Ref: http://storageswiss.com/2014/08/26/pick-the-next-storage-networking-protocol/

Picking The Next Storage Networking Protocol

Posted on August 26, 2014 by Charlie Hodges

The data center is under immense pressure to scale the infrastructure to support more virtual machines, more users per database and to deal with the capacity growth caused by big data. As they refresh their storage systems to address these demands they also need to consider which storage networking protocol and topology they should use. The problem is that selecting the right protocol and topology can be daunting and the consequences of making a wrong selection could be irreparable. In this video we are joined by CISCO to walk customers through that selection process.

As we discuss in the video there are three basic options available today in storage infrastructures. First are the classic storage networking technologies available today that are based on fibre channel or Ethernet. These are commonly used for legacy applications like databases and virtual environments.

Then there are the newer fabric-based Ethernet networks which allow the move to more converged architectures. The goal of these architectures is to reduce costs by reducing the number of HBAs and switches that need to be bought. These architectures are very popular in big data and the cloud but are working their way into legacy architectures as well.

There will be a time of transition for almost any data center. During this transition there will very likely be a mixture of fibre channel, legacy Ethernet and Ethernet fabric employed. It is important to leverage solutions that allow you to make that transition at the pace you and the organization are comfortable with. For some data centers that may be a very slow transition for others it may be very rapid.

As we discuss in the video the key design goal for an IT planner should be to not get locked into one particular protocol or another. Flexibility is vital to long term success. You want to make sure that you decide on an infrastructure that will allow you to change direction if you need to in the future.

Which DPI to choose when scanning your photos?

Ref: http://scanyourentirelife.com/dpi-should-be-scanning-your-paper-photographs/

The DPI You Should Be Scanning Your Paper Photographs

One of the most important decisions you face when scanning anything with your scanner is choosing what dpi (“dots per inch”) to scan with. And specifically for this post, what is the best dpi to use when scanning and archiving your 8×10″ and smaller paper photographic prints – which for most people, make up the majority of our pre-digital collection.

Making this decision was very challenging for me and certainly a huge part of my 8 year delay. The reason for this is that dpi is the critical variable in a fairly simple mathematical equation that will determine several important outcomes for your digital images:

• Detail – how much image detail you will extract from your photograph
• Image Size – how much resolution in pixels you will have to work with (e.g. 2400 x 3000 pixels)
• File Size – how large the file size will become (e.g. 64.9 MB or 64,878,462 bytes)

It’s definitely a decision you want to make before you complete your very first scan. Trust me, you don’t want to get halfway through your collection and realize you could have been extracting more image detail from your prints if you had just chosen a slightly higher dpi to begin with.

If you study the routine of a professional photo restorer, you will learn they tend to see each photograph as a separate challenge – like a doctor attending to an ailing patient for the first time. It’s a laborious investigative process for them. They may even scan each print several times with varying dpi’s, carefully comparing each image until they find the most appropriate dpi for the photo’s personalized workflow.

Because you probably have anywhere from hundreds to a few thousand photos on average in your family’s collection, it’s not practical or even reasonable for me to suggest we would want to attempt such perfectionism. So instead what I decided to do was focus my effort on finding a single dpi setting we could scan with for each print dimension in our collections – like a 3×3″, 4×6″ or a 5×7″ picture. This way, not only is it one less decision you will have to make when you’re sitting in front of a large stack of photographs to scan, but it will also create a pleasant consistency across your entire digital collection.

I know, so far this all sounds great doesn’t it?

Well the trouble with trying to settle on just one dpi setting per dimension is that it’s going to be used to produce (in most cases) just one “master” digital file that we will be archiving. So this one dpi is burdened with producing a satisfactory result for each of the three important outcomes I listed above.

To make it easier for us to wrap our heads around this problem, I have summarized all of my concerns into this one question:

What dpi should we scan our paper photographs with that will capture as much detail stored in them as we possibly can, will create a manageable file size, but will also produce enough image resolution should we choose to do some radical cropping or print out an average-sized enlargement from them someday?

Before we go any further, I feel it necessary to mention the term “dpi” really is incorrect when we’re talking about scanning images. Because of laziness in the industry, we have been saddled with this acronym carried over from “halftone dots per inch” used by press reproduction with screened plates used for magazines and newspapers.

