The era of the American Internet is ending.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.

Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.

And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence — and conceivably military — consequences.

American intelligence officials have warned about this shift. “Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge,” Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006. “We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us.”

Indeed, Internet industry executives and government officials have acknowledged that Internet traffic passing through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States has proved a distinct advantage for American intelligence agencies. In December 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had established a program with the cooperation of American telecommunications firms that included the interception of foreign Internet communications.

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The IEEE standards body quietly published the 802.11r roaming specification last month, allowing handoffs between Wi-Fi access points in the same way cellular phones shift between basestations.

The IEEE 802.11r-2008 standard was ratified on July 15. Read the rest of this entry »

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Starting Wednesday, users with pirated copies of Microsoft Corp’s Windows XP Professional operating system (OS) on machines that are Internet-capable could find their computer displays going black and with no screen icons visible.

There are 8.6 million users of Win XP Pro in Malaysia and about three million are expected to suffer the “blackouts,” according to Microsoft Malaysia.

To continue working, the user would need to reset the machine’s desktop background. Everything will return to normal. But when 60 minutes are up, the black screen will reappear and the user must go through the whole process again.

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Apple’s publicity nightmare keeps growing worse. The latest twist is more serious than dropped calls or lost e-mail — it’s a security flaw in the iPhone that could dial up trouble for users.

The flaw isn’t a new issue. Apple first addressed what is known as the passcode flaw last January. The fix prevented unauthorized users from circumventing the password-protected locking feature in an early version of the software. But the problem has reemerged in new versions of the iPhone software.

The flaw apparently allows attackers to bypass the passcode locking feature by touching “Emergency Call” on the password-entry screen and then double-tapping the Home button. An attacker would then have access to the iPhone users’ frequently called contacts list, which includes both addresses and phone numbers.

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Now Streamyx Combo Packages offers a special add on- Free Wifi Modem

If you are Combo Streamyx User, just pay additional RM10 a month Read the rest of this entry »

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Solid-state drives are fast becoming popular replacements for hard drives, especially in laptops, but experts caution that SSDs aren’t as secure as commonly thought.

SSDs may offer better data security than traditional hard drives, but they do not completely erase data and are vulnerable to physical hacks from light sources like an ultraviolet laser, experts say.

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