An anonymous reader writes: Hewlett-Packard, which has been backing off on ambitious public cloud plans for a year, is now calling it quits, sunsetting HP Helion Public cloud in January 2016. in a buzzword-laden blog post, the company says its building out support for interoperability with Amazon and Microsoft public cloud offerings to provide options for customers who require such functionality. "HP’s decision is the latest milestone in what has been a slow fade for the company’s public cloud ambitions. It has become increasingly clear that there are three, maybe four companies that can support (at scale) the massive shared computing, networking, and storage infrastructure necessary for a public cloud. ... HP will continue pushing its private and hybrid cloud."

An anonymous reader writes: TorrentFreak reports that the European Parliament is approaching a vote on new telecom regulations that aim to implement net neutrality throughout EU member states. Unfortunately, the legislation hinges on a few key amendments, and experts are warning about the consequences should those amendments fail to pass. "These amendments will ensure that specific types of traffic aren't throttled around the clock, for example. The current language would allow ISPs to throttle BitTorrent traffic permanently if that would optimize overall 'transmission quality.' This is not a far-fetched argument, since torrent traffic can be quite demanding on a network." That's not the only concern: "Besides file-sharing traffic the proposed legislation also allows Internet providers to interfere with encrypted traffic, including VPN connections. Since encrypted traffic can't be classified though deep packet inspection, ISPs may choose to de-prioritize it altogether."

1sockchuck writes: This week's case in which a Paris data center lost its license isn't an isolated incident, but the latest in a series of disputes in which community groups have fought data center projects, citing objections to generators or power lines. Data center site selection is often a secretive process, with cloud builders using codenames to cloak their identity. Community groups are using social media, blogs, research and media outreach to bring public attention to the process and voice their concerns. Protests from a Delaware group led to the cancellation of a data center project that planned to build a cogeneration plant. In Virginia, a coalition has organized to oppose a power line for an Amazon Web Services data center. Everyone wants their Internet, just not in their backyard.

CNET reports (and CTO John Saw explains on the company's blog) that Sprint has decided to taper access to a slice of its "unlimited" wireless data customers, by throttling access (not curtailing it, at least) to those who slurp down more than 23 gigabytes per month -- the same cap that T-Mobile has imposed. If you think "throttled" and "unlimited" don't quite jibe to describe the same service, you're not the only one to quibble: CNET notes that regulators have "begun scrutinizing the carriers' practice [of slowing access past a cap]. In June, the Federal Communications Commission threatened to fine AT&T $100 million for deceiving its customers by mislabeling its service as unlimited. The FCC also challenged Verizon when the company planned to expand its data throttling policy to its 4G customers. The company retracted that policy last fall. In June, Verizon also stopped slowing unlimited-data traffic for 3G customers."

citadrianne writes: Deep beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, sensors buried in a billion tons of ice—a cubic kilometer of frozen H2O—are searching for neutrinos. "We collect...one neutrino from the atmosphere every ~10 minutes that we sort of care about, and one neutrino per month that comes from an astrophysical sources that we care about a very great deal," researcher Nathan Whitehorn said. "Each particle interaction takes about 4 microseconds, so we have to sift through data to find the 50 microseconds a year of data we actually care about." Computing facilities manager Gonzalo Merino added, "If the filtered data from the Pole amounts to ~36TB/year, the processed data amounts to near 100TB/year." Because IceCube can't see satellites in geosynchronous orbit from the pole, internet coverage only lasts for six hours a day, Whitehorn explained. The raw data is stored on tape at the pole, and a 400-core cluster makes a first pass at the data to cut it down to around 100GB/day. A 4000-CPU dedicated local cluster crunches the numbers. Their storage system has to handle typical loads of "1-5GB/sec of sustained transfer levels, with thousands of connections in parallel," Merino explained.

Patrick O'Neill writes: Cars and streets are now connecting to the Internet for a long list of transportation and safety benefits but the new tech has drawbacks. Experts from government, industry, and academia say they have no confidence they'll develop a secure system that can protect users from tracking and privacy breaches. Their opinions were captured in a recent survey (PDF) from the Government Accountability Office. "The government is coordinating with the transportation industry on the Security Credential Management System (SCMS), a project to verify that basic road-safety messages come from authorized devices. ... At this point, it’s not clear who would even run such a system. Previous plans pointed toward car industry control, but the Transportation Department is now looking into playing 'a more active leadership role' for V2I as well as V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) networks. That role would include setting security and privacy standards when V2I and V2V networks become operational."