Instead, what we are dealing with are actually pixels and not dots. It’s really referred to as ppi or “pixels per inch.” The resolution of an image on your computer monitor is measured by the amount of pixels tall and pixels wide they are composed of (e.g. 2162 × 2194 pixels). However, to avoid any unneeded confusion here and because we are talking about the setting in your scanner software that almost always refers to ppi as dpi, I will use dpi instead. Just understand that as far as the setting on your scanner, they mean the same thing and can be used interchangeably.

Alright then. Now that we have that taken care of, let’s figure this out.

Choosing DPI Based on Time Required

One of the biggest mistakes I find people make when choosing the dpi is allowing the length of time it takes to complete the scan influence their decision. Those new to scanning may be surprised to learn that the higher the dpi, the longer it takes for the scanner to make its capturing pass and for the computer the process the information. I’ve recorded for you the time it takes my current scanner, the Epson Perfection v600, to complete scans with various dpi’s.

Scanning Times for a 3.5×3.5″ Print on an Epson Perfection V600
DPI	150	300	400	600	800	1200	2400	3200	4800
Time Elapsed (mins:sec)	:11	:12	:14	:18	:31	1:02	2:34	3:53	6:37

You can see there is in fact a vast difference in the amount of time required to scan at one of its lowest settings (150 dpi) and scanning with one of its highest (4800 dpi). But more importantly, I want you to notice the time it takes to scan at 300 dpi through 800 dpi is almost the same length of time. On this model, we are only talking about a difference of 19 seconds. And specifically between 300 and 600 dpi, it’s only a measly 6 seconds.

All scanners scan at different speeds so your scanner may or may not be slower than this model. But if it is, chances are the percentage of time between each of the dpi settings will be very similar. Regardless, if you think you are going to be one of the ones waiting impatiently for your scanner to work its magic on a higher dpi, I would like you to remember this. Scanning and archiving your family’s photo collection is an investment. It’s going to be an investment of your time and energy, and for that reason, you probably will only want to do this one time.

I believe it’s worth a few extra moments – as agonizing as you may find them to be – to insure your image quality isn’t being compromised by rushing the process. Open wounds need time to heal, baking dough needs time to rise, and photo scanners need time to scan. Got it?

To fill the extra time, consider taking an extra long sip of your nonfat mocha latte, play solitaire, watch some television, or better yet – lightly dust off your next photo to be scanned with a lint free cloth.

So what happens when you scan with the dpi set too low?

Paper prints were never intended to replace the original slides and negatives they were made from – they simply can’t hold that much detail. Instead they were only made so it would be easy to share them. We could print them out, stick them in a fun colorful album and bring them around town to show our family and friends.

If you are fortunate to have the original film negatives or slides, you definitely want to use them instead of your prints to create the highest quality digital images possible.

Sadly, many of us have accidentally misplaced our negatives or threw them in the trash throughout the years and are only left with these fair to moderate paper representations. But don’t get me wrong – we are lucky to have these. Just talk for a few minutes with someone who lost their entire collection to a house fire and you will want to cut them off mid-story and rush home to your shoebox of Polaroids and give them a big ol’ hug! I’m not kidding. Really hug them. Hug them now.

Paper prints can only hold up to 200 or 300 dpi worth of image detail. If you’re really blessed, you might have some prints with detail up to 600 dpi.

It’s really difficult to look at a photographic print and know how many “dots per inch” of detail it holds. Professionals that have been doing this for many years can probably tell based on a lot of criteria such as the year it was printed, the type of film negative it was exposed with, the type of paper it was printed on etc. But for the rest of us, I think it’s fair to say we can only estimate after some trial and error.

If you’re really motivated, take one of your prints and scan it at different resolutions such as 100, 300, 600 and 1200 dpi. Then put each one of your images on your computer monitor (zooming in when necessary) and compare the level of detail. Try and determine at which ppi setting you no longer are getting more picture detail from the setting below it. This dpi setting is then the one you may want to use for this photo because it gives you all the detail at a smaller filesize than that of a higher dpi setting.

So if you scan with too low of a dpi – for example 75, 100 or 150 dpi – you run an incredible risk of not capturing all of the detail that your paper prints are holding.

In order for us to settle on one dpi setting per photo dimension, we will need to choose one that, in many cases, will be too “high” – attempting to capture more detail than is realistically there – just to insure that we are able to capture the detail when it is available in a given print.

