The elaborate operation, which involved hiring computer programmers as far as Bulgaria, allowed the men to snatch up 1.5 million premium seats at concerts by Bruce Springsteen, Miley Cyrus and Bon Jovi, as well as Major League Baseball playoff games at Yankee stadium and the Broadway show, “Wicked” between 2002 and 2009, according to a 43-count federal indictment unsealed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office Monday.

Kenneth Lowson, 40, Kristofer Kirsch, 37, and Faisal Nahdi, 36, of Los Angeles, and Joel Stevenson, 37, of Alameda, were charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and to gain and exceed unauthorized access to computer systems.

Authorities said the massive conspiracy run by Wiseguys Tickets, which targeted several events in New Jersey, including concerts and games at Giants Stadium and the Prudential Center, put a spotlight on law enforcement’s ongoing battle against cyber-crime.

“The Wiseguys swarmed the ticket buying market and put themselves at the head of the line,” U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said at a press conference in Newark.

The four orchestrated an intricately-woven scheme that manipulated ticket sites — including Ticketmaster, Live Nation and Major League Baseball — into selling them the best tickets seconds after the start of an online sale, authorities said.

The operation essentially shut out ordinary fans from purchasing the seats with the best view of the stage or field, and then resold them at a steep markup to price-gouging ticket brokers.

“The public thought it had a fair shot at getting tickets to these events, but what the public didn’t know was that the defendants had cheated them out of that opportunity,” Fishman said.

Fans who were blocked from buying prime seats on online ticket sites were forced to buy tickets with an average mark-up of $30, Fishman said. In extreme cases, the mark-up was as high as $1,000 per ticket, he said.

In July 2008, when tickets went on sale for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at Giants Stadium, Wiseguys was able to purchase and control nearly half of the 440 general admission floor tickets made available to the public for that concert – the tickets closest to the stage.

The investigation began after Bruce Springsteen fans complained that all tickets for the series of shows at Giants Stadium were gone within seconds and immediately listed for resale at steep mark-ups on other sites.

“The federal prosecutors in this case … they’re able to shut down what is a massive illegal scalping operation,” said Rep. William J. Pascrell Jr., D-Paterson. Pascrell has sponsored the BOSS ACT — Better Oversight of Secondary Sales and Accountability in Concert Ticketing — which would require all brokers to register with the Federal Trade Commission and prohibit them from purchasing within the first 48 hours of sales.

“Here is the secondary market rearing its head. Fans knew this a long time ago,” he said. “They knew something was fishy about this. You didn’t have to go to a concert or a sporting event — just listen to your friends getting ripped off.”

The four allegedly hired hackers in Bulgaria to maneuver their way around the CAPTCHA technology that requires ticket buyers to type random, distorted words in order to prove they are not a computer program. The defendants essentially researched thousands of Web sites with CAPTCHA fields and created a database of the random words.

When they bombarded an online ticket site at the start of an online sale, their “bots” were able to fill out CAPTCHA fields faster than humans.

They allegedly created and managed hundreds of fake Internet domains and thousands of email addresses to disguise their activities from online ticket sellers, fooling ticket brokers into believing they were buying tickets from individuals, authorities said.

And when online ticket vendors offered pre-sales to fan clubs, Wiseguys employees would register for the fan clubs using fake names and email addresses, authorities said.

The current Internet Protocol (IPv4) provides the basic communication service that inter-connects the global set of networks that comprise the Internet. Designed in the early 1970s, IPv4 is rapidly running out of unassigned, globally unique network addresses. IPv6 was designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a next-generation replacement for IPv4. With a vastly larger address space, IPv6 will enable the Internet to grow unbounded for the foreseeable future.

The USGv6 Program is intended to assist federal government IT users and acqusition authorities by providing a framework to express and test IPv6 requirements for U.S. government procurements.

