Improve your wifi with the Linksys WRT150N-RM wireless-N router.

The Belkin N1 Vision wireless N router looks amazing.

TweakTown has a how-to guide on using an old router as a DIY wireless access point.

Researchers from the University of Michigan have developed “CloudAV,” a next-generation anti-virus technology. CloudAV seeks to improve PC resource utilization and virus detection rates by shifting the burden of virus analysis into the computing “cloud.”

Jon Oberheide and Evan Cooke, working under the guidance of Professor Farnam Jahanian, tout the cloud’s significant advantages over traditional client-side anti-virus:

• The cloud aggregates the detection results of many anti-virus engines; a feat that would be improbable, if not impossible, on a client system.
• The cloud offers enough resources to provide virtual behavioral analysis.
• The client buys reduced disk and CPU usage at the cost of increased network utilization.
• The burden of application maintenance is completely removed from the client side.

The engine currently consists of detection routines and signatures from Avast, AVG, BitDefender, ClamAV, F-Prot, F-Secure, Kaspersky, McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro. Analysis reveals (PDF) that the combined signature databases of these varied anti-virus applications yields a 91% detection rate.

While the technology sounds similar to centralized anti-virus, such as Symantec Corporate, it is quite different. Today’s corporate anti-virus products centrally manage user policies while leaving the burden of scanning and detection on the client end. Under this model, a significant processor and memory footprint is incurred.

Behavioral analysis is one of the more exciting aspects of this technology, according to the developers. Cooke and Oberheide explained that “behavioral analysis allows us to open a file in an emulated environment and trace the execution of a file through a system.” The cloud has enough resources to execute a potentially infected file in a virtual sandbox to determine its impact. This is a significant advance in anti-virus technology that would be impractical to run on a desktop, much less a smartphone.

Other new functionality includes the caching of files in the cloud so that detection isn’t a constant resource drain. Once a file signature is cached, it does not need to be reanalyzed. In effect, a single user that may be running Microsoft PowerPoint would submit the signature data for that version of PowerPoint to all PowerPoint users in the cloud. Because a single computer can contribute all the necessary information, deployments that have a swath of similarly-configured computers would benefit from reduced network overhead.

While the technology is being used in a production environment on the University of Michigan campus, there are no plans to commercialize the product. Agents have been developed for Windows, Linux, BSD, Nokia Maemo, and sendmail. Cooke and Oberheide envision implementations of these clients for ISP, campus and corporate deployments.

We were concerned about privacy in the cloud; specifically, we wondered whether or not we would want our ISP to scan sensitive files for us. They envisioned a hybrid system with a lightweight detection engine on the client side for files somehow tagged as private. Meanwhile the CloudAV technology would remain for system files, executables, and other non-sensitive information.

You can find more information on their website, including links to white papers about the technology.

Yesterday Comcast revealed that it was preparing to engage in select trials of new traffic management techniques to alleviate the burden of high-bandwidth users. Verizon CTO Richard Lynch also expressed a need for network management today at the annual communications summit for The Progress & Freedom Foundation in Aspen, CO. There has “always been a requirement for network management,” he said.

While Verizon has enjoyed the luxury of fiber-to-the-home deployments via its popular FIOS service, the telecom firm still feels the pinch of a congested network. Though Verizon spends more than $17 billion each year in infrastructure, Lynch affirms that it would take considerably more to alleviate congestion network-wide. Saying that “customers would be upset,” Lynch referred to the tremendous monthly bill that customers would foot to achieve the level of service popularly demanded.

In order to manage the stratospheric rise in internet traffic in recent years, Verizon is testing network-wide Quality of Service (QoS) practices that have long been employed on business networks. A QoS-managed network prioritizes latency-sensitive packets from sources such as VoIP. Protocols and applications of lesser importance could be delivered with an artificial delay of up to 22ms. Lynch asserts that few users would notice such a miniscule delay.

While the details of Verizon’s upcoming policies remain scarce, Mr. Lynch assures that it’s not for conspiratorial reasons. “We don’t have all the answers yet,” he said, but promises that full disclosure is “best way to go about it.”

Yesterday Comcast said it planned to continue throttling users on their network with protocol-agnostic traffic management. Comcast plans to impede the speeds of a bandwidth-intensive user “roughly between, probably, 10 and 20 minutes” says Comcast’s senior VP and general manager of online services Mitch Bowling. Comcast’s new approach to operating their network is the first of many such trials in an industry that claims to be struggling to keep up with the demands of its users.

Dubbed “Fair Share,” Comcast alleges that the new technique is for the health of its network. “If in fact a person is generating enough packets that they’re the ones creating that situation, we will manage that consumer for the overall good of all of our consumers,” Bowling said. Users who continue to generate intense traffic, regardless of its intent or purpose, will be managed until the traffic subsides.

The Philadelphia-based ISP recently found itself at the middle of a controversy when it came to light that it was surreptitiously interrupting users of the BitTorrent protocol with artificial packet loss. The ensuing flash mob of angry internet users and internet-era civil rights groups resulted in a public censure for the ISP.

Comcast’s commitment to the same practice on a broader scale is striking some as a disingenuous disregard for the spirit of the censure. Commenters have been quick to point out that the new practice continues in the same vein, while merely targeting additional people.

In light of the recent announcement that the new technology would be undergoing trials in select markets, Comcast was quick to defend itself. In a managed state, a user would have a connection that provided “a really good DSL experience,” Bowling said as he poked fun at competitors.

