Worth Reading: Pre-Internet digital communications

The Internet is a platform for universal communication. You can plug a device into any Internet connection, and provided it speaks TCP/IP, you can communicate with any other point on earth. But before the Internet, even before ARPANET, people and devices needed to talk. I thought I would take a look at some of the technologies which enabled people to communicate in a pre-Internet world. —eager

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Worth Reading: The Internet revolution is nothing to email home about

Economist Robert Gordon argues that the Second Industrial Revolution, entailing developments in electricity, internal combustion engines, modern communications, entertainment, petroleum/hydrocarbons, and chemicals, has had the most impact on productivity and living standards. By comparison, the Third Industrial Revolution, based around computing and the internet, appears to be less important. —Market Watch

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snaproute Go BGP Code Dive (11): Moving to Open Confirm

In the last post in this series, we began considering the bgp code that handles the open message that begins moving a new peer to open confirmed state. This is the particular bit of code of interest—

case BGPEventBGPOpen:
  st.fsm.StopConnectRetryTimer()
  bgpMsg := data.(*packet.BGPMessage)
  if st.fsm.ProcessOpenMessage(bgpMsg) {
    st.fsm.sendKeepAliveMessage()
    st.fsm.StartHoldTimer()
    st.fsm.ChangeState(NewOpenConfirmState(st.fsm))
  }

We looked at how this code assigns the contents of the received packet to bgpMsg; now we need to look at how this information is actually processed. bgpMsg is passed to st.fsm.ProcessOpenMessage() in the next line. This call is preceded by the st.fsm, which means this function is going to be found in the FSM, which means fsm.go. Indeed, func (fsm *FSM) ProcessOpenMessage... is around line 1172 in fsm.go—

func (fsm *FSM) ProcessOpenMessage(pkt *packet.BGPMessage) bool {
 body := pkt.Body.(*packet.BGPOpen)

 if uint32(body.HoldTime) < fsm.holdTime {
  fsm.SetHoldTime(uint32(body.HoldTime), uint32(body.HoldTime/3))
 }

 if body.MyAS == fsm.Manager.gConf.AS {
  fsm.peerType = config.PeerTypeInternal—
 } else {
  fsm.peerType = config.PeerTypeExternal
 }

 afiSafiMap := packet.GetProtocolFromOpenMsg(body)
 for protoFamily, _ := range afiSafiMap {
  if fsm. Continue reading

Worth Reading: Source code is not standards

One of the oft-repeated messages of the Software-Defined Pundits is “Standard bodies are broken, (open) source code is king”… and I’d guess that anyone who was too idealistic before being exposed to how the sausage is being made within IETF has no problems agreeing with them. However… —ipspace

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Worth Reading: Organizational Doxing and Disinformation

In the past few years, the devastating effects of hackers breaking into an organization’s network, stealing confidential data, and publishing everything have been made clear. It happened to the Democratic National Committee, to Sony, to the National Security Agency, to the cyber-arms weapons manufacturer Hacking Team, to the online adultery site Ashley Madison, and to the Panamanian tax-evasion law firm Mossack Fonseca. —Schneier on Security

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Plastic Frog on a Plastic Log

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Worth Reading: Google as an advertising gatekeeper

When Google decided in May to stop accepting online ads for short-term, ultra-high-cost personal loans known as payday loans, some people wondered whether the company was acting more like a publisher exercising editorial control than a supposedly neutral search engine. Now that Google’s policy has gone into effect, it’s worth asking: To what extent should the company be a gatekeeper, judging which online ads are okay and which are not? And if the world’s largest Internet search engine is going to be selective about accepting ads, where does it draw the line? —MIT Technology Review

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Worth Reading: Slack is less bad than the rest

A topic I complain about with some regularity is my inability to keep up with incoming messages. I’m too busy creating something for someone else to consume to bother trying to keep up. That’s the way of things. If I successfully keep up with all the input, I never achieve useful output. In this world of message misery, Slack is my friend. I find that Slack is better at managing input than most other forms of communication. —Ethan Banks

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On the ‘net: Author Interview at the LeanPub Blog

Len: Hi, I’m Len Epp from Leanpub, and in this Leanpub podcast I’ll be interviewing Daniel Dib and Russ White. Russ is based in North Carolina and has been working with large-scale networks for more than 20 years and written a number of books, co-authored over 40 software patents, and spoken at many different venues around the world. His blog is called Network and you can find it at ntwrk.guru. He’s currently on the architecture team at LinkedIn, where he works on next-generation data-centric designs, complexity, security, and privacy. —LeanPub Blog

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Worth Reading: Cryptocurrency mining malware infecting NAS’

A malware variant named Mal/Miner-C (also known as PhotoMiner) is infecting Internet-exposed Seagate Central Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices and using them to infect connected computers to mine for the Monero cryptocurrency. Miner-C, or PhotoMiner, appeared at the start of June 2016, when a report revealed how this malware was targeting FTP servers and spreading on its own to new machines thanks to worm-like features that attempted to brute-force other FTP servers using a list of default credentials. —Softpedia

