The Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) has completed the 802.11r standard better known as “Fast Basic Service Set Transition”. The 802.11r is a standard that lets Wi-Fi devices roam quickly between wireless access points (WAP) and  improves the performance of VoIP on enterprise LANs.

Traditional 802.11 devices take around 100ms to roam from one access point to another. The latency time to re-establish is not good for applications like VoIP.

The new IEEE 802.11r standard will help improve Wi-Fi VoIP connectivity by allowing the network to establish a security and QoS state for the device at the new access point, before it roams between the two, so the transition can take place in less than 50ms - the standard required for voice roaming.

Popularity: 39% [?]

Technorati, a blog search engine and advertisement network has  acquired BlogCritics, a 6-year old blog network that draws around 1 million unique monthly visitors. Technorati competes with Google Analytics, Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast in the analytics space, with Google Blog Search, Live.com, Yahoo.com, and Ask.com in the blog search sector and with many advertising companies in online advertising.Technorati plans to integrate BlogCritics into their Media division.

Below is an excerpt from Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra’s blog:

“Blogcritics brings us closer to an open community of bloggers and the audience that follows them. It also gives us a lot more advertising inventory. What’s in it for them? Our combined resources will help that community grow and expose their work to an even wider audience. We’ll also work more closely with Blogcritics authors so they can monetize their own blogs.”

Popularity: 15% [?]

After testing for four years, Google Suggest, an auto-complete feature for searches will finally be implemented in Google.com. The auto complete feature allows users to see the most-commonly searched phrases and number of search results for each phrase as the users are entering a few letters in Google’s search box. The feature will help users formulate queries easily, reduce spelling errors and save keystrokes.

Google, however is not the pioneer in this service, similar feature is being used by Yahoo and the newly launched search engine Cuil.

For those who can’t wait to see Google Suggest in action, you may CLICK HERE.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Good news to all Asterisk fans out there, Asterisk Graphical User Interface (GUI)  2.0 has been released and it looks great.

Asterisk, the most popular open source telephony system has been criticized in the past for not having a good GUI and most network administrators and asterisk enthusiasts like me prefer to use the Command Line Interface (CLI) to configure and maintain an asterisk platform.

Click HERE to check the screenshots of the new Asterisk GUI 2.0 

Popularity: 16% [?]

Last week, some of Red Hat servers were compromised by outside attackers. The intruder was able to sign a small number of OpenSSH packages relating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (i386 and x86_64 architectures) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (x86_64 architecture). The attack could also make the end-users victim if they installed the compromised software. As a result, Red Hat issued an OpenSSH update and provided a command-line tool that administrators can use to check if their system has compromised OpenSSH packages.

From the RHN announcement:

Last week Red Hat detected an intrusion on certain of its computer systems and took immediate action. While the investigation into the intrusion is on-going, our initial focus was to review and test the distribution channel we use with our customers, Red Hat Network (RHN) and its associated security measures. Based on these efforts, we remain highly confident that our systems and processes prevented the intrusion from compromising RHN or the content distributed via RHN and accordingly believe that customers who keep their systems updated using Red Hat Network are not at risk. We are issuing this alert primarily for those who may obtain Red Hat binary packages via channels other than those of official Red Hat subscribers.

Following products are affected:

• Red Hat Desktop (v. 4)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (v. 5 server)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (v. 4)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (v. 4.5.z)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop (v. 5 client)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES (v. 4)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES (v. 4.5.z)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS (v. 4)

Popularity: 18% [?]

Hillcrest Laboratories, a Maryland electronics laboratory that pioneered a technology that allows consumers to interact with digital media on TV using motion-control and pointing techniques sued Nintendo, the maker of the top- selling video-game console Wii.

According to Bloomberg report, Hillcrest is claiming the game maker is using their motion-control inventions in the Nintendo Wii and is seeking to block imports of the Wii and Wii remotes.

“While Hillcrest Labs has a great deal of respect for Nintendo and the Wii, Hillcrest Labs believes that Nintendo is in clear violation of its patents and has taken this action to protect its intellectual property rights,” the company said in a statement.

Hillcrest filed a complaint today with the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington and a civil suit in federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland. The patents involved  are Hillcrest’s U.S. Patent Nos. 7,262,760, 7,158,118, 7,414,611, and 7,139,983.

Popularity: 37% [?]