ComSoc Industry NewsCache (INC) |
|||||
|
HEADLINES AT A GLANCE"Social
Networks" "Social Networks" Social network theory can be applied to the Internet, and has become so significant that developers are incorporating it into the design of search engines and enterprise portals. Web portals can be used to model relationships between people, the Web pages they build and access, and the interactions between them. In an adaptive ranking model, the value of a document is raised by the frequency with which it is accessed in previous searches. Role-based recommendation engines incorporate the user's place and context in the company to make more detailed and precise document suggestions. Meanwhile, the tendency of users to converge into overlapping communities could be exploited by portals, if they can outline groups that relate to the user's context. The resulting system would then be able to locate the documents or experts that have the closest contextual match. Overall, the Web will continue to serve as a testing ground for social theory that can be translated to enterprise information management, although the translation is not seamless. (Enterprise Networking) "Shrinking the Cellular Phone, One
Component at a Time" Replacing passive components in wireless phones with microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) could be the key to reducing their size while cutting down on interference and signal loss. MEMS-based filters have a higher level of selectivity than those based on surface acoustic wave devices (SAW's). This in turn reduces amplification and power requirements for cell phones, thus allowing them to be simplified, says Clark T.-C. Nguyen of the University of Michigan. MEMS devices are many times smaller than SAW's, and can take a lot of abuse, he adds. Dicera, a company co-founded by Nguyen, is attempting to commercialize his MEMS resonator. "In theory, it's possible that wireless phones could become a ring that you put on your finger," Nguyen boasts. Meanwhile, Agilent Technologies is working on a film bulk acoustic resonator. William Mueller of Agilent says that manufacturers of gadgets for wireless communications are particularly interested in the technology, and believes that the integration of MEMS devices with phone electronics in an individual unit will be an important step toward super-small cell phones. (Wireless Communications) "Interoperability: Big Challenge
for Mobile Messaging" A recent Frost & Sullivan report detailed the interoperability problem slowing the adoption of mobile-messaging services in the United States. Because carriers use a mixture of three different network technologies--global system for mobile communications (GSM), code division multiple access (CDMA), and time division multiple access (TDMA)--they cannot send text messages between their networks. Moreover, most carriers use the simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) for short message services (SMSs), which also does not allow for inter-platform messaging. The Frost & Sullivan report also said other wireless Internet technologies, such as wireless email, were being pioneered separately by different device manufacturers without ensuring interoperability. Interoperability, said Frost & Sullivan industry analyst Kshitij Moghe, would be the "cornerstone" of growth in the U.S. mobile messaging market, which the study predicted to bring in $5 billion in revenue by 2007, up from $571 million in 2000. Currently, standard protocols for messaging interoperability in the United States are being developed by wireless infrastructure firms. (Network Operations, Management and Control) "Has Internet Phone Service Come of
Age?" Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) is taking off as companies realize cost savings after implementing the technology. Especially in Asia, where long-distance costs more than in Europe and North America, VoIP, which sends voice data over the Internet, is an attractive alternative to traditional phone systems. New VoIP technologies allow companies to keep their existing phone networks and end-user equipment, but supplement them with VoIP as well through gateways and "soft" switches. Although the technology downturn has hit some Internet telephony companies hard, experts say the foundation of basic VoIP telephony services could lead to more lucrative multimedia services in the future, such as instant messaging, videoconferencing, and email. Avaya's Karyn Mashima says companies are adopting the technology partially in order to guarantee the reliability of their phone systems, but also to capitalize on the cost savings aspects of VoIP. Although VoIP has made significant advances in terms of quality and reliability, it still is not as fail-safe as traditional networks, she notes. (Computer Communications, Systems and Protocols) "Follow the Bouncing Ball to
Storage" An attempt to create high-temperature superconductors has yielded an organic magnet that could find significant use in electronic storage and semiconductors. Russian physicist Tatiana Makarova says she was working to produce a superconducting material by joining buckyballs together, and instead developed a carbon-based sheet that is magnetic at room temperature. Furthermore, its magnetic properties can be maintained up to 200 degrees Celsius. Magnets such as the one Makarova created weigh considerably less and are more flexible than their metallic counterparts, and could be used to make inexpensive, strong, highly dense storage devices. Makarova's team has also discovered that light can change the material's magnetic properties, leading to optical storage applications. The carbon sheets could be incorporated into the manufacture of semiconductors because of their insulating and semiconducting traits. (Signal Processing, Storage and Communications Electronics) "Is the Internet Shrinking?