So can you scan with too high of a DPI?

When you buy a dedicated photo scanner, or even an all-in-one printer/scanner, you are led to believe from the specifications on the box it came in there is some real value in scanning with these extremely high dpi scanner settings.

I mean if the scanner is rated for “6400 x 9600 dpi” and that’s why I paid so much for this new fancy model, why not just go for it and set it to that 9600 dpi?

That’s a fair question to ask, especially considering all my talk about making sure that when you scan a photograph, you understand this may be the last you will ever get to scan it.

In most cases, you won’t do any harm scanning at unnecessarily high resolutions. Just don’t fool yourself into thinking the higher up you go, the more detail you will extract – because it probably isn’t there to begin with. If you had this much detail, it would be in your original film negative or slide – not in the print.

Also keep in mind the higher up you go, the exponentially greater amount of hard drive space you will need to save the file and the faster computer you will need to process this information in a photo manager. For example, the 3.5 x 3.5″ print at 4800 dpi (48-bit) I did for the chart above took up a massive 2.22 GB (2,216,808,780 bytes) of disk space. Those interested in archiving their masters on today’s single-sided recordable DVD’s will be unhappy to learn you will only get 2 of these to fit on a single-sided (4.7gb) recordable dvd.

I would agree that a 2.22 gigabyte image is rather large and way too excessive to be the average file size for your collection. But you really shouldn’t concern yourself if you start to see file sizes between 40 megabytes and 200 megabytes – especially when you choose to work with file size intense 48-bit uncompressed (TIFF) settings. And on occasion they could even be larger than that for your special photos.

We are finally past the time when hard drive space and processing power is in short supply for digital images. Except for some of the ultra-portable computers, an average personal computer bought today is more than competent at handling 100MB images, and enormous multi-terabyte (thousands of gigabytes) hard drives can be found under $100 if you shop around.

Keep in mind the ultimate goal for these scans are for their archival purposes, and will find their greatest reward years and years from now when computing power and storage space won’t even be a consideration anymore.

Optical Resolutions vs. Digital

The really high resolutions however – 2400, 3200 and 4800 dpi – are really intended for capturing really small and highly detailed sources like film negatives and slides.

If you want to experiment with these resolutions, just make sure you stay away from the “digital” ones. On the box your scanner or printer/scanner combo came in, you will see a rating with two numbers. The Epson Perfection v600 for example is rated for 6400 x 9600 dpi of resolution. The first number is the highest “optical” resolution your scanner is capable of, and therefore the highest dpi you should ever scan with. The second number, is often the highest resolution it’s capable of scanning digitally – faking the results by interpolating the data. Thankfully, some scanning software now won’t even let you select the digital dpi’s from the list.

In the case of the Epson Perfection v600, the maximum “digital” resolution is actually 12,800 dpi, much higher than the second number given. So you may need to consult your specifications printed on the box or find it in the printed or .pdf manual if you are curious about your scanner’s digital capabilities.

The Advantage of Having All This Archived Image Resolution

In the end, there won’t be any benefit to having our entire collection in a digital format if we aren’t able to make paper prints from them like we can with our film negatives. Just like we need a certain amount of “dpi” to capture images into the computer, we need a certain amount to print them back out to paper. The larger the piece of paper you want to print on, the more image resolution you are going to need in your digital files.

Printers today need on average between 200 and 300 ppi (dpi) of image resolution information to print a high quality image on high quality paper. And I am going to make the assumption that most of us seldom print out a photograph larger than 8×10 inches. Which is good, because almost all of the printers out there won’t even print larger than 8×10 inches!

I know you probably hate math as much as the next person, so don’t worry – I’ll do it for you. What this means is that in order to print out a photo on an 8×10″ piece of paper, we need up to a 2400 x 3000 ppi (dpi) image. Here’s my work:

(8 inches  x  300 ppi)  x  (10 inches  x  300 ppi)  =  2400 x 3000 pixels per inch

Given a choice, without a doubt in my mind, it’s better to scan too high than to scan too low.

And if you don’t want to take just my word for it (grin), when I started learning all about scanning years ago, I found great comfort in this quote from Wayne Fulton of scantips.com and kept going back to it:

It is true that if the image might be resized after the scan, it’s always much better quality to resize to reduce the image size rather than to resize to increase the image size. If you aren’t sure what your future intentions for the image might be, and won’t be able to scan it again, then it’s probably best to err on the large side (if storage space allows, up to reasonable amounts anyway). Resizing to be smaller discards excess pixels. But resizing to be larger must create (or fake) new interpolated pixels which were not in the original scan. There is no additional detail possible in interpolated pixels, even if the image is larger. The results are not at all the same as scanning at the higher resolution.

