Amazon Glacier: 99.999999999% durability long-term storage, for a penny a gig

Amazon has unveiled the latest addition to AWS: Glacier, a long-term, cloud-based storage solution that costs just $0.01 per gigabyte per month. This is significantly cheaper than on-site storage, and at least ten times cheaper than other cloud storage services (such as Amazon S3, Dropbox, Azure, and so on.)

Amazon Glacier is just like Amazon S3, but it’s designed explicitly for long-term storage. You upload your data, and then Amazon automatically duplicates the data across multiple geographically diverse repositories, promising 99.999999999% durability (if you store 10,000 objects in Glacier, you might lose one object every 10 million years). In short, you will only lose Amazon Glacier data if there’s some kind of apocalypse.

Unlike S3 or other cloud storage, which is “online” and always available for instant access, retrieving data from Glacier takes time — between 3 and 5 hours — and costs a significant amount of money (more than 10 cents per gig). There is also a $0.03 penalty per gig if you delete data within 90 days. If you store 100 terabytes in Glacier, you’re looking at around $10,000 to retrieve everything.

There is one rather important exception, though: In a given month, you can retrieve up to 5% of your total storage for free; so if you store 100TB, you can download 5TB per month for free. This fits in very well with the normal use-case for long-term storage (it’s very unlikely that you’d need to download the complete, 100TB, 20-year archive).

The key to this service is the 3-5 hour retrieval window, which is caused by Amazon using a robotic tape library. We don’t know the exact structure of Glacier, but it likely has a bunch of hard drives on the front end, acting as a cache for recent and regularly retrieved files, and then an absolutely massive tape library. When you make a retrieval request, a robotic arm grabs the tape with your data in, slots the tape into a drive, and then your data will be transferred to a hard drive ready for you to access. The 3-5 hour window is simply be the time it takes for the robotic arm to become available — if a lot of people are making retrieval requests, you have to wait in line.

Tape libraries can store a truly stupendous amount of data. Spectra makes a range of robotic devices that have 24 drives and space for 1,000 tapes — and these can then be networked together to create a library with a total capacity of 3.6 exabytes (3.7 million terabytes). It is likely that Amazon has built quite a few of these libraries at its data centers in the US, Europe, and Asia.

Rounding out the service, Amazon S3 users can easily transfer data directly into Glacier — and in the next few months, Amazon will allow AWS users to configure lifecycle policies that automatically move data from S3 to Glacier.

Amazon Glacier is, at least from the outset, almost perfectly placed. Managing long-term backups is hard work and very expensive, and there are a lot of companies that wouldlove to shut down their aging NAS and tape libraries and switch to Amazon. At just a penny per gig per month, Amazon Glacier will be more reliable, extensible, and cost effective than in-house solutions. The only real problem that I can foresee is data security — but considering you could just encrypt all of your data before sending it off to Glacier, the risk of someone cracking into your data is minimal.

Read: How big is the cloud?

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Microsoft commits to user privacy in IE10; risks advertiser wrath over Do Not Track support

Microsoft has affirmed its commitment to shipping IE10 and Windows 8 with “Do Not Track” (DNT) enabled by default. In doing so, it’s set the stage for a major war over user privacy, and appointed itself an unofficial white knight of user privacy.

Feel free to pause a moment and let the cognitive dissonance fade.

For those of you just tuning in, Do Not Track is a proposed privacy flag whose implementation is currently being drafted by the W3C. As currently implemented, a browser with DNT activated notifies the target website that the user does not wish to be tracked. A website that supports DNT would (theoretically) honor the flag and agree not to track the visitor’s activities. DNT is a voluntary standard — there’s no federal or state law mandating its use and very few websites currently support it. If a website doesn’t support DNT, turning it on in the browser does nothing.

A number of advertisers have signed on to help draft the DNT standard in a bid to avoid a government-mandated solution that might be far more limiting, but that doesn’t mean they like it. Microsoft’s initial statement that DNT would be enabled by default came as a total surprise to many of the participants in the W3C’s draft process and was sharply criticized from certain quarters. In June, the W3C changed the DNT draft to propose that browsersmust ship DNT off by default and enable it only if the user gives “explicit consent.” This implied that if Microsoft went ahead and shipped IE10 with DNT activated, it wouldn’t be able to claim its browser supported DNT.

Microsoft’s unofficial response? “Bring it.” In a recent blog post, Brendon Lynch, MS’s Chief Privacy Officer, spelled out how DNT is implemented in IE10. Users who choose “Express Settings” for browser configuration at first-run will have their DNT flag enabled. Users who choose to customize their options will be prompted to set the flag manually. In both cases, users are told what the DNT flag is and how to change it if they choose to do so.

“Our approach,” Lynch writes, “is part of our commitment to privacy by design and putting people first. We believe consumers should have more control over how data about their online behavior is tracked, shared, and used.”

Ulterior motive?

A number of pundits have questioned whether or not Microsoft is using privacy issues to strike at Google’s advertising empire. The truth is, we don’t know. Some draft standards are widely adopted before the final version is complete — 802.11n was a good example of this — but with DNT, the implementation is still being worked on. Browsers that support DNT tend to do it in different ways, and websites are waiting for a better understanding of what they need to do before they go ahead with implementing it.

