CourseCast of the Week

Episode 0060, 08/02/2008

Title/Description: GENI out of the bottle, Universities to become P2P cops

Welcome to Course Technology's CourseCast of the week, Episode 60, recorded August 2nd, 2008. This is Ken Baldauf bringing you this week's technology news and information. This CourseCast is brought to you by Course Technology. Check out www.course.com for innovative textbooks and creative electronic learning solutions.

Story 1 - GENI out of the bottle

Network researchers are rethinking the underlying infrastructure of the Internet. Some believe that it may be best to start over from a "clean slate" to engineer an internet that is faster and more secure. The problem these researchers face is in testing their theories. They are unable to use the actual Internet for testing, due to fear of interfering with its operations, and there is no other available global network available.

This week, however, marked a major step towards the creation of a global network sandbox for researchers to play in. The AP is reporting that BBN Technologies, the company that built ARPANET on which the Internet was derived, received $12 million and global bandwidth to use towards the creation of the Global Environment for Network Innovations or GENI. The GENI global network project was given $12 million dollars from the National Science Foundation, along with 40 gigabits per second of network capacity from Internet2 and the National Lambda Rail to use for testing new Internet networking technologies. That's enough bandwidth to stream 30 motion pictures to your home simultaneously.

But, don't get too excited yet. It will take five years and another $338 million for GENI to be up and running --- more years after that for the technologies to begin impacting the actual Internet. However, all involved see this week's endorsement as confirmation that GENI will become a reality.

Source: Project to rebuild Internet gets $12M, bandwidth [Wired], geni.net

Story 2 - Universities to Become P2P Cops

The Senate and House have reauthorized the Higher Education Act. The bill now goes to the President who is expected to sign it into law. A controversial aspect of this bill is a new provision requiring universities to provide students with access to commercial online music services and to filter network traffic to deter peer-to-peer file sharing. The bill would, in essence, turn university network administrators into agents of law enforcement, and the media companies crusading protect their music, and movies from illegal distribution. The new law will be the first to require universities to start evaluating the content of data streaming over their networks.

Sources: College funding bill passed with anti-P2P provisions intact [Ars Technica]

And that brings us to News Briefs.

  • The FCC has approved the merger of satellite radio providers XM and Sirius. Combined the companies will have 18 million subscribers and over 300 radio channels. [VentureBeat]
  • Research by Google found that there are over 1 trillion unique URLs in existence, with several billion new web pages popping up every day. [VentureBeat]
  • U.S. football fans will have a new way to experience Sunday Night Football this season - on the Internet. NBC and the NFL will be streaming the entire Sunday Night Football season to the Internet with special Internet-specific features. [Reuters]
  • After assuring the International Olympic Committee that journalists covering the games would have unfettered Internet access, China back peddled this week and announced that Internet access for Olympic guests will be censored. [NewsFactor]
  • A document from China's Public Security Bureau informs foreign-owned hotels in China that they are required to install network devices that will allow the Chinese government to monitor Internet use of hotel guests or face "severe retaliation". [NewsFactor]
  • Portugal has placed an order for 500,000 Intel Classmate PCs. The Classmate PC is a low-priced PC designed to compete with the one laptop per child campaign. This one order from Portugal nearly equals the total amount of OLPC notebooks sold. [NewsFactor]
  • Amazon has launched an e-commerce payment system called Checkout by Amazon to compete with PayPal and Google Checkout. [NewsFactor]
  • GPS devices are being used to monitor individuals charged with domestic violence and stalking. If the offender gets anywhere near the victim, the victim receives a cell phone warning allowing time to flee and get help. [NewsFactor]
  • It's finally official. In a precedent setting decision, The FCC has formally ordered Comcast to change how it manages its broadband network, cease its practice of packet filtering to slow down some services such as P2P, and provide full transparency on its network management practices. [Reuters]
  • An ex-Google engineer and her husband have launched a new search engine that they believe will challenge Google's dominance in the market. Check out Cuil at www.cuil.com and see if you agree. [ABC News]
  • Nintendo is considering holographic storage to confront the challenge of massive amounts of game data in the Wii. Holographic storage stores data in a 3-D space and could be the next generation of storage technologies for storing terabytes of data. [Computerworld]
  • While US airlines are moving towards approving in-flight cell phone use in order to boost business, a bill is making its way through the US House to prohibit the use of cell phones in flight. The Bill is dubbed the HANGUP Act of 2008. HANGUP stands for Halting Airplane Noise to Give Us Peace. [Ars Technica]

That's it for this week's CourseCast. Links to this week's stories and many more news and information resources are provided at the CourseCast Web site at www.course.com/coursecasts. E-mail us with your suggestions for the show at course.coursecasts@cengage.com. Until next time, have a great week and be sure to take advantage of the Power -- of Technology!