Clean Slate Internet

The Clean Slate Program is an interdisciplinary research program at Stanford University which aims to consider how the internet would be redesigned with a "Clean Slate". Its Program Director is Nick McKeown. 

They identify five key areas for research:

1. Network architecture
2. Heterogeneous applications
3. Heterogeneous physical layer technologies
4. Security
5. Economics & policy

Clean slate design: thoughts

Different communication paradigms

1. Phone networks were about wires, Internet about communication and networking of users, the Future

Internet is more and more about sharing of user generated content

2 The network itself is becoming more and more a large distributed database

3 The push and pull paradigm is changing due to the increase of storage in the network, which mediates the communication between users

4 Enable applications to move functionality inside the network: changing the end-to-end paradigm

5 Maybe multiple architectures are needed to consider different requirements at the same time:

            􀂁 Anonymity and accountability and security

            􀂁 Bulk data transfer and real-time communication

            􀂁 Performance and functionalities

6 Internet has no built-in security mechanisms, because it relies on cooperation and trust

􀂈 Internet is more and more about wireless access

􀂁 Spectrum allocated to Internet access is only a tiny fraction – most spectrum is unused

􀂁 Integration of wired/wireless networks

􀂁 Seamless mobility of users/services/networks

The design goals underlying the current Internet architecture in order of importance are:

(0) to connect existing networks,

(1) Survivability,

(2) To support multiple types of services,

(3) To accommodate a variety of physical networks,

(4) To allow distributed management,

(5) To be cost effective,

(6) To allow host attachment with a low level of effort and,

(7) To allow resource accountability.

Clean Slate Research Projects:

1.      The Programmable Open Mobile Internet (POMI) 2020 Project

2.      OpenFlow

3.      Web Security Projects

4.      Programmable Virtual Infrastructure for Virtual worlds

5.      Clean Slate Approach to Wireless Spectrum Usage

6.      A Clean Slate Approach to Enterprise Network Security: Ethane

7.      The NetFPGA Program

8.      Flow-level Models for the Internet

9.      Fast Dynamic Optical line paths for the Internet core 

10. Rate control Protocol

Mobile Number Portability: Delayed

The MNP service, which was expected to reach the metros of India by January 2010, now heads towards uncertainty.

The facility that allows the mobile phone users to retain their numbers while making a shift in the operator was slated to be implemented from January 1, 2010, in metros and large circles. For the rest of the country, the users were expected to have access to facility from April.

But post a review meeting, between the Department of Telecom (DoT), Telecom Regulatory and the mobileoperators, this week the implementation of MNP has been put off for around three to six months.

During the meet, both the private and state-run operators informed that they are not yet ready with the network to implement the MNP. The equipment has been deployed but testing and commissioning of the system would be completed only till the March, 2010, informed the operators.

The Indian nation is one of the fastest growing mobile markets in the world with the user base crossing the 500 million mark. But with issues such as the availability of 3G services and the facility MNP it seems the growth is to witness a setback. While, the 3G spectrum has been a long-awaited issue with the government pushing back the auction date from time-to-time, the implementation of MNP is being seen moving on the similar line, heading towards uncertainty!

3G (3rd Generation) in India's Perspective

The 3G device will function as a phone, a computer, a television,a pager, a videoconferencing center, a newspaper, a diary and even a credit card… it will support not only voice communications but also real-time video and full-scale multimedia. It will automatically search the Internet for relevant news and information on pre-selected subjects,books your next holiday for you online and download a bed time story for your child, complete with moving pictures. It will even be able to pay for goods when you shop via wireless electronic funds transfer. In short, the new mobile handset will become the single, indispensable ‘life tool’ carried everywhere, just like a wallet or purse is today.

Potential Applications for 3G – Rural
Telemedicine

Remove the lack of doctors in rural areas

Remove language barriers through Multi-lingual interfaces

Bridge lack of visual examination through video capability

Enable prescription service through document transfer

Education

Provide high bandwidth access for e-education courses

Provide video based Computer Based Trainings (CBTs)

Governance

Remove bureaucracy by providing instant viewing of land records etc.

