Russ

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Worth Reading: Access Control with Segmentation

When you couple software-defined segmentation with an intelligent planning and implementation methodology, you get active segmentation. This approach to segmentation allows network operators to effectively cordon off critical network assets and limit access appropriately with minimal disruption to normal business functions. via the Cloud Security Alliance

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Worth Reading: Outsourcing

And my second point is even more important: know the allegiance of your outsourcer. The key issue with outsourcing IT is this — who does your IT staff work FOR? via Cringley


This is a point that many people don’t get — if all businesses are data businesses (and they are, despite the constant refrain I’ve heard throughout my career that “we don’t make technology, here, so…”), then all the data, and all the analysis you do on that data, is just like the famous Coke recipe.

Know data, know your business. No data, no business.

It’s really that simple. When will we learn — and take this idea seriously? And when will we realize this rule applies to the network as well as the data in many cases?

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Understanding Rowhammer

As I learned in my early days in electronics, every wire is an antenna. This means that a signal in any wire, given enough power, can be transmitted, and that same signal, in an adjacent wire, can be received (and potentially decoded) through electromagnetic induction (Rule 3 may apply). This is a major problem in the carrying of signals through a wire, a phenomenon known as cross talk. How do communications engineers overcome this? By observing that a signal carried along parallel wires at opposite polarities will cancel each other out electromagnetically. The figure below might help out, if you’re not familiar with this.

induction

This canceling effect of two waveforms traveling a pair of wires 180deg out of phase is why the twisted is in twisted pair, and why it’s so crucial not to unbundle too much wire when punching down a jack or connector. The more untwisted the wire there is, the less effective the canceling effect is around the punch down, and the more likely you are to have near end or far end crosstalk.

If you consider one row of memory in a chip one wire, and a second, adjacent row of memory in the Continue reading

Worth Reading: Commoditization of the Black Market

Internet crime has become increasingly dependent on the underground economy: a loose federation of specialists selling capabilities, services, and resources explicitly tailored to the abuse ecosystem. Through these emerging markets,modern criminal entrepreneurs piece together dozens of àla carte components into entirely new criminal endeavors.

A paper of interest.

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Dated

"

The more up-to-date a book is, the sooner it will be dated.

" C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcom —

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Reaction: Testing to the Cut Score (Certifications)

Tom has an interesting post over at The Networking Nerd on one of my favorite areas of discussion — certifications. To give you a sense —

Perhaps raising the cut scores to more than 900 points isn’t the answer. Maybe instead more complex questions or more hands-on simulations are required to better test the knowledge of the candidates. These are better solutions that take time and research. They aren’t the false panacea of raising the passing score. The rising tide can’t be fixed by making the buoys float just a little higher.

I think the problem exam writers face is the defensibility problem. The problem of defensibility has been so strongly pushed into my head, from my years working on the CCDE and CCAr, that I tend to apply the problem to just about everything I do any longer. To state the problem, within the certification space, as succinctly as possible —

If someone sues me because they failed this exam, what evidence can I bring forward to prove this specific person should not have passed the exam.

It’s actually not as easy of a question to answer as it might appear. Why is your cut score set to x? Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Uber Imperative

Silicon Valley likes nothing better than to “disrupt” existing systems. But they think they’re disrupting economic system. What they don’t realize is what they’re disrupting is a political system, and not just one part of it, but the core of it. And it’s a political system they’re not really ideologically prepared to take on. -via the Federalist

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Good Enough

catalog-rack
Looking at my desk in the late 1990’s, that little haven where I came in early in the morning, and left ealry’ish in the afternoon, you’d see a catalog rack. Only it wasn’t full of catalogs, it contained a full set of the latest Cisco IOS documentation. We whined when a new version of the docs came out that wouldn’t fit in the catalog racks we already owned, and ordered another one. There was a bookcase on the side which contained the documentation from the last two or three versions of the IOS code, and then every hardware manual I could find. Another stack of books would be lying in a corner, the “quick reference” stuff that wouldn’t fit in one of the catalog racks. All over the walls were pieces of paper, carefully crafted shortcut sheets, shared around the TAC, pinned up. Given the nature of cubicle walls, we either bought special cubicle clips, or we made to do with various sorts of push pins. Just a few years later, the ISO auditors came along and made us throw it all away. Every last scrap. The dumpsters were filled to the max. Extra dumpsters were brought in, and we Continue reading

Saving the Web, Saving Community (Heavy Topic Warning)

Is the ‘web losing it’s populist (and/or democratic) spirit? Hossein Derakhshan, at least, thinks so. he argues that the ‘web is dying because the hyperlink is dying —

The hyperlink was my currency six years ago. Stemming from the idea of the hypertext, the hyperlink provided a diversity and decentralisation that the real world lacked. The hyperlink represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web… Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you’d rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. Blogs were cafes where people exchanged diverse ideas on any and every topic you could possibly be interested in. … Since I got out of jail, though, I’ve realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.

Much could be made of the argument that Hossein is just feeling the effects of being disconnected for six years. After being put in prison as a political dissident six years ago, he reappears on the scene only to find out the world has moved on without him. There are several points in his article that might indicate this — that he felt like Continue reading

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