An anonymous reader writes: Despite the ferment that occurs when yet another digital publisher paywalls a news-site, most paywalls are absurdly easy to circumvent, even using no other software than a web-browser, because of the need to present unrestricted content to the search engines that publicise it. None of the parties involved are considering anyone else's point of view: Google wants free flow of information funded by merit-based advertising revenue; publishers want to restore consumer lock-in in a network environment of story-led consumers who have completely abandoned the concept; and Apple is fine with content-blocking, since it just wants to sell hardware.

derekmead writes: A coalition of 260 cybersecurity experts is taking advantage of a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) public comment period to push for open source Wi-Fi router firmware.

The cybersecurity experts asked the FCC on Wednesday to require router makers to open-source their firmware, or the basic software that controls its core functionality, as a condition for it being licensed for use in the US. The request comes amid a wider debate on how the FCC should ensure that Wi-Fi routers' wireless signals don't "go outside stated regulatory rules" and cause harmful interference to other devices like cordless phones, radar, and satellite dishes.

MojoKid writes: Wireless routers are going through somewhat of a renaissance right now, thanks to the arrival of the 802.11ac standard that is "three times as fast as wireless-N" and the proliferation of Internet-connected devices in our homes and pockets. AC is backward compatible with all previous standards, and whereas 802.11n was only able to pump out 450Mb/s of total bandwidth, 802.11ac is capable of transmitting at up to 1,300Mbps on a 5GHz channel. AC capability is only available on the 5GHz channel, which has fewer devices on it than a typical 2.4GHz channel. The trade-off is that 5GHz signals typically don't travel as far as those on the 2.4GHz channel.

However, 802.11ac makes up for it with a technology named Beamforming, which allows it to figure out where devices are located and amplify the signal in their direction instead of just broadcasting in all directions like 802.11n. Also, while 802.11n supports only four streams of data, 802.11ac supports up to eight streams on channels that are twice as wide. HotHardware's AC Router round-up takes a look at four flagship AC routers from ASUS, TRENDnet, D-Link and Netgear. All are AC3200 routers that use the new Broadcom XStream 5G platform. Netgear's Nighthawk X6 tends to offer the best balance of performance in various use cases. However, all models performed similarly, with subtle variances in design, features and pricing left to differentiate them from one another.

New submitter beda writes: Open hardware has got much attention with the advent of Raspberry Pi, Arduino and their respective clones. But most of the devices are focused either on tinkerers (Arduino) or most notably multimedia (Raspberry Pi). However, there is not much happening in other areas such as home routers where openness might help improve security and drive progress. Our company (non-profit) is trying to change this with Turris Omnia but we still wander if there is in fact demand for such devices. Is the market large enough and the area cool enough? Are there enough people who would value open hardware running open software even with a higher price tag? Any feedback would be most valued.

An anonymous reader writes with this report about just how easy it is to disrupt if not entirely kill modern consumer-grade networks -- not just Wi-Fi, but Bluetooth and Zigbee networks, too. Crucial to determining the likelihood of any given kind of attack, though, is how much it would cost the attacker to attempt. The bad news for network owners and users is that it doesn't cost much at all: "According to Mathy Vanhoef, a PhD student at KU Leuven (Belgium), it can easily be done by using a Wi-Fi $15 dongle bought off Amazon, a Raspberry Pi board, and an amplifier that will broaden the range of the attack to some 120 meters."

jones_supa writes: A couple of years ago, details began to unfold of a government-backed high capacity data cable between Germany and Finland, which would be routed through the Baltic Sea. The cable has now been nicknamed "Sea Lion," and the work started Monday in Santahamina coastal area, outside Helsinki. The cable was built by Alcatel Lucent and is operated by the Finnish firm Cinia Group. The Finnish government, along with the banking and insurance sector, have together invested €100M into the project. That investment is expected to pay for itself many times over once the business sector gets a boost from the new telecom jump. The new cable also makes Finland independent of the Øresund Bridge, through which all of the country's Internet traffic is currently routed, via Denmark and Sweden. Eventually the new link can reach Asia as well, via the Northeast Passage shipping route.

