Russ

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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

The only thing constant is change

Several things of note for the near future.

As of today, I have moved into a role at Juniper networks. You will probably hear more about what I am working on over time, both here and there, and probably other places as well.

I hope to be changing platforms from WordPress to Craft in the spring; work is currently underway. This will likely mean some things about the design of this site will change; others will remain the same. Content wise, I am going to continue highlighting interesting research, soft skills, and networking technologies, but I will be trying to focus a bit more on disaggregation in all of these areas, rather than just floating around all over the place.

More as 2019 develops.

Weekend Reads 011119

Just when you express hope that the network industry can shed the past, somebody demonstrates it won’t be easy. An interview in Light Reading with Amdocs CTO Anthony Goonetilleke proposes that one of the unsung benefits of 5G is that it will enable operators to charge for services rather than for data. Is this really a 5G revolution in making, or are we simply reprising the same kind of silly stuff that’s been around for decades? —Tom Nolle

The Silicon Valley gospel of “disruption” has descended into caricature, but, at its core, there are some sound tactics buried beneath the self-serving bullshit. A lot of our systems and institutions are corrupt, bloated, and infested with cream-skimming rentiers who add nothing and take so much. —Cory Doctorow

The high-order bit in much of the below is complexity. Hardware, software, platforms, and ecosystems are often way too complex, and a whole lot of our security, privacy, and abuse problems stem from that. —Chris Palmer

How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a Continue reading

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