sarahnaomi writes: For years, San Francisco has had a robust fiber optic infrastructure laying dormant underneath its streets. Google announced Wednesday that it's going to start lighting some of those cables up. Welcome to the future of broadband in major cities. Most people don't know that many cities throughout the United States are already wired with "dark fiber": infrastructure that, for a variety of reasons, is never used to provide gigabit connections to actual residents. This fiber is often laid by companies you rarely hear about, like Zayo and Level 3, which lay fiber infrastructure in hopes the city, a provider like Google, or a corporate customer (like an office building) will eventually make use of it.

jones_supa writes: Vijay Pandurangan from Twitter warns about a Linux kernel bug that causes containers using Virtual Ethernet devices for network routing to not check TCP checksums. Examples of software stacks that use Virtual Ethernet devices are Docker on IPv6, Kubernetes, Google Container Engine and Mesos. The kernel flaw results in applications incorrectly receiving corrupt data in a number of situations, such as with bad networking hardware. The bug dates back at least 3 years or more – it is present in kernels as far back as the Twitter engineering team has tested. Their patch has been reviewed and accepted into the kernel, and is currently being backported to -stable releases back to 3.14 in various distributions. If you use containers in your setup, Pandurangan recommends that you deploy a kernel with this patch.

Robotech_Master writes: The ongoing saga of the Neverstop plan shows that Karma Wireless just can't seem to catch a break as far as high-bandwidth plans are concerned. After starting out with a straight pay-per-bandwidth plan, "Refuel," for its $150 wireless hotspot, Karma thought it would innovate with a throttled-but-otherwise-unlimited 4G plan, "Neverstop." However, it soon discovered that users were taking it at its word and using up considerably more bandwidth than Karma expected or could afford. After experimenting with further throttling, Karma subsequently revamped the plan into a $50 per month, 15 GB plan that throttled to dialup speed after it ran out. However, now it turns out even that plan was too optimistic, and Karma has opted to dump the Neverstop plan altogether in favor of tiered monthly plan called Pulse —whose bandwidth costs significantly more. ($40/mo for 5 GB, $75 for 10 GB, $140 for 20 GB.) Karma's "unlimited" users weren't pleased the first time the plan changed, and now they're practically through the roof.

An anonymous reader writes: An interesting paper from a PhD student in Ontario outlines a system which in initial tests has proved 97% effective at unmasking geo-spoofing VPN users. The Client Presence Verification (CPV) system presented in the paper utilises analysis of delays in network packets in order to determine the user's location, disregarding the IP address geolocation information which currently underpins the efforts of content providers such as Netflix to prevent VPN users accessing content which is not licensed in their country. The detection system was tested at global network laboratory PlanetLab using 80 network nodes based in the U.S. and Canada.

Mark.JUK writes: A team of researchers working in the Optical Networks Group at the University College London in England claim to have achieved the "greatest information rate ever recorded using a single [coherent optical] receiver", which was able to handle a record data speed of 1.125 Terabits per second (Tbps). The result, which required a 15 sub-carrier 8GBd DP-256QAM super-channel (15 channels of data) and total bandwidth of 121.5GHz, represents an increase of 12.5% relative to the previous record (1Tbps). Now they just need to test it using some long fibre optic cable because optical signals tend to become distorted when they travel over thousands of kilometers.

Today, in a surprising turn of events, Time Inc. went back in time 10 years and bought MySpace. Just kidding - there was no time travel. But Time did announce today that they acquired Viant, a company that has a large ad tech business, but also owns other properties, including the old networking site MySpace. Terms of the deal have not yet been disclosed, but Time described the acquisition as "game changing," most likely in regards to Viant's ad-tech business. It remains to be seen what this will do for the future of MySpace ...

itwbennett writes: Cisco has published an advisory for a vulnerability with a CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) score of 10 that was discovered by researchers from Exodus Intelligence. According to the advisory, 'a vulnerability in the Internet Key Exchange (IKE) version 1 (v1) and IKE version 2 (v2) code of Cisco ASA Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a reload of the affected system or to remotely execute code.' As CSO's Dave Lewis points out, 'the part of this that is most pressing is that Cisco claims that there are over a million of these deployed.'
And attackers have not been sitting on their thumbs.

Mark.JUK writes: A group of Japanese scientists working on a project managed by Hiroshima University claim to have successfully built a Terahertz (THz) transmitter, which is implemented as a silicon CMOS integrated circuit and can transmit a signal running at 10Gbps per data channel over multiple channels in the 275-305GHz band for a top speed of 100Gbps (Gigabits per second). But crucially nobody has mentioned the distance at which this speed could be achieved, particularly since the THz band isn't likely to have much of a reach. It also sits very close to the region used by lasers.

