The Insider News

Xconomy[^]:

The Internet may be hurtling toward collapse under the strain of too much traffic. But PARC research fellow Van Jacobson thinks he knows how to fix it. He’s done it before. Back in the mid-1980s, when the Internet was seeing its first modest surge in usage, Jacobson noticed that data packets were piling up on the message routers of the day, like cars waiting for cross-traffic to clear before entering an intersection. Working with fellow Berkeley computer science instructor Mike Karels, he came up with a small change to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that, in essence, allowed packets to ease into the intersections gradually, curing the congestion.

Revolution Wi-Fi[^]:

A lot of press has been released this week surrounding the cracking of MS-CHAPv2 authentication protocol at Defcon. All of these articles contain ambiguous and vague references to this hack affecting Wi-Fi networks running WPA2 security. Some articles even call for an end to the use of WPA2 authentication protocols such as PEAP that leverage MS-CHAPv2. But they fail to paint a true and accurate picture of the situation and the impact to Wi-Fi networks. I think this is misleading, and that any recommendations to stop using PEAP are flat-out wrong!

Bits Up![^]:

HTTP has been a longtime abuser of TCP and the Internet. It uses mountains of different TCP sessions that are often only a few packets long. This triggers lots of overhead and results in common stalling due to bad interaction with the way TCP was envisioned to be deployed. The situation is so bad that over 2/3rds of all TCP packet losses are repaired via the slowest possible mechanism (timer expiration), and more than 1 in 20 transactions experience a loss event. That's a sign that TCP interactions are the bottleneck in web scalability.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory[^]:

Considerable efforts have been invested by many different organizations in the past on the development of coding standards for the C programming language. The intent of this standard is not to duplicate the earlier work but to collect the best available insights in a
form that can help us improve the safety and reliability of our code. By conforming to a single institutional standard, rather than maintaining a multitude of project and mission specific standards, we can achieve greater consistency of code quality at JPL.

Howard Dierking[^]:

Now that Visual Studio 2012 is done, we’re busy figuring out what we should do next. For Web optimization, there are a few key scenarios that we know we want to support moving forward. There are also a whole bunch of other scenarios that we’ve either heard from different people or come up with during brainstorming. Here are some of our ideas.

Paul Stovell[^]:

Six years ago, I wrote an article about validation in WPF on Code Project. I also wrote a custom error provider that supported IDataErrorInfo, since, would you believe, WPF in version 3.0 didn't support IDataErrorInfo. Later, I worked on a bunch of open source projects around WPF like Bindable LINQ and Magellan. I was even in the MVVM-hyping, Code Project-link sharing club known as the WPF Disciples for a while. As I look back at WPF, I see a technology that had some good fundamentals, but has been really let down by poor implementation and, more importantly, by a lack of investment.