Worth Reading: DPRIVE

DNS privacy will be getting more attention over the coming years, as attacks as well as defenses move from the application to the network layer. It’s good to see efforts like DPRIVE looking ahead… via circleid

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Memorize — or Think?

I have several friends with either photographic, or near photographic, memories. For instance, I work with someone (on the philosophical side of my life) who is just astounding in this respect. If you walk into his office and ask about some concept you’ve just run across, no matter how esoteric, he can give you a rundown of every major book in the field covering the topic, important articles from several journals, and even book chapters that are germane and important. I’ve actually had him point me to the text of a footnote when I asked about a specific concept.

It seems, to me, that the networking industry often focuses on this sort of thing. Quick, can you name the types of line cards available for the Plutobarb CNX1000, how many of each you can put in the chassis, what the backplane speed is, and what the command is to configure OSPF type 3 filters on Tuesdays between three and four o’clock? When we hit this sort of question, and can’t answer it, people look at us like we’re silly or something.

Right?

I know, because I’ve been there. I’ve had people ask me the strangest questions in interviews, such as Continue reading

QOTW: Playing with the animal withing

You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal [or] play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth.
Dag Hammarskjöld

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Worth Reading: You can’t replace biometrics

Some security researchers refer to authentication systems based on fingerprints – such as unlocking an iPhone by using the home button’s fingerprint reader – as a type of active biometrics, as opposed to passive biometrics, which might look at the location or MAC address of a PC that is attempting to log into a banking application. And when active-biometrics data gets stolen, there’s little that victims can do to prevent the data from being abused. via bankinfo security

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Worth Reading: Skynet Barbie

Essentially, we’re conducting live experiments on our kids in regards to language development, their ability to self-regulate, interpersonal relations, and more. Unfortunately, there’s little good research to measure these impacts. via packetpushers

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Imprisoned and censored voices around the world

The number of individuals in prison around the world for raising their voices online is on the rise. In 2014, the Committee to Protect Journalists found that over half of imprisoned journalists were arrested for activities conducted on the Internet. In a 2015 report, Reporters Without Borders cited 178 incidents of imprisoned “netizens” in just a selection of twelve countries. Now that individuals can speak up without the need for institutions or gatekeepers, states choose the most direct way to take away their power: incarcerating them, and taking them offline. via the offline project

This is something every engineer, every blogger, and everyone who has a passion for free speech can help with. We live in a world that increasingly sees free speech as some sort of monstrously abnormal concept (even in the US); this is a fight we need to take up if any of us expect to be able to have a conversation about anything other than whether you should use EIGRP or IS-IS on a particular network.

We need to stand up for everyone who speaks, even if we don’t agree with them.

This is important.

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Worth Reading: Antivirus and Zero Day

Deploying multiple AV products might expand the total number of known malware signatures in your AV armor, but this approach doesn’t combat the biggest flaw: new, zero-day malware that no AV product has ever encountered (and therefore can’t possibly recognize). Even with frequent updates to the signature database, AV software just can’t keep up. via the cloud security alliance

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Beunos Aires

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Reaction: Openstack, snowflakes, and complexity

More recently, OpenStack luminary Randy Bias has candidly derided the silos that different vendors impose on OpenStack, containing “special features that only you have.” The result? “Every OpenStack deployment is its own unique snowflake,” Bias notes, due to the “hundreds upon hundreds of configuration options.” via infoworld

For all those who think opensource is going to take over the world, cleaning up (and destroying) the mess open standards have made, there is a lesson in here.

It won’t.

The problem isn’t open standards. The problem isn’t open source. We have met the problem, and it is… us. We are the problem here. What we keep thinking is that we can “solve” complexity in some way. Each time a new unicorn comes on the scene, we think, “here, at least, is the magical unicorn that will make the physical world work the way I always wanted it to.” But like real life unicorns, you won’t find one in your rose garden. Or any other garden, for that matter. Unicorns don’t exist. Get over it.

