Thanks to Prof. Goldman I see that the Virginia Supreme Court issued its opinion in Jaynes, the state-law criminal spam case that has wound its way through the courts there. It affirms the conviction and rejects the various challenges to Virginia’s spam statute… As a side note I should say that it’s not often one is actually excited to read an order in a case you’re not involved with. This is definitely one of those instances where the excitement is palpable… The news reports billed the case as the first felony conviction for sending spam. More…

The main reason for developing a new internet protocol was based on lack of address; however this was not the only reason. Unfortunately, many people think of IPv6 only as enormous address space, but there are a lot of other advantages, for example… authorizations and authentication function are implemented directly in the protocol and are mandatory… automatic configuration of network interfaces based on their physical address… protocol itself recognizes data streams which must be transmitted in real time, and the data must be processed with highest priority… More…

Zmanda has introduced a new version of Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) 2.1 which adds quite a few new capabilities for MySQL users. This version now includes enhanced snapshot support working with Linux LVM, Windows VSS, Solaris ZFS, NeApp SnapManager and Veritas VxFS. When they first told me about the performance on these systems I was blown away. I thought there must be some kind of a trick going on. The trick is to take advantage of the operating system’s underlying snapshot capabilities to minimize locking on the database, typically less than one second. Robin, head of our product management group,… READ MORE

Lee Dryburgh initiated a great thread in the Emerging Communications public group entitled What would your perfect phone be? There are 14 messages there at this moment with a lot of good ideas, but my first thought was the term “phone” is too limiting. Indeed, some of the correspondents’ ideas also go far beyond the idea of a telephone. Here’s what I want and fully expect to see, eventually. More…

Zyxel’s dual-drive NAS has the features and performance to take on D-Link’s popular product.

Zyxel’s dual-drive NAS has the features and performance to take on D-Link’s popular product.

An aspect of the open source software nirvana has been the end of Microsoft’s dominance. Well, anyone who sees Linux, OpenOffice or another OSS project/product as the death nail in Microsoft’s coffin is not living in reality. It pains me to say this; it really does. When you see Microsoft borrowing ideas from the OSS movement, it’s probably best stop smelling the roses and pay attention. For instance, Microsoft’s Sam Ramji has an interesting post on how OSS has influenced Windows Server 2008. Six areas Microsoft has learned from include: Modular architectures Programming language agnostic Feedback-driven development Built-for-purpose systems Sysadmins… READ MORE

Even though it’s still not a standard, 802.11n is starting to take off. The Swedish city of Lund has decided to build wireless hotspots using the technology. Larger carriers are also starting to get interested.

It happened in San Jose, it happened in Taiwan and soon it will happen in Philadelphia! A nightmare? A conspiracy? No, no, it was just the IPv6 hour. One hour of pure IPv6 LAN for NANOG attendees with a NAT-PT as valve to the crowded teeming world of the IPv4 internet… At 12 noon, Tuesday February 19th it happened! While Mac, Vista, Linux and Unix can breathe AAAA, Windows XP however cannot do DNS over IPv6 transport. What to do to avoid all these Windows XP users… More…

As you may be aware from recent news reports, traffic to the youtube.com website was ‘hijacked’ on a global scale on Sunday, 24 February 2008. The incident was a result of the unauthorised announcement of the prefix 208.65.153.0/24 and caused the popular video sharing website to become unreachable from most, if not all, of the Internet. The RIPE NCC conducted an analysis into how this incident was seen and tracked by the RIPE NCC’s Routing Information Service (RIS) and has published a case study… More…