When DARPA came up with the idea of an interlinked network of computers, the whole reasoning behind it was that a Soviet attack on one part of the system should not prevent communication. Now governments are putting themselves into the Soviet commander’s seats to play war games. Tecnobitsdeclares, we’ll be the Russians.

When an earthquake ruptured the main physical connection between Taiwan and the rest of the world, it was a bad day for BIOS downloaders. Any connection to Taiwan’s main technology companies dropped to a trickle almost instantly.

But there was a trickle.

Right now, the war against piracy over the web is at a critical stage, with governments press-ganging ISPs into the fight (often against their will, with court orders and the like) – determined to cut off the supply of TV shows, films and music that some people get for free.

But the internet, by its very nature, is all about ‘resilience’. It’s all about ‘OK, so there is a block here, no problem, I will route around it’.  And with modern networks/data transmission rates, it’s not like the Taiwan cable rupture – because the ‘fall back’ networks are also amazingly fast.

So what happens next?

Well, first up, it seems that Pirate Bay has declared itself to be some kind of political party, standing for various rights and freedoms. Tecnobitsis no legal expert, but that has to create some new challenges/tensions/difficulties for the governments that wish to battle the pirates.

The first of these is that, it seems, in most of these legal hearings in Holland, the loser would have some kind of right to lodge a statement. That looks to have been denied to Pirate Bay – but maybe as a political party, they would have more rights and it would be illegal to censure their speech in most countries outside of North Korea, Saudi Arabia and <insert name of your favourite dictatorship here>.

What also seems clear is that if Pirate Bay had been allowed to broadcast a message to the world, then it would have started with “Oh, by the way, here’s the fastest way around the block” and the court would have been obliged to print those instructions.

If we use a real world analogy, a government has decided that Scotland is an illegal place to visit – and it has shut the main motorway. However, there are several ‘A roads’ which allow you to drive to Scotland and back quite quickly. The court has decided that publishing an alternative map to Scotland is not legal. They have not managed to nuke Scotland, just trying to block people in England from knowing that you can drive there – in the hope that English people will, instead, visit Scottish stores (run by the UK government) and buy ‘approved’ Scottish products’.

The truth is that people who wanted to buy ‘Scottish goods’ would have already been getting them from the most conveniently located store – and those who were making the trip to Scotland and back had no intention of buying locally anyway – so it’s hard to know if this is a genuine win.

In fact, there is a strong argument to say that it was the constant influx of Scottish goods – from Scotland – that encouraged locals to buy more from the government-approved Scottish shops.

OK, we has stretched that analogy to breaking point – so we’ll leave it there.

Pirate Bay rebrands as a political party, Queen Elizabeth and her love of piracy – alongside a dubious graphic for the copyright defenders people (who 'borrowed' the design in the middle – ooops)

Comment below or in the Tecnobitsforums.

This week, the Citrix Synergy conference is going on in San Francisco, with lots of news related to Citrix’s CloudStack strategy coming out, and more. Through today, Friday, you can still access live keynotes and sessions from the conference, available by webcast here. Here is a roundup of some of the major news out of Citrix Synergy.

Citrix announced the launch of Citrix CloudPlatform, the first commercially supported cloud orchestration system based on Apache CloudStack. With the new commercial release, Citrix says "customers can quickly and easily evolve virtualized datacenter resources to automated, elastic, self-service IT delivery models."

Last month, Citrix submitted its CloudStack platform to the Apache Software Foundation, and, with support from over 50 key ecosystem partners, the Apache Software Foundation accepted CloudStack into its a major battle with OpenStack on the open source cloud computing scene. 

In conjunction with the conference, Citrix has also launched Project Avalon, discussed here.  Project Avalon enables windows desktops and windows applications to be delivered as cloud services, which can help give Citrix’s cloud platform an inroad into appealing to many enterprises. Citrix’s post on Project Avalon notes that it has “taken major engineering efforts to transform the XenDesktop product, which was designed to run on enterprise virtualization architecture, to work seamlessly on Apache CloudStack and Amazon Web Services.” Project Avalon is a big, Windows-focused bet on virtualization and the cloud.

