Russ

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Worth Reading: Why Net Neutrality can’t be implemented

Suppose for a moment that you are the victim of a wicked ISP that engages in disallowed “throttling” under a “neutral” regime for Internet access. You like to access streaming media from a particular “over the top” service provider. By coincidence, the performance of your favoured application drops at the same time your ISP launches a rival content service of its own. You then complain to the regulator, who investigates. She finds that your ISP did indeed change their traffic management settings right at the point that the “throttling” began. A swathe of routes, including the one to your preferred “over the top” application, have been given a different packet scheduling and routing treatment. It seems like an open-and-shut case of “throttling” resulting in a disallowed “neutrality violation”. Or is it? —Martin Geddes @ CircleID

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Worth Reading: Signposts on the roadmap to 10TB/sec

The world of Ethernet switching and routing used to be more predictable than just about any other part of the datacenter, but for the past decade the old adage – ten times the bandwidth for three times the cost – has not held. While 100 Gb/sec Ethernet was launched in 2010 and saw a fair amount of uptake amongst telecom suppliers for their backbones, the hyperscalers decided, quite correctly, that 100 Gb/sec Ethernet was too expensive and opted for 40 Gb/sec instead. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

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What Kind of Design?

In this short video I work through two kinds of design, or two different ways of designing a network. Which kind of designer are you? Do you see one as better than the other? Which would you prefer to do, are you right now?

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Worth Reading: Why you should have a CAA DNS record

This Friday, all certificate authorities will have to honor a Domain Name System (DNS) record that allows HTTPS website owners to restrict who can issue SSL certificates for their domain names. It’s a long-needed defense against the issuance of fraudulent certificates, a security risk that domain owners had few protections for until now. The Problem: There are tens of certificate authorities (CAs) trusted in browsers and operating systems and any one of them can theoretically issue a valid SSL certificate for any website on the internet. Furthermore, many of these certificate authorities have subordinate CAs and resellers that are operated by separate organizations and which can also issue SSL certificates to end users. —Lucian Constantin @ The New Stack

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Worth Reading: Work life balance

Miserable at work? You’re not alone. More than half of U.S. employees were not engaged at work between 2010 and 2012 according to Gallup’s recent State of the American Workplace report, which collected data from more than 195,000 employees. Many of those who were not engaged wanted a reason to be, such as the company showing them how to perform their best. —Alessandra Malito @ MarketWatch

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Worth Reading: Hunting AdwindRAT

An increasing number of malware families employ SSL/TLS encryption in order to evade detection by Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS). In this blog post I’m gonna have a look at Adwind, which is a cross-platform Remote Access Trojan (RAT) that has been using SSL to conceal it’s traffic for several years. AdwindRAT typically connects SSL sessions to seemingly random TCP ports on the C2 servers. Hence, a heuristic that could potentially be used to hunt for Adwind RAT malware is to look for SSL traffic going to TCP ports that normally don’t use SSL. However, relying on ONLY that heuristic would generate way too many false positives. —Erik Hjelmvik @ Netrecsec

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Worth Reading: Planning for cloud’s limitations

Protecting data from losses requires a well-planned data-management strategy. Many strategic plans include using cloud services, but IT and other departments must understand the cloud’s strengths and limitations when it comes to protection. The benefits of the cloud include inexpensive storage costs, instant scale, high availability and the elimination of on-premises hardware infrastructure. Used properly, the cloud is essential for many firms that simply couldn’t offer their service through any other platform. Despite these advantages, the cloud has limitations, and firms should build their plans around their understanding of these limitations. —David Zimmerman @ the Data Center Journal

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Worth Reading: Retrieval and relevance

Our expectations for search have gotten higher and higher since Google has gotten better and better. These days, very few people search beyond the first page. If those search results aren’t good enough, they’ll either try again or they’ll quit. As Search Engine Watch reports, “Page 1 results garnered 92 percent of all traffic from the average search, with traffic dropping off by 95 percent for Page 2.” —Faizan Ahmed @ Free Code Camp

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Reaction: Networking Vendors are Only Good for the Free Lunch

I ran into an article over at the Register this week which painted the entire networking industry, from vendors to standards bodies, with a rather broad brush. While there are true bits and pieces in the piece, some balance seems to be in order. The article recaps a presentation by Peyton Koran at Electronic Arts (I suspect the Register spiced things up a little for effect); the line of argument seems to run something like this—