Microsoft’s decision to ship DNT as active by default isn’t actually going to mean much right away. It’s already led the W3C to consider modifying the DNT proposal; the business interests working on the standard are petrified that an opt-in network will destroy their companies and bombard users with constant requests for data sharing. Some of these concerns are shared by privacy advocates; a standard that destroys companies and creates an impenetrable tangle of pop-ups is in no one’s best interests.

Visit Wired with IE10 and DNT enabled, and this is what you’ll see

For the moment, I’m willing to take Microsoft at its word. What’ll be critical to watch is how the company implements DNT on its own websites, what it advocates as the standard evolves, and whether its positions take principled stands on defending users’ rights, or are drawn in a way that benefits itself while choking out the competition. This is a move that really could go either way. If Windows 8 catches fire, it’ll fundamentally change the way Microsoft interacts with its customers and users. It’s fair to give the company a chance to demonstrate the principles it intends to uphold as part of that change — but it’s also fair to keep a weather eye on what’s going on behind the scenes.

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Is ‘cloud security’ an oxymoron?

Like it or not, technology is becoming ever more reliant on the cloud, and that has both positive and negative ramifications. On the positive side, cloud computing has opened up a whole new world of productivity that didn’t fully exist before services like Google Docs and Office 365 came into view. On a more personal scale, the cloud flipped the entertainment industry on its head with online music lockers that make it possible to access playlists and rock out to your ZZ Top albums wherever there’s an internet connection. Whether for work or play, living in the cloud can be truly awesome, but what happens when the sky starts falling?

Unfortunately, playing in the cloud isn’t always sunshine and rainbows, a point recently underscored when Mat Honan over at Wired fell victim to a band of hackers who weaseled their way into his Apple’s iCloud account. Honan recounted in frightening and fascinating detail how the cyber scoundrels took advantage of iCloud’s lack of a two-factor authentication process to access his account and remotely delete the data on his MacBook, iPad, and iPhone. Childhood pictures of his daughter and everything else he had stored on his mobile devices were wiped clean.

If you’re wondering how exactly this was made possible, Honan’s investigation, which involved chatting with one of the hackers involved, takes readers through a thrilling tale of how various online services — in this case, Amazon, Gmail, iCloud, and Twitter — reveal just enough personal information to pose a threat to one another if a hacker is truly determined. The devil isn’t in the details, however, it’s in our reliance on cloud computing, and sometimes there’s hell to pay.

What if I’m extra careful?

Millions of PlayStation Network subscribers saw the dark side to cloud computing when a massive security breach compromised their accounts.

Millions of PlayStation Network (PSN) subscribers trusted Sony with their name, address, birthday, credit card details, and other personal information, only to have all that information fall into the hands of hackers following a massive data breach that knocked PSN out of commission for almost a month. It was a rude awakening for millions and a reminder to us all that the concept of the cloud is still very much in its infancy and not without significant security risks.

Hacker attacks aren’t the only potential dark clouds. Computing in the cloud requires a level of a trust for things that are ultimately out of your control, like data outages and redundancy. If a data center goes up in flames, you have to trust that a team of engineers will be able to repair the damage quickly and efficiently, and that offsite backups exist so that your data can be restored. It happensmore often than many people realize.

What can I do?

Parking your data on third-party services isn’t inherently bad, it’s just risky. You can mitigate that risk by practicing smart computing habits, which first and foremost involves maintaining multiple backups. How diligent you should be depends entirely on how much you value your data, and if you’re sitting on mines of mission critical code, at minimum you should be backing up your digital bits to an offsite location on a weekly basis.

As for cloud computing services like Netflix, Dropbox, and anything else you might want to use, being safe is a two-prong process. First, do your research and find out what kind of security practices are in place before entrusting your personal information. As Honan found out, it’s comparatively easy to break into someone’s iCloud account and wreak havoc, and until Apple addresses this, you may want to avoid using it. There’s no shortage of cloud services available, so don’t settle on one that doesn’t take security as seriously as you do.

Secondly, it all comes full circle to safe computing practices, which we highlighted in a recent article. Unless you’re willing to unplug from the internet entirely (yeah, right!), you’re going to introduce some level of cloud-based risk into your online life. Safe computing practices ensure you’re doing everything possible on your end to prevent disaster, eliminating half the risk in the process. The other half is up to the players on the other side of the equation, and unfortunately, the very nature of cloud computing leaves that part out of your control.

Read: What would it feel like to live in the cloud?

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Don’t count your penguins before they’ve hatched

Leave it to Richard Stallman to pour cold water on a hot idea. The noted free software activist has come out against Steam for Linux, writing that “Nonfree game programs (like other nonfree programs) are unethical because they deny freedom to their users. (Game art is a different issue, because it isn’t software.) If you want freedom, one requisite for it is not having nonfree programs on your computer.”

It’s the argument I would have accepted from Stallman, actually. But it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily right — or the best one he could have made.

I’ve expressed here before that I vigorously support the rights of artists to get paid for their work, and I regard software the same way. My work in that realm has been relatively slight, but it’s been significant enough to convince me that the people who develop the ideas and execute the specific programming behind even the simplest applications deserve to make whatever they can from their efforts. What they do is hard, exacting work, which requires years of training, study, and practice, and giving them a little money in return — and the ability to specify (within certain restrictions) how that software may or may not be used or distributed does not seem that outlandish to me.

