My new blog at sbin.cn

Due to the publicly known reasons, this blog at wordpress.com has been not accessible at China for a long time till last Spring festival (Feb.2006). It’s very difficult for me to update and manage this blog, while most of my readers from mainland can not read it since then. So I decide move it to a new site with good performance.

• New site URL: Http://sbin.cn/blog
• New site RSS: Http://feeds.feedburner.com/sbindotcn

Hope you guys can change your bookmark and RSS feeds. I am sorry for the unconvenience for this move. Thanks for the great pleasure WP community gave me.

What Hamachi brings?

Bill recommended one “new” application to me. That’s Hamachi. It gave me a very complicated feeling.

It’s a wonderful software application, which provides us a virtual LAN over Internet. It’s a typical overlay network application, which makes use of P2P technology and has the capability to tranverse the NAT/FW enterprise perimeter. Additionally, it brings us an interesting function – Web Proxy:

Built-in Web proxy
An option to use Hamachi as a simple web proxy. This way your Hamachi peers may configure their Web browsers to access the Internet via your computer and therefore protect their Web traffic while it is in transition between you and them.

This feature is typically used for securing Web surfing from untrusted locations including cybercafes, coffee houses, hotels, etc

Obviously, founders of Hamachi have learned the lesson from Skype. They has done a lot of effort to open their protocols and algorithm in the identity, authentication, and communications among system components. That will be a door-knocker to those enterprise IT managers, because there must be growing security and system management software to support Hamachi, as long as Hamachi’s installation get enough base. According to their website, Hamachi has over 3,000,000 users at June 17, while this number was merely 2,000,000 in April, growing 50% in two months.

It’s a wonderful remote collaboration tool, as well as a virtual networking platform, particularly in the current booming broadband world.

At the other hand, the overspreading of such kind of softwares (for others, see vnn.cn, softether.com) has been eroding and further eliminating the enterprises’ network perimeter, leading the compomise of security policy. It requires that firewalls and networking devices should support more and more layer-7 applications, in particular P2P overlay networking traffic. Morever, Traditional IDS and UTM won’t work in face of virtual LANs.

Let’s keep an eye on them together. See my comment in chinese.

VoIPsa Blog

Here is coming an eye-catching blog at VoIP security at VoIPsa Blog.

Will Net Neutrality come again?

See comment at Register, named "Net Neutrality bid gone for good" by Andrew.  A bunch of Internet giants expressed their discontent to Net Neutrality, for its mistiness and injustice. Andrew is hoping a "more coherent and professional fashion", and even "with better branding". The key point in my brain, for its possible recoming, is the benefit balance between transmission network (typically those tradional telcos) operators and CP/SPs. The latter would not like to let the former "tame" the Internet, but "foster".  

See the story by Andrew….

Incredible Skype censoreship by China

FT.com reports that "Skype says texts are censored by China" by Alison Maitland. It's incredible, both from technical and political aspects. I do believe it's a distorted story by western reporters. Every skypers can testify the lie and absurdness. It betrays the fact that the scepticism and bias to China are expanded from VoIP to text chat. See what he said at the below:

Skype, the fast-growing internet communications company that belongs to Ebay, has admitted that its partner in China has filtered text messages, defending this compliance with censorship laws as the only way to do business in the country. In a Financial Times interview, Niklas Zennström, Skype’s chief executive, responded to accusations that the company had censored text messages containing words like “Falun Gong” – a banned movement – and “Dalai Lama”. He said that Tom Online, its joint venture partner in China, was complying with local law.

“Tom had implemented a text filter, which is what everyone else in that market is doing,” said Mr Zennström. “Those are the regulations.”

He claimed that compliance with Chinese censorship was no different from obeying rules governing business in western countries. China, along with the US and Germany, is one of Skype’s three biggest markets in terms of active users of its free telephony service, which routes encrypted calls between computers via the internet.

Entering the controversy that has seen Yahoo, Google and Microsoft heavily criticised for working with China’s censorship rules, Mr Zennström said: “I may like or not like the laws and regulations to operate businesses in the UK or Germany or the US, but if I do business there I choose to comply with those laws and regulations. I can try to lobby to change them, but I need to comply with them. China in that way is not different.”

ISP Rise Against P2P Users

There are pungent comments, criticism, satire, etc to those ISPs and telecom operators on their blocking, filtering and even passive attitude to P2P, from all over the internet. However, from the stand of ISPs, they have a lot of broken-hearted story to tell to their subscribers, shareholders, and those regulatory authorities. It seems that the earth has been divided into two camps: one is P2P pros, one is the P2P cons. But who is the judge ?

See an absorbing discussion named ISP Rise Against P2P Users at slashdot.org. The below is some excerpt…

bananaendian writes “Spencer Kelly from BBC’s Click program writes about the emerging backslash against high bandwidth P2P users. Apparently it has been estimates that up to one third of internet’s traffic is caused by BitTorrent file-sharing program. Especially ISPs who are leasing their bandwidth by the megabyte are more inclined to resort to ‘shaping your traffic’ by throttling ports, setting bandwidth limits or even classifying accounts according services used. What is your ISPs policy regarding P2P and is it fair for them to put restrictions and conditions on its use.”

ISP: Backslash
P2P: Forward slash. Riposte.
ISP: Touche. QOS Packet Filtering!
P2P. Lunge. Encryption!
ISP: En guard. Subpoena compliance.
P2P: Aahaaah! Ubiquitous Mesh Networks.
ISP: Arrrgh! [dies].

Where is BadAnalogyGuy when you need him?
—
Hello, Dad? I’m in jail.

First lawsuit on P2P infringing on copyrights at China

The first lawsuit on copyrights infringing by P2P software at mainland, China, was reported yesterday.

Kuro is a web site company providing music share services with their P2P based software. According to its website logo, it provides downloading and sharing of more than half a million MP3 pop songs and other music, using a software named Kuro, which is reported to be developed by a Taiwan software company.

A music and culture company at Shanghai, Busheng, claimed that Kuro illegally spreads up to 59 songs, owned by them, without any payment and even notification.

P2P is a sort of excellent technical model to allow mass file downloading and sharing. The number of P2P based applications is keep a rocket growth, along with strong law dissention. A couple of countries are legislating to regulate the development and application of P2P sharing and downloading. In greater China region, first law suit on BT (the most famous file sharing software based P2P) was reported at HongKong at last year, where the defendants were sentenced guilty and put into prison for 3 months.

Although the P2P sharing companies are often harassed by legal issues, but nobody would like to overlook their potentials to impact the Internet. A recent acquisition report of VeryCD by Google betrayed the background business value of such P2P sharing platforms. VeryCD is the central government of the new-rich P2P sharing platform – eMule, where you can find numerous movies, songs, books, and other electronic media, sharing by those millions of eMulers.

IM reviews at IM Watch

There are flooding IM clients waiting for your choice, isn't it? But which one do you like? which one fit your interests the best? I believe you must not have time to review them on by one. In fact, even if you have time, you just won't like to do that. 🙂

IM Watch is doing that for you. It lists out and reviews almost each one you have heard of, (except the most popular one at China – QQ of Tecent,) covering Gtalk, Skype, GAIM, AIM, Unyte, Gizmo Project, Chatzilla, Psi, PhoneGaim, Yahoo Messenger, …..

For a more comprehansive collection of various IM clients, see Betanews.