Okay so really, what DPI is the best for each print dimension?

We are finally to the point where I can tell you what dpi I use on average for each print dimension. It was just a matter of crunching the numbers to insure each sized print receives a high enough dpi to not only capture all of the detail possible but will also have enough image resolution to safely print out an 8×10″ photograph from it.

So here’s what you have been waiting for. Here are the dpi settings I came up with to fulfill all of my concerns yet still produces file sizes that are manageable on today’s hardware.

DPI Scanner Settings for Archiving Paper Prints
Print Dimensions	2.5×3.5″	3.5×3.5″	4×4.5″	3.5×5″	4×5″	4×6″	4×7″	5×7″	8×10″
DPI Setting	1000	900	600	600	600	600	600	600	600

Again, these dpi’s are formulated to be used across the board for lots and lots of prints. You might decide certain prints in your collection are way too soft and lack the detail to warrant the suggested dpi so if you want to scan these few at 300 dpi for instance, be my guest. And for example, you may find some black and white prints seem to have a tremendous amount of detail, so you may decide it’s worth scanning them at 1200 dpi. Or maybe there are a few prints here and there you know you will want to make really big enlargements of someday – your prized few. Whatever reason, just use the above settings as the default.

And a little note here – the pulldown menu in your scanning software where you choose the dpi may not have every conceivable value to choose from – in this case 900 or 1000 dpi. But chances are you can choose another dpi such as 800, hit the delete key to clear that amount and then type in the value you wish. If this doesn’t work, you may have to choose the preset value below or above my suggestion. Of course you know now to choose higher dpi right?

Be content in knowing that what these default settings have done for you is create a digital collection with consistent image dimensions throughout that will be extremely beneficial to you as you begin to work and print with them in your image managers. You won’t have to worry whether you have enough detail and resolution for future tasks because you have already planned ahead for them.

What dpi do you use to scan your paper prints with? Has this made you change your mind one way or the other?

Ref: http://www.zdnet.com/android-sdk-suffers-from-buffer-overflow-and-lack-of-hardening-7000025977/?s_cid=e566&ttag=e566

Android SDK suffers from buffer overflow and lack of hardening

Summary: The droidsec security group has discovered and patched a buffer overflow issue and a lack of compile-time hardening in the Android Debug Bridge.

By Chris Duckett | February 5, 2014 -- 02:59 GMT (10:59 SGT)

A classic buffer overflow exploit has been discovered in the Android software development kit (SDK) that impacts all versions of the Android Debug Bridge on Linux x86_64.

The exploit scenario involved an attacker starting a malicious Android Debug Bridge (ADB) server that interfaces with Android devices on a multi-user system and waiting for ADB clients, started by developers wanting to debug apps or send commands to devices, to connect. Due to the buffer exploit occurring early in protocol negotiations, droidsec said any command that communicates with the ADB Server will lead to successful exploitation.

Writing in a blog post to publicly disclose its findings, the droidsec group said that the exploit was confirmed on version 18.0.1 of the Android SDK platform tools on x86_64 Ubuntu Linux 12.04. Attempts to exploit the vulnerability on a 32-bit Linux system and the adb binary found on the Nexus 4 were unsuccessful. The droidsec team said it did not test the vulnerability on any Windows system.

Droidsec also discovered that the ADB binary failed to have a non-executable stack, and the executable was not position independent. The droidsec team said that taking advantage of this situation would be trivial.

"It should also be noted that host compilation also seems to intentionally opt out of the FORTIFY_SOURCE protections," droidsec said. "It's not clear why this is the case since the comment near this line of code references an internal only bug number."

The issues were discovered in early December, with patches submitted by droidsec soon after and accepted by Google into Android's source code tree. Following a lack of communication from Google, the droidsec team decided to publicly disclose the issues and patches.

Facebook today announced the open sourcing of Conceal, a set of Java APIs designed by the social network for encrypting user data on Android devices.

