Ixia Launches True 10 Gigabit Ethernet Test Device

Test equipment maker Ixia announced the industry's first true 10 Gigabit Ethernet test platform at Interop here.

The new XM12X 10 Gigabit Ethernet module, which is designed around the recently approved IEEE 802.3an-2006 standard for 10GBASE-T, contains 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports and one 10GBASE-T port. The 12 on-board processors allow the module to completely fill either the 10 Gigabit ports or the 10 Gigabit port with full Layer 2 through 7 traffic. The traffic is user configurable to match the specific test needs of users.

Xirrus Shows 11n Multi-Gigabit Wi-Fi Array

Xirrus, maker of high capacity long range Wi-Fi access points, is showing a new, faster array that uses 802.11n to provide gigabit throughput.

Canon, Toshiba Delay Launch Of 'SED' Televisions

Japanese high-tech giants Canon Inc. and Toshiba Corp. said Friday they had decided to postpone indefinitely the launch of a new type of flat television panel which is mired in legal wrangling.

Keylogging Trojan Dodges Anti-virus Detection

A new variant of the Russian Trojan Gozi is circulating on the Web, this time armed with a keylogging function and the ability to scramble itself so it is difficult to detect by anti-virus software.

Unrest in Cyberspace

Residents of the virtual world Second Life rise up to protest technical troubles brought on by a burgeoning population.

The overseers of Second Life, a complex and booming virtual world hailed by many as the first step toward an immersive 3-D Internet, attempted yesterday to calm angry cyber-citizens who have petitioned for fixes to technical bugs recently plaguing the world.

The main problem, in members' eyes: Second Life is growing so fast that it's straining Linden Lab's resources to the limit, including its developers' ability to fix old bugs and roll out new software versions that don't introduce new problems. In a town-hall meeting yesterday inside Second Life, the company appealed for patience.

"We are working to fix bugs and enable incremental improvement," said Cory Ondrejka, chief technology officer at Linden Lab, the venture-funded San Francisco startup that launched Second Life in 2003. The town-hall meeting was hastily arranged in response to a damning open letter published by irritated Second Life residents on April 30. "At the same time, we are building the foundations for the next-gen architecture that will radically improve our ability to scale," Ondrejka said.

Every day, some 25,000 computer owners, plus teams from dozens of major corporations, are rushing to join Second Life. But as these new members buy virtual land, set up house for their avatars, and start in-world businesses, the strain on the Second Life "grid" is increasing. Linden Lab is adding more than 120 new servers every week, according to Ondrejka, but users say that the company still isn't keeping up. Complaints have piled up in Second Life forums and blogs from longtime users impatiPublishent over frequent slowdowns and crashes, property that goes missing, messages that aren't delivered, search and friend-finder functions that don't work, purchases that aren't completed, and poor to nonexistent customer service and technical support.

The dissatisfaction culminated this week in the open letter, which demands that Linden Lab address the bugs "immediately," before rolling out planned features such as voice chat. More than 3,000 Second Life users have signed the letter so far.

"People feel that Linden Lab is failing them because they are paying a great deal, in some cases, for a product that is failing to work acceptably, from a company that will no longer communicate with its customers," says one signer, a United Kingdom-based IT manager known within Second Life as Inigo Chamerberlin.

Ondrejka spent most of the hour-long meeting answering residents' questions about the origins of the problems and explaining the steps his team of programmers plans to take to improve performance. As Ondrejka explained at the meeting and in an entry on the company's blog, many of the problems resulted from unnoticed errors in the most recent release of the simulation software and the viewer software that users must download to their PCs. Those errors are quickly being fixed, Ondrejka said.

But the company faces a far deeper challenge, in the form of an overall software architecture that wasn't designed to support as many people and transactions as Second Life now ho