GoDaddy revokes nearly 9,000 SSL certificates issued without proper validation

GoDaddy, one of the world's largest domain registrars and certificate authorities, revoked almost 9,000 SSL certificates this week after it learned that its domain validation system has had a serious bug for the past five months.The bug was the result of a routine code change made on July 29 to the system used to validate domain ownership before a certificate is issued. As a result, the system might have validated some domains when it shouldn't have, opening the possibility of abuse.Industry rules call for certificate authorities to check if the person requesting a certificate for a domain actually has control over that domain. This can be done in a variety of ways, including by asking the applicant to make an agreed-upon change to the website using that domain.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why Amazon is the current king of the virtual assistants

Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant was impossible to miss at CES 2017. The surprise hit service that powers Amazon's smart home hub, Echo, is being embedded into a growing arsenal of connected products, inside and outside the home. In many ways, Alexa is the feature of the moment for consumer electronics such as refrigerators, vacuums, DVR boxes, robots, TVs, washers and dryers, cars, and an important product category in which Amazon has thus far failed spectacularly: smartphones. Amazon was center stage during the annual tech gathering in the desert, as dozens of companies announced plans to integrate Alexa into their upcoming products. Ford, LG, Whirlpool, GE, Lenovo, Samsung, Hyundai and Huawei are a few of the big names that joined the race to bring Alexa to the masses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump’s DHS pick urges more coordination on cyberthreats

President-elect Donald Trump's pick for Homeland Security chief wants to forge closer ties with the private sector in the cyber arena.Gen. John F. Kelly (Ret.), a more than four-decade veteran of the Marine Corps, appeared this week before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee for his confirmation hearing, the second of Trump's appointees to begin that process.In his testimony on cybersecurity, Kelly noted the challenges of keeping pace with an ever-evolving spate of threats from a variety of actors, and stressed the importance of the government coordinating its defense efforts and intelligence with the private-sector firms that could be targeted by attackers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump’s DHS pick urges more coordination on cyberthreats

President-elect Donald Trump's pick for Homeland Security chief wants to forge closer ties with the private sector in the cyber arena.Gen. John F. Kelly (Ret.), a more than four-decade veteran of the Marine Corps, appeared this week before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee for his confirmation hearing, the second of Trump's appointees to begin that process.In his testimony on cybersecurity, Kelly noted the challenges of keeping pace with an ever-evolving spate of threats from a variety of actors, and stressed the importance of the government coordinating its defense efforts and intelligence with the private-sector firms that could be targeted by attackers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FCC chief accuses AT&T and Verizon of violating net neutrality—but it probably doesn’t matter

AT&T and Verizon are probably violating the Federal Communication Commission’s net neutrality rules by allowing third-parties to pay for subscribers’ data usage.That’s the determination FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler provided in a letter to several U.S. Senators on Wednesday, along with a report on the matter from The FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau. But Wheeler is set to step down as FCC Chair once President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office next Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump’s CIA nominee grilled on his advocacy of surveillance database

President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency wants to create a massive surveillance database by resurrecting a U.S. telephone records collection program, but some senators questioned what limits he would accept.CIA nominee Mike Pompeo, currently a Republican representative from Kansas, has called on Congress to reverse its mid-2015 decision to rein in the phone metadata collection program run by the National Security Agency, a sister agency to the CIA that focuses on signals intelligence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FCC chief accuses AT&T and Verizon of violating net neutrality—but it probably doesn’t matter

AT&T and Verizon are probably violating the Federal Communication Commission’s net neutrality rules by allowing third-parties to pay for subscribers’ data usage.That’s the determination FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler provided in a letter to several U.S. Senators on Wednesday, along with a report on the matter from The FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau. But Wheeler is set to step down as FCC Chair once President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office next Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump’s CIA nominee grilled on his advocacy of surveillance database

President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency wants to create a massive surveillance database by resurrecting a U.S. telephone records collection program, but some senators questioned what limits he would accept.CIA nominee Mike Pompeo, currently a Republican representative from Kansas, has called on Congress to reverse its mid-2015 decision to rein in the phone metadata collection program run by the National Security Agency, a sister agency to the CIA that focuses on signals intelligence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Culling The Community

exclusion

By now, you may have seen some bit of drama in the VMUG community around the apparent policy change that disqualified some VMUG leaders based on their employer. Eric Shanks (@Eric_Shanks) did a great job of covering it on his blog as did Matt Crape (@MattThatITGuy)with his post. While the VMUG situation has its own unique aspects, the question for me boils down to something simple: How do you remove people from an external community?

