Worth Reading: Free market needs some sunshine

This week is Sunshine Week, and lots of people are writing about government transparency, which is very important. From federal agencies stiff-arming Freedom of Information Act requests, to government agencies punishing whistleblowers, to the Obama Administration’s new record in withholding public information, there’s a lot to talk about. But it’s not just the government that matters. Plenty of private companies that deal with the public could do better with transparency than they do, and they’d be a lot more trusted if they did. The question is whether they care more about being trusted, or about what they can get away with. At the moment, it’s looking as if they’re more concerned with the latter. -via USA Today

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CAP Theorem and Routing

In 2000, Eric Brewer was observing and discussing the various characteristics of database systems. Through this work, he observed that a database generally has three characteristics—

• Consistency, which means the database will produce the same result for any two readers who happen to read a value at the same moment in time.
• Availability, which means the database can be read by any reader at any moment in time.
• Partionability, which means the database can be partitioned.

Brewer, in explaining the relationship between the three in a 2012 article, says—

The easiest way to understand CAP is to think of two nodes on opposite sides of a partition. Allowing at least one node to update state will cause the nodes to become inconsistent, thus forfeiting C (consistency). Likewise, if the choice is to preserve consistency, one side of the partition must act as if it is unavailable, thus forfeiting A (availability).

The CAP theorem, therefore, represents a two out of three situation—yet another two out of three “set” we encounter in the real world, probably grounded someplace in the larger space of complexity. We’ll leave the relationship to complexity on the side for the moment, however, and just look at how Continue reading

Worth Reading: The IANA transition so far

Since the creation of ICANN in 1998, the community has fervently supported this transition. For more than 10 years, APNIC and the RIR communities have actively advocated for the end of a special role by a single government. Here are some historical highlights of the last 10 years of the IANA stewardship transition from an APNIC and number community perspective. -via APNIC

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Worth Reading: Scrutinizing the Cisco-Arista legal battles

The legal battle between Cisco and Arista has heated up in a big way. Earlier this month, Judge David Shaw of the International Trade Commission (ITC) released the public version of the findings in the case. The findings reveal curious aspects of this case that raise questions about Cisco’s intentions and put a spotlight on Silicon Valley work culture. -via Network Computing

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Yokohama

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Book Winners!

Lots of good suggestions in my inbox—thanks to all who gave me some great design ideas to blog about. I eventually chose two winners, as I uncovered another copy of the book to give away! The two winners are Patrick Watson and Matthew Sabin. I’m going to try and run something like this every three or four months, so look for another one in the future.

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Rethinking BGP path validation (part 2)

This is the second post in the two part series on BGP path validation over on the LinkedIn Engineering blog.

We left off last time after having described the eight operational requirements that must be met for any system that reduces our reliance on transitive trust in relation to the AS Path. As a reminder, AS, or Autonomous Systems, is a set of routers which all follow a standard set of policies. A typical AS is run by a single organization, such as a company or an ISP. Now, let’s see how this kind of system might work in practice.

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Worth Reading: The Databerg Report

Veritas has released their US Databerg Report, which looks at the effects of today’s exploding data volumes and how they have been overlooked by most business leaders who were did not anticipate the exponential growth of data. In fact, an independent research study demonstrates how organizations around the world are on track to waste more than $3.3tn by 2020. Previously, Veritas released their study results on data management, which touches on this subject. -via Storage Review

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Worth Reading: OCP recap

Last week’s Open Compute Project Summit was kinda crazy with all the announcements of new members (the big one being Google), partnerships (the big one being Mellanox and Cumulus Networks) and contributions to OCP for both hardware and software. -via Packet Pushers

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Worth Reading: Building a Network

Building a strong network of people is very important in creating a successful career in IT. In these posts we will start first look at why building a network is important and in the other posts we will look at how to actually build the network and how to make sure that you are also contributing to the network and not only exploiting it. -via Lost in Transit

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Worth Reading: The FCC’s subtractive privacy rules

Less is not more. That’s real “common sense.” When one’s actions demonstrably create a worse rather than better outcome net-net, like the FCC’s new Title II ISP privacy policy does, others would justifiably consider it a mistake. While the FCC obviously complied with President Obama’s call for regulating broadband as a Title II utility, the FCC obviously ignored President Obama’s 2011 call for a 21st century regulatory system, where he said we are “making it our mission to root out regulations that conflict, that are not worth the cost, or are just plain dumb.” -via Somewhat Reasonable

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Worth Reading: iSDX

Today, we are excited to announce, in partnership with the Open Networking Foundation and Open Source SDN, the official launch of iSDX — open-source controller software for an industrial-scale Software-Defined Internet exchange point. iSDX allows independently operated networks to interconnect and exchange traffic in completely new ways. This software, which we’ve been developing for nearly three years, now finally operates at the scale of the world’s largest IXPs and interoperates with SDN-capable hardware switches, opening up new possibilities for interdomain business relationships and traffic exchange. -via Circle ID

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Should We Stop Encryption? Can We?

