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Ethernet co-inventor David Boggs dies at 71
Pioneering Xerox PARC computer researcher David Boggs, best known for co-inventing Ethernet, has died at 71.
MIT researchers use algebraic equation that improves WiFi and LTE data streams: boosts speed, reduces network congestion
Dodging the issues of spectrum auctions and more cell towers, researchers at MIT have discovered that they can use an algebraic equation to improve data speeds by reducing dropped packets. It's these dropped packets that can build up congestion across a wireless network, as devices attempt to recoup these missing data nuggets. But instead of sending typical packets, MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics created an equation that describes a series of packets. If a packet fails to deliver, then the receiving device is apparently able to "solve" the missing chunk, with the processing load on phones, routers and base stations apparently negligible. The tech, which can also seamlessly transition a data stream between wireless internet and LTE, has already been tested on WiFi networks over at MIT; when two percent of data packets were dropped, speeds were boosted from 1Mbps to 16Mbps. If five percent of packets were being lost, the researchers then saw bandwidth increase from 0.5Mbps to 13.5Mbps. Companies are apparently already licensing the tech, although MIT isn't revealing more on this just yet. Muriel Medard, project lead, said that there were currently "very severe inefficiencies that should be remedied before you consider acquiring more resources" -- namely more spectrum and hardware, although the gains seen in these early tests are yet to be replicated in real life. There's more on the science and development at the source link below.
Exploit uses firewalls to hijack smartphones, turns friends into foes
Normally, firewalls at cellular carriers are your best friends, screening out malware before it ever touches your phone. University of Michigan computer science researchers have found that those first lines of defense could be your enemy through a new exploit. As long as a small piece of malware sits on a device, that handset can infer TCP data packet sequence numbers coming from the firewall and hijack a phone's internet traffic with phishing sites, fake messages or other rogue code. The trick works on at least 48 carriers that use firewalls from Check Point, Cisco, Juniper and other networking heavy hitters -- AT&T being one of those providers. Carriers can turn the sequences off, although there are consequences to that as well. The only surefire solution is to either run antivirus apps if you're on a mobile OS like Android or else to run a platform that doesn't allow running unsigned apps at all, like iOS or Windows Phone. Whether or not the exploit is a serious threat is still far from certain, but we'll get a better sense of the risk on May 22nd, when Z. Morley Mao and Zhiyun Qian step up to the podium at an IEEE security symposium and deliver their findings.
Koster writes "how to hack an MMO"
Have you ever wanted to walk through walls in MMO? How about telepathically sense the locations of all the good drops in a zone, or make invisible things very, very visible?A blog post by game designer Raph Koster (of Ultima Online and now Metaplace fame) will tell you how! Admittedly, Koster doesn't really go into much detail. Also, he's trying to help developers avoid hacking problems, not giving inside secret tips to hackers. It's still an interesting read, though!He lays out an overview of the various design choices developers make that are exploited by hackers. For example, some developers might choose to trust the client to handle collision detection to reduce lag and increase gameplay responsiveness. Well, a clever hacker can make the client report to the server with false collision information, allowing that hacker to move through walls. It turns out that most designers take a middle-of-the-road approach, meaning that, as Koster puts it: "only bad-ass hackers are cheating, instead of damn near everyone."