Provide government information like policies, forms, schemes

Centralized initiative, decentralised implementation

Potential Applications for 3G – Urban
Railways
            Seat availability, booking & Train status
DGFT (Directorate General of Foreign Trade)
            Reduce processing time to a few hours for registrations
Customs
           Computerize and make available all export/import declarations
Central Excise
           Process and view Service Tax returns etc.
Postal Department
           Direct e-credit of Monthly Income Scheme returns into the investors account
Passport
           information, screening (at some locations) available over image transfer
           Status information to individuals
Income Tax, Land registration, Health Card etc.

The whole presentation can be found here.

Mobile Internet devices to cross one billion by 2013

Reading the shocking news here quite amazed to listen that Mobile Internet devices to cross one billion by 2013. 
It is no wonder that many wireless carriers are concerned with capacity when it comes to supporting the growing number of smartphones and other Internet-connected mobile devices. According to an IDC report, there were 450 million mobile Internet users worldwide this year. That amount is expected to more than double by 2013 eventually leading to over one billion devices.
There were more than 450 million mobile Internet users worldwide in 2009, a number that is expected to more than double by the end of 2013. Driven by the popularity and affordability of mobile phones, smartphones, and other wireless devices, IDC's Worldwide Digital Marketplace Model and Forecast expects the number of mobile devices accessing the Internet to surpass the one billion mark over the next four years.
"The number of mobile devices with Internet access has simply exploded over the last several years," said John Gantz, chief research officer at IDC. "With a wealth of information and
services available from almost anywhere, Internet-connected mobile devices are reshaping the way we go about our personal and professional lives. With an explosion in applications for  mobile devices underway, the next several years will witness another sea change in the way users interact with the Internet and further blur the lines between personal and professional."
IDC reports that the fastest growing applications over next four years will include those that allow for online purchases, participation in online communities and creating blogs. If you are an application developer it would be smart to get your foot in the door in one of these categories now. After all, you will have one billion users to serve in four years.

Good ways to use Twitter

Twitter is a micro blogging platform which allows you to publish short messages of less than 140 characters through different mediums like IM, cellphones and the web.

It has a social element as well, as it allows users to befriend and monitor each other’s messages or updates. So what you have here is a publishing tool that can be either public and private.