An anonymous reader writes: As part of its wider Internet.org initiative to deliver connectivity to poor and rural communities, Facebook is actively developing a new network technology which uses millimetre wave bands to transmit data. Facebook engineer Sanjai Kohli filed two patents which outlined a 'next generation' data system, which would make use of millimetre wave technology deployed as mesh networks. Kohli's patents detailed a type of centralised, cloud-based routing system which 'dynamically adjusts route and frequency channel assignments, transmit power, modulation, coding, and symbol rate to maximize network capacity and probability of packet delivery, rather than trying to maximize the capacity of any one link.'

munwin99 writes: For the longest time, when bringing up Wayland a recurring question was 'what about network transparency?!' Well, Samsung's Derek Foreman has today published the set of Wayland patches for providing Wayland network transparency by pushing the Wayland protocol over TCP/IP.

szczys writes: The Internet of Things is all the hype these days. On one side we have companies clamoring to sell you Internet-Connected-everything to replace all of the stuff you already have that is now considered "dumb." On the other side are security researchers screaming that we're installing remote access with little thought about securing it properly. The truth is a little of both is happening, and that this isn't a new thing. It's been around for years in industry, the new part is that it's much wider spread and much closer to your life. Al Williams walks through some real examples of the unintended consequences of IoT, including his experiences building and deploying devices, and some recent IoT gaffs like the NEST firmware upgrade that had some users waking up to an icy-cold home.

szczys writes: DSL is high-speed Internet that uses the same twisted pair of copper wire that still works with your Grandmother's wall-mounted telephone. How is that possible? The short answer is that the telephone company is cheating. But the long answer delves into the work of Claude Shannon, who figured out how much data could be reliably transferred using a given medium. His work, combined with that of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley (pioneers of channel capacity and the role noise plays in these systems), brings the Internet Age to many homes on an infrastructure that has been in use for more than a hundred years.

Mickeycaskill writes: Fujitsu and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have achieved a wireless transmission of 56Gbps over a 10cm distance using millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies located between 30-300GHz. While cellular capacity is improved in some areas through the addition of new mobile masts and small cells, the fibre networks used to link these sites to the wider network is either absent or not feasible to deploy in urban locations or on difficult terrain. This makes the wireless capacity of mobile masts even more important. To achieve the speed, researchers developed custom chips and interface technology to boost capacity of wireless signals without significant data loss.

It is claimed that by pairing the technology developed with a high-output amplifier, the same effect can be achieved outdoors and could be commercialised for mobile operators by 2020.

An anonymous reader writes: Big systems of hundreds of satellites are under development to provide wireless Internet globally, with Richard Branson's OneWeb and Thales' LeoSat aiming at consumers and business markets respectively. It's like reliving the late 1990s, when Bill Gates' Teledesic and Motorola's Celestri were trying to do the same thing before merging their efforts and then giving up. And now you can simulate OneWeb and LeoSat for yourself, and compare them to older systems, in the new release of the vintage SaVi satellite simulation package, which was created in the 1990s during the first time around. Bear in mind Karl Marx's dictum of history: the first time is tragedy, and the second time is farce. Do these new systems stand a chance?

An anonymous reader writes: In a filing submitted to the FCC, Google has stated that while concerns for health and environmental risks posed by Project Loon testing were 'genuinely held,' 'there is no factual basis for them.' Google's filing attempts to address a wide range of complaints, from environmental concerns related to increased exposure to RF and microwave radiation, to concerns for loss of control and crashes of the balloons themselves. First, it states that its proposed testing poses no health or environmental risks, and is all well within the standards of experimentation that the FCC regularly approves. It also pledges to avoid interference with any other users of the proposed bandwidth, by collocating transmitters on shared platforms and sharing information kept current daily by an FCC-approved third party database manager.

A_Mythago writes: The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails) has finalized version 2.0, which has several improvements and updates to continue to meet their mission of preserving privacy, anonymity and circumventing censorship without a trace, using a Debian 8.0 custom live distro. More details about Edward Snowden's use of Tails and the distro itself can be found at a previous Slashdot story from 2014.

An anonymous reader writes: OPNsense, the open-source firewall project powered by FreeBSD that began as a fork of pfSense, is out with a new release. OPNsense 16.1 was developed over the past half-year and is a big update. OPNsense 16.1 has upgraded to using a FreeBSD 10.2 base, support for a high-speed IPS mode, a redesigned captive portal, firewall improvements, and a wide range of other work.

An anonymous reader sends word about the latest telcos to join Facebook's Open Compute Project. The Stack reports: "A new wave of communications companies has joined Facebook's non-profit Open Compute Project (OCP), including AT&T, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom and South Korea's SK Telecom, as the movement seeks to share innovative hardware designs and drive down costs in the telecom arena. An OCP sub-section focused entirely on telecom requirements has been set up to look into servers and networking efficiency in the field. As one of the largest hardware buyers, telcos will provide a significant new market for the project, alongside its successful data center efforts.

An anonymous reader writes: CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider, has grand plans to update the world's largest particle accelerator complex in the next few years. But engineers have identified a barrier to the upgrade: there's no space for new cables in the injectors that accelerate particles before they enter the LHC. In the past, when parts of the accelerators have been upgraded or added to, engineers would often additionally replace the cables that connected them. In the process, they would leave in place the old cables that were no longer in use. Now, a heap of obsolete cables are blocking the way to install new ones needed for the accelerator’s next big upgrade. To make space, CERN engineers have set out to identify and remove the old, unused cables. All 9,000 of them.

lpress writes: The FCC has dropped Cuba from its exclusion list (PDF), so there are now no restrictions on U.S. telecom company dealings with ETECSA, the Cuban government telecommunication monopoly, or any other Cuban organization. Last week the U.S. sent its second high-level telecommunication delegation to Cuba. The delegates were FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and other government officials plus representatives of Cisco, Comcast, and Ericsson. Some of the news: there are at least 6 proposals for an undersea cable between Havana and Florida; Cisco has proposed a Network Academy at Cuba's leading computer science university (Chinese infrastructure dominates today); 4G mobile connectivity was discussed and Google was conspicuously absent. The time for Cuba to act is now — while President Obama is still in office.