Jun 1, 1998 12:00 PM

Bandwidth Scavenger

By Michael Menduno

| CRUCIAL TECH

| Bandwidth Scavenger

Building the Hack-Proof OS

Crystal Cultivator

Decoding Iceland

Fiber to the Home: Take Two

<h4>#### g a small piece of leftover cellular spectrum, Dick Gossen is linking machines to each other and to you.</h4 Tworld is divided into two types of telecom contenders: the folks with mammoth projects scrambling to lay new networks, and the clever small-fry ferreting out bandwidth from what's already there. It's doubtful the latter will ever win the same big kitties as the builders, but for the guileful and thrifty there's plenty to gain.

DGossen, the 53-year-old CEO of San Jose, California-based Aeris Communications, believes in that payoff. His is the save-string mentality of telephony: Why waste perfectly good, free bandwidth even if it seems like scraps? He's got a point.

Wyou initiate a cell call, your identity is sent to your service provider over a tiny chunk of idle bandwidth unused by the call itself. Aeris piggy-backs on this channel, sending data packets of up to 100 bits – called MicroBursts – to its central server. From there the data can be routed to customers' servers.

Wno infrastructure and a US$50 transmitter/receiver, MicroBurst offers a host of new telemetry applications: online utility-meter reading, wireless security systems, and vending machines that report when they're running low on Diet Coke.

"roBurst is the only way the telemetry market can grow," says Ivar Bazzy, manager of business development at security-electronics giant Ademco. "Everything else is too expensive and offers limited coverage." Ademco will package MicroBurst in all of its new security systems.

"sen's one of the extraordinarily rare Silicon Valley types who understands both the technology and the psychology of the players involved," says industry consultant John Wood, "making him one of the few very good poker players."

Wa patent on MicroBurst, Gossen – who in 1971 led a team at Texas Instruments to introduce the first portable calculator – believes he has the winning hand to exploit the wireless data market.

"re focusing on broad-based applications where value lies in connectivity," he says, "not in big bandwidth."

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Whileftware giants like Sun and Microsoft seem to consider computer security an impossible goal worth only the sketchiest pro forma attention, Canadian programmer Theo de Raadt insists security flaws are bugs – and bugs aren't to be tolerated. Driven by perfection, de Raadt and a small group of cohorts created OpenBSD – an operating system virtually immune to hacking.

nu hear about a new security hole that experts have just uncovered," says Mudge, a member of the élite hacker group L0pht Heavy Industries, "chances are de Raadt fixed it in OpenBSD." That's why the L0pht Web site is run on OpenBSD.

eRaadt was building the latticework of code that makes up OpenBSD three years ago, he was fascinated by the bugs that lead to gaping security holes in other applications. "We found new vulnerabilities in practically every piece of source code we looked at," says de Raadt.

Bs obvious niche is high-security applications. It's currently running on firewall boxes at a few banks, hospitals, and government facilities, but is mostly used by hackers. That's not exactly a lucrative market. And that presents OpenBSD's next big challenge – making money. OpenBSD is freely distributed, but de Raadt is eventually hoping to get sponsorship from platform vendors. "So far," he says, "everything has been funded out of my pocket."

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sian-bphysicist Natalia Zaitseva has an emerald-green thumb. Using her fast-growth method, a tiny seed crystal is planted in a 6-foot rotating tank of potassium dihydrogen phosphate solution. In just six weeks it matures into a gargantuan, 500-pound pyramid-shaped crystal. Raw crystals of that size traditionally take up to two years to grow. Zait

st developed her technique in Russia, but is now using it to help engineers build the world's largest laser at the US$1.2 billion National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California. The

rade up of 192 beams, will be housed in a complex the length of two football fields and will be used to simulate the blast of a small-scale fusion bomb and create a pebble-sized sun as hot as the real thing. But completion of the project by its scheduled 2003 launch date would be impossible without Zaitseva's fast-growth method. Scientists will need more than 100 of her crystals, cut into 700 flawless slices – some measuring over a foot wide and a half-inch thick – to change the focus, direction, and wavelength of the laser beam. Just

