Networking

Internet users in Germany can now have a DSL line for as little as €3.99 per month. Germany's biggest ISP, T-Online, has launched its no-frills DSL brand Congster in a fight back against low-cost rivals, Reuters reports.

But there is a catch: Congster is a stripped-down Internet access service, without an email address or SMTP access. Tech-savvy subscribers should run their own mail server, or stick to webmail services such as Hotmail. Additional services such as premium content and anti-virus software are also not available.

With the launch of the first backbone network of the next-generation Internet in China, the country is expected to dramatically narrow its gap with the world's leaders, officials and experts said.

Eight departments of the Chinese Government announced on Saturday in Beijing that CERNET2 was going into formal operation.

NTT DoCoMo announced today that high-speed packet transmission with 1 Gbps data rate in the downlink was achieved successfully in a laboratory experiment using fourth-generation (4G) mobile communication radio access equipments on August 20, 2004, considering field experiments in the early next year.

Research published this week has shown that broadband over power line services may not be attractive to many potential customers. America's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) laid out regulatory guidelines for companies who want to offer broadband over power lines (BPL) last month, and US utility firms are expected to begin selling services soon.

Trials are also already taking place in the UK, but the study from energy information firm Platts suggests that commercial take-up could be limited.

Zebra is open source TCP/IP routing software that is similar to Cisco's Internetworking Operating System (IOS). Flexible and powerful, it can handle routing protocols such as Routing Information Protocol (RIP), Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), and all of their various flavors. This article shows how our authors set up Zebra and used it to manage routes dynamically in conjunction with real Cisco hardware.

Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, predicted last week that the ZigBee wireless standard would be hugely successful -- which makes sense, as his company Polaris Ventures, has a stake in its success. The supporters of ZigBee, or the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, claim that it will allow manufacturers to connect billions of electronic devices to the Internet, but concerns have been voiced that the emerging standard is about to fragment.

Thanks to projects such as KAME and USAGI, most of the standard Internet service daemons have long since been updated to support IPv6. The last pieces were solid Linux kernel IPv6 support, and easy integration of IPv6 into Linux distributions.

Fashonistas love to flaunt their prada shoes. Rappers pile on the bling until thier sparkle is blinding. Corporate honchos throw parties with ice sculptures that pee vodka. So what do geeks do to establish their place on the food chain? They boast about their fat broadband connections.

The internet could be made more secure, reliable and powerful by overlaying new networking technology on top of the existing backbone, according to the world's leading microchip maker, Intel.

The company's chief technology officer, Pat Gelsinger, warned that the internet needs a radical overhaul to address growing demand for access, bandwidth and more advanced internet programs. The message came in a keynote speech delivered at the Intel Developer's Forum in San Francisco, US, on Thursday.

A huge IRC botnet controlling more than 10,000 machines has been shut down by the security staff of Norwegian provider Telenor, according to the Internet Storm Center. The discovery confirms beliefs about the growth of botnets, which were cited in the recent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack upon Akamai and DoubleClick that sparked broader web site outages.