Worth Reading: AI and being left out

It is often argued that technological progress always leads to massive shifts in employment but that at the end of the day the economy grows as new jobs are created. However, that’s a far too facile way of looking at the impact of AI and automation on jobs today. Joel Mokyr, a leading economic historian at Northwestern University, has spent his career studying how people and societies have experienced the radical transitions spurred by advances in technology, such as the Industrial Revolution that began in the late 18th century. The current disruptions are faster and “more intensive,” Mokyr says. “It is nothing like what we have seen in the past, and the issue is whether the system can adapt as it did in the past.” —Technology Review

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Worth Reading: What Cisco reveals about the enterprise market

Cisco is now sitting on a staggering $71.85 billion in cash, a lot of it overseas and inaccessible for doing acquisitions or anything until it is repatriated to the United States, where it is headquartered. Cisco could borrow money to build its appliances, offsetting its cash hoard without actually drawing it down and incurring taxes, and then simply offer every switch, router, and server with a monthly rental price. It would have to wait three to four years until most of the base converts from purchases to rentals. If Cisco set the rental rate fairly, then it could get off the product sales mouse wheel completely, and if Cisco made more malleable switches, with a mix of FPGAs and maybe ASICs like Cavium’s XPliant or Barefoot Networks’ Tofino chips, it could extend the life of these rented machines quite far and not incur hardware upgrade cycle costs like it is now. —The Next Platform

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On the ‘net: Net Neutrality Explained

Net Neutrality seems like a simple, easy to understand concept—but it seems the deeper you dig into the concept, this appearance of simplicity is actually just a light coat of surfacing on a very complex set of problems. The best place to begin is with the basic premise of net neutrality: providers who are transporting data should treat every packet the same, regardless of the source, the destination, or the service. —Tech Target

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Worth Reading: Overcoming data center cabling challenges

Now, many users have started employing high-density 40GbE switch line cards to break out as part of 10GbE applications. For example, a high-density 10GbE SFP+ line card has 48x10GbE ports, whereas a high-density 40GbE QSFP+ board may have 36x40GbE ports. As such, a 40GbE line card can be used to obtain 4×36 = 144x10GbE ports in the same cabling space and power-consumption conditions, thus reducing the cost and power consumption of the single-port 10GbE. —Data Center Journal

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Worth Reading: A digital Geneva treaty

In a blog post published today on Microsoft’s website, company President and Chief Legal Officer, Brad Smith, has raised concerns over escalating cyberattcks over the past year and the need for a Digital Geneva Convention. He wrote: “Just as the Fourth Geneva Convention has long protected civilians in times of war, we now need a Digital Geneva Convention that will commit governments to protecting civilians from nation-state attacks in times of peace. —CircleID

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TCP, Congestion Control, and Buffer Bloat

Cardwell, Neal, Yuchung Cheng, C. Stephen Gunn, Soheil Hassas Yeganeh, and Van Jacobson. “BBR: Congestion-Based Congestion Control.” Queue 14, no. 5 (October 2016): 50:20–50:53. doi:10.1145/3012426.3022184.

Article available here
Slides available here

In the “old days,” packet loss was a major problems; so much so that just about every routing protocol has a number of different mechanisms to ensure the reliable delivery of packets. For instance, in IS-IS, we have—

1. Local reliability between peers using CSNPs and PSNPs
2. On some links, a periodic check using CSNPs to ensure no packets were dropped
3. Acknowledgements for packets on transmission
4. Periodic timeouts and retransmissions of LSPs

It’s not that early protocol designers were dumb, it’s that packet loss was really this much of a problem. Congestion in the more recent sense was not even something you would not have even thought of; memory was expensive, so buffers were necessarily small, and hence a packet would obviously be dropped before it was buffered for any amount of time. TCP’s retransmission mechanism, the parameters around the window size, and the slow start mechanism, were designed to react to packet drops. Further, it might be obvious to think that any particular stream might provide Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Root of the DNS

The namespace of the DNS is a hierarchically structured label space. Each label can have an arbitrary number of immediately descendant labels, and only one immediate parent label. Domain names are expressed as an ordered sequence of labels in left-to-right order starting at the terminal label and then each successive parent label until the root label is reached. When expressing a domain name the ascii period character denotes a label delimiter. Fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) are names that express a label sequence from the terminal label through to the apex (or “root”) label. —Potaroo

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Worth Reading: ARM gains a foothold in China

China represents a huge opportunity for chip designer ARM as it looks to extend its low-power system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture beyond the mobile and embedded devices spaces and into new areas, such as the datacenter and emerging markets like autonomous vehicles, drones and the Internet of Things. China is a massive, fast-growing market with tech companies – including such giants as Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent – looking to leverage such technologies as artificial intelligence to help expand their businesses deeper into the global market and turning to vendors like ARM that can help them fuel that growth. —The Next Platform

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Reaction; Do we really need a new Internet?

The other day several of us were gathered in a conference room on the 17th floor of the LinkedIn building in San Francisco, looking out of the windows as we discussed some various technical matters. All around us, there were new buildings under construction, with that tall towering crane anchored to the building in several places. We wondered how that crane was built, and considered how precise the building process seemed to be to the complete mess building a network seems to be.

