Russ

Author Archives: Russ

Learn to Code?

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I went to school to learn art and illustration. In those long ago days, folks in my art and illustration classes would sometimes get into a discussion about what, precisely, to do with an art degree. My answer was, ultimately, to turn it into a career building slides and illustrations in the field of network engineering. ? And I’m only half joking.

The discussion around the illustration board in those days was whether it was better to become an art teacher, or to focus just on the art and illustration itself. The two sides went at it hammer and tongs over weeks at a time. My only contribution to the discussion was this: even if you want to be the ultimate in the art world, a fine artist, you must still have a subject. While much of modern art might seem to be about nothing much at all, it has always seemed, to me, that art must be about something.

This week I was poking around one of the various places I tend to poke on the ‘net and ran across this collage. Click to see the full image.

Get the Continue reading

Weekend Reads 020719

When the 2015 rules were passed, the FCC moved to regulate the internet as a telecommunications service, as opposed to the less stringent classification of an information service, a change that was then reversed in 2017. —Colin Lecher

Imagine this: an enormous tech company is tracking what you do on your phone, even when you’re not using any of its services, down to the specific images that you see. —Sydney Li and Jason Kelley

The new head of a congressional antitrust panel has vowed to take on big technology companies that “threaten our democracy”, the latest sign of a growing cross-party Washington consensus that Silicon Valley has grown too powerful. —David Smith

Moore’s Law has underwritten a remarkable period of growth and stability for the computer industry. The doubling of transistor density at a predictable cadence has fueled not only five decades of increased processor performance, but also the rise of the general-purpose computing model. However, according to a pair of researchers at MIT and Aachen University, that’s all coming to an end. —Michael Feldman

Deciding what products can improve an organization’s network security is a complex process. You must weigh a number of factors as part of the purchase Continue reading

History of Networking: ILNP with Saleem Bhatti

Using a single IP address to provide both identity and location information can create challenges and inefficiencies in network design. In this History of Networking episode, we sit down with Saleem Bhatti to talk about the history of ILNP and IP mobility to see how this tech aims to resolve this challenge.

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Research: User Fairness as a Quality of Service Problem

In networks, we tend to think of Quality of Service (QoS) relating primarily to classes of traffic. These classes of traffic, in turn, are grounded in application behavior driven by user expectations. For instance, users expect voice communications to be near real time so conversation can take place “normally,” which means delay must be held to a minimum. In order to provide support for the CODECs that make voice communication possible, jitter must be tightly controlled, as well; it is often better to drop a packet outside some jitter bounds than to deliver it. ‘Net neutrality, on the other hand, tends to see the key factor as access to a particular service.

In this diagram, assume Y and Z are two different video streaming services; A is streaming video from Y, while B is streaming from Z. The argument of ‘net neutrality is that the provider who runs the E to F link (or the network represented by that single link) should not be allowed to prefer the service at Y over Z (or the other way around). One of the basic problems with ‘net neutrality is the problem of not preferring one content provider over another is not as Continue reading

Weekend Reads 020119

I think that the data center industry has reached a point of equilibrium and stabilization where the players for cloud service have been defined, the large mega applications (like Facebook and Google) have become a monopoly on their respective businesses, and there has been slow but sustained growth in all of these markets. —Yuval Bacher

How many times in the software industry have you heard developers fight over which programming language is better? How many times have you heard about that one pattern that will fix all of our problems moving forward? —Marco Palladino

What’s clear is that supply chain attacks are a well-established, if underappreciated, method of surveillance — and much work remains to be done to secure computing devices from this type of compromise. —Micah Lee, Henrik Moltke

But when designing underlying cyber protections, too many architects are taking zero trust to be the primary objective. This is a misinterpretation. In the first instance, we should look to protect our resources from attack. What zero trust reminds us is that we are fallible, and that we should put in place backup plans in the form of monitoring and incident response for the (hopefully rare) cases where our protection Continue reading

Network Collective: Peering with Providers

In this episode of the Network Collective Community Roundtable, the panel discusses the nuances of getting your organization connected to the internet. Is it as simple as connecting a cable and calling it a day, or is there more to think about when designing your Internet edge? Joining the Network Collective team for this conversation is Dr. Pete Welcher and Tom Ammon.

The Revenge of the Ancillaries

Have you ever tried to make water flow in a specific direction? Maybe you have some particularly muddy spot in your yard, so you dig a small ditch and think, “the water will now flow from here to there, and the muddy spot won’t be so muddy the next time it rains.” Then it rains, and the water goes a completely different direction, or overflows the little channel you’ve dug, making things worse. The most effective way to channel water, of course, is to put it in pipes—but this doesn’t always seem to work, either.

