Monday, August 08, 2005

On the road to WiFi

An interesting article on the use of WiFi along the country side. This bit in particular caught my attention..

Driving along the road here, I used my laptop to get e-mail and download video - and you can do that while cruising at 70 miles per hour, mile after mile after mile, at a transmission speed several times as fast as a T-1 line.


VERY Cool!!

Usually, the police and fire agencies communicate just by radio, but Hermiston decided to go with a public-private partnership that established a Wi-Fi network. The police chief, Dan Coulombe, showed me the wireless computers that all police officers now carry. They can download data and receive images from video monitors - and, if nerve gas ever escaped, display the cloud's direction and speed.

Fingerprint readers are now being added to these portable devices so a police officer can almost instantly run a person's fingerprint through a multistate database. And if there's a report of a burglary, the police rushing to the scene can download floor plans of the building, live images from video monitors and information about the alarm system.


Source

Sunday, August 07, 2005

Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL

The implementation of OpenGL on Windows Vista turns up an interesting debate. To summarize this issue,

a] A wrapper will be used to get OpenGL to work along with Direct3d. So, performance of OpenGL apps could face a performance hit of up to 50%.

b] Microsoft implemented the proprietary Direct3d and so created this situation of incompatibility between the two.

c] By creating a proprietary system for gaming, vendors would find no reason to port to Open GL based platforms such as GNU/Linux..?

The debate

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Exploit writers team up to target Cisco routers

LAS VEGAS In a room at the Alexis Park Hotel, a nightmare scenario for Cisco has begun to unfold.

It's Saturday night, a time for blowout parties at the annual DEF CON hacker convention, including the Goth-flavored Black and White Ball. But a half dozen researchers in the nondescript room quietly drink, stare at the screens of their laptops, and in low voices, discuss how to compromise two flat metal boxes sitting on a sofa side table: Cisco routers.

They argue that it's the logical conclusion to Cisco's attempts to censor a presentation given by Michael Lynn, a security researcher who resigned from his company, Internet Security Systems, to present his method for compromising and running code on Cisco routers at the Black Hat Security Briefings earlier this week.

The companies made good on legal threats, settling on Thursday with Lynn, who signed a permanent injunction preventing him from using the presentation or disseminating the information at either Black Hat or the following DEF CON convention.

The legal tactics acted to mobilize security researchers and hackers at the shows to glean whatever information they could about the methods used by Lynn and reproduce his work.

Source