Microsoft has rewritten the operation of its Source Network Address Translation (SNAT) protocol in a bid to improve Azure's load balancing performance. Source Network Address Translation is a special sauce that allocates IP port numbers, making it easy for a router to fling traffic around multiple Azure servers. In the TCP/IP …

An infosec educator from the United States Military Academy at West Point has taken a look at Netflix's HTTPS implementation, and reckons all he needs to know what programs you like is a bit of passive traffic capture. The problem, writes Michael Kranch (with collaborator Andrew Reed), is information in TCP/IP headers are …

Bridgeworks says it can make communicating with offsite tape libraries vastly faster than physically shipping tapes, and vastly cheaper if you are using a remote Fibre Channel SAN or site-to-site replication before transmitting data to the tape library. The basic pitch is: "Don't do this. Send your data direct to a SCSI tape …

Feature Bridgeworks has found way to improve wide area TCP/IP transmission of large, streamed files that compensates for packet loss, radically improving the performance of NetApp SnapMirror and SnapVault which are hobbled by packet loss. It’s been working on the technology to virtualise a TCP/IP connection for several years. Here’s …

Nokia and ARM are at the heart of a bid to revamp the ageing TCP/IP stack to make it better suited to networks that need to operate at very high speed and/or low latency. Among the plethora of industry alliances at the intersection of telecoms, IT and IP, this looks like one with a genuine contribution to make to the evolution …

A group of major vendors has put forward an open source TCP/IP stack they say is designed to reinvigorate the ancient and rather crusty protocol. Nokia, ARM, and Enea are offering up both code and tutorials here for their OpenFastPath user-space TCP/IP implementation. As The Register has previously noted, user-space …

The US National Science Foundation, Cisco, Verisign, Panasonic and boffins from around the world have thrown their weight behind a new “Named Data Networking Consortium” that aims to develop “a practically deployable set of protocols replacing TCP/IP that increases network trustworthiness and security, addresses the growing …

The world is awash with proposals to improve the venerable TCP/IP protocol. The latest, from researchers at the University of Cincinnati, addresses shortcomings in the protocol's behaviour on wireless networks. Since wireless, rather than a coloured Ethernet cable, is the default connection for most devices, how WiFi handles …

Researchers from Denmark's Aalborg university are claiming that Internet could move traffic five times or more faster than it does today. The downside? Doing away with how TCP/IP currently functions. In this announcement, Aalborg professor Frank Fitzek provides a (somewhat sketchy) outline of what he calls “Random Linear …

Scientists at the University of Buffalo (UB) have tested an underwater network that could make internet-like communications across the world's oceans a possibility. Electrical Engineering Graduate Students Hovannes Kulhandjian and Zahed Hossain of Tommaso Melodia’s WINES Lab Research on Lake Erie It's an MPAA takedown …

Analysis Thirty years ago this week the modern internet became operational as the US military flipped the switch on TCP/IP, but the move to the protocol stack was nearly killed at birth. The deadline was 1 January, 1983: after this, any of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network's (ARPANET) 400 hosts that were still clinging to …

Google Atmosphere There is no need to rewrite the basic internet protocols to beef up security, Vint Cerf has said. He also warned that governments are making increasingly heavy-handed attempts to take control of the interwebs. Cerf, co-creator of TCP/IP and currently chief internet evangelist at Google, told delegates at the Atmosphere …

Gemalto has managed to get Facebook running on a SIM chip, making every GSM phone a Facebook phone and bringing social networking to the dumbest of handsets. The SIM-based client isn't as pretty as its smartphone contemporaries – don't expect picture streams or sliding interfaces – but it was developed with the help of …

Velocity Google vice president of engineering Urs Hölzle has warned that unless we update the internet's underlying protocols, any improvements to network bandwidth will be wasted. "It's very clear that the network speed itself will increase," Hölzle said today during a keynote speech at the internet-infrastructure obsessed Velocity …

Full body scanners at US airports can transmit digital strip search images of people, contrary to US Transportation Security Authority assurances. The TSA has maintained that such scanners cannot store or transmit scanned body images of people, stating that "the machines have zero storage capability." A TSA release stated …

Arms globocorp Lockheed Martin announced today that it has won a $31m contract from the famous Pentagon crazy-ideas bureau, DARPA, to reinvent the internet and make it more suitable for military use. Microsoft will also be involved in the effort. The main thrust of the effort will be to develop a new Military Network Protocol …

Network latency is a fact of life. There is nothing you can do about it, except join the network queue and wait. But Bridgeworks thinks it has solved the latency problem with pipelining and artificial intelligence. Can it be true? SANSlide is the product that does this and it aims to increase the speed of storage backup …

In the beginning, Ethernet was optional. When Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs cooked up their network protocol at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s, it was meant to connect the research haven’s now famous Alto machines — but only if researchers felt the need. “Each scientist would get a kind of Alto order form,” Metcalfe remembers, “ …