For a long time now it has been said that Apple will open up their MobileMe platform to compete against Google’s free to use SaaS Products (GMail, GDocs, etc.). With Amazon’s Recent push into their mp3 cloud player and the huge market share that iTunes holds, it makes sense that the MobileMe product will soon interact with iTunes and users will be able to store their music in some sort of online HD, However the question about how Apple can charge users to stream music they already own lingers.
More will be revealed when Apple officially announces the service. The cost is going to be an interesting contributing factor. At the moment, MobileMe costs $99 a year per subscription.
With storage moving to a cloud service, the need to huge hard drives will start to diminish. Once content is stored remotely, Apple’s iPad will take on a whole new importance.
Steve Jobs will officially announce iCloud at 10am June 6 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.
After a relatively long road traveled with a few bumps along the way, as of yesterday, Linus’s mainline tree (2.6.39+) contains literally every component needed for Linux to run both as a management domain kernel(Dom0) and a guest(DomU).
Xen has always used Linux as the management OS (Dom0) on top of the hypervisor itself, to do the device management and control of the virtual machines running on top of Xen. And for many years, next to the hypervisor, there was a substantial linux kernel patch that had to be applied on top of a linux kernel to transform into this “Dom0″. This code had to constantly be kept in sync with the progress Linux itself was making and as such caused a substantial amount of extra work that had to be done.
Another bit of code, that’s been in the kernel for many years, were the paravirt drivers for xen in a guest VM (DomU). Linux has had this as part of the codebase for quite a few years, the xen network, block and xenbus drivers that are loaded when you run a hardware virtualized guest (hvm) on Xen with paravirt (pv) drivers. This is always referred to as pv-hvm.
A pure hardware virtualized kernel without any xen drivers, just emulated qemu devices is just simply called an “hvm guest”. This does not perform well as any type of network or block IO goes through many layers of emulation. As hardware virtualization has improved over the years in the chips, pv-hvm has become performant and is frequently used. The pv-drivers basically are highly optimized virtual devices that communicate through the hypervisor to do network or disk io, handled behind the scenes by the Dom0 kernel and what is called backend devices (netbk, blockbk).
A pure paravirtualized guest is/was an OS kernel that was totally modified to really be in sync with the hypervisor and let the hypervisor take care or own a number of tasks to be as optimized as possible. Performance and integration is the best with a paravirtualized kernel and this also allowed xen to run on x86 hardware, optimally, without hardware virtualization instruction support – this is referred to as pv-guest. The Dom0 kernel runs in pv mode (more on this later) and the DomU guests could run in hvm, pv-hvm or pv mode.
Over the years, a number of efforts were made to get these pv / dom0 patches submitted into the mainline kernel but at times the code was not considered acceptable by a number of the linux kernel maintainers and little progress was made. Over the last 2 years a renewed effort started to really convert the code into patches considerd acceptable and a set of people : Jeremy Fitzhardinge, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk, Ian Campbell , Stefano Stabellini (and others not mentioned but obviously also important) focused on getting this stuff done once and for all… and so.. bit by bit. code was rewritten submitted for review, rewritten again until it was considered ok. In terms of timeline, a good chunk of code has gone in over time to handle Linux as a well behaved guest (DomU) first, then followed by all the work to make the Dom0 happy as well.
One change that happened in the Linux kernel to be able to better handle such an infrastructure in a virtual world for more than one hypervisor, was called pvops.
pvops, is a mode where the kernel can switch into pv, hvm or pvhvm at boot time. Instead of having multiple kernel binaries, there is just one and it will lay out its operations at boot time when it detects on what platform it runs. Linux as a DomU guest on Xen has had pvops support since 2.6.23/24 with good use starting around 2.6.27. So the frontend network and block drivers and running pvops on xen has been around also for quite some time. As this finalized the work focused more on preparing the Dom0 parts of integration and a migration from the old classical pure pv kernel mode to what’s now called pvops.
