in brief The iPhone isn’t even here yet, but a newly revealed patent filing could shed light on Apple’s next move.
Unwired View published an illustration of what an iPod Nano would look like — based on the filing — with a touch screen on the back of the player.
The touch screen interface is similar to the iPhone, with a QWERTY keyboard and phone pad dialer as options that can be brought to the surface.
in brief Networking vendor Linksys has named Craig Gledhill as vice president for Asia-Pacific.
Based in Singapore, Gledhill will start in early August. In the newly created role, he will be responsible for strategy, execution and expansion across Asia-Pacific, focusing on growing the company’s consumer and small business segments, Linksys said in a statement.
Gledhill joins Linksys with more than 16 years experience in IT and was previously managing director of Singapore and Brunei for parent company, Cisco.
Meanwhile, Cisco Australia yesterday announced management changes with vice president Ross Fowler moving to its European operations. Les Williamson, client director for Cisco’s Telstra business, will replace Fowler.
update A senior Coles executive has been selected to replace Soo Kee Ng as Optus’s chief information officer.
Lawrie Turner (pic), general manager for Retail Systems at the Coles Group, will assume the CIO position on August 6.
In an e-mail distributed to employees yesterday, and seen by ZDNet Australia, Optus chief executive Paul O’Sullivan said: “Lawrie has over 15 years experience in senior IT management and has worked for major Australian and US companies across the retail (David Jones), airline (Qantas) and travel industries.”
O’Sullivan expressed confidence Turner’s leadership will ensure the IT team is focused on helping Optus deliver on its vision to “lead Australia in outstanding customer experience by 2010″.
“Lawrie has a strong track record of leading change in a variety of environments and has extensive experience with real-time, mission critical systems,” he added.
Last month, ZDNet Australia reported on the departure of Ng from SingTel-owned Optus, after a three-year stint in the role.
Ng heads home to Singapore where he will lead SingTel’s local IT operations. O’Sullivan, in his e-mail, thanked Ng for his contribution to the team, saying “we wish Soo Kee well in his new role as CIO for our Singapore business”.
Although there is precious little evidence of VoIP security attacks, organisations cannot afford to be complacent. Make no mistake, VoIP is an attractive target for hackers and malware writers.
To demonstrate the potential danger that enterprises with unsecured VoIP systems face, the Voice over IP Security Association (Voipsa) has published a list of publicly available tools that target VoIP applications. There are signs hackers are now turning their attention to voice over IP and most security commentators believe the first major attacks will occur over the next six to 12 months.
This means all enterprises need to ensure their VoIP infrastructure is protected, although this needn’t be an onerous undertaking.
The simple fact that VoIP now typically comes under the aegis of the IT department should in fact help security. Although running proprietary operating systems, PBXs were in fact open to a large range of security attacks. It was generally just a little harder to access and required specialised knowledge.
While VoIP has increased the number of people able to exploit a corporate phone system, the tools and expertise to protect the technology have also been improved.
VLANs
The first step for VoIP security is to follow data networking best practice. Ovum analyst Graham Titterington says: “Most security in VoIP is a question of good network security and housekeeping.”
Enterprises should deploy the voice traffic on a separate virtual LAN, or VLAN, from the data traffic. This helps protect the voice service if there is a denial of service attack on the data network.
Chris Whitwood, network manager at University College Falmouth, which has deployed IP telephony, says: “Denial of service is a particular problem for VoIP as it can completely destroy your telephony service. To protect against this, enterprises need to use security such as intrusion prevention systems and have a well-segmented network using VLANs.”
VLANs need to be properly architected to prevent packets jumping from one VLAN to the other. However, even if they are, hacking tools are available that can make packets do just that. Additional tools that will help networks in case of any attack are intrusion detection and prevention systems, which scan for rogue incoming packets, and straightforward antivirus software which can help prevent any known threats from disrupting the network.
Another best practice that needs to be extended to voice is changing the default passwords of all of the components of the system. Phones, for example, can become vulnerable if their passwords are not changed as they offer many points of entry for hackers. In addition, companies should remove all unnecessary applications from VoIP systems such as telnet and web servers. Many IP phones have web servers installed, so that configuration can be managed from a PC screen, however this leaves them exposed to the Internet.
Patching is another key security chore. Because VoIP is now just another application that runs on a commercial operating system, it needs to be patched regularly along with the rest of the IT estate. Ken Munro, managing director of penetration testing company SecureTest, says: “Enterprises need to make sure that all of the firmware of the VoIP system is up-to-date. They need to have a rigorous patching regime as new vulnerabilities are found in VoIP systems every few days.”
Encryption
While there is some debate about the threat level that eavesdropping poses to VoIP, companies should consider using encryption to secure their VoIP calls. Encryption should definitely be used where there is any risk of eavesdropping such as wireless networks or remote users. Some security experts even suggest encryption is used throughout the network.