ICSA Labs of Mechanicsburg, Pa., and the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Laboratory in Durham, N.H., were accredited by private accreditation bodies operating under the International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC). To become accredited under the USGv6 program, a test laboratory must demonstrate the quality control processes that insure the accuracy, transparency and reproducibility of their testing results and must demonstrate their use of USGv6-approved test methods and test suites. The end goal is to assure vendors and USGv6 users that the conformance, interoperability and capability tests performed at one commercial lab are equivalent to those of any other accredited lab.

“The accreditation of two open test laboratories is a significant achievement for the USGv6 effort,” noted NIST’s Stephen Nightingale, who leads the testing program. “The existence of two accredited labs demonstrates that our test methods and means of inter-laboratory comparisons and quality control are viable; and in fact, we expect that additional commercial labs will come on-line in the future.”

For more information on the USGv6 Program see the “Frequently Asked Questions” page at www.antd.nist.gov/usgv6/usgv6-v1-faq.htm

The basic characteristics and advantages:

• High density of ports
• Modern memory TCAM (Ternary Content Addressable Memory) provides in the big networks switching of level 3, routeing on the basis of rules, realisation of reports OSPF and BGP4.
• Protection against type attacks “refusal in service” (DoS)
• The expanded lists of the control of access, Secure Shell, Secure Copy, SNMP v3, means аутентификации (AAA, 802.1x, RADIUS, TACACS +).
• The differentiated service with voice transfer support, video and the data in one network with the expanded possibilities of maintenance of quality of service QoS and a multiple-address announcement.
• Pass-band parametrization on demand, high-speed multilevel management of a pass-band.
• The built in technology sFlow ™ (RFC 3176) with use of the information of levels 2-7 for each port provides scaling of functions of the account and billing
• Reservation of power units and the interface modules with hot replacement, Rapid STP, MRP, VRRP and VSRP.

Parametres:

Quantity slots: 4

• Switching capacity – 128 Gbit/with
• With the module 10GbE* 101 million packages a second
• With module Gig E* of 83 million packages in a second

Maximum quantity of ports on system

• 10/100 Ethernet: 144
• Gigabit Ethernet: 56
• 10 Gigabit Ethernet 6

Maximum quantity of ports in a 7-foot rack 10/100 1296

• Gigabit Ethernet: 504
• Gigabit Ethernet 54
• Reservation of power units: 1+1 N+1 N+1
• Specialised functional complexes for camera and corporate networks
• Redundant operating and interface modules with hot replacement.
• Redundant power units with hot replacement
• Aggregation of channels according to IEEE 802.3ad.
• Reports of reservation of network level for networks of 2 and 3 levels.

Functions Level 2

Report MRP (Metro Ring Protocol). Offers alternative to structures on the basis of Spanning Tree and provides in ring Ethernet topology of city networks time of detection of failures and emergency switching of less second. Report VSRP (Virtual Switch Redundancy Protocol). Offers alternative to structures on the basis of Spanning Tree One copy STP functions in one device on all VLAN, organised on port. At the expense of it systems BigIron can support the devices of the third firms working with one copy STP according to the specification 802.1q PVST (Per VLAN Spanning Tree). Gives to services-providers of city networks the control over report STP in everyone VLAN with a view of traffic regulation
PVGST on the basis of standard IEEE 802.1s. Essentially raises scalability STP and VLAN, allowing to use from 2 to 16 copies STP or Rapid STP for service to 4096 VLAN SuperSpanTM.

The new working out Foundry, allowing to build very big Ethernet networks of level 2, simple in management and operation Report Rapid STP on the basis of standard IEEE 802.1w. Essentially, to fractions of a second, reduces time of convergence of the report spanning tree Superbig VLAN (SAV). By means of this function the operator can separate domains VLAN of the service-provider from domains VLAN of the client and increase number supported VLAN. The traffic of set VLAN of the standard 802.1q, belonging to one client, unites in one VLAN the service-provider that allows the provider to transfer the traffic of 16 million VLAN, serving to 4096 clients, each of which can use to 4096 VLAN.
Traffic IGMP check (IGMP Snooping). Hardware support of multiple-address appendices Functions Level 3. Support of modern reports of Internet routeing.

