Worth Reading: SD-WANS

SD-WANs promise to solve many of the thorny problems related to building and managing a large-scale wide-area network. This technology isn’t a panacea, however. This Report examines what an SD-WAN can and can’t do, and when it might be most effectively deployed. via channel partners

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QOTW: Height

Height is the measure of littleness. The man who has not the sense of true greatness is easily exultant or easily depressed, sometimes both together. It is because the ant does not consider the giant beetle that he looks down on the tiny gnat; and it is because the walker does not feel the wind from the heights that he lingers on the mountain slopes.
Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

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Sunrise on Oak Island

One of the neat things about Oak Island is it’s a south facing beach. You don’t get the sun over the beach in the morning, but along the beach, and both sunrise and sunset are over the water at some time in the year. Some days, the sunrise and the sunset are both over the ocean.

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Worth Reading: Open Source (Part 1)

How is the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) broken? Can you count the ways? The process is too slow, the standards are often opaque, the results are often complex and difficult to deploy; any engineer who’s been in the networking field long enough most likely can recite a litany of complaints. via network computing

This is the first of a four part series on open source versus open standards.

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Worth Reading: Micromanaging Compute

In people management, it’s generally accepted that micromanaging a person is often a bad idea. Micromanagement removes the opportunity for the individual to find a better path than originally conceived. It also often focuses on the specific steps of a process, but unfortunately removes the context that would help someone understand how to improve the process. via infoworld

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HL: Freedom To

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Worth Learning: The Power Grid

Stop mulling over the latest (now dead) command line, and learn something useful. If you work in networking, you work with electricity. But how many people really know how the power grid works? Even though I have relatives and friends who’ve worked in the power industry all their lives, I’m still learning new things about the grid, and the way it works.

Four items of interest in this area for today.

A really short and simple video

A longer, boring video with lots of presentations and details

An interesting paper on coal to data

An article giving the other side of the renewable hype

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Worth Reading: Trading Shares in Milliseconds

Today’s stock market has become a world of automated transactions executed at lightning speed. This high-frequency trading could make the financial system more efficient, but it could also turn small mistakes into catastrophes. via technology review

Or as Thomas Sowell says — Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.

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Skipping the Hype Cycle

Sipping from the firehose is a big problem in the tech industries. Every time I turn around there’s yet another new technology to make everything better. If you can’t quote rule 11, you need to learn it by heart. Now. I’ll wait right here while you do the memorization thing.

So — why the hype cycle? Essentially, it comes down to this: we’re emotionally driven creatures. Advertisers have known this for years; to wit —

On average, consumers are exposed to more than 5000 advertisements per day. Among those 5000-plus advertisements, only about 12 will make an impression on the average consumer. How can your business stand out among the clutter? Whether you are a Fortune 500 company or a recently funded startup, the best way for your business to stand out is by building emotional connections with your audience. Your business needs to acknowledge that selling a product is no longer enough. Now it’s all about the experience you provide with it. This experience is dependent on your ability to trigger the right emotions, from the right audience, at the right time. via entrepreneur

Mark the last words in that quote: it’s about selling an experience, rather than a Continue reading

Civilization

One of the most dangerous errors instilled into us by nineteenth-century progressive optimism is the idea that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost.
C.S. Lewis, Rehabilitations

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Barcelona

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Big Data for Social Engineering

First, it integrates with corporate directories such as Active Directory and social media sites like LinkedIn to map the connections between employees, as well as important outside contacts. Bell calls this the “real org chart.” Hackers can use such information to choose people they ought to impersonate while trying to scam employees. From there, AVA users can craft custom phishing campaigns, both in email and Twitter, to see how employees respond. via wired

This is a white hat tool, of course, a form of social engineering penetration testing. Two points of interest, though.

First, you can be pretty certain hackers are already using this sort of tool today to find the right person to contact, how to contact them, and to discover the things they know people will respond to. The rule of thumb you should keep in mind is — at least 80% of the time, hackers are already using the tools researchers come up with to do penetration testing. Remember all those fake people inhabiting the world of twitter, facebok, and the like? Some of them might not be just another click farm — some of them might be clickbait for hackers to find out who you Continue reading

HL: Optimal Routing Design

Perfect start to get into network design, covers all the foundation topics and general principles. Amazon Review of Optimal Routing Design

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Are Walled Gardens the Future of the ‘net?

From the very beginning, the walled garden has been the opposite of what those who work on and around the ‘net have wanted. The IETF, and the protocols it has developed over the years, have always been about free and open access to anyone who wants to learn networking, coding, or even just what the latest baseball score for their favorite team. Of course, a number of tech giants (remember Compuserve?) fought to build walled gardens using the tools of the Internet. A user would dial into a modem pool, and access the world through a small portal that would provide a consistent and controlled interface for their entire experience, from email to news to chat to…

The same battle rages in recent times, as well. Phone makers, mobile providers, and even social media networks would desperately like to make your only interface into the global Internet a single O/S or app. From this one app, you’ll be able to talk to your friends, pay your bills, save all your data, and, in general, live your entire life. And for those times when you can’t get to what you want outside the app or social network, they will gladly Continue reading

Worth Reading: Software Defined Overload

Engineers have a chronic case of Software Defined Overload. SD-anything ranks right up there with Fat Free and New And Improved as the Most Overused Marketing Terms. via Networking Nerd

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Worth Reading: New Port Mapper DDoS Attack

In hopes of warding off significant attacks, Level 3 Communications is trying to spread the word among ISPs of a major new distributed denial of service (DDoS) threat. The threat was identified after Level 3’s security monitoring detected unusual activity that appeared to be bad actors testing out and then using a new DDoS threat vector, Portmapper. via lightreading

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Come meet me at Cloud Partners

I’m moderating a panel called Cloud Builders at the upcoming Cloud Partners show in Boston! If you’re going to be there, look me up.

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HL: Talk to the Dummy

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Liskov Substitution and Modularity in Network Design

Furthering the thoughts I’ve put into the forthcoming book on network complexity…

One of the hardest things for designers to wrap their heads around is the concept of unintended consequences. One of the definitional points of complexity in any design is the problem of “push button on right side, weird thing happens over on the left side, and there’s no apparent connection between the two.” This is often just a result of the complexity problem in its base form — the unsolvable triangle (fast/cheap/quality — choose two). The problem is that we often don’t see the third leg of the triangle.

The Liskov substitution principle is one of the mechanisms coders use to manage complexity in object oriented design. The general idea is this: suppose I build an object that describes rectangles. This object can hold the width and the height of the rectangle, and it can return the area of the rectangle. Now, assume I build another object called “square” that overloads the rectangle object, but it forces the width and height to be the same (a square is type of rectangle that has all equal sides, after all). This all seems perfectly normal, right?

Now let’s say Continue reading

Worth Reading: Labellio

Labellio is the world’s easiest deep learning web service for computer vision. It aims to provide a deep learning environment for image data where non-experts in deep learning can experiment with their ideas for image classification applications. via NVidia

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