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spiralworld of human genomics, an inbred population is worth its weight in gold. Hence a new research project in Iceland between DeCode Genetics, a two-year-old biotech firm, and pharmaceutical giant F. Hoffmann-La Roche. The comp

tof comparing healthy and sick genes is simplified by studying the DNA of the Icelandic natives, whose genes have been free from major outside influences since the Vikings settled the isolated nation 1,000 years ago. La Roche expects the US$200 million deal to lead to the discovery of new drugs for a dozen of the most common genetic diseases. By S

nberg (<a href="http://) is a Wiredtributing editor and a consultant for a New York investment firm. Portfolio managers he consults for may have long or short positions in the companies mentioned. |

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cable #### moths are still struggling to deliver more bandwidth to your home. But with wave-division multiplexing, smaller carriers may get to you first. By Steve G. Steinberg</h4> There was a fment, sometime around 1994, when the idea of stringing fiber-optic cable to the home was taken seriously. But it didn't take long before experts, pundits, and industry analysts dismissed the idea as utopian and unrealistic. It would be

texpensive to rewire the local loop, they announced, and besides, nobody needs that much bandwidth. Instead, the smart-thinking went, telcos would use ADSL to provide high bandwidth over existing phone lines, while cable providers would offer competing services via cable modems. Well, surpri

phone and cable folks failed to move forward much. In the meantime, the emergence of new fiber-optic technologies, championed by a new breed of service providers, has made the old dream of fiber to the home seem plausible once again. This latest

made possible by wave-division multiplexing. You may have heard of WDM in a different context. Introduced by Ciena Corporation and Lucent Technologies during the mid-1990s, WDM is currently used by long distance telephone companies to increase the amount of information that can be squeezed across their fiber-optic backbones. WDM achieves

dwidth efficiencies by sending packets of data over multiple wavelengths. Although the information travels on light beyond the visible spectrum, a useful way to visualize the process is to imagine data being sent along on the particular color waves of the spectrum. Most of today's systems allow carriers to use 40 separate waves, which translates into 40 times as much bandwidth. That's a big

lr folks like AT&T and MCI, whose nationwide fiber-optic networks are running out of capacity. For the big telcos, it's far cheaper to deploy WDM equipment than to go out and dig new cable trenches. Operators are discovering that sending more data over the same old fiber isn't the only exciting part of WDM – just as important is the way it divides the bandwidth. Before WDM,

oransmitted long-haul traffic with time-division multiplexing (TDM). Instead of dividing bandwidth into multiple wavelengths, TDM divided it into time slots. Think of TDM as a train, where each car represents a different time slot. When a train leaves the station, the first car is carrying data from User One, the second car is carrying data from User Two, and so on. As you step up the bandwidth, trains speed by faster and faster, making it a lot harder to pull off a single car. Why does thi

t? Because if you want to share bandwidth among many users, you want it to be as simple as possible to separate out each user's data. This all sta

take sense if you look at how fiber optics are being used by the competitive local exchange carriers. CLECs (pronounced SEE-lecs) such as Teleport Communications Group and WorldCom's MFS represent a new class of aggressive phone companies that compete against the RBOCs by offering high-speed T1 and T3 connections to businesses. In the past

lf years, the CLECs have been busy deploying fiber-optic loops that encircle the urban core of large cities. You've probably seen them tearing up the streets in your downtown recently. The loops they're installing pass by many potential customers, which makes them more cost-efficient than point-to-point fiber connections. Such service

xins Ciena chief executive Pat Nettles, are made possible by a key distinction between WDM and TDM loops: With a TDM loop, the cost of the equipment needed to separate out one channel goes up as the speed of an entire loop increases, but with a WDM loop, the cost of such equipment rises only with the speed of the channel itself. That seeming

ipoint makes all the difference. Suddenly, CLECs can offer residents of an apartment building T1 service at a reasonable price. Instead of a US$200,000 piece of equipment in the basement, it costs more like $20,000. None of the

