Weeks before bombs started falling on Georgia, a security researcher in suburban Massachusetts was watching an attack against the country in cyberspace.

Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks in Lexington noticed a stream of data directed at Georgian government sites containing the message: “win+love+in+Rusia.”

Other Internet experts in the United States said the attacks against Georgia’s Internet infrastructure began as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests — known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks — that overloaded and effectively shut down Georgian servers.

Researchers at Shadowserver, a volunteer group that tracks malicious network activity, reported that the Web site of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, had been rendered inoperable for 24 hours by multiple D.D.O.S. attacks. They said the command and control server that directed the attack was based in the United States and had come online several weeks before it began the assault.

An image from the Web site of the Georgian Parliament after it had been defaced.

Read more @ nytimes.com

Last week Mozilla Labs, the R&D arm of the open-source browser maker, launched the Mozilla Labs Concept Series -– an open initiative to “explore and design future directions for the Web.” As Mozilla Labs VP Chris Beard told me, “we’ve been very good at recruiting and engaging tech collaborators, but our design efforts have been more haphazard.” The goal of the Concept Series is to bring more people and ideas into the discussion. He stressed that it is not an effort to “open-source design,” saying that he didn’t believe in “design by committee,” but that in the ideation phase, more ideas is better. In order to lower the barrier to entry, the initiative welcomes interactive prototypes, mock-ups, sketches, or even just ideas submitted without any visuals.

To kick off the project, Mozilla posted a three-part series of videos that imagined a Web browser of the future.

The videos and the hyper-interactive concept they captured – called Aurora — were created by the Web design firm Adaptive Path, one of the smartest working in the space. Sometime I&D columnist and Adaptive Path co-founder Jesse James Garret led the Aurora design. If you have any interest in Web design or innovation, you should watch the videos, which have sparked debate. (See here and here).

Read more @ businessweek.com

Dropped calls and choppy Web surfing on Apple’s latest smartphone stem from an Infineon chip. A fix is on the way

Complaints over dropped calls and choppy Web connections on Apple’s iPhone 3G have sparked a wave of debate in the blogosphere over the root cause of the problems. Two well-placed sources tell BusinessWeek.com the glitches are related to a chip inside Apple’s music-playing cell phone. The sources add that Apple (AAPL) plans to remedy the problems through a software upgrade rather than through a more disruptive step, such as a product recall.

The news reinforces analysis by Richard Windsor of Nomura Securities, who said in an Aug. 12 report that the problem involves a communications chip made by Munich-based Infineon Technologies (IFX). Faulty software on the chip causes problems when the iPhone needs to switch from wireless networks that allow for faster Web downloads to slower ones, the people say.

Apple: "No comment"

Users of the iPhone 3G complain they’re unable to get the faster connections available on so-called 3G, or third-generation, wireless networks even in some areas where 3G networks are in place. Owners also lament frequent shifting between high-speed and slower-speed networks during calls and Web sessions. The handoffs sometimes result in dropped calls. The problem is affecting 2% to 3% of iPhone traffic, the people say. That compares with a dropped-call rate of around 1% for all traffic for AT&T (T), Apple’s exclusive partner in the U.S. "This is a problem, but it’s not a catastrophe," one of the sources says.

Read more @ businessweek.com

Samsung is hoping to steal a little of the Olympic spotlight in Beijing on Thursday as it unveils its latest “eco-phone.” The E200 Eco is the third phone Samsung has introduced this year with parts made from bioplastics — materials extracted from corn. It is the first, however, in which the entire case is bioplastic.

Cheil Industries, a company that is part of the Samsung Group, has been developing these environmentally friendly materials.

The E200 Eco has a 1.3-megapixel camera, video messaging capabilities and an MP3 player. The phone will be available in Europe next month but does not yet have an American release date. As a bonus, the phone’s packaging is made from recycled materials.

Read more @ nytimes.com

Twitter has stopped sending SMS updates to UK customers, thus leaving them unaware of the latest important updates on what their friends had for breakfast. Twitter is a service for bloggers who can’t string a sentence together and who want to appeal to readers who can’t focus beyond a headline. Updates can be sent in over SMS message, limited to 140 characters, and are bounced out to interested parties.
The problem, for Twitter, is that sending SMS messages is an expensive business in Europe, even when they are purchased in bulk, and if an incoming message is bounced out to 10 "friends" then Twitter has to pay to send those ten messages. But while in Europe the sender has to pay the full cost of message delivery, as getting messages is free, in the USA received messages are deducted from the tariff bundle, so Twitter can continue to offer the service there. Back in Blighty, however, it’s just too expensive.

View: The full story @ The Reg

Two California companies said Thursday that they would each build solar power plants that were 10 times bigger than the largest now in service, creating the first true utility-scale use of a technology now mostly confined to rooftop supplements to conventional power supplies.

The solar power will be sold to Pacific Gas and Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The utility said that it expected the plants, both using photovoltaic technology, which turns sunlight directly into electricity, would be competitive with other renewable sources, including wind and solar thermal, which uses the sun’s heat to boil water.

Read more @ nytimes.com