Slashdot reader alaskana98 writes: In the February 2001 issue of Maximum PC, technical editor Will Smith described in his column what he would like to see in the "perfect set-top box". At a time when arguably the best 'PVR' experience was being provided by the first iterations of the Tivo (with no HDTV or LAN connectivity), Will's description of what a set-top box could and should be comes eerily close to what we now know as the Apple TV and other 'set-top' boxes such as Roku and Amazon Firestick...

To be fair, not every feature on his list would come to pass. For example, he envisioned this device as essentially serving as the main "broadband router of a household, sharing your Internet connection with any networkable device in your house". Also, he envisions the media box as providing a "robust web experience" for the whole family, something that today's set-top boxes aren't especially good at (anyone remember WebTV?).

Still, in wanting an "elusive magical box" that "will set on top of our HDTV's and do everything our computers, game consoles, and VCRs do, only better", he was prescient in his descriptions of what would eventually materialize as the Apple TV and other like-minded set-top boxes, impressive for a denizen of the year 2001.
Are you impressed with Smith's predictive ability? Here's what he wrote...

• On networking: "My set-top box will have to have a high-speed broadband connection...sharing your Internet connection with any networkable device in your house via standard Ethernet, Wi-Fi compatible wireless Ethernet, Bluetooth".

• On gaming: "[W]ill include state-of-the-art 3D acceleration and gaming support" and "will include Bluetooth-style wireless connections for all your controllers".

• On media playback: "[W]ill also serve as a media store, handing the duties of both my high-def personal video recorder (HD-PVR) and digital audio jukebox".

• On device collaboration: "integrating the ability to automatically synchronize with Bluetooth-enabled" devices. [Though the original article says "PDAs"]

An anonymous reader writes: Cisco on Wednesday outlined new details behind its strategy to build next-generation internet technology. As a set up for what it dubs its 'Internet for the Future' strategy, the networking giant announced a multi-year plan for building and investing in 5G internet technology, including silicon, optics and software. On the silicon side, Cisco announced Silicon One, a new switching and routing applications specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for the 5G internet era. The programmable networking chip is designed to provide significant improvements to performance, bandwidth, power efficiency, scalability and flexibility, according to Cisco. Cisco said the first first generation of the chip, Q100, surpassed the 10 Tbps routing milestone for network bandwidth.

In addition to the silicon, Cisco also outlined its focus on the optics space. As port rates increase from 100G to 400G, optics become a larger portion of the cost to build and operate internet infrastructure. To account for that, Cisco said its qualification program tests its optics and non-Cisco optics to comply with industry standards, and invests organically to make sure that its router and switch ports rates continue to increase. Cisco also announced plans to offer flexible consumption models for Silicon One that were first established with its optics portfolio, followed by the disaggregation of the Cisco IOS XR7 software. The Silicon One architecture will integrate into its new 8000 series carrier class routers, which is powered by Cisco's new IOS XR7 operating system. The OS will provide faster download speeds and security improvements, Cisco said.

According to the report, Cisco is currently working with Comcast and NTT Communications on ongoing deployments and trials of the 8000 series.

Facebook said it would not weaken end-to-end encryption across its messaging apps, despite pressure from world governments, in a letter to US Attorney General Bill Barr and UK and Australian leaders. From a report: The letter, sent Monday, came in response to an October open letter from Barr, UK Home Secretary Priti Patel, Australian Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton, and then-acting US homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan, which raised concerns that Facebook's continued implementation of end-to-end encryption on its WhatsApp and Messenger apps would prevent law enforcement agencies from finding illegal activity such as child sexual exploitation, terrorism, and election meddling. The US, UK, and Australian governments asked the social networking company to design a backdoor in its encryption protocols, or a separate way for law enforcement to gain access to user content. "It is simply impossible to create such a backdoor for one purpose and not expect others to try and open it," wrote WhatsApp head Will Cathcart and Messenger head Stan Chudnovsky in Facebook's response. "People's private messages would be less secure and the real winners would be anyone seeking to take advantage of that weakened security. That is not something we are prepared to do."

The fastest-growing data center market segment returned to growth mode in the third quarter of 2019, with global hyperscale capex spending exceeding $31 billion, up 8 percent year over year. From a report: The $31 billion is the second-highest spending quarter in history in terms of the amount hyperscale operators -- led by Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft -- are spending on building, expanding and equipping data centers, according to IT research and market firm Synergy Research Group. "Hyperscale companies are in growth mode and revenue growth rates remain in strong double-digit territory, with aggregated third quarter revenues up 14 percent over 2018," said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group. "Amazon, Google, Facebook and Alibaba are all growing much more rapidly than that. These expanding companies are highly reliant on bigger and better data center operations, which will drive continued growth in capex levels." Hyperscale data centers are giant facilities containing tens of thousands of servers and other IT products such as storage, networking and UPS hardware.

