The key asset of Internet is the domain name directory known as DNS. A root name server is a DNS server that answers requests for the root namespace domain, and redirects requests for a particular top-level domain to that TLD’s name servers.
There are currently thirteen root name servers around the world. Most of the servers reside in the United States while the rest exist in multiple locations on different continents. The US government plays a key role in supervising the asset.
In the early hours of Tuesday, three key servers were hit by a barrage of data in what is known as a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). There is no evidence of damage proving once again the robustness of the Internet.
The servers under attacks are as follow:
- G-root, G.root-servers.org at Columbus, Ohio, USA
- L-root, L.root-servers.org at Los Angeles, California, USA
- UltraDNS, authoritative for .org and .info TLDs
Ignition Interlock Device: A Concise Overview
0 Comments Published November 22nd, 2006 in Infrastructure.
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and the U.S. Department of Transportation with the backing of car manufacturers such as Volvo and SAAB is set to launch a new campaign against drunk driving by mandating a Ignition Interlock Device on every car.
The device is effective to repeated offenders but expensive to nondrinker. Since July 2004, more than 75,000 Ignition Interlock Devices (IIDs) were installed in the U.S. because of DUI and DWI convictions.
What exactly does the device offer? Let’s take Guardian Interlock Systems as an example. The company has been in the business since 1985 and the first to introduce the device in California.
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XBRL or Extensible Business Reporting Language is a member of the family of languages based on XML, which is a standard for the electronic exchange of data between businesses and on the internet. The rich and powerful structure of XBRL allows very efficient handling of business data by computer software as well as human reading (example).
XBRL International, the organization that focuses on the progress of XBRL, has 15 established jurisdictions and 6 provisional jurisdictions across the globe. The organization publishes two documents about XBRL - XBRL Specification and XBRL Taxonomies. Each jurisdiction promotes XBRL and organizes or sponsors the creation of taxonomies, notably for the main accounting standards for business reporting in its area.
The latest Recommended Specification was updated on 7 Nov 2005 with a version number of 2.1. With the support of more about 450 major companies, organizations and government agencies, XBRL is steadily getting its place in the global business community.
Imagine a mobile device without the need to recharge ever. BBC News has a report on the work of Assistant Professor Marin Soljacic and his colleagues Aristeidis Karalis and John Joannopoulos about wireless power transfer.
The system is consisted of two antennas - one on the power source, the other on the device - resonating at 6.4MHz. The electromagnetic waves (energy) picked up by the device is used to recharge the battery. Resonance is a natural phenomena visibly observed in musical instruments.
In physics, resonance is the tendency of a system to oscillate when excited by energy at a certain frequency. This frequency is known as the system’s natural frequency of vibration, resonant frequency, or eigenfrequency. A resonant object, whether mechanical, acoustic, or electrical, will be easy to vibrate at resonant frequency, and more difficult to vibrate at other frequencies.
e-Passports or RFID passports are passports embedded with RFID tags. The first issuing country was Malaysia in 1998. The Malaysian passport records the travel history (time, date, and place) of entries and exits from the country.
On October 25, 2005, the U.S. government announced that all U.S. passports would be implanted with RFID tags starting in October 2006.
How can you tell if your passport contains a RFID tag? Look for the Electronic Passport logo on the front cover (shown on the left). The tag is capable of transmitting your name, nationality, sex, date of birth, place of birth and digitized photograph. Additional digitized data such as “fingerprints or iris scans” may also be included.
What is Desktop Virtualization and how is it different from Server Virtualization like Solaris Zone? Essentially the technology behind them is identical. The difference is in the problem it addresses.
Server Virtualization takes control of a sprawling number of servers that were sucking power and becoming tough to cool. It also addresses some aspect of security and manageability. However, the ultimate goal is about saving money and consolidation.
Traditionally tool like VMware Workstation is only useful for development and testing. Increasingly, enterprise customers are starting to look at slicing and dicing desktop CPUs, just as they are doing with server CPUs, to isolate and secure workloads on single physical systems. This approach to desktop virtualization goes beyond the more common practice, in which applications and workloads are hosted at a remote location for centralized management and remote access.
Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) Overview
0 Comments Published September 29th, 2006 in Infrastructure.
The Schools Interoperability Framework Association (SIFA) is a non-profit membership organization whose members include over 300 software vendors, school districts, state departments of education and other organizations active in primary and secondary (pK-12) markets. These organizations have come together to create a set of rules and definitions which enable software programs from different companies to share information. This set of platform-independent, vendor-neutral rules and definitions is called the SIF Implementation Specification. The SIF Specification makes it possible for programs within a school or district to share data without any additional programming and without requiring each vendor to learn and support the intricacies of other vendors’ applications.
The Implementation Specification defines the software implementation guidelines for SIF; it does not make any assumption of what hardware and software products need to be used to develop SIF-certified applications. Instead, it defines the requirements of architecture, communication, software components, and interfaces between them.
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I recently setup a mail server for a company. I was blamed for using the same domain name for internal and external access. I was asked to use a different internal and external domain name instead. The irony is the difference between the domain names is so subtle. For external domain name, I was asked to use example.com and example.com.my for internal domain name.
The reason some people prefer using different names for internal and external domains is a DNS suffix like .corp can not be resolved by external network clients because it is not a publicly available top level domain name. The disadvantage is that this configuration requires you to manage two separate namespaces. Also, using a stand-alone internal domain that is unrelated to your external domain might create confusion for users because the namespaces do not reflect a relationship between resources within and outside of your network. Whatever security advantages that may be gained by this DNS design are mitigated by the complications and user dissatisfaction you’ll encounter when using different domain names for internal and external network resources.