At the conference, Citrix is also swe covered here. Citrix is positioning Podio as a new part of its GoTo line of products, which includes GoToMeeting, and if you consider Podio alongside both GoToMeeting and CloudStack, it becomes clear that Citrix has its eye on end-to-end cloud platform tools, including approachable front-end applications. While Podio isn’t open source, its freemium model and user-configurable cloud collaboration environments have an open and flexible ethos to them. There is a good discussion of this week’s Podio demos here.

With all of Citrix’s CloudStack moves, it’s becoming clear that CloudStack will do direct battle with OpenStack, but we’ve noted that there is room for both of these open source cloud platforms.  We’ve covered Citrix’s decision to cut its support for the open source OpenStack cloud computing platform and move full steam ahead with the next phase of its CloudStack strategy. Both OpenStack and CloudStack have many big backers, so it’s natural that these two platforms are being characterized as engaged in a high-profile fight.

The ReadWriteCloud Channel extrapolated on the notion that multiple cloud platforms can succeed in an excellent point in a post titled "It’s Not Highlander: There Can Be More Than One Open Source Cloud":

"Assuming even one-third of the companies that pledged to support CloudStack become serious contributors, CloudStack should have a bright future. It takes little away from OpenStack for CloudStack to succeed…After all the dust settles, it would be best for everyone from the open source cloud communities to figure out how they can work together. The "there can be only one" approach isn’t going to help anybody, and may benefit Amazon, VMware and other proprietary vendors who can market their wares without any drama."

We’ll round up more news from Citrix Synergy, but through the end of today, you can still catch the free webcasts of events from the conference.

Changes are a-coming to chkdsk and NTFS health in Windows 8, and unlike the controversial Metro interface, these tweaks should make everyone happy. As hard drives get bigger, the Windows 7 chkdsk times get longer (and longer, and longer…) when hard disk errors occur, as infrequent as they are. In a worse-case scenario, attempting to boot a corrupt drive can take hours. The new system changes all that.

The Windows 8 improvements will let NTFS try to identify corruptions on-the-fly and make an instant fix in the background, no usage interruptions required. If that doesn’t work, Windows 8 will conduct a “spot verification scan” to determine if the corruption is genuine or just a brief memory glitch.

Genuine errors will be reported to the user and the OS will start scan the system during idle CPU/storage times and log the location of the problems. When the scan is done, Windows 8 will prompt the user to reboot the PC at his convenience. Chkdsk will then use the information NTFS logged about the errors to fix the corruptions quickly.

“The restart is quick (adding just a few additional seconds) and the PC is returned to a healthy state,” core manager Kim Bangalore writes on the Building Windows 8 blog. Hopefully it really is that quick and simple! For all the nitty gritty details and a helpful FAQ, hit the link.

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It’s all well and good giving a shout out to a new software update that will touch the lives of millions, but how certain can we be that our lives will actually improve after the time-consuming effort of updating an iPad or sumsuch?  Tecnobitsoptimistically plugs an iPad 3 into a USB 3 port, hoping that things might go quicker.

While the iPad 2 seemed as solid as a rock from the day it arrived, we have to say that there have been times with the iPad 3 when ‘your window just disappears’. You’re doing something one second and the next, it’s gone.

Microsoft users roll with these punches – it takes more than randomly ending browser windows before we get psyched. That said, once you do lock yourself into the locked down world of the Apple-ites, you sort of expect things to work.