Late last year in 2.6.37, we had a mainline kernel that was able to actually run as the “Dom0″ for the Xen hypervisor. That was a big step, followed shortly by adding the remaining bits that were needed to really handle every area : memory management, grant table stuff, network pv driver backend and block pv driver backend code (and other misc components). The last remaining driver just got merged 2 days ago into 2.6.39+ mainline – the block backend driver blkback.
Google’s new movie rental service will not work on Android devices where the user has gained root file permissions (otherwise known as “rooting”). Instead, users will receive an error message when trying to rent movies. We can the hear the grinding of hacker teeth as we write this.
Google Android
Blog Android Central heard it straight from the horse’s mouth, with Google passing on the message that it will block such devices “due to requirements related to copyright protection”. This is being interpreted as pressure from the licence owners — the movie studios — who feel that owners of rooted devices pose a greater risk to their intellectual property. It’s also worth noting that the movie rental service is only available in the US for now, and that an Australian release would require new licence negotiations. There’s a slim chance that this could result in a more hacker-friendly result down under.
Many will argue that this move is another dent in Google’s claim of the openness of Android, but blaming Google feels like shooting the messenger. If Google really wanted to stamp out user exploits, it could go a lot further with stronger deterrents, like blocking users from the Market or other core services.
A little over a year ago, Twitter purchased the most successful iPhone application for using the mini-messaging social networking service, Tweetie. Twitter took that product, made it free and hasn’t really looked back since. Now, it plans to do the same with the popular TweetDeck application.
TweetDeck is more widespread, as it runs as a desktop app via Adobe Air, on Google Chrome as a Web app, an iOS app and on Android. But the long and short of it is, Twitter now has its bases covered for ways to interact with the core service in all arenas.
The deal, which has been speculated on for some months as one of the more straightforward moves that Twitter could make, is for around US$ 40 million and takes TweetDeck off the table as other companies were interested in buying.
The British-based TweetDeck team is currently touting TweetDeck 2.0 for iPhone and will probably keep on churning out the goods for their new masters. The app, for those out of the loop, helps create columns of topics that users can keep an eye on, an approach not unique to TweetDeck, but it is often the most mentioned.
Well, Internet censorship in Australia has unofficially commenced.
To give some background, I’ve been a (reasonably) happy TPG customer for a number of years, That is until it rains, or for any number of reasons I have to call TPG tech support and sit on hold for 2 hours only to get connected to some idiot that’s sitting offshore in some call center reading from a pre-written script, telling me that I need to buy a new modem or install some sort of microsoft service pack on my mac..
Why do did I like TPG? It’s cheap and has no capped data allowance (for the particular plan that I’m on). This was before they restricted all of my access to port 80 of my favourite creative commons index, ThePirateBay.
And before you start saying that it’s my stupid self or my router or my firewall.. I’m not an idiot and I am probably more experienced at diagnosing network problems than the average Joe, having worked in the Datacenter & Hosting industry for many years now.
Here is an nmap scan from my laptop of thepiratebay.org’s resolving IP at this time:
JaekBook-Pro:~ jake$ nmap -P0 194.71.107.15
Starting Nmap 5.21 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2011-05-23 22:44 EST
Nmap scan report for thepiratebay.org (194.71.107.15)
Host is up.
All 1000 scanned ports on thepiratebay.org (194.71.107.15) are filtered
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 207.79 seconds
That’s a bit odd, no ports appear to be unfiltered and open? Let’s try telnet’ing to TPB’s IP from my linux box (not my laptop) at home:
[root@nugget ~]# telnet 194.71.107.15 80
Trying 194.71.107.15...
GET / HTTP/1.1
telnet: connect to address 194.71.107.15: Connection timed out
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection timed out
And to confirm there’s no firewalls on that box:
[root@nugget ~]# iptables -nvL
Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination
Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination
Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination
And just to ensure that I’m not going crazy, Here’s a test from my (Australian hosted) VPS, telnet’ing to the same IP:
From Hosted-VPS (AU)
-bash-3.2# telnet 194.71.107.15 80
Trying 194.71.107.15...
