFreak tested an old Demonoid research account registered some years ago – it worked – as did one registered in more recent times. That goes someway to confirming the D2 owner’s claim that the database copy was taken from a July 2012 backup just after Demonoid’s shutdown. So what other information culled from the old Demonoid is currently in D2′s possession? “Everything except the domain names which led to the rebranding to d2.vu,” the admin explains. “What you see is the tracker database of the old Demonoid. We aren’t launching the forum at this time but we do plan to start an IRC channel in the near future so the community can interact in real time,” the admin explains. While on initial inspection there is a familiar look and feel (color changes aside), what D2 does not have is something that Demonoid was famous for – a tracker. All torrents are now tracked by outside sources/magnets which means that the site is now more like a sign-up version of The Pirate Bay than the semi-private offering users experienced before. “This was done based on functional and legal necessity, efficiency and to take the site out of the negotiation of peer-to-peer file sharing. Also note that there is work in progress which will re-implement missing functionality and add new features,” TorrentFreak was told. Technicalities aside, there is also another big issue – that of trust. How can former users of Demonoid be confident of the site’s intentions? For example, is the site endorsed or approved by any former senior staff? “No former admins have been involved with this rebranding or launch. This effort is independent and undertaken entirely for the benefit of the community. We do welcome past community moderators to help with d2 if they wish,” we were told. Thinking ahead, we posed another question to the admins of D2. Demonoid has a bit of a reputation as the comeback kid and in the past has reappeared online just when people think the show is over. If users migrate to D2 and that site gets momentum, what happens in the event that the real Demonoid comes back? “If the previous admin group wanted the admin role back we’d have to figure out how to verify that it’s really them and then we’d work it out,” we were informed. “The great effort we made here is for the Demonoid community. We completely understand the community’s need to be cautious and questioning. We aren’t phishing or pushing malware or attempting anything malicious. We intend to do our best to keep the site up and current. It’s in the hands of the community to participate as they did before to co-create and thrive,” the admins conclude.

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