Sam Klein: Ethos Capital, a new commercial investment firm founded in the past few months in Boston, has 2 staff and only one major investment: a deal to acquire the 501c3 non-profit that currently runs the .org domain (valued at a few $B), for an undisclosed sum. This was initiated immediately after ICANN decided in May, over almost universal opposition, to remove the price cap on .org registrations with no meaningful price protections for existing or future registrants. This seems to violate a range of ethical, ICANN, ISOC, and non-profit guidelines. It is certainly the privatisation of a not-for-profit monopoly into a for-profit one, which will benefit ISOC and a few individuals by inconveniencing millions of others. I have questions:


1. Do affected parties have recourse?
2. Other than polite letters, is anything being done? (Maybe: Official complaints have been filed, but don't expect results.)
3. Georgia Tech's Internet Governance Project has pointed ideas for ICANN. (You can .. join ISOC as a member to take part in future decisions.)
4. Has anyone currently at ICANN + ISOC made substantive comment? (Yes: Richard Barnes, ISOC trustee and netizen, explains why he voted to sell .org.) Vint Cerf said: 'Hard to imagine $60/year would be a deal breaker for even small non-profits.')
5. How did we reach the point of Net pioneers embracing 95% profit margins? Tim Berners-Lee adds, "I'm very concerned about the sale of .org to a private company. If the Public Interest Registry ends up not being required to act in the public interest, it would be a travesty. We need an urgent explanation."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In April of this year, Intel cancelled its 5G-modem building plans. This week, it's announcing that they're back on the table -- but this time, with system-on-chip vendor MediaTek building the hardware. The partnership has Intel setting the 5G specifications, MediaTek developing the modem to match, and Intel optimizing and validating it afterwards. Intel will also lend its marketing and integration muscle to convince OEMs to use the new hardware and help them make sure it works well in final products. This also means Intel will be writing operating-system-level drivers for the modems.

The partnership looks like a sensible one for both parties: Intel has been struggling to get its own 10nm hardware out the door on time, so getting this hardware design task off its plate may relieve some pressure there, while still keeping the company in an emerging market. MediaTek, on the other hand, can definitely benefit from Intel's software development expertise and deep integration with OEM vendors in the PC space. Specifically, the companies will be adapting MediaTek's existing Helio M70 5G modem for use in PC hardware. The M70 modem is already being built into MediaTek's Dimensity family of ARM System-on-Chip (SoC) designs; the new partnership gives MediaTek a whole new platform to market to and gives Intel a foot back into the door in 5G. It also may represent a way for Intel to push back against ARM-based Windows hardware like Samsung's Galaxy Book S, built on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx platform. We can expect to see the resulting hardware shipping some time in 2021, the report adds.

Kelerei writes: The RIPE NCC, the regional internet registry for Europe, West Asia, and the former USSR, has allocated the final /22 remaining in their address pool, and has stated that they have now run out of IPv4 addresses. RIPE will continue to recover IPv4 addresses from organisations that go out of business, close, or that return them due to lack of need, but expects these small amounts of recovered IPv4 addresses to fall well short of demand: RIPE will now only assign IPv4 addresses to entities that have never received any IPv4 allocation in the past, and even then will assign no more than a /24. RIPE puts out a call to action for IPv6 migration:

Taiwan's MediaTek has announced a partnership with U.S. chipmaking giant Intel to supply future Intel-powered PCs with fifth-generation networking modems from the start of 2021. From a report: The agreement marks a small step toward a big change in the way computing is done, as 5G promises to revolutionize both the speed and availability of cellular networks, creating dense coverage with bandwidth comparable to current Wi-Fi standards and beyond. Mobile computers stand to benefit greatly from this upgrade, and U.S. PC vendors Dell and HP have both been named by MediaTek among the likely first customers for the 5G-enabled, Intel-powered laptops that are to come. In July, Intel agreed to sell its cellular modem business to Apple for $1 billion, which the Cupertino, California company will use to speed up and improve design efforts around a 5G chip for its 2020 iPhones.

