I am suddenly swamped with RL things to do. So, not much time for a post. However, a couple of notes…

WARNING: Flashlight Apps

Word is going around about a flashlight apps on smart phones. Seems the ten most downloaded flashlight apps are all spyware. A company named Snoopwall has published a report on these apps and named names. See: Snoopwall (Android App) and get their free app.

Battle for VR

Gwyneth Llewelyn, a writer I enjoy reading, has posted: The battle for the future virtual world environment is on! It is a good analysis of the current VR competition.

She points out an interesting statistic. Goods sales at the peak of the SL Hype Days (2007-9) was in the range of a few million dollars (US) per year. Now goods sales are around 500 million, half a billion. That is growth.

Gwyn sees the VR and virtual world products as only serving a niche market with a small number of users. That is accurate today. But, a lot of people are trying to figure out how to make their new VR products relevant to the masses. Facebook and Google are pouring hundreds of millions into development of VR products. While the dreamers like Zuckerberg, Rosedale, Lucky, and others might just jump and spend money, multi-billion dollar companies tend to analyze market potential and size their investment to the potential return.

Check out Gwyn’s article. See what you think.

There is currently a problem with the Internet. Some time ago I wrote of the change from IPv4 to IPv6, which is a change in the standard way of assigning Internet addresses to devices. We were running out of addresses. New hardware capable of handling larger addresses has to be added and has been being added for the last couple of years.

Now another growth pain is starting to impact users as the Internet grows more complicated. We are seeing slow Internet and sites we cannot connect to because the routers that direct traffic from place to place run out of memory. The older routers can typically hold 512,000 addresses. Sounds like plenty. But, that is what they thought about addresses too.

The problems are hitting in the USA and Canada as older routers max’d out. The problem right now is that Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)routing tables have grown too large for some top-level Internet routers to handle. The result is that these routers can no longer properly handle Internet traffic. The result is they get confused and fail to rout anything, forget some routes and stop forwarding traffic destined for those routes, or just ignores that traffic. Whatever they do, your connection slows to a crawl as the system tries to find a way to route you packet to the destination or fails altogether.

You can figure out if you are running into this problem by doing trace route testing. See my Troubleshooting your Connection. If you are hitting the problem you will see your packets fail to get past some router.

The problem has to be fixed by the Internet Service Providers, mostly the backbone providers. About all you can do is suffer and complain to your ISP. The Trace Route information will help them get THEIR complaints to the right people.

If you want more information, search on 512k Internet.

The media is trying for ratings. To get them, they over hype things. I am also convinced that journalist become journalist because they cannot do math or understand science, which to some degree means technology. So, they have little understanding of HeartBleed, what it does, how it does it, or what it means.

HeartBleed

To put things in some perspective check out: Answering the Critical Question: Can You Get Private SSL Keys Using Heartbleed?

The quick explanation of HeartBleed is that it is an exploit run on SERVERS that use the OpenSSL code and only certain versions of it. Anti-virus and anti-malware software cannot fix or protect you from such a problem.

So, if someone is selling protection, they are selling into the hype-generated fear. They are opportunists, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But, if they are providing software for your computer they are only providing some people peace of mind. You can get peace of mind for free from understanding the reality.

Cloudflare’s explanation is what I’ll call medium level technical. It is readable and I think SL users will probably understand it. But, the TL;DR is:

The exploit in the server code will allow a hacker to trick the server into sending them the code they need to decrypt HTTPS encrypted network packets. When you browser talks to a bank or other server using OpenSSL the network packets traveling back and forth are encrypted. To date no one has been able to break that encryption. So, your conversation is secure.  Continue reading →