The TRENDnet 300Mbps Dual Band Wireless N Gigabit router brings speed to all your connections.

The TRENDnet 200Mbps powerline network kit is an easy way to wire your house.

I am a media freak.

Let me say that again: I am a media freak. I am also a gadget addict, a power user who streams, downloads, plays online games and is generally considered by most ISPs to be a heavy bandwidth user and a general pain in the ass. Thus, I have used many routers in the past only to have them be unstable and crash even when flashed to latest versions. As an example of my normal usage pattern, I once had a router crash on me while I was bidding on Ebay; it reset and made me lose the auction, so in response I took a hammer to it.

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Grandfather of the internet-gone-Googler Vint Cerf came out swinging yesterday at the obtuse approach ISPs are taking with bandwidth management. While most are looking to throttle and meter customers in any way they can, Cerf suggests that a bandwidth guarantee would mean everyone wins.

Cerf suggests that users should be guaranteed a minimum bandwidth without traffic limitations. I would like you to raise your hand if you believe that’s what you’re already paying for. If you raised your hand, it is unfortunate that this is probably not the case. Today’s ISPs do not guarantee a maximum or minimum bandwidth for your line, and instead choose to qualify bandwidth statements with “Up to.” This charming phrase guarantees that your line will be able to access content on the internet, and implies nothing further. You are not entitled to, nor may you ever come close to, what was advertised on the box.

Cerf’s musings seem absurd on the surface, but a closer look at the state of bandwidth in the U.S. reveals a bleak picture. Provider nodes are typically over-saturated; they service entire neighborhoods with an insufficient capacity to deliver as advertised. This irritating little problem leads to the rapid jump in speed that many users experience between the hours of five and seven in the morning when most sane users are rather asleep.

Vint Cerf smartly points out that we have a chance to fix the real problem, rather than masking it with caps and penalties. Guaranteeing each user a set amount of bandwidth means the ISP knows precisely what equipment and provisioning is required for each user and neighborhood. One hundred users paying for 8Mbps/2Mbps service would require a node capable of handling 800Mbps/200Mbps. Miraculously, the congestion issues would disappear as no user is battling another for the slice of the pie.

Ars rightly points out that both DSL and cable are capped by the DSLAM or the cable modem. This leads to well-known bandwidth requirements, but ISPs have oversold the promise of speed, under-delivered on the back-end, and rode that overburdened hog to the bank.

This tectonic paradigm shift in broadband provisioning in the United States would require significant investment in the improvement of existing infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, telcos and cablecos are not in any hurry to fix the root of the problem. It’s easier to blame your customers for your inadequacy. There’s profit in that.

In October of 2007, the combined research of the Associated Press and other news outlets announced that the US ISP Comcast was engaging in unscrupulous traffic management of the web. The EFF, internet users, and other civil liberty groups were furious over the revelation. While the United States has no official net neutrality legislation, Comcast’s practice was generally regarded as a de facto horror. The proceedings that were spun from these findings have breathed new life into net neutrality with the bi-partisan signing of a new enforcement order.

The new order will legally oblige Comcast to cease and desist in further traffic manipulation and force them to disclose the methods they used to manipulate internet traffic. While this is not a law, it sets a relieving precedent regarding traffic management in the days to come.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin likened the manipulation of web traffic to the manipulation of traditional mail.

“Would you be OK with the post office opening your mail, deciding they didn’t want to bother delivering it, and hiding that fact by sending it back to you stamped ‘address unknown – return to sender?’” he said.

“Or if they opened letters mailed to you, decided that because the mail truck is full sometimes, letters to you could wait, and then hid both that they read your letters and delayed them?” he continued.

This decision sends a clear warning to other U.S. ISPs considering illegitimate manipulation of American — and to a lesser extent, global — web traffic. Hands off.

Carterfone: just one more reason the Internet exists.

The dream of a wireless-enabled new millennium was a WiFi-blanketed world that enabled seamless roaming for new generations of phones, MIDs and UMPCs. Microsoft felt strongly about this dream, and promised unprecedented support for wireless devices in Windows XP. They delivered in the form of the Wireless Zero Configuration (WZC) service, and it was designed to eliminate the irritations of vendor-specific WiFi utilities. Any wireless card could interface with WZC, and the subsequent addition of WPA support kept the utility up to speed with the progress of WiFi. In theory, the goal of WZC is an admirable one, but its execution leaves quite a bit to be desired. The seamless wireless roaming that WZC was supposed to cultivate has made it an unacceptable solution for single-WAP environments. As users around the globe connect to their lone wireless router with the service, they suffer lost connections, lost packets and high pings. Today we’re going to cover the whys and hows of the issue to ameliorate one of XP’s biggest nuisances.

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Last weekend, I was at a friend’s house for a LAN party. After our usual Team Fortress 2 session and a quick break playing the board game “Attack!”, we found ourselves… Well, bored. In our boredom, we began thinking of games we’d always wanted to play in a multiplayer setting but, for whatever reason, never had the chance. We settled on Dungeon Keeper, a personal favorite of all involved. For the Windows XP users it won’t take much to get this game up and running on your system for some LAN party goodness. Vista owners will encounter some speed-bumps along the way, but we have a workaround for 32bit users. Unfortunately, 64bit Vista users will be out of luck. With that, lets take a look at what we’ll need to get this up and running.

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Verizon was the winning bidder for the hottest FCC commodity in town, the C block.