Wireless Display Standards Explained: AirPlay, Miracast, WiDi, Chromecast, and DLNA

Ref: http://www.howtogeek.com/177145/wireless-display-standards-explained-airplay-miracast-widi-chromecast-and-dlna/

HDMI allows you to connect almost any device to a TV or another external display, but HDMI requires a wired connection. You might assume there’d be a well-supported standard for wireless displays, but you’d be wrong.

When it comes to mirroring a device’s screen wirelessly or using it as a remote-control for media displayed on another screen, there is still a wide variety of competing standards fighting it out in the market.

AirPlay

AirPlay is Apple’s wireless display standard. It allows you to stream video from an iPhone, iPad, or Mac to an Apple TV. Using AirPlay, you can display the contents of your Mac’s desktop, start a video in an app on your iPhone and “push” it to your TV, or play a game on your iPad and mirror your display on your TV.

Apple’s AirPlay standard is flexible enough to work in two different ways. It can use display mirroring to mirror the contents of a device’s display, or use a streaming mode that’s smarter. For example, you could play a video in an app on an iPhone and use the playback controls on your iPhone to control the video on your TV. Even while fiddling with the playback controls on your iPhone’s screen, they wouldn’t appear on your TV — AirPlay is smart enough to stream only the content you want to see on the display.

AirPlay works very well, but it has a big limitation — it only works with Apple devices. If you have a Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV, you’ll be happy with it. If you want to stream from a Windows laptop or to a device that isn’t an Apple TV, you’re out of luck.

Miracast

Miracast is an industry-wide standard that’s essentially a response to Apple’s AirPlay. Miracast support is build into Android 4.2+ and Windows 8.1, allowing Android smartphones, Windows tablets and laptops, and other devices to wirelessly stream to Miracast-compliant receivers.

In theory, Miracast is great. In practice, Miracast hasn’t worked out so well. While Miracast is theoretically a standard, there are only a handful of Miracast receivers out there that actually work well in practice. While devices are supposed to interface with other devices that support the standard, many Miracast-certified devices just don’t work (or don’t work well) with Miracast-certified receivers. The standard seems to have collapsed in practice — it’s not really a standard. Check out this table of test results to see just how much of an incompatible mess Miracast seems to be.

Another problem is that the standard doesn’t mandate devices be branded with the “Miracast” brand. Manufacturers have taken to calling their Miracast implementations other things. For example, LG calls their Miracast support “SmartShare,” Samsung calls it “AllShare Cast,” Sony calls it “screen mirroring, ” and Panasonic calls it “display mirroring.” You might pick up a new Samsung TV, see the “AllShare Cast” logo on the box, and not be aware that this is theoretically a Miracast-compatible TV. You’d probably assume that it only worked with other Samsung devices supporting AllShare Cast — and you might not be wrong, considering how many theoretically compatible Miracast devices are incompatible with each other!

You might assume that, since Microsoft added built-in Miracast support to Windows 8.1, their Xbox One console would function as a Miracast receiver. This would make streaming from a Windows 8.1 tablet to your TV via your Xbox One possible and easy. You’d be wrong — the Xbox One can’t function as a Miracast receiver.

In other words, Miracast isn’t doing too well. Even if it were, there’s another problem: Miracast only offers display mirroring. You wouldn’t be able to stream a video from your phone on your TV without the playback controls appearing on your TV while you used them, for example.

WiDi

WiDi is short for Intel Wireless Display, a feature associated with Intel’s Wi-Fi Direct standard. This is Intel’s attempt at offering a wireless video and audio streaming system that could compete with Apple’s AirPlay. WiDi never saw much uptake.

Intel Wireless Display 3.5 makes WiDi Miracast-compatible, essentially turning WiDi into another branded Miracast-compatible standard. Intel has basically folded WiDi into Miracast.

Chromecast

When Google launched the Nexus 4 with Android 4.2 in 2012, they talked up its support of Miracast. Soon, they said, you’d be able to buy cheap Miracast-compatible receivers that you could plug into your TV’s HDMI port. The wireless display problem would be solved, enabling easy display-mirroring from Android and Windows devices.

These cheap, compatible receivers failed to materialize. Instead, a year later, Google launchedthe Chromecast. A Chromecast is a cheap receiver that plugs into your TV’s HDMI port, but it uses something called the DIAL (DIscover And Launch) protocol. To use the Chromecast, you open an app on your Android phone — Netflix, for example. You tell Netflix to play a video to your Chromecast. The Chromecast then connects to the Internet and plays the video, allowing you to control its playback via the app on your smartphone.