As Linux has shown time and time again over the last 20 years, with even the best free software, you typically get what you pay for: half-realized concepts, poor user interfaces, and support that’s either nonexistent or completely relegated to a community that may or may not be able to help you with whatever issue you’re facing. More elaborate software package (Windows, Office, most games) have tons of research, testing, and design muscle behind them. They’re so easy, and in many cases fun, to use because the companies have the money to ensure they are that way. That involves a lot of people and a substantial investment, and I have no problem with that being protected.

That said, I appreciate Stallman’s perspective, and how vocal he has been about it for a long time. He’s very much the type to practice what he preaches, and he’s been working to make software more open for decades. Even if I don’t agree with his every point, I absolutely think it’s a discussion worth having, and that the back and forth is, at its essence, generally good for the free software community. And, in an ideal world, Linux would be the completely free, completely open vehicle through which he could realize his dreams.

Of course, we don’t live in that world. In our world, the one in which Linux has less than 2% market share, such admirable idealism is not going to have the desired effect. It may even turn off many of the people who could potentially be interested in what free and open-source software has to offer.

The fact is that the people most likely to find Stallman’s argument powerful are those who are already committed to his cause. Everyone else needs to be convinced. And the only way that’s going to happen is if free software advocates entice them with something they already know they want and like — a type of digital gateway drug that will bring them into the fold. No, it probably won’t work as well as people like Stallman might hope, but it’s more likely to have a lasting impact than saying — through either word or implication — that people need to settle for inferior products. Which, if we’re being honest, is where Linux remains on most fronts, but especially with games.

Steam may encourage people to use paid software on Linux, but it will also force them to expand their horizons by experiencing firsthand what the operating system is capable of. Linux has a reputation of being limiting and difficult to use, and if it’s not entirely unearned, this could go a long way to helping the community prove how much the OS has evolved and improved in recent years.

If an ordinary guy used to using commercial software becomes frustrated by Windows 8, to pick a random (yet totally believable) example, and looks into one of the friendlier Linux distros (Ubuntu or Linux Mint, maybe?) as an alternative, you have to give him something or he won’t be willing to fully make the switch. Once that something is out there, then you can try to reel him in the rest of the way. “Sure, it’s great to be able to play all these games, but Linux is really about keeping software free and open. Why not try these titles that you don’t have to pay for, and that don’t saddle you with byzantine licensing restrictions?” Maybe he’ll accept it, maybe he won’t, but he’ll already be immersed in Linux, and will thus need a lot less persuasion than he might otherwise.

Get enough people on board — by whatever method — and software developers might see the value in Linux and be willing to devote more of their time and resources to creating software that will work with it. When that happens, everyone benefits. But the chances that it will ever happen when Linux commands as little public attention as it now does is, at its best, naïve. And if it has to be forever constrained in the ways Stallman suggests, the chances are excellent that it’s not going to happen at all.

To his credit, Stallman obviously understands this to some degree. He goes on to say in his piece that “if you’re going to use these games, you’re better off using them on GNU/Linux rather than on Microsoft Windows,” but it ultimately amounts to little more than a grudging endorsement of the lesser-of-two-evils variety. He continues: “If you want to promote freedom, please take care not to talk about the availability of these games on GNU/Linux as support for our cause.”

Freedom, as they say, isn’t free. There’s always a cost. For Linux that cost might be, at least temporarily, opening the doors to paid, closed software just to prove to people the possibilities of the platform. Stallman’s goal of ultimate freedom by way of Linux may be attainable, even within his lifetime. But it will never come to fruition as long as stalwarts like Stallman only emphasize their devotion to outfitting Linux with a different kind of chain.

Read: Could this be the year of the Linux desktop? and Valve: OpenGL outperforms DirectX — even on Windows

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Office 2013: Microsoft’s cloud-based, standalone, sorta-Metro productivity suite

Microsoft has released a new Customer Preview demo of its upcoming Office 2013 (aka Office 15) suite, and we’ve spent a few hours with the product to get a feel for what we can expect when the full version drops in early 2013. According to Microsoft, Office 2013 is a cloud-based product with a physical, licensed-for-perpetuity option for those who aren’t willing to sign up for a subscription service. It’s Metroesque without being a full implementation of Metro, and it’s very much a product in transition.

According to Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, Office 2013 is “a service first.” The executive, who’s come under fire in recent months for the company’s lackluster stock price over the past decade, claimed that Office 2013 is “the most ambitious release of Office we’ve ever done.”

As part of that “service first” mentality, Office 2013 is effectively being rolled into Office 365 and now comes in a Home Premium subscription flavor. Up to now, Office 365 was strictly a business product; Microsoft hopes to change that by integrating features like SkyDrive and offering a multi-license family pack. Sign up for Office Home Premium, and you receive a license for up to five devices (which, of course, Microsoft hopes will be a bunch of Surface tablets).

Buying Office 2013

Cloud integration comes in the form of “Office on Demand,” which lets you stream the software to a system where it isn’t installed, edit documents remotely, and then save the files online. Files, in Office 2013, are saved to your SkyDrive account by default, and customers opting for the Home Premium edition will be rewarded with 60 minutes of Skype access per month and an additional 20GB of SkyDrive storage space.

As a one-time offer, that’s a pretty attractive package. As a subscription, it’s considerably more dicey. The problem Microsoft faces with this approach is that the vast majority of home users rarely buy Office upgrades (assuming they bought it in the first place). For example, I upgraded to Office 2007 because I wanted the new graphing engine that debuted in Excel that year. I haven’t bought a new copy since, because the 2007 version of Excel does everything I need it to. I don’t know if my Microsoft Word needs have changed since 1997; my parents still use Word 2003 and I had no trouble working with it while visiting.

A full copy of Office 2010 Home & Student is $119.45 for a single PC, $149.95 for up to three PCs. That includes Word, Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint. We don’t yet know the price of the Home Premium subscription flavor. In my use-case (a five-year upgrade cycle), assuming I needed three licenses, that works out $9.93 per license, per year. Unless Microsoft makes Home Premium ridiculously cheap, it’ll cost significantly more to subscribe over five years than it will to just buy a license for $119. The five-license offer might be great for people who actually need five licenses, but I suspect that even in a family household, only 1-2 computers actually need to be running the latest and greatest Office flavor.

Using Office 2013

During Install, Office prompts you to sign in using Windows Live. It then configures your SkyDrive and attaches a link under Favorites in Windows Explorer.

When you click on File in Office 13, you’re presented with the following (we’re using MS Word as our example application):

Select a location and the familiar file dialog window will open in the requisite location. One of the peculiarities of the new interface, however, is the way double and single clicks are treated. Double-click on any of the locations under “Places” and a file dialog box opens in that location. Single-click on any of the locations one column to the right, and the same thing happens. The SkyDrive integration is a useful feature for keeping documents available, and it automatically saves both locally and online.

As for the main editing interface, here’s a set of screenshots showing the default view in Office 2007 and Office 2013. Note that in Office 2013, the “W” at the top-left corner is strictly for resizing the window or closing the application. The old file dialogs that were accessed by the Start button in Word 2007/2010 are now under File.

Word 2007′s default screen

One major difference, and something it’s hard for me to get past, is that Word 2013 literally makes my eyes hurt. To be fair, I have problems with eye strain anyway, but the unrelenting white/black contrast in Word means there’s nowhere else to look, even for a second. Excel is even worse.

Humans have a well-known bias that causes us to conflate familiarity and quality, so I’m purposefully not going to poke too hard at the new chromeless UI. My gut feeling, however, is that Microsoft’s relentless simplification has created a design that makes it harder to identify specific items. In Office 2007, the Ribbon’s Clipboard, Font, Alignment, and Number options all have a slightly different background. It helps set them apart as individual sub-groups within the overall Ribbon. In the new versions, the subtle color variation that identified them as sub-groups are gone.

Find and Replace gets an overhaul

One function that’s been substantially overhauled is Find & Replace. This function has scarcely changed over the past decade, but in Office 2013 the familiar Ctrl-F box has been supplanted by the Navigation pane.

The Navigation window’s search options are accessible and intuitively easy to understand, but the old Ctrl-PgUp/PgDn method of moving between Find, Replace, and Go To doesn’t work anymore.

You click the little down arrow, then choose “Advanced Find” for the old-style F&R window

I’ve focused on Find and Replace because its both a simple function everyone uses and an example of how poorly Metro interfaces with Word’s conventional layout and structure. Spell check has been given a similar overhaul, though it still functions much the same. One annoying difference — instead of simply completing, now it tries to offer pick-me-ups.

The new F&R function is great at finding things, but if you actually need to edit what you find, you’re back in Old Word. Back when Windows 8 was a year away from launch, a lot of people assumed that Microsoft would fix these jarring transitions and find a way to smooth them out.

That no longer seems to be the case. It very much appears that these jarring overlaps are precisely what Redmond intends to ship. Neither the Building Windows 8 blog nor Windows 8 itself have addressed what many desktop users see as a core problem — Metro’s organizational system is a poor fit for the desktop, and Windows often bounces between Metro-style windows and classic desktop functionality depending on what setting you’re trying to adjust or what program you need to run.

Metro is fine. The Metro/Desktop collision isn’t.

The biggest problem with Office 2013 isn’t Metro — it’s the way Metro and the Classic Office environment clash. Apart from the GUI changes, Word looks like Word — until you hit Ctrl-F. Unlike clicking on File, which brings up an obvious Metro-style menu, the “Navigation” tab that slides in could be a standard feature in regular office. You don’t necessarily know it’s Metro until you start trying to do things. The spellchecker, for example, is also Metroesque.

Unlike Windows, which is more-or-less a guaranteed revenue stream for Microsoft as long as people keep buying computers, Office pushback could have a real effect on sales. I’m hard-pressed to think of a reason why any desktop user would want to use Office 2013 over previous versions. Sure, the whole “If you’re on a tablet…” adage applies, but really, how many tablet owners are pining for Office software? More to the point, how many tablet owners prioritize Office software yet don’t have a way to connect a wireless keyboard and mouse?

Interacting with Metro means taking my eyes off my work and switching from “Get things done” mode to “Figure it out” mode. As an IT journalist, I’m used to wearing both hats, and it’s still enormously distracting. That distraction makes it hard to imagine recommending a “Desktro” (MetTop?) version of Office to anyone. I find myself instinctively looking for keyboard shortcuts rather than dealing with Metro. That might be normal for a neckbearded Linux user, but I’ve never been a keyboard shortcut person. This morning, I learned that F12 = Save As — because I’d rather learn a new keyboard shortcut than have to click on the word File, than double-click a preliminary save option, then single-click a directory, then type a file name.

The SkyDrive integration is nifty and the consumer subscription service might be a good deal depending on price, but the idea of training average business users to navigate Office’s pseudo-Metro interface summons images of a DO NOT WANT sign lit in brilliant red neon with letters they could read on Pluto.

Hopefully, future iterations of the product will fix these problems, but after watching them persist in Windows 8, with that OS barely a month from RTM, I’m not optimistic. Despite the fact that the transition could be even rockier in Office, due to the business-centric nature of the product, Microsoft is determinedly pushing ahead with this new paradigm.

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Microsoft’s tweaks to Skype could facilitate wiretapping (Updated)

VoIP, the voice-over-IP communications technology that is slowly making POTS landlines obsolete. SIP providers, VoIP applications, and messaging platforms all utilize VoIP to provide voice calling on PCs, phones, and mobile devices. One of the most popular VoIP applications is the Skype messaging service. Skype uses a peer-to-peer network of internet nodes to route voice and/or video calls between users around the world. Especially in the case of consumer-grade VoIP, it is significantly cheaper than a traditional landline for voice calls, and it can potentially deliver better sound quality. Another area where VoIP services like Skype excel is as a communication medium for criminals. Thanks to the fast pace of technology and the use of a peer-to-peer connection, Skype is a decent platform to communicate without fear of others listening in, to an extent.

Of course, Skype is not a fully decentralized service because it uses so-called “supernodes.” The supernodes are basically servers that both the caller and recipient can connect to, and they use these mutually-known servers to make the initial introduction between the two clients. Reportedly, Microsoft is re-engineering these supernodes to make it easier for law enforcement to monitor calls by allowing the supernodes to not only make the introduction but to actually route the voice data of the calls as well. In this way, the actual voice data would pass through the monitored servers and the call is no longer secure. It is essentially a man-in-the-middle attack, and it is made all the easier because Microsoft -– who owns Skype and knows the keys used for the service’s encryption -– is helping.

As far as what this means for you, if you are not doing anything malicious then you don’t need to worry too much. Patriot Act exceptions aside, you would have to be acting suspiciously enough for a judge to grant a warrant before your conversations could be snooped. With that said, it is a bit disconcerting that it is possible to violate your privacy, especially when you aren’t doing anything to warrant such potential invasions.

Your best bet for securing your voice communications for the simple sake of privacy is to set up your own VoIP “softphone” with open source SIP software, and use end-to-end encryption and keys that you control access to. Such encryption includes ZRTP for the secure key exchange and SRTP for securing the voice (data) stream between you and the recipient. SRTP in particular is interesting because it uses, by default, a 128-bit key derived from a master key — exchanged using the ZRTP (or similar) protocol — that is further salted with a 112-bit key (which helps make the encryption key harder to brute force by making it more computationally expensive to do so).

The move by Microsoft is somewhat disheartening, but at the end of the day it will not affect the company’s userbase much. Yes, your conversations are potentially less private and secure, but Skype remains one of the easiest (and free) VoIP clients to use. Skype is now essentially equivalent to other traditional forms of communications like landlines and cellphones that are already capable of being tapped. From the perspective that it is a necessary evil to have to monitor and find malicious people, it is not a bad thing for Microsoft to do so long as it conforms to legal procedures and is not abused. That last part is, I think, what worries a lot of privacy conscious people, and if you do value security over convenience there are definitely better options out there than Skype.

Update – 3:33pm – Skype has contacted us to note that the changes were made in order to “improve the Skype user experience”, not to open the doors to tapping.

Regarding the supernodes Mark Gillett, Skype’s Corporate VP of Product Engineering & Operations noted:

As part of our ongoing commitment to continually improve the Skype user experience, we developed supernodes which can be located on dedicated servers within secure datacenters. This has not changed the underlying nature of Skype’s peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, in which supernodes simply allow users to find one another (calls do not pass through supernodes). We believe this approach has immediate performance, scalability and availability benefits for the hundreds of millions of users that make up the Skype community.

And in response to that claim that the source code was leaked, Skype’s Chief Security Office, Adrian Asher, wrote:

Skype takes all necessary steps to prevent/defeat nefarious attempts to subvert the Skype experience. Skype takes its users’ safety and security seriously and we work tirelessly to ensure each individual has the best possible experience.

Of course a government wiretap is not something a corporation (or most people) would consider to be “nefarious”, but Skype has said to us that the changes were not made to help law enforcement.

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Threading the nanoscale needle: Applied Materials launches new interconnect technology

I’ve written quite a bit about the future of semiconductor design over the past eight months, but virtually all of our coverage has focused on materials engineering and the search for molecular structures that scale more effectively than conventional CMOS as we plunge below the 20nm node. Interconnects — the tiny wires that connect the various silicon layers inside a processor — are something we haven’t spent much time on to date. Today, Applied Materials is launching its new “Amber” PVD (Physical Vapor Deposition) technology for building interconnects.

One of the reasons that the ITRS — International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors — is so ominous and foreboding is that the semiconductor industry faces enormous challenges in virtually every field. Interconnect technology is no exception; one of the problems Applied Materials is trying to solve is that conventional approaches to interconnect fill no longer work well as the gaps between contacts are too small.

As the aperture narrows and deepens, conventional plating leads to gaps — voids — in the fill layer. Such voids are difficult to directly detect, and circuits created with such flaws may initially function as designed. Because the amount of conducting material is significantly lower than it’s supposed to be, however, the copper at the edges heats more quickly, is subjected to greater electrical strain, and eventually fails. This is an obvious problem for device manufacturers, given that modern CMOS chips use literally miles of interconnects.

The graph in the upper-left-hand corner shows the length of the vias in a processor, the total number, and the number of single vias (vias that link two specific points). The lower-right-hand graph shows the impact of defective vias on semiconductor yields. At 130nm, high defect levels had a relatively small impact on overall yields. At 28nm, defect levels that wouldn’t have sabotaged 5% of yield at 130nm are crippling, killing upwards of 30% of a product. This has been partly driven by the explosive growth in the number of vias per product.

Applied Materials’ new method for interconnect fill is to deposit the material cold and then introduce heat. This reflow process leverages capillary action, which is defined as “the ability of a liquid to flow in narrow spaces without the assistance of, and in opposition to external forces like gravity… If the diameter of the tube is sufficiently small, then the combination of surface tension (which is caused by cohesion within the liquid) and adhesive forces between the liquid and container act to lift the liquid.”

Capillary action is the reason a paintbrush absorbs paint, it’s why paper towels work, and in this case, it’s how Applied Materials can build void-less interconnects at the necessary sizes without radically rethinking the manufacturing process. It’s not the perfectly-scaling, indefinitely applicable solution everyone would like to find — the general lack of such solutions is something of a theme in our coverage of semiconductor manufacturing — but it pushes back the boundaries while nanowires, air gaps, carbon nanotubes, and optical interconnects (both inter- and intra-chip) are all being researched. AppMat suggests that this approach will scale well into the 1Xnm process nodes, by which time problems in other areas may have made the interconnect issue trivial regardless.

The ITRS’s long-term outlook is rather cheerless. “It is clear that while transistor performance intrinsically improves with geometric scaling, interconnect performance does not. This implies that unless revolutionary interconnect solutions are found, interconnects will increasingly limit the performance and power efficiency of new products. Looking forward, a coherent vision for both global and local interconnects faces numerous challenges and few potential solutions.”

For now, the advantage to the new “Amber” PVD system is that it pushes back the ITRS timeframe for “No Known Solution” to various interconnect problems back to 2019 as opposed to 2016. Hopefully the additional three years of research will be enough time to find different solutions or alternate materials.

Read more about Applied Materials, and the quest beyond 22nm

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Unleash your Chromebox: How to dual-boot Ubuntu Linux on your Chrome OS device

Google’s new Chromebox has some compelling features for large-scale IT shops. Capable of providing solid, secure performance at a reasonable price with almost no administrative overhead, they will no doubt find their way onto trading floors and into hospitals and universities, among other places. For many of the rest of us, the Chromebox, and the Chromebook before it, are a waste of perfectly good hardware. The Chromebox given out at Google I/O, for example, comes with a Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 16GB SSD. It also has plenty of USB and video ports as well as a built-in speaker. That’s more than enough muscle to run a full-on OS like Linux instead of trying to live within the tight, web-only, confines of Chrome OS.

Hacker-friendly out of the box

Fortunately, Google and Samsung, who makes the ‘box, seem to have anticipated exactly this response, and left both the Chromebooks and Chromeboxes wide open to hacking. Not only can the devices be converted to dual-boot Chrome OS and Linux — nullifying the locked-down Chrome OS security model in the process of course — but it’s also easy to return them back to their locked-up factory defaults. What a dream setup! If only phones were this hacker friendly the word “brick” could pretty much disappear from the vocabulary on XDA.

Beginning the journey to a hacked Chromebox is as simple as flipping the developer switch in the back — slightly hidden inside the Kensington lock slot. Most Chromebooks have their developer switch in a similar location like the one shown in this diagram. Flipping the switch and rebooting opens up a wealth of new possibilities for your device. Keep in mind that the process will erase any local data you have on the device, and takes about 10 minutes to complete.

Running the developer-mode BIOS

Once you’ve gotten your Chrome OS device rebooted with the developer switch turned on (which lets you access a developer shell), you’ll be able to run the developer mode BIOS to further customize the unit. Start by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F2 when the device gets to the Select Language screen, to get a shell login prompt. Then log in with the username chronos(there is no password on the account) and become root using the command sudo bash(sudo simply tells the device you want to run its command line as root, and bash starts up a new shell). Finally, issue the command chromeos-firmwareupdate --mode=todevwhich switches your device to load the development BIOS by default. Note that if you’re using a Chrome-customized keyboard it might have “->” where the F2 normally is on a PC. Just press that instead of F2.

You’re now running the developer mode BIOS, which allows you to boot non-Google kernels or even to boot off an external USB device. If you have any trouble getting to this point, Google itself provides a helpful set of directions. You can always revert to the factory-default BIOS with the command chromeos-firmwareupdate --mode normal.

Re-partitioning your disk for dual booting

Now you’re ready to set up a partition for Ubuntu, by re-partitioning the unit’s solid-state drive. Start by rebooting the device, but before logging in use Ctrl-Alt-F2 again to get to a developer shell, and log in as chronos. You’ll want to make sure you’ve set your device up with a WiFi or wired Ethernet connection prior to this, to allow downloading the necessary scripts and Ubuntu build.

Once you’re logged in as chronos, run the commands wget http://goo.gl/oyjlt and then sudo sh oyjlt. Wget grabs a shell script to re-partition your drive, and the sudo command executes it. The script works by shrinking the Chrome OS partition and creating one for Ubuntu in the newly created space. Assuming your device shipped with a 16GB SSD, the Chrome OS partition will initially be about 11GB. You can tell the script how much of that space to give Ubuntu. 8GB or 9GB will give you a couple GB of space for Ubuntu programs and files, after the distribution is installed, while still allowing Chrome OS a little bit of room for caching and local file storage.

The re-partitioning script will run for as long as 10-15 minutes and then reboot and re-initialize the Chrome OS partition — wiping out your settings and data in the process. You’ll be greeted by the same initial welcome screen you saw when you first powered on your Chromebox. After you have set up an internet connection for the device again and gotten to the Google login screen, you need to repeat the steps of going to a developer shell (Ctrl-Alt-F2), logging in as chronos, and retrieving and running the Ubuntu install script a second time (wget http://goo.gl/oyjlt; sudo sh oyjlt). This time the script will notice there is already a partition for Ubuntu and start downloading and loading Ubuntu for Chrome (ChrUbuntu).

Once the script has retrieved the 52 100MB files that make up the distribution (they total around 1-2GB compressed), it will reboot and amazingly you’ll find yourself staring at an Ubuntu login. The default username is user, with the intuitive password user. At this point, you might want to acquaint yourself with our beginner’s guide to Linux commands.

Even though you’ll be in Ubuntu at this point, your device will still boot Chrome OS by default. To change the default boot OS, you can simply issue the command sudo cgpt add -i 6 -P 5 -S 1 /dev/sda to make Ubuntu the default, or sudo cgpt add -i 6 -P 0 -S 1 /dev/sda to make Chrome OS the default. If you’re having trouble, Jay Lee has provided a helpful step-by-step tutorial on the process for the Chromebook, which worked just as well when I used it on a Chromebox from Google I/O. Special thanks to Glenn Fisher for digging up the instructions and sorting out the keymappings.

Working with Ubuntu

Once I loaded Ubuntu on a Chromebox using this method, I could install and run just about any Linux application, even most of those requiring 3D hardware. The ChrUbuntu distribution includes OpenGL libraries for the Chromebook and Chromebox, and has apt-get in case you need some libraries that it doesn’t provide by default.

The only application I had trouble with was X-Plane, since it is not supported on the Intel HD 3000 graphics hardware in the Chromebox. Even CPU-intensive apps like Gimp and Blender ran without a hitch, and the quick access times of the SSD let them run more responsively than they would on many entry- and even mid-level PCs.

Obviously the small size of the Ubuntu partition will become a limitation fairly quickly if you want to store a lot of data, but the USB ports on your Chrome device — the Chromebox features six of them — will come in handy for adding external hard drives or large flash drives to expand your storage. Likewise the Chromebox is set up for dual monitor support, with two DisplayPort connectors and a DVI-I connector on its backplate.

Chromebox processor: Celeron or i5

There is some confusion about the processor in current Chromeboxes. Units currently for sale ship with an Intel Celeron B840 processor, an entry-level dual-core CPU clocked at 1.9GHz. Those units have the model number XE300M22-A01US. The units at Google I/O, while looking identical on the outside, and having identical RAM and SSD, featured an Intel Core i5 2540M, clocked at 2.4GHz. The i5 models have the number XE300M22-A02US. There have been some references to the Core i5 version selling for as much as $499, but it is also possible the distribution channel is going through some type of upgrade to the more powerful units.

Either version has plenty of power to run Linux, but the A02 model certainly compares more favorably to the $599 Mac Mini, with a similar processor and more RAM. While the Chromebox’s 16GB SSD isn’t anywhere near the capacity of the Mac Mini’s 500GB hard drive, it’s nearly instant access makes for much faster booting and snappier response when web browsing or using applications. So if you’re looking for a well-designed, small, piece of hardware to run Linux, Google’s Chromebox is certainly an intriguing option.

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Cisco responds to unhappy users, reboots Connect Cloud, restores router functionality

Last week, Cisco rolled out its Connect Cloud service as an automatic update to routers with that particular function enabled — and triggered widespread user outrage in the process. The company’s Privacy Supplemental that accompanied the service implied that it would monitor users’ internet history, the Terms and Conditions stated that Cisco could kill user accounts for accessing certain content, and the only way to log into the router without a Connect Cloud account was to take it offline.

This collectively pissed off just about everyone, including yours truly. We’ve been in contact with Cisco since our initial story; the company has now released a follow-up blog post detailing the upcoming changes to the service and apologizing for how the rollout was initially handled. Here are some of the highlights:

• No more mandatory sign-ups — Connect Cloud will be an optional feature Linksys owners can choose to register for. Routers will default to standard (read: local) management. You will not need a Connect Cloud account to sign into or manage router functions.
• No automatic updates if the auto-update feature is turned off – Originally, the T&C contained a statement that Cisco could update routers where auto-update was deactivated, if the company deemed it necessary. Cisco has now stated it will not do this, and will revise its documentation accordingly.
• No monitoring or disconnects — I’ll quote these bits directly, since the terminology is important. “Cisco Connect Cloud and Cisco Linksys routers do not monitor or store information about how our customers are using the Internet and we do not arbitrarily disconnect customers from the Internet. The Cisco Connect Cloud service has never monitored customers’ Internet usage, nor was it designed to do so, and we will clarify this in an update to the terms of service. Cisco’s Linksys routers do not track or store any personal information regarding customers’ use of the Internet.”
• Router updates will continue to be offered for both CC-enabled devices and standard interfaces – Cisco will continue to offer firmware updates for both interfaces and types of users. Choosing the standard interface doesn’t mean you’ll be cut off from future security.

Cautiously optimistic

After having several conversations with Cisco representatives, I’m hopeful that the company is serious about these changes. Is it possible that this was a cynical land-grab to see what customers would or wouldn’t tolerate? Absolutely yes — and that’s why we’ll keep an eye on the situation and the documents in question. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that the company’s statements track nearly perfectly with a list of recommendations we made earlier this week.

Given the company’s quick response and rollback, it’s at least plausible that this was a case of over-enthusiasm combined with a poor understanding of what Linksys users most value about the product. In comments around the web, the phrase “it just works” came up repeatedly when users described why they were Linksys customers. My own preference for the brand is based on such statements; Linksys routers are broadly compatible workhorses that handle home routing tasks simply and require minimal maintenance. With Connect Cloud, Cisco is clearly hoping to boost its visibility, but the company’s first attempt to do so went too far.

Hopefully a more measured approach will achieve the desired goal without the negative feedback. As an optional service, there’s nothing wrong with Cisco’s Connect Cloud. We understand that readers will be dubious after last week’s events; we’ll keep an eye on Cisco’s documentation and T&C and notify you of any changes.

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Facebook invests in 55-terabit intra-Asia submarine cable system

Facebook has joined a consortium that will build by far the fastest intra-Asia submarine fiber optic network, the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG). Facebook is the only American company involved with the venture, which will see 10,000km (6,000 miles) of prime fiber laid between Malaysia and Japan (pictured above), with branches landing in almost every country along the way (Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and South Korea).

When the cable goes online in 2014, it is slated to use 40Gbps channels, for a total capacity of 55 terabits per second, or a transfer speed of 6.9 terabytes (138 Blu-ray discs) per second. When the various routers and repeaters are upgraded to 100Gbps-per-channel, the cable will have a total capacity of well over 100Tbps. The members of the consortium have put forward a total of $450 million so far, which makes it one of the most expensive submarine cable systems in the world.

The prime reason for building the cable, other than making money, is to provide more redundancy between the US and Asia. Currently, almost every connection from Asia to the US is routed through Singapore or Japan. If there is congestion at one of these sites, or a cable is cut, then the other (highly populous) countries in south east Asia are in trouble. It is perhaps no surprise that China Telecom and China Unicom, two of the world’s largest telecoms companies, are involved in the laying of APG. Time dotCom, another member of the APG consortium, says that the new cable will reduce latency between the US and Asia — which is fairly important, considering how many internet services are based in the US.

Beyond redundancy, this cable (and Facebook’s involvement) is significant for one very important reason: Over the next few years, almost all of the internet’s growth will occur in Asia. The total number of internet users has almost stagnated in Europe and North America — while in China, India, and south east Asia, hundreds of millions of people are connecting to the internet every year. Facebook has almost reached saturation point in Europe and North America, while its growth in Asia is only just starting to kick in. Backing this cable is Facebook’s way of acknowledging that Asian users are important to the continued growth of the social network — and, of course, the company is also communicating to its shareholders that its flagging US and EU growth isn’t a cause for concern.

While it seems quite sensible, it’s actually quite uncommon for web-based companies to invest in infrastructure beyond their own data centers. Google is one of the few exceptions, owning large swathes of the internet’s backbone, and being a member of the consortium that laid the Japan-US Unity submarine cable system. By owning a large portion of the network between its servers and its users, and thus control of the network setup and topology, it can provide much faster (lower-latency) access to its services. Being the most popular destination on the web, I wouldn’t be surprised if this marks the beginning of significant infrastructure investment by Facebook.

Read more about the secret world of submarine cables, or about the $1.5 billion polar Arctic Fibre and Arctic Link cables that will cut London-Tokyo latency by 60ms.

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