1. Personal Branding. Twitter is a social media platform you can use to build your personal brand. It has the primary benefit of developing a casual persona and establishes you as a social personality that is connected and approachable. As Twitter adoption increases, new users will be drawn towards well established Twitter personas.
2. Get Feedback. Need an alternative perspective on how a website looks or the right course of action to take? Blast out a message asking for advice and you’ll receive replies from other users. This collective intelligence can be used as fodder for articles or projects.
3. Hire People. Need a good logo designer, marketer or programmer? Send out a message asking for recommendations. This is a very quick and easy way to hire freelancers or even companies based on familiar recommendations.
4. Direct traffic. Twitter can be used to get traffic to your websites or the sites of friends. If you ask your friends to tweet about it, the message will spread faster and further as other active users pick it up. There is a viral nature to all types of news, even on a site like Twitter.
5. Read News. Twitter users often link to useful sites or articles and can be a source of scoops and alternative news. You can also subscribe to Twitter feeds for specific websites/conferences, which allows you to receive and view content quickly. This is very useful for active social news participants.
6. Make New Friends. Like any other social network, Twitter has a built-in function for you to befriend and track the messages of other users. This is an easy way for you connect with people outside of your usual circle. Make an effort to add active users you find interesting. A Twitter acquaintance can be developed into a long lasting friendship.
7. Network for benefits. Twitter can be used as a socializing platform for you to interact with other like-minded people, especially those in the same industry. It can be used to establish consistent and deeper relationships for future benefits such as testimonials or peer recommendations.
8. Use it as a ToDo list. Use Twitter to record down what you need to do while you are away from the computer. Mark the tweet as a favorite to file it for referencing. Another alternative is to use an Online task management service that is synced with Twitter. 
9. Business Management. Twitter can be used as a company intranet that connects employees to one another. Workers can liaise with each other when working on group projects. Particularly useful when certain workers go out often in the field. Updates could be set to private for security reasons.
10. Notify Your Customers. Set up a Twitter feed for the specific purpose of notifying customers when new products come in. Customers can subscribe via mobile or RSS for instant notification. Twitter can also be used to provide mini-updates for one-on-one clients.
11. Take Notes. Twitter provides you with an easy way to record important ideas or concepts you want to explore further. Include links relevant to ideas you want to explore. Note taking can also be done offline via mobile applications.
12. Event Updates. Businesses can use Twitter as a means to inform event participants and latest event happenings/changes. This is a hassle-free way of disseminating information, especially when you don’t have the means to set up a direct mobile link between you and the audience
13. Find Prospects. Twitter can be used as a means to find potential customers or clients online. Do a search for keywords related to your product on Twitter Search and then follow users. Tweet about topics parallel to your product and close prospects away from public channels by using direct messages or offline communications. Discretion and skill is needed in this area.
14. Provide Live coverage. Twitter’s message size limit prevents detailed coverage of events but it can allow you to provide real-time commentary which may help to spark further discussion or interest on the event as other Twitter users spread the message. Very useful for citizen journalism.
15. Time Management and Analysis. Twitter can simply be used to keep a detailed record of what you are doing every daily. This might be boring for others but this type of usage is useful when you want to analyze how you spend and manage your time.
16. Set Up Meetings. Twitter can help you organize impromptu meetups. For example, you can twitter a message while at a cafe, event or art gallery and arrange to meet fellow users at a specific spot. It’s an informal and casual way of arranging a meeting.
17. Acquire Votes. Send a link to your stories you’ve submitted in other social news sites like Digg. Sometimes your followers will vote up the stories because they agree with it. This allows you to acquire more support for your efforts on other social media websites.

Network Simulator (ns-2)

NS (version 2) is an object-oriented, discrete event driven network simulator developed at UC Berkely written in C++ and OTcl (Tcl script language with Object-oriented extensions). It implements network protocols such as TCP and UPD, traffic source behavior such as FTP, Telnet, Web, CBR and VBR, router queue management mechanism such as Drop Tail, RED and CBQ, routing algorithms such as Dijkstra, and more. NS also implements multicasting and some of the MAC layer protocols for LAN simulations. NS-2 includes a tool for viewing the simulation results, called NAM.

NAM is a Tcl/TK based animation tool for viewing network simulation traces and real world packet trace data. The first step to use nam is to produce the trace file. The trace file should contain topology information, e.g., nodes, links, as well as packet traces. Usually, the trace file is generated by NS. During an ns simulation, user can produce topology configurations, layout information, and packet traces using tracing events in ns.

When the trace file is generated, it is ready to be animated by NaM. Upon startup, NAM will read the trace file, create topology, pop up a window, do layout if necessary, then pause at the time of the first packet in the trace file. Through its user interface, NAM provides control over many aspects of animation.
Network simulator can be learnt here and here.

What a Google Wave Can Do?

It’s again Google; continue to win the hearts of their users. Google released a latest Messenger called Google Wave. Google Wave combines email and instant messages, enabling several users to edit documents in real time. Now Google Invites users to join the Google wave on trial basis. The search giant hopes the tool, described as “how e-mail would look if it were invented today”, will transform how people communicate online. It’s to 100,000 invitees, each of whom can invite five further people to “join the Wave”. Third party developers can use the code to build new apps.

Wave developer described it as a tool for communication and collaboration. Such functions include real-time typing. This means people can see a comment being written character by character and can answer a question before a fellow ‘Waver’ has even finished asking it. 