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Worth Reading: The lean and antifragile data center

Cloud is a new technology domain, and data centre engineering is still a developing discipline. I have interviewed a top expert in cloud infrastructure, senior leader and consultant, Pete Cladingbowl of Skozo. He has a vision of the ‘lean’ data centre and a better kind of Internet for users to reach it. He also has a roadmap for how these can be practically realised. The key is to apply established theories of value flow from more mature industries. —CircleID

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On the ‘net: White Box Switching at LinkedIn

When LinkedIn announced their Project Falco I knew exactly what one of my future Software Gone Wild podcasts would be: a chat with Russ White (Mr. CCDE, now network architect @ LinkedIn). It took us a long while (and then the summer break intervened) but I finally got it published: Episode 62 is waiting for you. —ipspace

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Worth Reading: Assessing the current state of container security

Any rational organization that wishes to run mission-critical services on containers will at some point ask the question: “But is it secure? Can we really trust containers with our data and applications?” Amongst tech folks, this often leads to a containers versus virtual machines (VMs) debate and a discussion of the protection provided by the hypervisor layer in VMs. —The New Stack

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Worth Reading: laptop killing USB stick

For just a few bucks, you can pick up a USB stick that destroys almost anything that it’s plugged into. Laptops, PCs, televisions, photo booths — you name it. Once a proof-of-concept, the pocket-sized USB stick now fits in any security tester’s repertoire of tools and hacks, says the Hong Kong-based company that developed it. It works like this: when the USB Kill stick is plugged in, it rapidly charges its capacitors from the USB power supply, and then discharges — all in the matter of seconds. —ZDNet

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Can I2RS Keep Up? (I2RS Performance)

What about I2RS performance?

The first post in this series provides a basic overview of I2RS; there I used a simple diagram to illustrate how I2RS interacts with the RIB—

One question that comes to mind when looking at a data flow like this (or rather should come to mind!) is what kind of performance this setup will provide. Before diving into the answer to this question, though, perhaps it’s important to ask a different question—what kind of performance do you really need? There are (at least) two distinct performance profiles in routing—the time it takes to initially start up a routing peer, and the time it takes to converge on a single topology and/or route change. In reality, this second profile can be further broken down into multiple profiles (with or without an equal cost path, with or without a loop free alternate, etc.), but for our purposes I’ll just deal with the two broad categories here.

If your first instinct is to say that initial convergence time doesn’t matter, go back and review the recent Delta Airlines outage carefully. If you are still not convinced initial convergence time matters, go back and reread what you can Continue reading

Worth Reading: Long secret Stingray manuals detail phone spying

Harris Corp’s Stingray surveillance device has been one of the most closely guarded secrets in law enforcement for more than 15 years. The company and its police clients across the United States have fought to keep information about the mobile phone-monitoring boxes from the public against which they are used. The Intercept has obtained several Harris instruction manuals spanning roughly 200 pages and meticulously detailing how to create a cellular surveillance dragnet. —The Intercept

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Worth Reading: Someone is learning how to take down the Internet

Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large a large nation state. China and Russia would be my first guesses. —Lawfare

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Reaction: Devops and Dumpster Fires

Networking is often a “best effort” type of configuration. We monkey around with something until it works, then roll it into production and hope it holds. As we keep building more patches on to of patches or try to implement new features that require something to be disabled or bypassed, that creates a house of cards that is only as strong as the first stiff wind. It’s far too easy to cause a network to fall over because of a change in a routing table or a series of bad decisions that aren’t enough to cause chaos unless done together. —Networking Nerd

Precisely.

But what are we to do about it. Tom’s Take is that we need to push back on applications. This, also, I completely agree with. But this only brings us to another problem—how do we make the case that applications need to be rewritten to work on a simpler network? The simple answer is—let’s teach coders how networks really work, so they can figure out how to better code to the environment in which their applications live. Let me be helpful here—I’ve been working on networks since somewhere around 1986, and on computers and electronics since Continue reading

Worth Reading: Your comfort zone may destroy the world

Journalism has been on life support since the advent of social media, but this past year we have witnessed the quick, painful death of truth, and it may be gone forever. Put a comfortable lie in an echo chamber, and nobody will challenge it. It will reverberate until it is accepted as actually true. Then, the willfully ignorant will shout it as loudly as they can. It may be their truth, but that does not make it true. —Shelly Palmer

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Wroth Reading: Exascale might prove difficult

The supercomputing industry is accustomed to 1,000X performance strides, and that is because people like to think in big round numbers and bold concepts. Every leap in performance is exciting not just because of the engineering challenges in bringing systems with kilo, mega, tera, peta, and exa scales into being, but because of the science that is enabled by such increasingly massive machines. But every leap is getting a bit more difficult as imagination meets up with the constraints of budgets and the laws of physics. The exascale leap is proving to be particularly difficult, and not just because it is the one we are looking across the chasm at. —The Next Platform

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