Instead of looking for the next magical unicorn, we need to get to work figuring out which problems need to be solved, which ones Continue reading

HL: Does it Work?

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Worth Reading: Negative vibes on the ICANN transition

It’s an unspoken truth that the reason it has taken 10 years longer than originally anticipated for the US government to hand over control of the “IANA functions” to ICANN is because the govt agency in charge – the National Technology and Information Administration (NTIA) – has always been mildly despairing of how its experiment in representational democracy has turned out. Far from creating an organization that was able to reflect the extraordinary collective effort that made the internet possible, ICANN has become an unwieldy monster: riven with politics, brimming with self-importance, driven almost entirely by status and insider concerns, and never looking outside its own bubble unless under threat. via the register

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Worth Reading: The changing mobile landscape

Rather than a large pool of potential suppliers who are strongly motivated to compete with each other by building to the specifications provided by the cellular access providers, the concentration of supply has lead to a different dynamic where the platform providers are able to effectively dictate their terms and conditions to the mobile access network operators. Interestingly this, in turn, has emboldened some of the larger application providers to flex their market muscles and in turn set forth in their own direction. via circle id

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Intellectual virtue and the engineer

On the 19th of January in 2009, Captain “Sully” Sullenberger glided an Airbus A320 into the Hudson River just after takeoff from LaGuardia airport in New York City. Both engines failed due to multiple bird strikes, so the ditching was undertaken with no power, in a highly populated area. Captain Sullenberger could have attempted to land on one of several large highways, but all of these tend to have heavy traffic patterns; he could not make it to any airport with the power he had remaining, so he ditched the plane in the river. Out of the 155 passengers on board, only one needed overnight hospitalization.

There are a number of interesting things about this story, but there is one crucial point that applies directly to life at large, and engineering in detail. Here’s a simple question that exposes the issue at hand—

Do you think the Captain had time to read the manual while the plane was gliding along in the air after losing both engines? Or do you think he just knew what to do?

Way back in the mists of time, a man named Aristotle struggled over the concept of ethics. Not only was he trying to Continue reading

Worth Reading: Anycast TCP

But recently, some popular CDNs have also started using anycast for HTTP traffic. This gave us hope, because their TCP connection with end users would last for a similar duration as LinkedIn’s TCP connection to our end users. A Nanog presentation in 2006 claimed that anycast works. So, to validate the assumption that TCP over anycast in the modern internet is no longer a problem, we ran a few synthetic tests. -via catchpoint

Continue reading

Worth Reading: The FCC defends ‘net neutrality

The FCC’s latest legal brief defending its Open Internet Order, will represent the FCC’s “strongest possible” legal arguments for its Title II net neutrality case – a vainglorious legal fortress. In reality, the FCC’s legal case is closer to a magnificent beach sandcastle. via somewhat reasonable

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QOTW: Genius

“Genius is long patience,” but it must be organized and intelligent patience. One does not need extraordinary gifts to carry some work through; average superiority suffices; the rest depends on energy and wise application of energy. It is as with a conscientious workman, careful and steady…
Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

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Worth Reading: An EIGRP Scaling Puzzle

What’s more interesting than simply asking about scale, though, is to ask the “why” question… via packet pushers

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Worth Reading: Breach Presumption

The hipster view of data loss seems to be a shrug of the shoulders these days. As a society, we give up financial data to people that steal it so often that we barely care. We shrug our shoulders, sigh at the inconvenience, set up a new account or two, and move on. Yes, sometimes the damage is more serious than unauthorized charges on our Visa cards, but that’s rare enough to avoid societal outrage. Rather, we’ve simply gotten used to the breaches. via ethan banks

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Highlight: Jack of All Trades

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Worth Reading: How the IETF is fixing its open standards process

A number of changes have been put in place in the last year to improve the speed at which the IETF can operate. This final post in my series on open standards and open source models examines these changes, along with the tradeoffs. via network computing

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