If you are unsure whether you want all your Wave friends to see exactly what you are writing, when you are writing it, the developers are working on a draft mode which will allow the real-time aspect to be switched off. Unlike traditional instant messenger (IM) conversations continue even once everyone has logged out. This means that those invited to a Wave conversation but not currently online, can read the message strand in full at a later date.


One of the best options in Wave is about sharing photos with wiki style editing tools. All messages can be edited at any point by members of the conversation and a Playback facility permit users to see exactly who has edited what and at what time. You may be known or not that Google, a famously collaborative firm, now writes all its design documents in Wave. Wave also makes it very easy to share photos; you can simply drag from the desktop onto the Wave platform. If you are planning a trip you can talk about it and plan it in Wave and then share all the photos at the end.

Get an Invitation by signing up here.

Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi)

Wi-Fi short for wireless fidelity refers to a set of wireless networking technologies and more specifically referred to as any type of 802.11 network. Wi-Fi is the wireless technology to handle the networking/communication. Wi-Fi allocates internet connection and to be transmitted by the radio waves. Radio waves are transmitted from antenna and Wi-Fi receivers pick them up. When a user receives the Wi-Fi signals, a wireless internet connection is produced and a user is prompted to provide the user name and password if required to establish a wireless connection.


Today the gap between a cell phone experience and Wi-Fi is huge. With a phone, it is usually safe to assume you have got a signal; with Wi-Fi it's almost always safe to assume you don't. Even in the presence of a hot spot (and there are few good ways to know you are, short of opening your laptop and "sniffing" for it), odds are you won't be able to log on, because it's either a private network or a commercial one that requires a subscription. Even places that advertise access, such as hotels and airports, often have it just in the lobby or at certain gates.

Why there is IPv6 news around!

What exactly is IPv6:
IPv6 or Internet Protocol Version 6 is the next generation protocol for the Internet. It is designed to provide several advantages over current Internet Protocol Version i.e. IPv4. Both IPv6 and IPv4 define network layer protocol i.e. data is sent from one computer to another computer over packet-switched networks for ex. through internet. IPv6 is also Data-oriented Protocol like IPv4.


Limitations of IPv4:
IPv4 is a 20 year old design and nobody anticipated the growth of the Internet. The current and projected size has exposed some design problems with IPv4.
There are several issues with IPv4:
1. Address Space Exhaustion: The recent exponential growth of the Internet is exhausting IPv4 address space. It supports only a fixed 32 bit field for addressing.


2. Address prefix allocation: Because of the way that IPv4 address prefixes have been and are currently allocated, Internet backbone routers are routinely required to maintain unreasonably large routing tables of over 85,000 specified routes. The current IPv4 Internet routing 
infrastructure is a combination of both flat and hierarchical routing.


3. Complexity of configuration: Most current IPv4 implementations must be either manually configured or use a stateful address configuration protocol such as Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). With more computers and devices using IP, there is a need for a simpler and more automatic configuration of addresses and other configuration settings that do not rely on the administration of a DHCP infrastructure.


4. Data security Issue: Private communication over a public medium like the Internet requires 
encryption services that protect the data being sent from being viewed or modified in transit. Although an add-on standard now exists for providing security for IPv4 packets (known as Internet Protocol Security or IPsec), this standard is optional and proprietary alternatives are commonly used.


5. Quality of Service (QoS): While standards for QoS exist for IPv4, no identification of packet flow for QoS handling by routers is present within the IPv4 header. Instead, real-time traffic support relies on the IPv4 Type of Service (ToS) field and the identification of the payload, typically using a UDP or TCP port. However, the IPv4 ToS field has limited functionality and payload identification using a TCP and UDP port is not possible when the IPv4 packet payload is encrypted.