Systems BigIron support the following scaled reports EGP and IGP

• BGPv4
• OSPF
• IS-IS

Routeing on the basis of rules (PBR). Allows to make individual decisions on routeing on the basis of the source address. Clients of a city network can get in one configuration access to various service decisions, including the raised security measures, the expanded possibilities, access to preferable providers.
Private virtual local networks (VLAN).
Full-function complex of functions of a multiple-address announcement. Hardware support of a multiple-address announcement, including reports DVMRP, MSDP, PIM-SM (Sparse Mode) and PIM-DM (Dense Mode) Reports VRRP and VRRPE (Enhanced VRRP). Allow to use BigIron as a reserve network router. In default, BigIron automatically and бесшовно starts to carry out functions of the failed router. Universal network management The centralised network management. The graphic web – interface Foundry IronView Network Manager allows to supervise from the central station modernisation of the software and configurations for any product Foundry. The command interface. The standard interface for all products Foundry.

However, despite hitting the market first, WiMax has taken a back seat to LTE (Long-Term Evolution) as a 4G (fourth-generation) mobile technology. LTE is backed by the industry body behind GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) and is on the road maps of most major carriers that have chosen a 4G system. In the U.S., Verizon Wireless plans to launch LTE commercially this year and AT&T will follow next year.

Cisco can serve both markets with products it acquired through its purchase last year of Starent Networks, which made gateways between radio networks and a carrier’s core IP infrastructure. Both WiMax and LTE are based on IP packet networks. In order to concentrate on this business, the company will get out of making the actual radios that deliver WiMax signals to subscribers’ devices.

“Cisco’s mobile strategy has always been to provide a radio-agnostic approach that focuses on the packet core and IP network, where the company can add differentiated value. After a recent review of our WiMax business, we announced a decision to discontinue designing and building new WiMax base stations and modems, and we also announced a support plan for transitioning existing customers,” Cisco spokesman Jim Brady said Friday.

The Navini products haven’t played a big role in high-profile WiMax networks. Cisco is a supplier to the world’s largest WiMax network project, Clearwire’s national U.S. buildout, but only with IP equipment, not radios.

Analysts called the Starent acquisition a move away from WiMax toward the larger LTE market. Unlike WiMax, which had its roots in the wireless LAN world, with strong backing by Intel, LTE is dominated by the giants of cellular equipment, such as Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent. Cisco has said it does not intend to compete with those types of vendors.

Analysts were not surprised by Cisco’s announcement.

“Cisco pulling out at this moment looks like good business,” said analyst Laurence Swasey of Visant Strategies. He believes LTE will dominate the 4G world and may even be adopted by current WiMax carriers eventually.

Cisco did the WiMax industry a big favor by buying Navini, Swasey said. “It was a stamp of approval at a time when the market was very fragmented as to what 3.5G and 4G would be to the masses,” he said. Today, several major vendors, including Huawei, Samsung and Motorola, are supplying RAN equipment for commercial networks. Cisco’s decision to get out of the business will have far less impact than its choosing to get in, Swasey said.

PC World

If you find you are accidentally picking up someone else’s network, tap the name of the network listed to go to the next screen. You should see a list of nearby networks on the next screen. If you are connected to the wrong one, tap the name of your own network in the list and type in any required password; then see if you can get to the Internet on the Touch.

If the Touch shows that you are connected to your own network on the Wi-Fi Networks screen, tap the blue arrow next to the network name. The next screen should show the Wi-Fi network information for the iPod Touch. Unless you have a specially configured network, you probably want to have the option for D.H.C.P. (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) selected and the screen should display a series of numbers like the I.P. address. (Every device connecting to the Internet needs one of these Internet Protocol addresses to work.)

If all the numbers are filled in but you still can’t get on the Internet, tap the Renew Lease button, which should give you an updated I.P. address number. Try to connect to the Internet and see if it works.

If it doesn’t, you can reset the information the Touch keeps on hand for this network by tapping the Forget This Network button on the network settings screen. Once you forget the network, return to the screen with the list of Wi-Fi networks, choose your network again and carefully retype the setup and password information.