Nonsense!" Certain analysts concluded that falling domain name registrations in the fourth quarter of 2001 signified the contraction of the Internet, but this assumption is false. The Internet is still growing, and a great deal of that growth is fueled by corporate use. Research indicates a 3 percent increase in American adults with Web access, 40 percent more Web-connected host computers, a 100 percent gain in the number of available online documents, and a more than 100 percent spike in traffic on the U.S. portion of the Internet backbone. Arlington Industries net administrator Chris Kozlov attributes the rise in traffic to new Web-based applications becoming more and more accessible. The emergence of broadband and the spread of mobile devices is likely to drive Internet growth even further, according to experts. Keeping up with consumer demand for bandwidth and applications is tough, say network executives. Oregon State University is a case in point: The institution supports 24,000 students and staff, and raised inbound Internet traffic from 18 Mbps to 22 Mbps over the past year; outbound traffic can top 45 Mbps. (Internet Architecture, Technology and Applications) "Wireless Offices--a Hacker
Boon?" Although corporations are starting to realize that wireless networks offer hackers an easy opportunity to intercept company information, executives still are deciding to go with wireless as a way of discouraging employees from setting up rogue access points. Wireless networks--either official or rogue--can now be found at roughly 30 percent of companies that have a computer network, according to Gartner Dataquest. And at companies that do not have an official network, employees often create a rogue network out of inexpensive components that can be obtained at outlets such as Fry's Electronics. Companies with wireless offices also have to worry about whether the business next door has a wireless network, which would create more security problems; with wireless networks, information travels over a freely available and unregulated piece of frequency that lacks encryption protection. Security has become an important factor now that there is some believe that a wireless network could serve as an open door for a hacker to gain access to a company's main computer. Such concerns have made more companies reticent about wireless network plans, suggests Inder Gopal, CEO of ReefEdge, a seller of wireless network equipment based in New Jersey. "But a lot of IT guys are saying, 'Look, either I do it, or my employees are going to take the law into their own hands and set up a rogue access point,'" he adds. Companies are taking their chances with official networks, but are improving their security with solutions such as sniffers, encryption, 802i, and virtual private networks. (Wireless Communications) "University Users Lack Internet
Protection" University of Oregon network users, including students, staff, and faculty, are subject to file searches based on the amount of bandwidth used, which could indicate they are downloading pirated material from the Internet. Other campuses are more conscious of their network users' privacy, but the University of Oregon has no privacy policy governing file searches. Over 250 students living in residence halls had their access restricted last fall term because their downloading activities were investigated and found to be illegal. The university says it only monitors use and investigates suspicious activity, but no formal policy has been established to protect other network resources, such as campus-provided email and file storage. The University of California system, on the other hand, explicitly states the circumstances in which a file search can take place. (Network Operations, Management and Control) "Wireless Network Lets Objects Talk
Back" Siemens researchers in Princeton, N.J., have developed a computer system that communicates via voice recognition technology. The system is intended to help engineers and others check the status of equipment by talking to it. Project researcher Yacop Genc says the system could be implemented in an actual setting by the middle of this year and could be useful in chemical, oil, gas, or nuclear plants that have thousands of parts. He believes the system could be combined with a headset and virtual reality technology to add a visual component to the system. In the system, each piece of equipment is attached to sensors that check its status and performance, and all the equipment parts carry an exclusive pattern for identification. A camera, attached to a small computer worn by the user, recognizes these patterns. The user points the camera toward a particular piece of equipment and asks how it is; the computer processes the question via voice recognition. A central computer then picks up the information wirelessly and responds with diagnostic information. (Wireless Communications) "Mapping the 'Dark Net'" Up to 5 percent of the Internet is fully
inaccessible, say researchers at Arbor Networks. Empty spaces exist on the
Internet that are not reachable by Web browsers or search engines. These
results come from a three-year study targeting the topology, or
connectivity, of servers linked to the Internet. Most computers with dark
spaces are owned by broadband customers and the U.S. military, who