IPv6 Address Space:
IPv6 addresses the main problem of IPv4, that is, the exhaustion of addresses to connect computers or host in a packet-switched network. IPv6 has a very large address space and consists of 128 bits as compared to 32 bits in IPv4. Therefore, it is now possible to support 2^128 (i.e. 3.4 × 10^{38 )unique IP addresses, a substantial increase in number of computers that can be addressed with the help of IPv6 addressing scheme.}


Features of IPv6:
1. New standardized header format
2. Larger address space
3. Multicast and anycast
4. Stateless address configuration
5. Built-in security
6. Better support for QoS
7. Extensibility

Useful Keyboard Shortcuts

CTRL+C (Copy) 

CTRL+X (Cut) 

CTRL+V (Paste) 

CTRL+Z (Undo) 

DELETE (Delete) 

SHIFT+DELETE (Delete the selected item permanently 

without placing the item in the Recycle Bin) 

CTRL while dragging an item (Copy the selected item) 

CTRL+SHIFT while dragging an item (Create a shortcut to the selected item) 

F2 key (Rename the selected item) 

CTRL+RIGHT ARROW (Move the insertion point to the beginning of the next word) 

CTRL+LEFT ARROW (Move the insertion point to the beginning of the previous word) 

CTRL+DOWN ARROW (Move the insertion point to the beginning of the next paragraph) 

CTRL+UP ARROW (Move the insertion point to the beginning of the previous paragraph) 

CTRL+SHIFT with any of the arrow keys (Highlight a block of text) 

SHIFT with any of the arrow keys 

(Select more than one item in a window or on the desktop, or select text in a document) 

CTRL+A (Select all) 

F3 key (Search for a file or a folder) 

ALT+ENTER (View the properties for the selected item) 

ALT+F4 (Close the active item, or quit the active program) 

ALT+ENTER (Display the properties of the selected object) 

ALT+SPACEBAR (Open the shortcut menu for the active window) 

CTRL+F4 (Close the active document in programs that enable 

you to have multiple documents open simultaneously) 

ALT+TAB (Switch between the open items) 

ALT+ESC (Cycle through items in the order that they had been opened) 

F6 key (Cycle through the screen elements in a window or on the desktop) 

F4 key (Display the Address bar list in My Computer or Windows Explorer) 

SHIFT+F10 (Display the shortcut menu for the selected item) 

ALT+SPACEBAR (Display the System menu for the active window) 

CTRL+ESC (Display the Start menu) 

ALT+Underlined letter in a menu name (Display the corresponding menu) 

F10 key (Activate the menu bar in the active program) 

RIGHT ARROW (Open the next menu to the right, or open a submenu) 

LEFT ARROW (Open the next menu to the left, or close a submenu) 

F5 key (Update the active window) 

BACKSPACE (View the folder one level up in My Computer or Windows Explorer) 

ESC (Cancel the current task) 

SHIFT when you insert a CD-ROM into the CD-ROM drive 

(Prevent the CD-ROM from automatically playing) 

Dialog Box Keyboard Shortcuts 

CTRL+TAB (Move forward through the tabs) 

CTRL+SHIFT+TAB (Move backward through the tabs) 

TAB (Move forward through the options) 

SHIFT+TAB (Move backward through the options) 

ALT+Underlined letter 

(Perform the corresponding command or select the corresponding option) 

ENTER (Perform the command for the active option or button) 

SPACEBAR (Select or clear the check box if the active option is a check box) 

Arrow keys (Select a button if the active option is a group of option buttons) 

F1 key (Display Help) 

F4 key (Display the items in the active list) 

BACKSPACE 

(Open a folder one level up if a folder is selected in the Save As or Open dialog box)

Microsoft Natural Keyboard Shortcuts 

Windows Logo (Display or hide the Start menu) 

Windows Logo+BREAK (Display the System Properties dialog box) 

Windows Logo+D (Display the desktop) 

Windows Logo+M (Minimize all of the windows) 

Windows Logo+SHIFT+M (Restore the minimized windows) 

Windows Logo+E (Open My Computer) 

Windows Logo+F (Search for a file or a folder) 

CTRL+Windows Logo+F (Search for computers) 

Windows Logo+F1 (Display Windows Help) 

Windows Logo+ L (Lock the keyboard) 

Windows Logo+R (Open the Run dialog box) 

Windows Logo+U (Open Utility Manager)