  • Vendors are only paying attention to larger customers, and/or a large group of customers asking for the same thing; if you are not in either group, then you get no service from any vendor
  • Vendors further bake secret sauce into their hardware, making it impossible to get what you want from your network without buying from them
  • Standards bodies are too slow, and hence useless
  • People are working around this, and getting to the inter-operable networks they really want, by moving to the cloud
  • There is another way: just treat your networking gear like servers, and write your own protocols—after all you probably already have programmers on staff who know how to do this

Let’s think about these a little more deeply.

Vendors only Continue reading

Worth Reading: Global content removals

From the Internet’s earliest days, the tension between a global communication network and local geography-based laws has been obvious. One scenario is that every jurisdiction’s local laws apply to the Internet globally, meaning that the country (or sub-national regulator) with the most restrictive law for any content category sets the global standard for that content. If this scenario comes to pass, the Internet will only contain content that is legal in every jurisdiction in the world — a small fraction of the content we as Americans might enjoy, because many countries restrict content that is clearly legal in the U.S. —Eric Goldman @ CircleID

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Worth Reading: Common issue detection for CPU profiling

Profiling of services is a useful method to find optimizations to improve service performance; the ODP (“On-Demand Profiling”) framework has helped identify many performance problems at LinkedIn. However, as these analyses and subsequent optimizations are done for individual services, common performance problems (patterns) are often rediscovered. This results in wasted effort for teams and doesn’t help with the global uptake of important fixes. —John Nicol, Chen Li, Peinan Chen, Tao Feng, and Hari Ramachandran @ LinkedIn

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On the ‘web: The Future of Data Center Fabrics

Recorded live at IETF 99, this Priority Queue episode is a roundtable conversation on new and emerging ideas for data center fabrics. Greg Ferro is joined by Jeff Tantsura, a chair of the routing working group at IETF; Russ White, a network architect at LinkedIn; and Tony Przygienda, who works for a vendor and claims to be the only grownup in this conversation. (You be the judge!)

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Worth Reading: Gen-Z

It has been almost a year now since Gen-Z launched, and the consortium is growing and the specifications are being cooked up by the techies. The core Gen-Z spec was published in December 2016 and updated in July to a 0.9 level; it is expected to be at the 1.0 level before the end of the year. The related The PHY spec is at about a 0.5 release level, and it should be at the 1.0 release level by the end of the year. And interestingly, the Gen-Z folks are showing off a new connector spec developed in conjunction with Tyco Electronics that uses 112 GT/sec signaling that delivers more bandwidth than PCI-Express or DDR4 slots in a much smaller form factor. (More on this in a second.) —Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: In defense of NATs

Network Address Translation (NAT) has often been described as an unfortunate aberration in the evolution of the Internet, and one that will be expunged with the completion of the transition to IPv6. I think that this view, which appears to form part of today’s conventional wisdom about the Internet, unnecessarily vilifies NATs. In my opinion, NATs are far from being an aberration, and instead, I see them as an informative step in the evolution of the Internet, particularly as they relate to possibilities in the evolution of name-based networking. Here’s why. —Geoff Huston @ APNIC

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Worth Reading: Security is a System Property

here’s lots of security advice in the press: keep your systems patched, use a password manager, don’t click on links in email, etc. But there’s one thing these adages omit: an attacker who is targeting you, rather than whoever falls for the phishing email, won’t be stopped by one defensive measure. Rather, they’ll go after the weakest part of your defenses. You have to protect everything — including things you hadn’t realized were relevant. Security is a systems problem: everything matters, including the links between the components and even the people who use the system. —Steven Bellovin @ CircleID

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Worth Reading: Time is not on your side

Many of the presenters, like Truman Boyes of Bloomberg and Peyton Maynard-Koran of EA, discussed the idea of building boxes from existing components instead of buying them from established networking vendors like Cisco and Arista. The argument does hold some valid ideas. If you can get your hardware from someone like EdgeCore or Accton and get your software from someone else like Pluribus Networks or Pica8 it looks like a slam dunk. You get 90% to 95% of a solution that you could get from Cisco with much less cost to you overall. —Networking Nerd

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