Broadband Internet Speed test

An interesting new technology called xMax from xG Technology, LLC promises high bandwidth, low power, long range broadband access that unlike WiFi and WiMAX does not need a dedicated frequency spectrum.

xMax is however not limited to just wireless, it can be used for wired applications too, where it claims improvements to existing DSL and cable installations.

From the xG Technology website:

xGTM Technology, LLC is an innovative research and product development firm that has produced a new low power, long range broadband technology called xMax. xMax is a novel modulation and encoding technology that boosts the range and power efficiency of all wired and wireless communications. xMax is not a compression technique, but rather a synergistic mix of two well-established communication approaches that dramatically improves spectrum utilization.

Read more in the xG Technology FAQ.

Have you ever received an email you didn’t ask for, from a sender you have had no prior contact with, maybe offering a product you do not want? Then you may be the victim of SPAM!

I’m sure you’ve heard of spam, most of us get them by the dozens or hundreds a day. The “good” thing about spam and spam senders is that they are rarely standard compliant. This means something called greylisting works very efficiently at reducing spam.
The theory is that legit mail servers resend on temporary errors, while spam senders do not. So the greylisting software refuse the mail with a temporary error the first time, and accepts it after some time have elapsed. For more information please read the whitepaper by Evan Harris

Sendmail has an system called milter for filtering mail in the mail processing chain. A mail filter can be used for filtering out spam, viruses, etc. A milter can reject a message during the SMTP session. There are some milter implementations of greylisting. On of them is milter-greylist.

If you’re running your own mail server, greylisting is definitely something to consider in your fight against spam.

Now, one might argue that consumers purchusing country music CDs deserve it. But there is no excuse for a company to place malicious code on the customers computer without the customer knowing, much less consenting.

The writeup by Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals about finding the rootkit on his computer makes an interesting read.

Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) aka Powerband is the use of Power Line Communication (PLC) technology to provide broadband Internet access through ordinary power lines.

Broadband over powerlines has been regarded as the “holy grail” by many because it gets around the biggest challenge to broadband providers — building cable infrastructure. Although there are many engineering challenges in providing broadband over power lines, the infrastructure is already built in most countries — including good penetration into rural areas.

BPL can deliver up to 135 Mbps at the application layer, but generally speeds of 256 kbps to 2.7 Mbps are offered to consumers.

There is an IEEE draft standard; IEEE P1901 - Draft Standard for Broadband over Power Line Networks: Medium Access Control and Physical Layer Specifications .

Another competing evolving standard is the HomePlug power alliance which defined the HomePlug 1.0 and the HomePlug AV technologies.
Devolo has an interesting product that uses HomePlug, the MicroLink dLAN Audio.
These specifications are aimed in-home distribution, while the HomePlug BPL is a to-the-home technology.

Testing of this technology is conducted by various ISPs across the globe, and some are even deploying the technology widescale.

By late June the People’s Republic of China had 103 million Internet users, of which more than 53 million are broadband subscribers.
The most common access form is ADSL; two thirds of the country’s broadband subscribers, or 33 million are connected with ADSL.

Now that’s good news for email spam fighters around the world…