Month: August 2016

(credit: Virginia Tech)

Wow, a cable company, is the latest ISP to announce gigabit Internet plans. By the end of this year, Wow promises to offer gigabit speeds to "thousands of residential and business customers" in Huntsville and Auburn, Alabama; Evansville, Indiana; Knoxville, Tennessee; and Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan.

Wow will offer symmetrical gigabit using fiber-to-the-home in Grosse Point, but the other cities may end up with cable. Using newer DOCSIS technology, Wow can offer gigabit download speeds over cable. But cable upload speeds will be just 50Mbps, a Wow spokesperson told Ars today.

The spokesperson declined to provide specific launch dates and prices, saying, "As we turn up each market later this year we will be announcing our very competitive pricing." Pricing may have to be as low as $70 a month for gigabit service to be competitive against Google Fiber and AT&T. Google hasn't turned on service in any of Wow's announced markets, but it has plans for Huntsville, Alabama. AT&T also plans to launch gigabit Internet in Huntsville by the end of 2016.

Juniper Networks has found and mostly patched a flaw in the way the firmware on its routers process IPv6 traffic, which allowed malicious users to simulate Direct Denial of Service attacks.

The vulnerability, which seems to be common to all devices processing IPv6 address, meant that purposely crafted neighbour discovery packets could be used to flood the routing engine from a remote or unauthenticated source, causing it to stop processing legitimate traffic, and leading to a DDoS condition.

According to Juniper's advisory report:

Venezuelan free software activist Luigino Bracci Roa has claimed that his Twitter account was closed down permanently by the US company without any prior warning, after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) complained about videos he had posted on the micro-blogging service.

The @Lubrio account was popular: Bracci says that he tweeted 133,000 times since he created the account in 2008, and had garnered nearly 43,000 followers in that time.

On his blog, Bracci shared the letters of complaint sent by the IOC to Twitter, which show that the committee did not demand that his account be shut down, but instead asked Twitter to "immediately and permanently remove the material" from its website. That's hardly surprising given the IOC's attempts to impose strict controls on all media outlets and how they use material connected with the Olympics.

Webpass radios on top of a San Francisco building. (credit: Webpass)

Google Fiber was planning to install fiber lines in San Jose starting last month, but has delayed the project while it considers a wireless alternative, according to a report today in the San Jose Mercury News.

Google Fiber recently announced plans to purchase Webpass, a company that uses point-to-point wireless technology to offer speeds up to 1Gbps, the same as Google's fiber-to-the-home network. San Jose may not be the only city where Google Fiber re-thinks current plans as a result of its newfound wireless capabilities. The Webpass purchase is expected to be completed this summer.

"Google Fiber is already up and running in seven other major cities, outside California, but a source familiar with the project says the company is putting additional fiber locations on the back burner to reassess the technology and explore a cheaper alternative—wireless service that does not require expensive, capital-intensive and time-consuming installation of fiber cables under the ground," the Mercury News reported. "The source said Google is now focusing more on aerial installation."

(credit: Sara Björk)

A federal appeals court in Denver has ruled that e-mailed images obtained by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children constituted a warrantless search, and therefore must be suppressed as part of a child pornography case.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Friday in favor of a Kansas man who sent an e-mail in April 2013 with four attachments that included suspected child porn via his AOL account. AOL immediately flagged the message via its hash value matching algorithm, believing one of the attached images was suspect, and sent them all on to NCMEC. (Providers have a "duty to report" to the NCMEC if their users access, transmit, or store child pornography.) The agency then opened his message and confirmed that Walter Ackerman had indeed attempted to transmit not just one, but four illegal images.

The following month, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent got the tip through the NCMEC system, and he sought and received a warrant to search Ackerman's home in Lebanon, Kansas. Under questioning, Ackerman admitted to distributing child pornography via e-mail. Months later, Ackerman was formally indicted on two counts of child pornography. His lawyers filed a motion to suppress in February 2014, arguing that his e-mail was searched illegally. Ackerman eventually accepted a plea deal in September 2014. Although he was sentenced to 170 months in prison, he was kept out of custody pending an appeal on the Fourth Amendment question.