The next time you think about shadow IT in your organization, think of these pipes, and how the entire system of IT must look to a user in your organization. For instance, I have had corporate laptops where you must enter two or three passwords to boot the laptop, provided by departments that require you to use your corporate laptop for everything, and with security rules forbidding the use of any personal software on the corporate laptop. I have even had company issued laptops on which you could not modify the position of icons on the desktop, change the menu items in any piece Continue reading

Weekend Reads 012419

The speed and agility of open source projects benefit from lightweight and flexible governance. Their ability to run with such efficient governance is supported by the potential for project forking. —Scott K Peterson

You know what the English language needs? A word for the hot, sickening feeling you get when you accidentally hit “Reply All,” subsequently broadcasting a private message to a much larger group. —Graham Roumieu

In fact, we’ll likely see a rise in internet blackouts in 2019, for two reasons: countries deliberately “turning off” the internet within their borders, and hackers disrupting segments of the internet with distributed denial-of-service attacks. Above all, both will force policymakers everywhere to reckon with the fact that the internet itself is increasingly becoming centralized—and therefore increasingly vulnerable to manipulation, making everyone less safe. —Justin Sherman

Leadership in 5G technology is not just about building a network, but also about whether that network will be secure enough for the innovations it promises. And the 5G “race” is more complex and dangerous than industry and the Trump administration portray. —Tom Wheeler

If you’re one of the 8 million people who uses Slack as an intraoffice communication platform, then you’re likely well aware of how Continue reading

When Metaphors Fail

We often use metaphors to describe a particular part of a thing or the thing itself. For instance, we might say “I’m as hungry as a horse,” to describe how much we think we could eat (although a more appropriate saying might be “as hungry as a bird,” as it turns out!). Network operators and engineers are no exception to this making of metaphors, of course.

Metaphors have a reductionistic tendency. For instance, when saying I am as hungry as a horse, I am relating the amount of food a horse might eat to the amount of food I feel like eating. The metaphor reduces the entire person and the entire horse so the turn on a single point—a quantity of food. In using this kind of comparison, I am not claiming to have the same number of legs as a horse, or perhaps a swishing tail like a horse.

The danger in using a metaphor is that you can take the part to be the whole. When this happens, the metaphor says things it should not say, and can cause us to misunderstand the scope, complexity, or solution to a problem. For some reason, we tend to do Continue reading

Weekend Reads 011819

Optimism around 5G may be strong for now, but service providers are finding it difficult to convey a feasible business case for the technology as average consumers remain ill-informed of its true benefits. 61% of respondents were hopeful about the overall availability of 5G coming in the next two years, however, 40% don’t believe consumers will be willing to pay more for the privilege. —Sigal Biran-Nagar

DNS security from the client perspective is a one-hour online course examining both technical and managerial topics associated with the security of the Domain Name System. Participants will learn about the process of a domain name and DNS request, from registration to name resolution; the security risks of each component; and the mitigation options currently available. —Lisa Corness

Your job search can feel like a movie you’ve seen over and over. The same thing seems to happen every time. You get motivated to finally start looking for a new job. You hunt around the internet and make a list of intriguing jobs. You start imagining yourself getting out of your current job. You start applying, there’s progress, you get some call backs, maybe you even go on-site to interview a few times. There’s a Continue reading

On the ‘net: ARCnet

ARCnet was not an accidental choice in the networks I supported at the time. While thinnet was widely available, it required running coax cable. The only twisted pair Ethernet standard available at the time required new cables to be run through buildings, which could often be an expensive proposition. For instance, one of the places that relied heavily on ARCnet was a legal office in a small town in north-central New Jersey. @ECI’s LighTALK

Reaction: Open Source

As long-standing contributor to open standards, and someone trying to become more involved in the open source world (I really need to find an extra ten hours a day!), I am always thinking about these ecosystems, and how the relate to the network engineering world. This article on RedisDB, and in particular this quote, caught my attention—

There’s a longstanding myth in the open-source world that projects are driven by a community of contributors, but in reality, paid developers contribute the bulk of the code in most modern open-source projects, as Puppet founder Luke Kanies explained in our story earlier this year. That money has to come from somewhere.

The point of the article is a lot of companies that support open source projects, like RedisDB, are moving to a more closed source solutions to survive. The cloud providers are called out as a source of a lot of problems in this article, as they consume a lot of open source software, but do not really spend a lot of time or effort in supporting it. Open source, in this situation, becomes a sort of tragedy of the commons, where everyone things someone else is going to do the Continue reading

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