Google Maps will soon begin testing a new feature that's more common to social networks like Facebook, rather than a maps app: the ability to find and follow other users. From a report: In Google Maps' case, it's specifically rolling out the ability to follow top "Local Guides" -- its community members who actively review business and share to Google Maps photos and other knowledge as part of a larger rewards program. The Local Guides program launched in 2015 as a way to take on Yelp Elites by allowing the most active Maps contributors to earn status as a tastemaker of sorts for their own hometown. Guides write more in-depth business reviews and post photos in order to help other Google Maps users learn about the area.

In exchange, they receive a variety of perks, like early access to new features, exclusive local meetups, free access to Google services, discounts and coupons and more. Now, Google says, it's kicking off a pilot program that will allow Google Maps users in select markets to follow top Local Guides by clicking a new "Follow" button on these users' profile pages. By doing so, the Guides' recommendations will be surfaced for you when you're using Google Maps. In a new section on the "For You" tab in the app, you'll find the area recommendations from the Local Guides. Google is piloting the program in Bangkok, Delhi, London, Mexico City, New York, Osaka, San Francisco, Sao Paulo and Tokyo, for the time being. Presumably, if all goes well, it would expand to more markets. Further reading: Google Maps Has Introduced So Many New Features and Design Changes in Recent Months That Getting Directions On It is Becoming an Increasingly Challenging Task; and Ten Years of Google Maps, From Slashdot to Ground Truth (2015).

New submitter Shad0wz writes: Microsoft's Core Network team just announced they plan on supporting DoH in the Windows resolver. In the blog post, the company writes: Providing encrypted DNS support without breaking existing Windows device admin configuration won't be easy. However, at Microsoft we believe that "we have to treat privacy as a human right. We have to have end-to-end cybersecurity built into technology." We also believe Windows adoption of encrypted DNS will help make the overall Internet ecosystem healthier. There is an assumption by many that DNS encryption requires DNS centralization. This is only true if encrypted DNS adoption isn't universal. To keep the DNS decentralized, it will be important for client operating systems (such as Windows) and Internet service providers alike to widely adopt encrypted DNS. With the decision made to build support for encrypted DNS, the next step is to figure out what kind of DNS encryption Windows will support and how it will be configured. Here are our team's guiding principles on making those decisions:

Windows DNS needs to be as private and functional as possible by default without the need for user or admin configuration because Windows DNS traffic represents a snapshot of the user's browsing history. To Windows users, this means their experience will be made as private as possible by Windows out of the box. For Microsoft, this means we will look for opportunities to encrypt Windows DNS traffic without changing the configured DNS resolvers set by users and system administrators.
Privacy-minded Windows users and administrators need to be guided to DNS settings even if they don't know what DNS is yet. Many users are interested in controlling their privacy and go looking for privacy-centric settings such as app permissions to camera and location but may not be aware of or know about DNS settings or understand why they matter and may not look for them in the device settings.
Windows users and administrators need to be able to improve their DNS configuration with as few simple actions as possible. We must ensure we don't require specialized knowledge or effort on the part of Windows users to benefit from encrypted DNS. Enterprise policies and UI actions alike should be something you only have to do once rather than need to maintain.
Windows users and administrators need to explicitly allow fallback from encrypted DNS once configured. Once Windows has been configured to use encrypted DNS, if it gets no other instructions from Windows users or administrators, it should assume falling back to unencrypted DNS is forbidden.

The Trump administration is giving American companies another three months to do business with the Chinese telecom giant Huawei, the Commerce Department said Monday. From a report: It is the third time the U.S. has extended a reprieve, which is meant to help ease disruption for Huawei customers. Many Internet and cellphone carriers in rural parts of the U.S. buy networking equipment from Huawei, and the temporary extension means they can keep their networks up to date. "The Temporary General License extension will allow carriers to continue to service customers in some of the most remote areas of the United States who would otherwise be left in the dark," said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in a statement.

An anonymous reader writes: A team of academics has disclosed today two vulnerabilities known collectively as TPM-FAIL that could allow an attacker to retrieve cryptographic keys stored inside TPMs. The first vulnerability is CVE-2019-11090 and impacts Intel's Platform Trust Technology (PTT). Intel PTT is Intel's fTPM software-based TPM solution and is widely used on servers, desktops, and laptops, being supported on all Intel CPUs released since 2013, starting with the Haswell generation. The second is CVE-2019-16863 and impacts the ST33 TPM chip made by STMicroelectronics. This chip is incredibly popular and is used on a wide array of devices ranging from networking equipment to cloud servers, being one of the few chips that received a CommonCriteria (CC) EAL 4+ classification — which implies it comes with built-in protection against side-channel attacks like the ones discovered by the research team. Unlike most TPM attacks, these ones were deemed practical. A local adversary can recover the ECDSA key from Intel fTPM in 4-20 minutes depending on the access level. We even show that these attacks can be performed remotely on fast networks, by recovering the authentication key of a virtual private network (VPN) server in 5 hours.