In this way, your smartphone allows you to discover videos, launch them on the Chromecast, and control their playback. The Chromecast doesn’t simply display the contents of your device’s screen. However, Chromecast also offers a feature that lets you stream your entire desktop or the contents of a Chrome tab to your TV via the Chromecast — just like AirPlay.

Like Microsoft’s Xbox One, Google’s Chromecast doesn’t support Miracast at all. The Chromecast is clearly an example of Google throwing their hands up in the air and giving up on Miracast, at least in the short term. Considering all the problems with Miracast and how well Chromecast works, Google appears to have made the right decision.

Play To, DLNA, UPnP

DLNA stands for “Digital Living Network Alliance.” DLNA uses Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) — but not the type of UPnP that allows you to automatically forward ports on your router.

Confused yet? Try not to be — this standard is a mess of different terms, but DLNA-enabled devices appear as “Play To” targets. That’s generally how you’ll see them.

DLNA isn’t really a wireless display solution. Instead, it’s simply a way to take content on one device and play it on another. For example, you might open Windows Media Player on your PC and use the Play To feature to play a video file from your computer’s hard drive to an audio/video receiver connected to your TV, such as a game console. Compatible devices automatically advertise themselves on the network so they’d appear in the Play To menu without any further configuration needed. The device would then connect to your computer over the network and stream the media you selected.

You can still use DLNA to stream media from a Windows 8.1 PC to an Xbox One. However, the standard was clearly designed years ago — it assumes you have local media. Play To only allows you to play local media files like pictures, videos, and music on your hard drive. There’s no way to play videos from Netflix or YouTube, stream music from an online service, display a presentation and control it on your screen, or just display the contents of your desktop.

---

AirPlay arrived in 2010 and other companies are still struggling to match it. If you’re one of the many people who would like to see an open standard that allows non-Apple devices to wirelessly share their displays, the Miracast mess has been tough to watch.

LTE-Advance is the real 4G

Ref: http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/standards/lte-advanced-is-the-real-4g

TelecomStandardsFeature
LTE-Advanced Is the Real 4G
More network capacity, faster data speeds, and better coverage will come from LTE-Advanced mobile technologies

By Ariel Bleicher
Posted 31 Dec 2013 | 18:00 GMT

Illustration: Eddie Guy
This article is part of the “2014 Top Tech to Watch” series, IEEE Spectrum’s annual prediction of technologies that will make headlines in the coming year.

Have you ever called your cellphone carrier to report poor signal strength? Sure you have. And did that carrier do anything significant to fix the problem? Of course it didn’t—unless you live in South Korea.

“I guarantee you—if I call my carrier tonight and complain about not getting a good signal in my bathroom, they will send someone to install a repeater first thing tomorrow morning,” said Wonil Roh during an interview in Suwon last October.

Full disclosure: Roh heads the Advanced Communications Laboratory at Samsung Electronics Co. But he doesn’t need the lofty title to get that kind of attention in South Korea’s intensely competitive wireless arena. Home to Samsung and LG Corp., the world’s first- and fourth-largest smartphone makers, the country boasts some of the most advanced wireless networks on earth. Last June, for instance, SK Telecom Co. launched what it called the “world’s first publicly available LTE-Advanced network.” Short for Long Term Evolution, LTE is the globally embraced standard behind today’s top-of-the-line 4G smartphones and tablets. For the same price as an LTE plan, LTE-Advanced subscribers could now get twice the data rates, SK claimed. Not to be outdone, its competitors LG Uplus Corp. and KT Corp. began offering their own LTE-Advanced services in July. By October, a million people had signed up for SK’s service alone.

What’s happening in South Korea will soon come to pass in other parts of the world. Operators everywhere face a universal and unremitting predicament: Customers want more data at faster speeds to run ever more sophisticated applications. Today it’s video calls and sports broadcasts; tomorrow it’ll be telemedicine and virtual shopping sprees. Each year, according to Cisco Systems, global mobile traffic more than doubles. And that exponential growth is showing no signs of waning.