You can also reset all the network settings on the Touch by tapping the settings icon on the Home screen, tapping General and then Reset and then on Reset All Network Settings. If you still can’t get it to work properly, Apple has other suggestions at support.apple.com/kb/TS1398.

NY Times

Hurt Locker throws light on terrible work of division on neutralisation of explosives. Hollywood does not exaggerate horror СВУ – improvised explosive devices which are the largest murderers of the British and American armies in Iraq and Afghanistan. СВУ Kalashnikov has superseded to become the weapon risen 21st century. It can be collected on a rural backyard and allows Talibs to incur blow of the enemy which much more surpasses them in quantity and fire power, as the Soviet military-air forces in 1980.

Work of the British and American soldiers on disarmament of these devices the heroic. But real race on counteraction to threat follows thousand miles – in secret laboratories at East coast of America. Within last three years the Pentagon has spent $15,5 billion Scientific minds in attempt to develop more effective ways For detection of improvised explosive devices and their neutralisation. Scientists and engineers work Round hours, inventing robots, lasers, chemical detectors and even specially trained bees. The program unites scientific shots and money in scales which last time saw in the Second World War when the project Manhattan – working out of a nuclear bomb was carried out.

In 2003 was 81 registered incidents in СВУ in Afghanistan. Last year – 8159. Improvised explosive devices do not represent anything new. Guy Fox used one to try to blow up parliament. Lawrence Aravijsky put bombs on the railway to break Turkish routes of deliveries in the First World War. They have been extended in Vietnam.

The term the improvised explosive device has been invented in 1970th years when the British army IRA has made bombs of fertilizers and Semteksa imported by an illicit way from Libya. War in Iraq has seen their use in new scales. It is the huge country with a huge stock of an ammunition. The central command in July, 2003 was asked by the Pentagon about new «the Manhettensky project» for neutralisation of improvised explosive devices. Jieddo now has more than 3000 employees and means at a rate of 4 Billions dollars a year.

The person, responsible for it is Michael Outs’s general – the veteran of Iraq. «War against improvised explosive devices is very personal», – he speaks. «I have lost many my friends, and itself was in immediate proximity many times. Almost each soldier whom I know, saw or has suffered from an improvised explosive device, was in a defeat zone изи knows the one who was lost».

About half of all American soldiers who were lost in Iraq, have been killed СВУ. In Afghanistan this figure makes now about two thirds. But insurgents understand that they cause a loss more than simply death and mutilations ». This strategic weapon influences will of our countries abroad», – Outs has told. «We should find ways of detection and defeat, and to survive. We should remove it from the weapon which influences our strategy».

Network Time Protocol can be utilized to synchronize the time on computers across a network. A NTP time server is utilized to obtain the correct time from a time source and adjust the local time in each participating computer.

The time source used by the time server is extremely important as this forms the basis of all time updates across the network. Recent studies show an alarming number of stratum 1 time sources on the internet are bad time keepers. A reported 391 of 957 supposedly stratum 1 NTP time sources had time offsets of over 10 seconds. Incredibly, one time source was offset by a staggering 6 years. Only 28% of the internet based stratum 1 clocks actually appears to be useful, based on research by Nelson Minar, MIT Media Lab Cambridge, MA USA. Mis-configuration appears to be the main cause for inaccurate time sources provided by the internet.

The integrity of the time source utilized by the time server cannot be stressed more highly. The accuracy of each computer on the network is dependant on the accuracy of the time source utilized by the time server. A useful rule is to beware when obtaining the time from sources that cannot be validated, i.e. from an unknown third party across the internet.

Extracts from the Conclusion of the article by Nelson Minar, MIT Media Lab Cambridge, MA USA. “This survey has captured the state of the NTP network in November 1999. The network is growing rapidly and seems to be managing reasonably well. Timing statistics suggest that delays and accuracies have improved over the years, helping clock accuracy for everyone. This survey uncovers two problems: the number of bad clocks on the network, and the unbalanced nature of the network load. The number of bad clocks was a truly surprising result. Only 28% of the stratum 1 clocks found appear to actually be useful”.