Dan York, director of IP technology at PBX manufacturer Mitel and director at Voipsa, says: “The best encryption for VoIP is secureRTP, which does not have much of a processing overhead. It is a lightweight encryption method and would be ideal in smaller businesses with fewer than 1,000 users.” SecureRTP uses high-strength encryption and is used by a number of VoIP application vendors.
Remote users require an additional layer of security as they will need to traverse the firewall. One approach is to use an IPSec (Internet Protocol security) VPN but the processing overhead can impact on the quality of the voice service. Alternatively it’s possible to use SSL technology to help tunnel through the firewall and access the VoIP system - an option that has much less impact on the call quality.
University College Falmouth’s Whitwood says: “There are always concerns that conversations of remote workers could be intercepted. To prevent this we create a VPN tunnel between the user and the VoIP servers. For users to gain access to the telephony system they would need to use this VPN because it is not accessible from the outside world.”
Finally, in order to make sure all the good work in securing the network does not go to waste, organisations need to enforce a user-security policy that encompasses voice over IP. This needs to spell out in clear terms what responsibilities users have - for example, in keeping their passwords secret - and what applications they can download.
Adhering to a clear security policy should help prevent users from falling victim to phishing scams and other social engineering that can bypass all of the security measures enterprises put in place.
Advanced Micro Devices is coming out with its own Centrino. The US-based chipmaker is prepping an energy-efficient notebook chip, code-named Griffin, as well as a platform based around Griffin called Puma, (similar to Intel’s Centrino) that will likely allow AMD to better compete in the rapidly growing notebook market.
Griffin will go into mass production toward the end of the year and Puma-based notebooks sporting the chips will hit in mid-2008, according to AMD Fellow Maurice Steinman.
Intel has produced chips sporting architectures optimised for notebooks since 2003 and has come out with new versions at a somewhat regular pace. Partly as a result, Intel has maintained a larger market share in laptops over AMD than in other markets.
After Griffin’s release, AMD will follow with Fusion, a chip that integrates graphics into the processor core in 2009, he said. Fusion will first appear in notebooks. (Last year, AMD said Fusion would come out in 2008 or 2009.)
Griffin is AMD’s first chip specifically designed for notebooks, said Steinman. AMD sells chips tweaked for notebooks now, but these products are effectively just more power-efficient versions of the other chips AMD sells into other markets.
“If you look at our current offerings, it’s really the same basic micro-architecture being offered in notebooks, servers and desktops,” he said.
By adopting a new architecture, the company says it can cut power consumption further without worrying as much about making changes that might affect how the architecture works in the server world, for instance.
In Griffin, for instance, the two processing cores and the integrated memory controller — which shuttles data back and forth between the processing cores and memory — are all on separate power planes. By separating all of these subcomponents in Griffin onto different planes, two can go into deep sleep states while the last one continues to work. The memory controller can also operate at a lower voltage.
In Barcelona, an upcoming four-core server chip from AMD, the memory controller is on a separate power plane, but the four cores are all on the same voltage plane, he said. Power consumption is important in servers, but not to the same degree as with notebooks, noted Steinman.
Griffin will also be able to drop to slower speeds when full performance isn’t needed. Currently, AMD chips can drop to 800 megahertz. The cores in Griffin, independent of each other, will be able to drop to one-eighth the chip’s stated speed. Thus, if it’s a 2.4GHz chip, a single core will be able to drop to 300MHz to conserve power.
“You can get some real work done at those lower frequencies,” he said.
In another twist, Griffin will be able to shut down lanes inside of the HyperTransport 3 links connecting different processors, when not in use, he said. These power savings techniques will largely be controlled by the CPU and the chipset, he said, and will be independent and above any power management techniques implemented by the operating system.
Griffin, though, won’t be able to accommodate as much memory as a server chip, Steinman said. He didn’t specify how much less, but said the chip was designed for notebook-size memory loads, not the massive amounts of memory servers can require. Again, this architectural difference saves power.
The chip will initially come out on the 65-nanometer process. Each core will contain a 1MB cache.
Puma, meanwhile, will continue the power management theme by coming with a feature, called PowerXpress that shuts off the discreet graphics processor in notebooks when they are running on batteries. In the unplugged mode, notebooks will run on the graphics capabilities in the chipset.
Most notebooks, Steinman conceded, actually don’t come with a discreet graphics chip, but it will save power for those that do.
Puma, though, may raise some diplomatic problems for AMD. For years, the company has carped about Centrino, claiming that it locked notebook makers and consumers into an all-Intel world. In the meantime, AMD bought chipset and graphics maker ATI Technologies. As Centrino is all-Intel, Puma is an all-AMD solution.
AMD signaled it would start to move toward platforms last year.
In 2003, Intel came out with Centrino, a notebook platform designed around the then new Pentium M. The Pentium M relied on a different architecture than other Intel chips at the time and consumed substantially less power.
Centrino also came with Wi-Fi chips, rare then, and the notebooks were tuned to ensure they would work with public hot spots. Sales zoomed and the success helped spur Wi-Fi adoption.