Fun Fact: In South Korea, LTE-Advanced subscribers can download an 800-megabit movie in as little as 43 seconds.
So now, four years after the first networks using LTE went live, operators are looking to its successor. Already, more than a dozen carriers outside of South Korea, including AT&T, Australia’s Telstra, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, and Telenor Sweden have reported that they are testing LTE-Advanced technologies, and analysts expect commercial rollouts to start this year. By 2018, according to ABI Research, global LTE-Advanced connections will approach 500 million—about five times as many as LTE can claim today.

“There’s no way around it—LTE has to evolve,” says Lingjia Liu, a wireless expert at the University of Kansas. “LTE-Advanced will become the dominant standard.”

Wireless specialists are calling LTE-Advanced “true 4G” because unlike ordinary 4G LTE, it actually meets the International Telecommunication Union’s specifications for fourth-generation wireless systems.

One of these criteria is speed. LTE-Advanced can theoretically achieve data download rates as high as 3 gigabits per second and upload rates as high as 1.5 Gb/s. By comparison, LTE tops out around 300 Mb/s for downloads and 75 Mb/s for uploads. And LTE-Advanced isn’t just about faster rates. It also includes new transmission protocols and multiple-antenna schemes that enable smoother handoffs between cells, increase throughput at cell edges, and stuff more bits per second into each hertz of spectrum. The result will be higher network capacity, more consistent connections, and cheaper data.

Why Did the Russians Ban an Appliance Found in 90% of American Homes

http://livefreelivenatural.com/russians-ban-appliance-found-90-american-home/

Google Taking Aim at Device Modders in Android 4.4 KitKat

Ref: http://www.xda-developers.com/android/google-taking-aim-at-device-modders-in-android-4-4-kitkat/

Google Taking Aim at Device Modders in Android 4.4 KitKat
POSTED NOVEMBER 1, 2013 AT 6:30 PM BY PULSER_G2
Google Taking Aim at Device Modders in Android 4.4 KitKat
Android 4.4 introduces a number of changes intended to reduce the risks of rootkits on the platform. In addition to SELinux, the dm-verity kernel feature is also used on boot. The dm-verity feature is used to verify the filesystem storage, and detect modifications to the device at block level (rather than file level). In essence, dm-verity aims to prevent root software from modifying the device file system. This is done by detecting the modifications made to the filesystem, which will no longer match the expected configuration.
In dm-verity, each block of the storage device has a SHA-256 hash associated with it. (For reference, a block is simply a unit of address for storage, typically around 4 KB on flash devices.) A tree of hashes is formed across pages, such that only the “top” hash in the tree (known as the root hash) needs to be trusted, in order for the entire filesystem to be trusted. If any block is modified, this will change the hash, breaking the chain.
The boot partition of the device will contain a public key, which the OEM is expected to externally verify (perhaps via the bootloader or low-level CPU features). This public key is used to ensure the signature of the hash on the file system is valid and unmodified.
In order to reduce the time taken to verify the filesystem, blocks are only verified when they are accessed, and are verified in parallel with the regular read operation (to essentially eliminate any latency with accessing the storage). If the verification changes (i.e. files have changed on the system partition), then a read error is generated. Depending on the application accessing the data, it may proceed if it’s not a critical action, but it is also possible for applications to decline to operate under these conditions.
While nobody can predict the future with 100% accuracy, I think it’s fair to say that “rooting” and modifying devices running Android 4.4 with locked bootloaders (i.e. where root exploits are required, as the OEM will not permit custom kernels) may well be considerably more difficult than in previous Android versions. It seems that Android 4.4 is taking a few leaves out of the Chrome OS book, as these changes essentially implement “verified boot,” as found on Chrome OS.
To re-iterate, if you are able to change the kernel your device uses, this feature will not be a concern. It’s possible to either disable dm-verity in the kernel, or to set it up to use your own keys to authenticate the system hash. For users who choose to buy carrier-branded devices and accept a locked bootloader, but find a way to root the device, take heed of this warning. It’s not at all unlikely (in my technical opinion) for this to become incredibly unlikely to happen on future devices. If you want the ability to modify the software on your phone, I’d avoid anything with a locked bootloader, and ensure you can modify the kernel (to disable or modify the dm-verity signatures).
Right now, little is known about what this will actually mean, but aside from greater security for users on stock ROMs, I suspect there will be some noticeable impact on casual users wishing to make small changes to Android. Until we see devices from other OEMs shipping with 4.4, it’s difficult to really assess how (or if) this will change things. But take note, and bear it in mind.