An anonymous reader writes: CloudFlare's content delivery network relies on their ability to shuffle data around. As they've scaled up, they've run into some interesting technical limits on how fast they can manage this. Last month they explained how the unmodified Linux kernel can only handle about 1 million packets per second, when easily-available NICs can manage 10 times that. So, they did what you're supposed to do when you encounter a problem with open source software: they developed a patch for the Netmap project to increase throughput. "Usually, when a network card goes into the Netmap mode, all the RX queues get disconnected from the kernel and are available to the Netmap applications. We don't want that. We want to keep most of the RX queues back in the kernel mode, and enable Netmap mode only on selected RX queues. We call this functionality: 'single RX queue mode.'" With their changes, Netmap was able to receive about 5.8 million packets per second. Their patch is currently awaiting review.

johnslater writes: A friend at the BBC has written a short description of his project to deliver UHD video over IP networks. The application bypasses the OS network stack, and constructs network packets directly in a buffer shared with the network hardware, achieving a ten-fold throughput improvement. He writes: "Using this technique, we can send or receive uncompressed UHD 2160p50 video (more than 8 Gbps) using a single CPU core, leaving all the rest of the server's cores free for video processing." This is part of a broader BBC project to develop an end-to-end IP-based studio system.

An anonymous reader writes: We've discussed some proposed FCC rules that could restrict modification of wireless routers in such a way that open source firmware would become banned. Eric S. Raymond has published the comment he sent to the FCC about this. He argues, "The present state of router and wireless-access-point firmware is nothing short of a disaster with grave national-security implications. ... The effect of locking down router and WiFi firmware as these rules contemplate would be to lock irreparably in place the bugs and security vulnerabilities we now have. To those like myself who know or can guess the true extent of those vulnerabilities, this is a terrifying possibility. I believe there is only one way to avoid a debacle: mandated device upgradeability and mandated open-source licensing for device firmware so that the security and reliability problems can be swarmed over by all the volunteer hands we can recruit. This is an approach proven to work by the Internet ubiquity and high reliability of the Linux operating system."

alphadogg writes: LTE-U is a technology developed by Qualcomm that lets a service provider broadcast and receive signals over unlicensed spectrum, which is usable by anybody – specifically, in this case, the spectrum used by Wi-Fi networks in both businesses and homes. By opening up this new spectrum, major U.S. wireless carriers hope to ease the load on the licensed frequencies they control and help their services keep up with demand. Unsurprisingly, several outside experiments that pitted standard LTE technology or 'simulated LTE-U' technology, in the case of one in-depth Google study, against Wi-Fi transmitters on the same frequencies found that LTE drastically reduced the throughput on the Wi-Fi connection.

Mickeycaskill writes: Researchers at Symantec have documented a piece of malware that infects routers and other connected devices, but instead of harming them, improves their security. Affected routers connect to a peer-to-peer network with other compromised devices, to distribute threat updates. 'Linux.Wifatch' makes no attempt to conceal itself and even left messages for users, urging them to change their passwords and update their firmware. Symantec estimates 'tens of thousands' of devices are affected and warns that despite Wifatch's seemingly philanthropic intentions, it should be treated with caution.

"It should be made clear that Linux.Wifatch is a piece of code that infects a device without user consent and in that regard is the same as any other piece of malware," said Symantec. "It should also be pointed out that Wifatch contains a number of general-purpose back doors that can be used by the author to carry out potentially malicious actions." There is one simple solution to rid yourself of the malware though: reset your device

New submitter aduxorth writes: Sky Muster, the first of the two satellites that will comprise Australia's NBN's Long-Term Satellite Service, has been successfully launched from Guiana Space Centre in South America. The two geostationary satellites will offer a total capacity of 135 gigabits per second, with 25/5Mbps wholesale speeds available to end users. The second satellite is expected to launch next year. Testing of this satellite will start soon and will continue until services are launched early next year.

An anonymous reader writes: It appears a large number of customers of Telstra (one of Australia's largest telcos) have been suffering crippling speeds while attempting to connect to any Apple Service for the better part of four days. Reports indicate this is affecting Apple Music, Apple App Stores (on both iOS and OSX) and are stopping many Telstra customers from getting access to app updates and the much anticipated El Capitan release of OS X. Mobile phone customers as well as home broadband customers seem to be affected at this stage with a large number of posts both on Twitter and the Whirlpool Broadband Forum. It appears one Twitter user has also fully summarised all the issues in a single post including many of the Twitter posts as well.

Tokolosh writes: Raytheon is a company well-known in military-industrial and political circles, but not so much for software, networking and cybersecurity. That has not stopped the DHS awarding it a $1 billion, five year contract to help more than 100 civilian agencies manage their computer security. Raytheon said DHS selected it to be the prime contractor and systems integrator for the agency's Network Security Deployment (NSD) division, and its National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS). The contract runs for five years, but some orders could be extended for up to an additional 24 months, it said. Dave Wajsgras, president of Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services, said the company had invested over $3.5 billion in recent years to expand its cybersecurity capabilities. He said cybersecurity incidents had increased an average of 66 percent a year worldwide between 2009 and 2014. As you might expect, Raytheon spends heavily on political contributions and lobbying.