boarder8925 writes “David Clark, who led the development of the internet in the 1970s, is working with the National Science Foundation on a plan for a whole new infrastructure to replace today’s global network. The NSF aims to put out a request for proposals in the fall for plans and designs that could lead to what Clark called a ‘clean slate’ internet architecture. Those designs, Clark said, could be tested on the National LambdaRail, the nationwide optical network that researchers are using to experiment with new networking technologies and applications.”

Excerpt of Scoove’s comment on slashdot: “State of the consumer market: Let’s be honest for a second. While we dream of IPv6 efficiencies, the world out there is clinging onto Windows 98, first edition. They’re stuck in the IP dark ages (hell, I had a discussion today with a Fortune 500 senior manager who thought dialup optimization was the same thing as broadband. *sigh* It’s the Dilbert PHB “etch and sketch” laptop all over again!). These are people that can’t understand their kids P2P and the five trojans pushing out spam are why their broadband is slow. These are the people that refuse to use antivirus, personal firewalls and spyware detection. Do you expect them to understand the nuances of better IP networks? QoS? Mobile IP? Dream on…“

* Slashdot | David Clark: Rebuild the Internet

An anonymous slashdot reader writes “Sophos has come up with some pretty interesting research: apparently, there’s a 50 percent chance unprotected Windows PCs will be compromised within 12 minutes of going online. Sophos came to that conclusion based on research covering the last six months of virus activity. The company said authors of malware such as spam, viruses, phishing scams and spyware have increased both the volume and sophistication of their assaults, releasing almost 8,000 new viruses in the first half of 2005 and increasingly teaming up in joint ventures to make money. The new-virus figure is up 59 percent on the same period last year.”

* Slashdot | The 12-minute Windows Heist

An anonymous Slashdot reader submits “Will the blogosphere become just as spammy as Usenet? There may be over 10M weblogs out there, most of them seem to be fake spam blogs created to manipulate the search engines. Scott Johnson, CTO at Feedster, complained that “at times we see upwards of 90% of the traffic from Blogspot being spam,” and the problem is likely to only get worse. Can blog search engines like Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub filter the signal from the torrent of noise? Or will we have to seek new approaches such as the social filtering used by Del.icio.us or collaborative filtering used by Findory to separate the ham from the spam?”

Slashdot | The Ham and Spam of Weblogs

/. “IBM has launched its Watson Blue Gene system, the largest privately owned supercompuer seen by the press. The super computer is described reaching a whopping 91.29 teraflops. IBM has plans on giving Academic researchers access to some computing time. Some more info can be found the IBM site. All this makes you wonder what other supercomputers are out there, not known to the press, and if it’s time to increase the size of your private key and strengthen your encryption.”

* Slashdot | Largest Privately Owned Supercomputer

Yaniv Shaked and Avishai Wool have written a report about the security flaws in Bluetooth that they have uncovered (investigated).

Abstract:
This paper describes the implementation of an attack on the Bluetooth security mechanism. Specifically, we describe a passive attack, in which an attacker can find the PIN used during the pairing process. We then describe the cracking speed we can achieve through three optimizations methods. Our fastest optimization employs an algebraic representation of a central cryptographic primitive (SAFER+) used in Bluetooth. Our results show that a 4-digit PIN can be cracked in less than 0.3 sec on an old Pentium III 450MHz computer, and in 0.06 sec on a Pentium IV 3Ghz HT computer.

* Cracking the Bluetooth PIN1