It’s not like they’re asking for a back door for every device.
If the world goes dark through encryption, we’ll be back to the wild west!
After all, if it were your daughter who had been killed in a terrorist attack, you’d want the government to get to that information, too.

While sitting on a panel this last week, I heard all three reactions to the Apple versus FBI case. But none of these reactions ring true to me.

Let’s take the first one: no, they’re not asking for a back door for every device. Under the time tested balance between privacy and government power, the specific point is that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy until they come under suspicion of wrongdoing. However, it’s very difficult to trust that, in the current environment, that such power, once granted, won’t be broadened to every case, all the time. The division between privacy and justice before the law was supposed to be at the point of suspicion. That wall, however, has already been breached, so the argument now moves to “what information should the government be able to trawl through in order to find crimes?” They are asking for Continue reading

Worth Reading: Utilization at ‘net interconnects

I am pleased to release analysis taken from direct measurement of Internet interconnection points, which represents advancement in this important field of research. To this end, I am releasing a working paper that includes data from seven Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who collectively serve approximately half of all US broadband subscribers. -via Circle ID

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The Design Mindset (2)

In a comment from last week’s post on the design mindset, which focuses on asking what through observation, Alan asked why I don’t focus on business drivers, or intent, first. This is a great question. Let me give you three answers before we actually move on to asking why?

Why can yuor barin raed tihs? Because your mind has a natural ability to recognize patterns and “unscramble” them. In reality, what you’re doing is seeing something that looks similar to what you’ve seen before, inferring that’s what is meant now, and putting the two together in a way you can understand. It’s pattern recognition at it’s finest—you’re already a master at this, even if you think you’re not. This is an important skill for assessing the world and reacting in (near) real time; if we didn’t have this skill, we wouldn’t be able to tolerate the information inflow we actually receive on a daily basis.

The danger is, of course, that you’re going to see a pattern you think you recognize and skip to the next thing to look at without realizing that you’ve mismatched the pattern. These pattern mismatches can be dangerous in the real world—like the time I Continue reading

Worth Reading: Improving Communication

You’d think that after all these years of technology being a driving force behind business growth, there’d be similarly strong communication links between IT and business leaders. Alas, it’s still the case that those kinds of close relationships remain the exception rather than the rule. Let’s face it, even IT executives and the engineers or analysts who report to them sometimes seem to be speaking different languages. -via Netcraftsmen

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Securing BGP: A Case Study (5)

BGP provides reachability for the global ‘net, as well as being used in many private networks. As a system, BGP (ultimately) isn’t very secure. But how do we go about securing BGP? This series investigates the questions, constraints, and solutions any proposal to secure BGP must deal with as a case study of asking the right questions, and working at the intersection of business and technology.

As a short review, we started off with three questions, described in the first post, each of which we’ve been considering in some detail:

• Should we focus on a centralized solution to this problem, or a distributed one?
  • Assuming we’re using some sort of encryption to secure the information used in path validation, where do the keys come from? The fourth post considers this question.
  • Should the information used to validate paths be distributed or stored in a somewhat centralized database?
• Should we consider solutions that are carried within the control plane, within BGP itself, or outside?
• What is it we can actually prove in a packet switched network? This is considered in post 2 and post 3.

Here I’m going to discuss the problem of a centralized versus distributed database to carry the Continue reading

Worth Reading: On collaborative blocking and filtering

On the Internet, there are many reasons why blocking and filtering of communication takes place. Some of us use ad-blockers because we get tired of kitchen utilities ads on every single page we visit, simply because we’ve been surfing online recipes. Parents may want to block adult content for minors. Companies may want to ensure their confidential trade secrets don’t leak. All of us want to keep viruses and malware off our computers and networks. Other reasons to block communication include copyright protection, preventing illegal trade (pills, handbags, gambling), public safety, health, and/or moral concerns, the latter triad often being a motivation for the type of blocking and filtering we call censorship. -via the Internet Society

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Oak Island Pier

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Worth Reading: SSL, TLS, and difficult privacy

Securing encrypted Internet traffic transmissions, such as those between web browsers and web servers, is decidedly not simple. Despite the fact that well-established protocols, namely Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS), have seen use for many years, they still have some complexities and security vulnerabilities. -via CFA

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