Butterfly

The post Butterfly appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: The psychology of bad passwords

A Lab42 survey, which polled consumers across the United States, Germany, France, New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom, highlights the psychology around why consumers develop poor password habits despite understanding the obvious risk, and suggests that there is a level of cognitive dissonance around our online habits. —helpnetsecurity

The post Worth Reading: The psychology of bad passwords appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Increasing the strength of the root zone

A few weeks ago, on Oct. 1, 2016, Verisign successfully doubled the size of the cryptographic key that generates Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) signatures for the internet’s root zone. With this change, root zone Domain Name System (DNS) responses can be fully validated using 2048-bit RSA keys. This project involved work by numerous people within Verisign, as well as collaborations with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). —Circle ID

The post Worth Reading: Increasing the strength of the root zone appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: What the IoT means to you

In the broadest possible terms, the Internet of Things is the connectivity of things that are able to communicate data about themselves to the “network” or to be controlled from the network. This means that the Internet of Things is as nebulous, ubiquitous and diverse as the internet itself, examples of IoT devices could range from the iKettle to devices use sophisticated monitoring of HD video to support mission critical applications like traffic flow management. —ECI

The post Worth Reading: What the IoT means to you appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: The balancing act of freelancing

By the end of the work day, the last thing you want to do is look at another pixel. Since 8:30am, you’ve been firing on all cylinders. Deadlines, meetings and requests have been swarming your desk as restlessly as your fingers against your keys. The mental expenditure you endure each day is taxing. Yet, you’re not done. You have even more deadlines, calls, meetings and requests to honor once you get home–your place of solitude. They belong to your freelance clients. You must pay them the same amount of attention and focus as you give to your day job. —Line 25

The post Worth Reading: The balancing act of freelancing appeared first on 'net work.

Thoughts on the Tomahawk II

Broadcom released some information about the new Tomahawk II chip last week in a press release. For those who follow hardware, there are some interesting points worth considering here.

First, the chip supports 256x25g SERDES. Each pair of 25G SERDES can be combined into a single 50g port, allowing the switch to support 128 50g ports. Sets of four SERDES can be combined into a single 100g port, allowing the switch to support 64 100g ports.

Second, there is some question about the table sizes in this new chip. The press release notes the chip has “Increased On-Chip Forwarding Databases,” but doesn’t give any precise information. Information from vendors who wrap sheet metal around the chipset to build a complete box don’t seem to be too forthcoming in their information about this aspect of the new chip, either. The Tomahawk line has long had issues with its nominal 100,000 forwarding table entry limit, particularly in large scale data center fabrics and applications such as IX fabrics. We’ll simply have to wait to find out more about this aspect of the new chip, it seems.

Third, there is some question about the forwarding buffers available on the chip. Again, the Tomahawk Continue reading

Worth Reading: The EU is pushing new IoT security rules

The European Commission is drafting new cybersecurity requirements to beef up security around so-called Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as Web-connected security cameras, routers and digital video recorders (DVRs). News of the expected proposal comes as security firms are warning that a great many IoT devices are equipped with little or no security protections. iotb2According to a report at Euractiv.com, the Commission is planning the new IoT rules as part of a new plan to overhaul the European Union’s telecommunications laws. “The Commission would encourage companies to come up with a labeling system for internet-connected devices that are approved and secure,” wrote Catherine Stupp. “The EU labelling system that rates appliances based on how much energy they consume could be a template for the cybersecurity ratings.” —Krebs on Security

The post Worth Reading: The EU is pushing new IoT security rules appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Flowspec is a step forward

Do you recall when service providers typically had to call upon Remote Trigger Blackhole (RTBH) to mitigate DDOS attacks? With RTBH, we only had two methods, source-based and destination-based. We would basically take the hardest approach. Either drop all traffic from the source or drop all traffic to the destination. This could be both wanted and unwanted traffic. —Netcraftsmen

The post Worth Reading: Flowspec is a step forward appeared first on 'net work.

On the ‘net: Software Patents

What should we do with software patents? I’ve seen both sides of the debate, as I work a great deal in the context of standards bodies (particularly the IETF), where software patents have impeded progress on a community-driven (and/or community-usable) standard. On the other hand, I have been listed as a co-inventor on at least 40 software patents across more than twenty years of work, and have a number of software patents either filed or in the process of being filed. —CircleID

The post On the ‘net: Software Patents appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: The Overlapping Birthday Problem

How many arbitrary people do you have to get into a room before two of them share the same birthday? Probability theory has considered this problem for so long that no one is quite certain who first posed the so-called “birthday problem” or “birthday paradox.” What we do know is that this occurs with many fewer people than we might have guessed. In fact, there’s a 50% chance that two people will share a birthday (month and date) with only 23 people. That confidence goes up to 99% with 75 people. Beyond just awkward situations about who gets the first slice of cake, this idea has applications in cryptography and security situations. The short of the idea is that things that seem unpredictable or unlikely are often much more likely than we would think. —Cloud Security Alliance

The post Worth Reading: The Overlapping Birthday Problem appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: MANRs gains steam

The Internet Society’s Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS), which launched nearly two years ago as a plan for advancing the security and resilience of the Net’s routing infrastructure, has signed up network operators in Asia, North and South America, Africa, and Europe, including six network providers from Russia, five in the Netherlands, five in the US, and four in Germany. AT&T, Comcast, and Level 3, are among the largest US ISPs that have joined the effort. —Dark Reading

The post Worth Reading: MANRs gains steam appeared first on 'net work.