Dell is planning to offer business clients a subscription model for products like servers and personal computers, "seeking to counter the lure of cloud services from Amazon and Microsoft," reports Bloomberg. From the report: Dell and its hardware peers have been under pressure to offer corporate clients the flexibility and simplicity of infrastructure cloud services. Public cloud titans such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have cut demand for data-center hardware as more businesses look to rent computing power rather than invest in their own server farms. Rival Hewlett Packard Enterprise said in June that it would move to a subscription model by 2022. Research firm Gartner predicts 15% of data-center hardware deals will include pay-per-use pricing in 2022, up from 1% in 2019, Dell said.

Dell is making it easier for clients to upgrade their hardware since they don't have to spend a large amount of capital expenditures upfront, but can pay a smaller amount each month that counts toward a company's operating expenditures. For the consumption programs, customers pay for the amount of storage or computing power they use. Companies can also hire Dell to completely manage their hardware infrastructure for them. While Dell's overall sales climbed 2% in the quarter that ended Aug. 2, demand for its servers and networking gear dropped 12% in a reversal from last year, when there was unprecedented customer interest in the products. Dell still expects the vast majority of customers to pay upfront for products in the next three to five years, Grocott said.

Twitter is proposing a handful of new features designed to help its users spot "synthetic" or "manipulated" media, including deepfake videos. From a report: The social networking giant last month announced plans to implement a new policy around media assets that have been altered to mislead the public. Today heralds Twitter's first draft proposal, alongside a public consultation period, as it works to refine the rules and how they will be enforced. "When you come to Twitter to see what's happening in the world, we want you to have context about the content you're seeing and engaging with," said Twitter VP of trust and safety Del Harvey in a blog post. "Deliberate attempts to mislead or confuse people through manipulated media undermine the integrity of the conversation."

All major browsers -- including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, Brave -- have plans to support DNS-over-HTTPS (or DoH), a protocol that encrypts DNS traffic and helps improve a user's privacy on the web. From a report: The DoH protocol has been one of the year's hot topics. It's a protocol that, when deployed inside a browser, it allows the browser to hide DNS requests and responses inside regular-looking HTTPS traffic. Doing this makes a user's DNS traffic invisible to third-party network observers, such as ISPs. But while users love DoH and have deemed it a privacy boon, ISPs, networking operators, and cyber-security vendors hate it. A UK ISP called Mozilla an "internet villain" for its plans to roll out DoH, and a Comcast-backed lobby group has been caught preparing a misleading document about DoH that they were planning to present to US lawmakers in the hopes of preventing DoH's broader rollout. However, this may be a little too late. ZDNet has spent the week reaching out to major web browser providers to gauge their future plans regarding DoH, and all vendors plan to ship it, in one form or another.

New submitter Myself writes: There's a funny thing about a global satellite system that beams signals down to anyone to use: It also means anyone can monitor the performance thereof. So when such a system suffers a crippling days-long outage and the operators are tight-lipped about why, look no further than Bert Hubert (who you may know from the PowerDNS project) to scramble together a bunch of code and a worldwide network of volunteers, to analyze exactly what happened. This is the story of how and why the Galileo GNSS network was down for a whole week.

In one of America's top cities for property crime, the Atlantic examines the "porch pirate" of San Francisco's Potrero Hill. It's an 8,000-word long read about how one of the neighborhood's troubled long-time residents "entered a vortex of smart cameras, Nextdoor rants, and cellphone surveillance," in a town where the public hospital she was born in is now named after Mark Zuckerberg.

Her story begins when a 30-something product marketing manager at Google received a notification on his iPhone from his home surveillance camera, sharing a recording of a woman stealing a package from his porch. He cruises the neighborhood, spots her boarding a city bus, and calls 911, having her arrested. The article notes that 17% of America's homeowners now own a smart video surveillance device. But it also seems to be trying to bring another perspective to "the citizen surveillance facilitated by porch cams and Nextdoor to the benefit of corporations and venture capitalists."