apparently do not want outsiders to have access to their networks. Dark
spaces often occur when parts of the Net are accessible from one ISP but
unreachable through another. Also, failures and filter errors result from
poorly configured routers. Contractual disagreements between ISPs can also
cause blocks in Internet traffic; most providers have peering agreements
for sharing one another's Internet traffic. Hacking activity can also
produce dark spaces through spam, IRC battles, and address theft. (Internet
Architecture, Technology and Applications) "U.S. Urged to Add More Protection
to GPS Systems" The Sept. 11 attacks and the growing threat of wireless hacker intrusions has spurred a homeland security task force to urge the government to designate the Global Positioning System (GPS) a critical national infrastructure in need of beefed-up protection. In addition to providing precision navigation, the GPS satellite network supplies timing support for a spate of electronic systems, back-up systems for the Internet, cell phones, financial network encryption, and the electric power grid among them. The task force, which is backed by The Heritage Foundation, says President Bush should issue a new presidential order that categorizes GPS as a critical infrastructure, and notes that previous directives from Bush and President Clinton failed to do so. It is not hard to jam GPS signals, warns Maj. Barry Venable of the Pentagon's Space Command. He says, "In the military, we encrypt all of our data, but that is not necessarily happening in the commercial sector." Former CIA scientist Allen Thomson says satellite defense will be a much more complicated proposition than people have been intimating. (Wireless Communications) "A Better Web Through Higher
Math" Mathematicians are continuing to further the science of the Internet and help it become faster, more useful, and secure. Already, two important Internet technologies got their start in pure mathematics: Akamai technologies' content delivery network and Google's relational Web search methods. Researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center are continuing this trend by looking into the way Internet communities naturally connect in a graph model, in which each site is a vertex and each hyperlink a line between them. Their research is helping to develop new Internet search methods that would be able to identify the most authoritative sites for any given subject. Mathematics is also being used to help solve the problem of denial-of-service attacks that are plaguing the Web. University of Massachusetts-Amherst computer scientist Micah Adler proposes adding just a small header to each packet of data that would enable authorities to track its source. Currently, there is virtually no way to track perpetrators of denial-of-service attacks because Internet data packets lack the simple header information that Adler's research suggests. (Internet Architecture, Technology and Applications) "Is 802.11a Dead Before It Even
Begins?" Although 802.11a devices are much faster and operate at a higher frequency than their 802.11b counterparts, they are still prone to the same faults, namely the weakness of Wireless Equivalent Privacy (WEP), writes John Taschek. WEP still requires vendor enhancements to maintain the privacy of transmissions, he notes. Taschek also predicts that the devices will be outdated by the end of 2002, as faster and more secure standards--802.11g and 802.11e, for example--are rolled out. He takes the IEEE to task for rushing to ratify all these standards, which leads to a confused marketplace. "We don't want [wireless] to be prohibitively expensive, and we want it to be fully baked," Taschek writes. "802.11 unfortunately is not." Taschek notes that 802.11's planned evolution, still years off, should lead to version 802.11i, which finally will offer explicit authentication and security functions. (Communications Standards) "Addressing the Anti-Crisis" An IP address shortage is inevitable, if not imminent--at least in the United States. Some do not expect a major address shortage for 10 years, but such outlooks would make the United States very short-sighted in regards to the rest of the world. Deploying a third-generation (3G) network that supports IPv6 may be a quick way to prevent such a shortage, especially in less domain-rich markets where such a possibility looms on the horizon. However, an extensive infrastructure upgrade is necessary for 3G implementation, and while foreign operators are greatly interested in IPv6, U.S. operators need convincing that an IPv6 investment will yield positive results. Return on investment could be demonstrated if there was a way to solidly measure a trio of enhanced capabilities offered by IPv6, including more efficient message routing for mobile users through the elimination of triangulation, the automatic assignment and configuration of IP addresses to end-user devices and network elements, and financial benefits. "Yes, [IPv6] has scalability and security and there are features and benefits that can be sold around that, but it has to be part of a longer-term strategy from a telco perspective," argues Intel's Andrew Myall. (Internet Architecture, Technology and Applications) "Burning Up the Wires" Deploying Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop offers