Babies And Bathwater

Removing unauthorized people from a community is nothing new under the sun. I was a Cisco Champion once upon a time. During the program’s second year I participated in briefings and events with the rest of the group, including my good friend Amy Arnold (@AmyEngineer). When the time came to reapply to the program for Year 3, I declined to apply again for my own reasons. Amy, however, was told that she couldn’t reapply. She and several other folks in the program were being disqualified for “reasons”. It actually took us a while to figure out why, and the answer still wasn’t 100% clear. To this day the best we can figure out is that Continue reading

Containers will be a $2.6B market by 2020, research firm says

The market for containers – which are used by developers to package applications – is “exploding” with a slew of startups looking to compete with legacy vendors who are increasingly prioritizing the technology.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Greenpeace’s naughty and nice list of the most – and least – green tech vendors | Oops, this Redditor accidentally deleted his Microsoft Azure DNS +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Introduction to VPN (Virtual Private Network)

Introduction to VPN (Virtual Private Network) Let’s start with the definition. VPN is a logical network and created over shared physical infrastructure. Shared infrastructure can be private such as MPLS VPN of a Service Provider or over the Public infrastructure such as Internet. There are many concepts to understand VPN in detail but in this […]

The post Introduction to VPN (Virtual Private Network) appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Review: PocketCHIP—Super cheap Linux terminal that fits in your pocket

Portable, pocket-sized computer. Runs Linux. Has a good battery life. Bonus points for a physical keyboard, and full-size USB port. Double bonus points for being cheap. That’s sort of my ideal “carry with me” device. If I can have a Linux device, with a proper shell that I can work entirely from, I’m a happy camper. Over the past few years I’ve been able to hobble together a few devices to accomplish this Utopian goal—more or less. At one point, I hobbled together a makeshift Raspberry Pi case (with a screen that I powered with an external USB power supply) using a whole lot of electrical tape. That was great except the “case” was just—well—tape. And I couldn’t find a tiny physical keyboard that fit with the size of it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

InfraKit Under the Hood: High Availability

Back in October, Docker released Infrakit, an open source toolkit for creating and managing declarative, self-healing infrastructure. This is the first in a two part series that dives more deeply into the internals of InfraKit.

Introduction

At Docker,  our mission to build tools of mass innovation constantly challenges to look at ways to improve the way developers and operators work. Docker Engine with integrated orchestration via Swarm mode have greatly simplified and improved efficiency in application deployment and management of microservices. Going a level deeper, we asked ourselves if we could improve the lives of operators by making tools to simplify and automate orchestration of infrastructure resources. This led us to open source InfraKit, as set of building blocks for creating self-healing and self-managing systems.

Infrakit

There are articles and tutorials (such as this, and this) to help you get acquainted with InfraKit. InfraKit is made up of a set of components which actively manage infrastructure resources based on a declarative specification. These active agents continuously monitor and reconcile differences between your specification and actual infrastructure state. So far, we have implemented the functionality of scaling groups to support the creation of a compute cluster or Continue reading

Microsoft launches StaffHub to connect deskless workers

Microsoft is taking another step toward serving workers who aren't at computers all day with a new Office 365 service launched Thursday. StaffHub, which is part of the company's enterprise productivity offering, allows managers to set schedules for deskless workers like retail employees and service technicians.The service is designed to let managers set schedules for and distribute company resources to employees through a simple interface. Employees can use the service to swap shifts with one another and chat, too.The new offering is part of Microsoft's push to expand usage of Office 365. While the cloud productivity service has had a strong following among knowledge workers, it has traditionally held less utility for people who aren't editing Word documents and sending emails through Outlook all day.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rudy Giuliani to coordinate regular cybersecurity meetings between Trump, tech leaders

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani says Donald Trump has tapped him to gather top cybersecurity leaders to meet with the administration regularly to share “all the information available in the private sector” with the goal of improving national cyber defenses “because we’re so far behind.” “The president elect-decided he wanted to bring in on a regular basis the people in the private sector, the corporate leaders in particular and thought leaders in the private sector who are working on security for cyber because we’re so far behind,” Giuliani said on Fox and Friends.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rudy Giuliani to coordinate regular cybersecurity meetings between Trump, tech leaders

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani says Donald Trump has tapped him to gather top cybersecurity leaders to meet with the administration regularly to share “all the information available in the private sector” with the goal of improving national cyber defenses “because we’re so far behind.”“The president elect-decided he wanted to bring in on a regular basis the people in the private sector, the corporate leaders in particular and thought leaders in the private sector who are working on security for cyber because we’re so far behind,” Giuliani said on Fox and Friends.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here