Connected to 194.71.107.15.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.1
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 349
Connection: close
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 12:33:21 GMT
Server: lighttpd
Now seriously.. Was the downloading and seeding of the high definition copy of “The Tunnel” enough to permit my ISP to censor my access to particular URLs? I hope not. You would think that some sort of speed shaping would be introduced… right? Or maybe a phone call to ask if my usage could be reduced.
What makes this a slight bit amusing, only because I know they’re idiots, is that even though access to the website is censored, I can still access the actual trackers. Additionally, I can still bounce my connection through any number of servers or proxies on the internet and download the creative commons & open source .torrent files I need.
The BackTrack Dev team has worked furiously in the past months on BackTrack 5, code name “revolution” – they released it on May 10th. This new revision has been built from scratch, and boasts several major improvements over all our previous releases. It’s based on Ubuntu LucidLTS – Kernel 2.6.38, patched with all relevant wireless injection patches. Fully open source and GPL compliant.
The HDCP Encryption/Decryption code was released and already there is an open source tool available that can encrypt or decrypt your blueray discs. I’m hosting it here (Safe, tested).
Download the archive, fire up your terminal and extract the contents to a folder, get in that directory and issue the ‘make’ command to quickly compile yourself a working executable.
To test the tool: ./hdcp -t
(If there is any “!” in the output, then there was an error)
To benchmark your computer: ./hdcp -S
I have a macbook pro i7 @ 2.66Ghz and i scored 242 640×480 Frames/second – Post your results in the comments.
The HDCP cipher is designed to be efficient when implemented in hardware, but it is terribly inefficient in software, primarily because it makes extensive use of bit operations. This implementation uses bit-slicing to achieve high speeds by exploiting bit-level parallelism. The developers of this software have created a few high-level routines to make it as easy as possible to implement HDCP.
Decryption of 1080p content is about 7x slower but decryption can be parallelized across multiple cores, so a high-end 64-bit CPU should be able to decrypt 30fps 1080p content using two cores and about 1.6GB of RAM.
If you’ve tried to download Oracle 10g express database (or any oracle rpm) from their website using wget, you’ve probably hit a bit of a brick wall that looks like an oracle login page. Then, when you try to wget using the link to the rpm you’ve also been unsuccessful. So, Here’s your solution:
Having a ball playing around with the just-released GoogleCL tool, which offers command line access to Google Calendar, contacts, Docs, Picasa, Blogger, and YouTube. With Python-based GoogleCL installed, you can do things such as list today’s events on your GCal right in the terminal, like so:
$ google calendar today title
Coffee with Michael and Samir
Dozing off
Lunch at Flingers
Instant use case: Add echo “Next 24 hours:”;google calendar today title to your ~/.bash_profile file to see what you’ve got scheduled for the day when you launch a new Terminal window. Some more GoogleCL fun inside.
If you just type google at the command line, you launch an interactive terminal that lets you try all the various commands. In the interactive terminal, type command-name help to see its options, like help calendar.
Each command has several parameters that aren’t immediately apparent. For example, in calendar, you can omit the long and hairy event URL by using the title parameter. You can list events for a particular day using the data parameter (–date 2010-06-16), and you can get events from a particular calendar and by keyword search term.
For example, to see all my trips to Melbourne on my Work calendar, I’d use the command:
$ google calendar list --cal Work --query Melbourne
Remember the beauty of the command line: you can easily chain commands together with the pipe, so you can sed, awk, and grep output to your heart’s content, and then write it to a file if needed, using >. Before I discovered the title parameter on the calendar command, I was planning to use sed to filter out the calendar URLs from the output. (Thanks to lightening-fastsed and awk experts on Twitter, I was prepared to do just that.)
While I’ve mostly only played with calendar, the Docs access is pretty useful, too. With it, you could easily schedule cron’ed backups of your Google Docs, or push data into a new doc on a regular basis. Same deal with Picasa and YouTube. I like the idea of cron’ing a job that backs up my Google contacts to a CSV file on my local computer weekly, too. I don’t see myself ever blogging from the command line, but it’s neat that you can.
When installing I had an issue when running the google command, There was some python errors followed by:
