Those Internet Hugging Wireless Hippies, Wippies

So far we have had startups like Fonera and OpenSpark/Sparknet offering WLAN/WiFi communities with community access points for broadband customers. Recently and very quietly Saunalahti -- an ISP, which is part of Elisa now -- released a pre-beta of yet another wireless community, Wippies. The trick is here, this community is supported heavily by operator-grade services like decent email space, diskspace, VoIP, blogs, forums etc. partially eliminating the need to get these services from Google and other service providers. And did I already mention that this operator community is not limited only to one operator? The HomeBox (WLAN-ADSL Router) or WiFiBox (WLAN AP) can be used also in every operator's ADSL or Internet connection. Saunalahti is also promising development interfaces and access to the community AP platform making the community AP in author's opinion the most promising attempt to build functional and truly open community AP. I guess the author has to admit that there still are operators, which still innovate and do new services. Here's the link to the service: http://www.wippies.com/

Peer To Peer Networking Course at TUT

Once again from Professor Harju's email announcement: TLT-2486 ADVANCED COURSE IN BROADBAND NETWORKS, 3 cr The topic of this seminar course in Spring 2007 is *Peer-to-Peer Networking*. The course is suitable for postgraduate studies. The course starts on Friday, February 6, 2007 at 12.15 in TB111. For more information, see http://www.cs.tut.fi/kurssit/TLT-2486/ P2P systems are dynamic networks of peers that create an overlay network on top of the Internet Protocol (IP) network. P2P networks can aggregate enormous storage and processing resources while minimising entry and scaling costs. There are a lot of ways how these overlay networks can be formed and managed, and how content is stored into and searched from these networks. The aim of the course is to give a comprehensive and up-to-date view of the different mechanisms and aspects involved.

Networking presentation at TUT

Once in a while there are presentations at Tampere University of Technology from visiting researchers, which might interest also Modeemi's network-oriented members. Noticed this this morning so please excuse me for late announcement. Shamelessly ripping off Professor Harju's mail: Dr. Tuomas Aura Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK will give a presentation on "Pitfalls in Internet mobility and multihoming" on Monday, January 29, 2007 at 13.15 - 14.00 in TB224, Tietotalo, TUT. Abstract: Mobility, dynamic addressing, and multihoming features are being added to network protocols at all layers of the protocol stack to enable movement and to increase reliability. By misusing such features, an attacker may be able to hijack data and connections, prevent legitimate communication, and cause a packet flood. In this talk, I will show examples of what has gone wrong in standard protocols such as Mobile IPv6, SCTP and SIP. Fortunately, simple, inexpensive design principles have enabled us to prevent such attacks.