significant benefits for enterprises. Research demonstrates that the benefits of 1 Gbps Gigabit Ethernet over 100 Mbps Fast Internet increase with the number of records per transaction. The average performance delta between the two speeds was 41 percent. Workflow tests also yielded clear gains, with the performance delta across five configuration models averaging 22 percent. In addition, Gigabit Ethernet did well in the managed PC scenario; the OfficeBench 3.0 test script used ran as high as 67 percent faster. Tests indicated that performance improvement is raised as the PC becomes faster. The benefits derived from Gigabit Ethernet seem all the more accessible since many IT products have fallen in price due to the recession, while vendors are touting connectivity performance as one of the major advantages of enterprise desktop systems. Furthermore, most Gigabit-over-copper products are backward-compatible with Fast Ethernet. (Gigabit Networking) "Grid Computing: Supercomputing at
your Desktop" Researchers wanting to develop super-fast computers are working with collaborative applications. Collaborative environments--the Grid--draw upon the resources of other systems such as networks, databases, instrumentations, and computers. Grid computing brings together distributed computer resources using smart systems to schedule and manage. Research in the area is being conducted by a team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of California at San Diego, CalTech, and Argonne National Laboratory. In August, the group was awarded a $54 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a distributed supercomputing system. Dubbed Tera-Grid, the system will be located in four sites and will be linked to a 40 Gbps network. Other projects in the field include the $12 million National Middleware Initiative to promote the development of software for multiple applications over the Internet; and IBM's open source Globus Toolkit, which strives to incorporate grid computing into its technology and marketing plans. (Computer Communications, Systems and Protocols) "Protective Coats" The vulnerability of data has people worried that the spread of wireless LANs (WLANs) will only increase the risk, but knowledgeable users can protect their networks by adding layers of security. Safeguards for wired connections can be applied to wireless; these include continuously updating antivirus software and intrusion-detection applications on users' laptops, and strong password and logon standards. Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is 802.11b's primary protection, and although it can be circumvented by hackers, the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance says it remains "a very effective deterrent against the vast majority of attackers." Other security measures include limiting the system to trusted clients, and the deployment of media access control (MAC) address-based authentication. Integrating standards and proprietary technologies, such as enhancing WEP's RC4 encryption design, offers even greater security. WLAN authentication has two modes: Shared secret and certificates. Network-layer technologies used for remote access--IPSec, VPNs, and HTTP secure Web access--can offer an even greater level of protection. (Network Reliability, Security and Quality Management) "Providers Look to Security" Service providers are re-engineering their security services offerings to meet the increased needs of companies after the September 11 attacks. IBM Global Services has added at new division and several new offerings since November 2001. IBM is also taking a broader view of corporate security, and has established a Global Solutions Office to examine issues of growing concern. Rusine Mitchell-Sinclair, the head of Global Services Safety and Security Practice, says IBM expanded its offerings to meet customer needs. She says, "Things have changed in the environment with some of the events of the latter half of this year, and customers are coming to us and asking us to not only continue to support them in the traditional ways we have, which is more of an IT-type of security, but to be able to go into the type of capabilities they need post September 11." Some of the new services Global Services is offering include intrusion detection, authentification, managed firewall services, and security assessment. Mitchell-Sinclair says the assessment services are very important in the new environment because they provide the client with a holistic view of their security needs. "You have to know what you have and if there are any areas that need strengthening and improvement," she says. (Network Reliability, Security and Quality Assurance)
HOW TO SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE You can receive notification of the ComSoc INC as a free service provided by the IEEE Communications Society. The following are the instructions to subscribe/unsubscribe via email 1. Send an email message to INC-request@comsoc.org subscribe The archived back issues can be found on the ComSoc INC site DISCLAIMER: These news write-ups are written by Information Inc. from worldwide sources. For details about disclaimers and limitation of liability please go to http://www.ieee.org/about/documentation/copyright/legal.htm#liability © copyright 1999 INFORMATION, INC. |
|
|||