The conclusion by Nelson Minar underlines the importance of ensuring that for commercial applications it is essential to use an accurate auditable time source such as a radio atomic clock, or GPS time.

Not a single House Republican voted for the bill when it came to the floor two weeks ago, and despite many compromises in the Senate, only three Republicans came on board. The final bill includes $507 billion in spending programs and $282 billion in tax relief, including a scaled-back version of Obama’s middle-class tax-cut proposal, which would give credits of up to $400 for individuals and $800 for families within certain income limits. House Democrats, angry over some of the cuts, particularly for school construction, initially balked at the deal and delayed a final meeting Wednesday afternoon between House and Senate negotiators.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, was conspicuously absent from Wednesday’s news conference in which members of the Senate announced the agreement. Officials had said previously that one of the final issues to be settled was money for school modernization, a priority for Pelosi as well as Obama and one on which they differed with the moderate Republicans whose votes will be essential for final Senate approval. Originally, Pelosi and House Democrats wanted a new program dedicated to school construction, but Republicans held firm against that. In the end, officials said the agreement added flexibility to a $54 billion state stabilization fund, to permit local governments to use some of the money for modernizing school buildings but not building new ones.

While final details and dollar amounts were not available late Wednesday, the general outlines of the agreement show it will help California with its $40 billion budget shortfall. Reimbursement for Medicaid spending and a special fund for the states would mean about $14 billion for California, according to one congressional staffer. The plan also will mean about $4.5 billion for highway and transit projects in California, Caltrans Director Will Kempton said after a meeting of state transportation officials at the White House. “That will be a big help, and we are confident we will be able to get this money out fairly quickly,” said Kempton, who recently postponed $2.2 billion in projects because of state budget woes. California taxpayers also will benefit from a $70 billion provision that will protect about 4 million residents from the alternative-minimum tax.

But some House Democrats complained that the provision shouldn’t be part of a stimulus plan because it pushed out more infrastructure spending. Even trimmed to $789 billion, the recovery measure will be the most expansive unleashing of the government’s fiscal firepower in the face of a recession since World War II. Yet it seemed almost trifling compared with the $2.5 trillion rescue plan for the financial system — a combination of loans to banks and incentives to bring private capital into the banking system — announced Tuesday by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Although the final legislative language was not immediately available, lawmakers said the bill contained more than $150 billion in public works projects for transportation, energy and technology, and $87 billion in aid to help states meet rising Medicaid costs.

Despite intense lobbying by governors around the country, the final deal slashed $25 billion from the proposed state fiscal stabilization fund, eliminated $16 billion in aid for school construction and sharply curtailed health care subsidies for the unemployed. The Senate bill came together only after a bipartisan group of centrist senators, led by Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Ben Nelson, D-Neb., reached a deal to trim the cost of the package to $838 billion from more than $920 billion. “These aren’t easy times, obviously for America,” Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, who also was a member of that group, said at the news conference with Reid to announce the final agreement. “Given the gravity of the circumstances economically, I thought it was important to be part of a process that could yield a consensus-based solution.”

But the majority of Republicans continued to criticize the stimulus measure Wednesday as a bloated and ill-designed spending bonanza by Democrats on favored projects that would not help lift the economy out of recession but would permanently expand the federal government and plunge future generations of Americans deep into debt. “Yesterday, the Senate cast one of the most expensive votes in history,” the minority leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said. “Americans are wondering how we’re going to pay for all this.

Mercury News

• Defining new trust, security models and security policies that address the current and future threats, and ensure affordable security services, maintaining an adequate security level without infringing a user’s right to privacy;
• Specifying components to build the infrastructure, to enforce these policies, select the existing tools and devices, and define the new components to develop;
• Participating to the core research initiatives towards eEurope-2005.

• For personal usage, the priority concerns are ease of use and privacy protection,
• For business usage, the heterogeneity and mobility are the major issues with a priority and accessibility,
• For public services and e-government, the priority is the survivability of the infrastructure, and then integrated in a transversal trust and security model.

SEINIT delivers specification documents of the security framework with, in regard the threat and vulnerabilities addressed.