Fabric versus Network: What’s the Difference?

We often hear about fabrics, and we often hear about networks—but on paper, an in practice, they often seem to be the same thing. Leaving aside the many realms of vendor hype, what’s really the difference? Poking around on the ‘net, I came across a couple of definitions that seemed useful, at least at first blush. For instance, SDN Search gives provides the following insight—

The word fabric is used as a metaphor to illustrate the idea that if someone were to document network components and their relationships on paper, the lines would weave back and forth so densely that the diagram would resemble a woven piece of cloth.

While this is interesting, it gives us more of a “on the paper” answer than what might be called a functional view. The entry at Wikipedia is more operationally based—

Switched Fabric or switching fabric is a network topology in which network nodes interconnect via one or more network switches (particularly crossbar switches). Because a switched fabric network spreads network traffic across multiple physical links, it yields higher total throughput than broadcast networks, such as early Ethernet.

Greg has an interesting (though older) post up on the topic, Continue reading

Worth Reading: Stop Trying to Deter Cyber Criminals

With the foregoing in mind, the key question today is, “Given the very problematic historical record, why should anybody think that cyber deterrence will somehow now become a useful and functional policy option?” And when one adds the fresh wrinkles of anonymity and/or deniability of the perpetrator, the low cost—relative to other forms of aggression—of cyberspace-based attack, and the virtually nonexistent barriers to entry that diffuse power to swarms of hackers, the goal of achieving reliable, robust cyber deterrence seems well out of reach. —ACM

The post Worth Reading: Stop Trying to Deter Cyber Criminals appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Building the LinkedIn Knowledge Graph

At LinkedIn, we use machine learning technology widely to optimize our products: for instance, ranking search results, advertisements, and updates in the news feed, or recommending people, jobs, articles, and learning opportunities to members. An important component of this technology stack is a knowledge graph that provides input signals to machine learning models and data insight pipelines to power LinkedIn products. This post gives an overview of how we build this knowledge graph. —LinkedIn Engineering Blog

The post Worth Reading: Building the LinkedIn Knowledge Graph appeared first on 'net work.

Basement Hall

The post Basement Hall appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Limitations of Current Branch Office WAN

A key characteristic of the traditional branch office WAN architecture is to have T1/E1-based access to a service provider’s MPLS network at each branch office and to have one or more high speed links at each data center. In this architecture it is common to backhaul some or all of a company’s Internet traffic to a data center before handing that traffic off to the Internet. In order to understand how common this architectural approach is, the survey respondents were asked to indicate how much of their Internet traffic that is generated in branch offices is backhauled to a data center before being handed off to the Internet. —ECI

The post Worth Reading: Limitations of Current Branch Office WAN appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Data Centric Computing

Unlike enterprise business applications of the 1990s, systems processing this growing deluge of unstructured data have to deal with an entirely different class of problems. As data scales beyond petabytes, simply ingesting, storing, retrieving, and processing data becomes challenging using traditional server and application architectures. currentThe sheer scale of infrastructure needed to support these workflows is, for most companies, daunting. There is network complexity required to support terabytes per hour data ingest rates, a large and growing storage tier, and a compute infrastructure that continuously scans incoming data to classify and process it. —The Next Platform

The post Worth Reading: Data Centric Computing appeared first on 'net work.

Humans, to Computers

The post Humans, to Computers appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: The Wild West of Performance Measurement

Data-driven decision making relies on contextual understanding of how data is gathered and the type of analysis used to arrive at an outcome. The popularity of data-driven decision-making has increased the number of companies using statistics to support a preference or vendor selection. The Internet Performance Management (IPM) market hasn’t been spared, but, unlike other markets where institutions have codified a standard for qualification and quantification, such as the FDA’s nutrition labels, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, or the Coffee Quality Institute, the IPM market is still in the Wild West stage. —Circle ID

The post Worth Reading: The Wild West of Performance Measurement appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Why I care about Segment Routing

As a WAN guy by chance and opportunity, and a service provider engineer and architect by choice (and also chance and opportunity), segment routing (SR) is one of those wonderful new technologies that keeps rearing its head over and over in recent days – and it’s already playing in the big leagues. SR is supported by many of the large network equipment providers including Cisco, Juniper, and Nokia (Alcatel-Lucent), and as I have just learned, Arista. Why is this a notable tech you may want to pay attention to? —Forwarding Plane

The post Worth Reading: Why I care about Segment Routing appeared first on 'net work.