And then, this week, I ran across a couple of articles arguing that we need a new Internet. For instance—

What we really have today is a Prototype Internet. It has shown us what is possible when we have a cheap and ubiquitous digital infrastructure. Everyone who uses it has had joyous moments when they have spoken to family far away, found a hot new lover, discovered their perfect house, or booked a wonderful holiday somewhere exotic. For this, we should be grateful and have no regrets. Yet we have not only learned about the possibilities, but also about the problems. The Prototype Internet is not fit for purpose for the safety-critical and socially sensitive types of Continue reading

Worth Reading: Mud Slinging

Network Engineers are redefining themselves, always learning, always trying to improve themselves and marketing still puts out things like this in 2017. Sales and marketing definitely need to up their game. As my CEO said the other day: “Business is not between companies, it’s between people”. This is exactly what it’s about. If you burn my confidence by putting up stupid stuff on social media, it will affect your sales. Endorse your product on its own merits. Don’t talk down other vendors. This only makes YOU look bad. —Lost in Transit

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Worth Reading: Putting ARM servers through the paces

When ARM officials and partners several years ago began talking about pushing the low-power chip architecture from our phones and tablets and into the datacenter, the initial target was the emerging field of microservers – small, highly dense and highly efficient systems aimed at the growing number of cloud providers and hyperscale environments where power efficiency was as important as performance. —The Next Platform

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Sphere in spheres

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Worth Reading: Extend your ITIL

Defining precise cybersecurity services in the context of an IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is very important. From my perspective, many organizations struggle with cybersecurity because they do not understand what these essential services are. In the first post of this series, I discussed how ITIL misses the mark when it comes to operational security. In this post, I will discuss the six essential cybersecurity services required to run a credible security operation and how you can implement them in security operations. —APNIC

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Worth Reading: Got a license for that YouTube channel?

Justin Chandler was shocked and confused when he was given a citation for operating a business out of his home without first obtaining a license. Unlike many people who run home-based businesses, Chandler doesn’t actually sell anything. In fact, he doesn’t even provide a service. He does, however, run a successful YouTube channel, which, according to officials in Cobb County, Georgia, means Chandler qualifies as a small business owner. —The Stream

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Triangle Network Engineers

I’m speaking at the Triangle Network Engineers meeting on the 9th of March; click below to find out more.

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Worth Reading: Intel’s ticking time bomb

It started somewhat innocently. Cisco released a field notice that there was an issue with some signal clocks on a range of their networking devices. This by itself was a huge issue. There had been rumblings about this issue for a few months. Some proactive replacement of affected devices to test things. Followed by panicked customer visits when the news broke on February 2nd. Cisco looked like they were about to get a black eye. —The Networking Nerd

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Worth Reading: How long does it take to steal a credit card number?

Using the discovered card details to make an international money transfer took just 27 minutes from creating the transfer account to cash in hand (in this case in India, from funds initiating in the UK). That’s fast enough that there’s very little time for a bank to detect fraud and reverse the payment. Digging a little deeper though, there are also some interesting lessons to be learned about unintended emergent behaviours in complex systems, misaligned incentives, and the state of card payment security in general. —The Morning Paper

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Metacognitive

If I could choose just a handful of skills you must learn to be a successful engineer, being metacognitive would certainly be among them. What is metacognition? OOne of my favorite books on the virtue ethic applied to mental skills defines it thus—

Metacognitive people are concerned not just with what they need to know but with what thinking strategies are best suited to achieve that end. —Philip Dow, Virtuous Minds

The concept is simple. Implementation, as always, is the hard part. Particularly as engineers, we spend a lot of time thinking about technique. We ask questions like—

• How do I configure this?
• How would I use this technology?
• What is the problem here?
• Why would I want to do it that way?

These technos focused questions are great for solving day to day, or even no-so-day-to-day problems. But they aren’t so great for mental growth? Why not? Imagine you are tasked with cutting wood for a living. You might start out by simply cutting the wood. You place a piece on the block, swing the axe, and the splits fall off. You can consider this the what of cutting wood (or, for those who are interested in philosophy, the Continue reading

Worth Reading: The inconvenience of privacy

Unfortunately, it is not easy to assess the weight of privacy losses. Typically, in the online world, no small privacy loss will create a catastrophe. One business tracking one click of yours is not a big deal. But privacy losses accumulate, and the entirety of what you have revealed online through browsing, clicking, buying and liking, can paint a frighteningly detailed portrait of you. Privacy losses are like ecologic damages or health deterioration: no one act of littering, no one puff of a cigarette will bring about disaster, but the sum of them through time might. —Connecting

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Worth Reading: IBM should buy…

We spend a lot of time contemplating what technologies will be deployed at the heart of servers, storage, and networks and thereby form the foundation of the next successive generations of platforms in the datacenter for running applications old and new. While technology is inherently interesting, we are cognizant of the fact that the companies producing technology need global reach and a certain critical mass. —The Next Platform

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