Networking

Brace yourself. The Internet is about to get a lot busier and more cluttered.

A friend of mine is a system administrator for an East Coast company with a secondary (DR) data center at a colocation in a western state. We chatted recently about some of the features of his secondary data center, which is dedicated to maintaining security and uptime for its clients. With his insights fresh in mind (and with his permission), I thought it might be interesting to outline the processes used by the hosting organization -- which I'll leave nameless for confidentiality purposes -- by discussing what you might expect to encounter were you to visit it.

Google's quest to build a fiber network in Austin, Texas has hit a snag in the form of AT&T.

Gigabit-class broadband is capturing the imagination of Internet users throughout the country. With Google and other companies bringing fiber-based services that deliver a gigabit of data each second to the home, communities are accelerating their push to get the highest speeds.

A consumer who really needs 1,000 megabits of bandwidth is probably a rare creature, but excitement over fiber deployments show there is at least some demand for what is a ludicrous speed compared to most home Internet connections.

In October, a report surfaced that the US National Security Agency secretly accessed data from tech giants like Google and Yahoo, by way of intercepting the unencrypted traffic flowing between each company's data centers.

FOR people living under repressive regimes censorship is an everyday reality, and browsing the internet freely is impossible without some serious technical know-how. This week Google threw its weight behind an idea that lets people circumvent censorship by using the internet connection of a friend in a non-censored country.

A collaboration between the University of Washington in Seattle and non-profit firm Brave New Software, uProxy lets users share their internet connection with friends on social networks through a browser extension.

NASA scientists say the first tests of what could someday become an outer space Internet have far surpassed their expectations.

"It's been beyond what we expected," said Don Cornwell, the Lunar Laser Communications Mission manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "We obviously expected it would work well, but this is even better... Everything going better than we thought it would. We're running these systems error free."

The average size of DDoS attacks is still climbing with the number breaching 20Gbps around four times the level seen a year ago, according to Arbor Networks.

The firm's numbers of the first three quarters of 2013 show a rising curve with average attack sizes reaching 3-3.5Gbps, compared to 1.48Gbps for the same period in 2012. For the year as a whole, the average was now 2.64Gbps.

A backdoor found in firmware used in several D-Link routers could allow an attacker to change a device's settings, a serious security problem that could be used for surveillance.

Craig Heffner, a vulnerability researcher with Tactical Network Solutions who specializes in wireless and embedded systems, found the vulnerability. Heffner wrote on his blog that the web interface for some D-Link routers could be accessed if a browser's user agent string is set to "xmlset_roodkcableoj28840ybtide."

The leaders who run the internet’s technical global infrastructure say the time has come to end U.S. dominance over it.

In response to leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Fadi Chehadé, who heads the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and others have called for “an environment, in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on equal footing.”