From the article: Under the reasoning that more surveillance improves public safety, over 500 police departments -- including in Houston and a stretch of Los Angeles suburbs -- have partnered with Ring. Many departments advertise rebates for Ring devices on government social-media channels, sometimes offering up to $125. Ring matches the rebate up to $50. Dave Maass, a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital civil liberties, said it's unseemly to use taxpayer money to subsidize the build-out of citizen surveillance. Amazon and other moneyed tech companies competing for market share are "enlisting law enforcement to be their sales force, to have the cops give it their imprimatur of credibility," said Maass, a claim echoed in an open letter to government agencies from more than 30 civil-rights organizations this fall and a petition asking Congress to investigate the Ring partnerships. (Ring disputes this characterization....)

In some cities, the relationship between the police and companies has gone beyond marketing. Amazon is helping police departments run "bait box" operations, in which police place decoy boxes on porches -- often with GPS trackers inside -- to capture anyone who tries to steal them... Amazon sent police free branded boxes, and even heat maps of areas where the company's customers suffer the most thefts...

Stings and porch-pirate footage attract media attention -- but what comes next for the thieves rarely gets the same limelight. Often, perpetrators face punishments whose scale might surprise the amateur smart-cam detectives and Nextdoor sleuths who help nail them... In December, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas announced an enforcement campaign called Operation Porch Pirate. Two suspects were arrested and charged with federal mail theft. One pleaded guilty to stealing $170.42 worth of goods, including camouflage crew socks and a Call of Duty video game from Amazon, and was sentenced to 14 months of probation. Another pleaded guilty to possession of stolen mail -- four packages, two from Amazon -- and awaits sentencing of up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine...

While porch cams have been used to investigate cases as serious as homicides, the surveillance and neighborhood social networking typically make a particular type of crime especially visible: those lower-level ones happening out in public, committed by the poorest. Despite the much higher cost of white-collar crime, it seems to cause less societal hand-wringing than what might be caught on a Ring camera, said W. David Ball, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law. "Did people really feel that crime was 'out of control' after Theranos?" he said. "People lost hundreds of millions of dollars. You would have to break into every single car in San Francisco for the next ten years to amount to the amount stolen under Theranos."
In the article the EFF's investigative researcher also asks if police end up providing more protection to affluent communities than the ones that can't afford Amazon's Ring cameras. But W. David Ball, the law professor, also asks whether locking up low-level criminals is just ignoring the larger issue of poverty in increasingly expensive cities.

"Everyone assumes that jail works to deter people. But I don't know if I were hungry, and had no other way of eating, that that would deter me from stealing."

hackingbear writes: As reported by market researcher Canalys, Chinese tech giant and smartphone maker Huawei posted 66% annual growth, reaching a staggering 42% market share in China, which is the largest, albeit slightly shrinking, smartphone market in the world. A combination of keen pricing, technical innovation and patriotism has turned its strong domestic position into a dominant one, at the expense of Apple, whose market share has dropped to 5.1%, as well as other Chinese vendors such as Vivo and Xiaomi.

"Huawei is in a strong position to consolidate its dominance further amid 5G network rollout," Canalys commented. The Shenzhen tech giant knows that the impact of the blacklist is limited by unwavering support at home, where the headline loss of full-fat Android, its biggest international issue, has no impact -- Google's software and services are unavailable in China, while completely removing US-made semiconductors and components from its phones and networking gear.

harrymcc writes: On October 29, 1969, a graduate student in a UCLA computer science lab logged into a computer hundreds of miles away at the Stanford Research Institute. It was the first connection via ARPANET, which -- after 20 years as a government and academic network -- evolved into the modern internet. Over at Fast Company, Mark Sullivan marked the anniversary by visiting the room where the historic login took place and talking to three of the people who made it happen.

An anonymous reader quotes ISP Review: The RIPE Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC), which manages regional distribution of internet addresses for the UK, Europe, Middle East and parts of Central Asia, has confirmed that their final reserve pool of Internet Protocol v4 (IPv4) addresses will completely run out in November 2019. Strictly speaking the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) started running out of address space in 2012 and began rationing the little they had left. Fast forward a few years and at the start of October 2019 it was confirmed that they only had 1 million IPv4 addresses left in their available pool (out of 4 billion addresses total), "which we expect to run out in November 2019...."

Thankfully many ISPs, devices and services have now introduced "newer" IPv6 addresses, although some still have a lot of work to do (e.g. TalkTalk)... A Spokesperson for RIPE NCC told ISPreview.co.uk "... IPv4 'run-out' has long been anticipated and planned for by the technical community and no one needs to worry about the Internet suddenly breaking. But it does mean that the pressure will continue to build for many networks, necessitating the use of complex and expensive workarounds.

"Our advice to network operators is to take stock of their IP resources and to make sure their IPv6 plans are making progress."