sve publicly discussed such a service yet. But according to executives at Lucent, Ciena, and Cambrian Systems – companies selling the necessary WDM equipment to the CLECs – there's going to be a flurry of announcements over the next four months. If you don't live in an urban area, you're out of luck – at least for now. The CLECs have focused on cities because that's where the money is. Still, the shared-loop architecture works equally well in suburbs. And the few cable companies building fiber networks are using WDM to offer cheap Internet service. One way or a

efiber could arrive at your door sooner than you expected. By Garet

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ited cn rooms of semiconductor fabrication, botching a silicon wafer assembly can cost thousands of dollars. Operator-training takes months and is often inconsistent, with different technicians receiving training of varying quality. Bothered by this

--miss method, Tom Orton, a director of training at Intel in the 1980s, began experimenting with virtual reality as a way to streamline the process. In 1996, Orton cofounded Modis Training Technologies in Mesa, Arizona, to fully render his vision of VR-based training, and later that year the company delivered its first software package. Today, Modis can barely keep up with demand, with clients such as Motorola, IBM, and Rockwell Semiconductor Systems seeking customized VR packages. The training mim

ey aspect of the manufacturing process, down to putting on bunny suits and the color of employee lockers. This level of detail helps smooth the transition from the training world to the plant, Orton believes. The results are impressive: VR training takes one-tenth the time and cuts the cost in half. The simulations

ron a company's intranet, so several employees can access it, even from different geographical locations – IBM is training chip fabricators at both its Vermont and Ireland plants using a single Modis package. Modis is also id

fsmall companies that lack large training facilities. "We've been growing 50 percent a year," says Ian Burrows, vice president for fab operations at Vitesse Semiconductor. "We needed a program that could get people rapidly up to speed and could cut down training time." Modis is the onl

my offering VR training to the tech sector, according to Ann Elias at the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington. Orton plans to e

ddis VR to the utilities, medical, and nuclear industries soon. "This technology could have a dramatic impact," says Orton. "Efficiency is unlocked when you allow someone to practice and apply what they have learned before doing it for real." By Kate Farn

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–y, how to engineer a better toothbrush – into a query field. The software then searches a database of solutions from other disciplines to find functions similar to tooth brushing and suggests alternative ideas. To test the new soft

,under Valery Tsourikov assembled two groups of MIT grad students and offered each team several engineering enigmas. One group used TechOptimizer, the other relied on pure gray matter. After one hour, the TechOptimizer team had twice as many solutions. By Tom Standage<

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st aboany run-of-the-mill PC is also a radio transmitter. Electromagnetic signals emitted by your monitor, known as tempest radiation, can be picked up miles away, and with a suitable receiver the desktop image can be reconstructed. To prevent eavesdropping, the US Department of Defense spends roughly US$1.5 billion a year on expensive metallic shielding equipment. So how can you protect yourself without paying a fortune? Ross Anderson, a profess

tgland's University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory Security Group, and student Markus Kuhn have discovered that tempest radiation can be dramatically reduced with nothing more than a fancy screen font. With normal fonts, the electron guns in your monitor abruptly switch on and off when they encounter the edge of a character, emitting a pulse of telltale tempest radiation. But by smoothing the edges of the characters using a mathematical algorithm, the guns switch more gently, thus avoiding compromising signals. "This is going to comple

nge the tempest game," says Anderson. Soft Tempest screen drivers for Linux may be freely available on the Net this year. Just 2 percent of all Ch

eve hot running water, but nine in ten have televisions (The Gallup Organization) … Annual PC salasoared from 44,000 in 1993 to 2.5 million last year (Nazca S&S) … Every year, crpping nearly as many transistors as the planet has ants, about 1 quintillion (Popular Science) … DVD player sa7its in 1997 – their first year of introduction – and are estimated to reach 1 million units by the end of 1998 (Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association) … DVD-ROM driveulace CD-ROM in the home or business PC, with 6.7 million units in use by the end of 1998 (InfoTech) … Retail sales a costing less than $500 will grow roughly 50 percent per year in the US until 2001 (CAP Ventures)