Cue Apple iOS 5.1.1

According to Apple’s own site, users have been suffering from a number of afflictions, including (but not limited to) the following (with solutions):-

• Improves reliability of using HDR option for photos taken using the Lock Screen shortcut
• Addresses bugs that could prevent the new iPad from switching between 2G and 3G networks
• Fixes bugs that affected AirPlay video playback in some circumstances
• Improved reliability for syncing Safari bookmarks and Reading List
• Fixes an issue where ‘Unable to purchase’ alert could be displayed after successful purchase

The update takes a while, so it’s nice to get the ‘things seem OK’ message at the end.

The main security issues fixed with Safari/WebKit are described as follows:-

Safari
Available for: iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch (3rd generation) and later, iPad, iPad 2
Impact: A maliciously crafted website may be able to spoof the address in the location bar
Description: A URL spoofing issue existed in Safari. This could be used in a malicious web site to direct the user to a spoofed site that visually appeared to be a legitimate domain. This issue is addressed through improved URL handling. This issue does not affect OS X systems.

WebKit
Impact: Visiting a maliciously crafted website may lead to a cross-site scripting attack
Description: Multiple cross-site scripting issues existed in WebKit.
Impact: Visiting a maliciously crafted website may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution
Description: A memory corruption issue existed in WebKit.

Being protected from all of these evils is certainly a good thing. What’s less good is the speed with which ‘issues’ with iOS 5.1.1. are posted – almost as soon as anyone has had a chance to install the update.

One quick glance through Google and the most common seem to centre on things like synchronisation and battery life.

You'd need to research the issues for yourself to assess their veracity, but the idea of Apple being 100% stable is just not true – so we would recommend that you do a little research and a lot of backing up before you press 'go'

Comment below or in the Tecnobitsforums.

Following years of rumors saying that Google would launch a cloud-based storage service to compete with players such as Dropbox, Google did indeed introduce Google Drive in late April. You can to fill a gap in google’s Chrome OS.

As we’ve reported before, with Chrome OS, Google bet heavily on the idea that consumers and business users would have no problem storing data and using applications in the cloud, without working on the locally stored data/applications model that most people are used to. Now, there are clear signs that Google Drive is going to be the stopgap that solves this Chrome OS problem.

In a recent post, I wrote:

"Google could create useful synergies between a new cloud-based storage service and Chrome OS, and there might even be room to give people storage incentives in the cloud if they choose Chrome OS. That kind of incentive might entice some businesses to adopt Chromebooks and Google’s operating system.The price-per-gigabyte of storage has been dropping for many years, and it now represents a way that Google could spend very little to offer free incentives to adopt Chrome OS."

Sure enough, Sundar Pichai, the Googler who manages development of Chrome OS as well as the Google Apps online services, has confirmed that Google will closely integrateGoogle Drive online storage with an upcoming version of the Chrome OS operating system. Wired reports this:

"Basically, Google Drive — a service that operates on the web — will perform as if it was the local file system. If you open the ‘save file’ dialog box on Chrome OS, for instance, the system will take you straight to Google Drive. “We’ll…effectively integrate [Google] Drive into the native file system of Chrome OS,” says Scott Johnson, Google’s Google Drive product manager. “All the core OS functionality will use [Google] Drive as a place to store data — if that’s what you opt in to.”

Many people who have written Chromebooks off, and many people who think Google Drive is just an entertainment play, should take note of this. Think about it. One of the barriers to adoption for Chrome OS so far has been that it is not designed to work with locally stored data and apps. Instead, it concentrates everything on the cloud. But with Google Drive, users have a free and obvious way–and a way provided by Google–to marry storage, data and applications with use of Google’s operating system.

f systems running Chrome OS start to come with large amounts of free Google Drive storage as an incentive to use the operating system, some enterprises might bite simply because Google would be providing them an end-to-end cloud computing solution: the OS, the storage, the cloud-based applications (Google Docs) and the tight security that Chrome OS is known for and that enterprises demand. 

Look for Google’s next play to be offering incentives to enterprises for lots of free cloud storage via Google Drive if they choose to adopt Chromebooks. It’s a shrewd way in the door to enterprises, where Microsoft still has such dominant market share.