Worth Reading: Bill would surveil Americans for life

The bill requires sharing of private student data among various federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid, the Department of Treasury, the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration, and the Bureau of the Census (this is a non-exclusive list). So an individual’s personally identifiable student-loan data can be linked to his tax information and his military information and his Social Security records and everything the census knows about him, which if he filled out the long form is pretty much everything about his life. There are no limits on the purposes for which this data-matching can take place. The only limits will exist in bureaucrats’ imagination. —The Federalist

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Flight

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Worth Reading: We are all groot

If you venture forth on becoming a programmer after reaching any kind of reasonable adulthood — i.e., gotten through college, survived the military, worked a “real” job or two — you’re used to feeling reasonably successful. Which is one of the perks of being a so-called grownup. Starting new at the very bottom of a new major life area with zero knowledge or experience is something we all did at some point — when you think about it, that is pretty much what childhood is all about. But your typical kid has lots of energy, no mortgage/rent or car payments to worry about, and — most importantly — is developmentally wired to learn a whole bunch of stuff all at once with their nice fresh, flexible brain. —Free Code Camp

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Worth Reading: Nosy neighbors and cloud privacy

You get your run-of-the-mill noisy neighbours – the ones who occasionally have friends round and play music a little too loud until a little too late. And then in the UK at least you get what we used to call “Asbos,” named after the Anti-Social Behaviour Orders that were introduced to try and curb deliberate disturbances of the peace. The same thing happens on the public cloud. You have accidental interference from neighbouring processes, and then you have your cloud ASBOs – which make deliberate attacks on neighbouring processes. —the morning paper

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Open19: A New Step for Data Centers

While most network engineers do not spend a lot of time thinking about environmentals, like power and cooling, physical space problems are actually one of the major hurdles to building truly large scale data centers. Consider this: a typical 1ru rack mount router weighs in at around 30 pounds, including the power supplies. Centralizing rack power, and removing the sheet metal, can probably reduce this by about 25% (if not more). By extension, centralizing power and removing the sheet metal from an entire data center’s worth of equipment could reduce the weight on the floor by about 10-15%—or rather, allow about 10-15% more equipment to be stacked into the same physical space. Cooling, cabling, and other considerations are similar—even paying for the sheet metal around each box to be formed and shipped adds costs.

What about blade mount systems? Most of these are designed for rather specialized environments, or they are designed for a single vendor’s blades. In the routing space, most of these solutions are actually chassis based systems, which are fraught with problems in large scale data center buildouts. The solution? Some form of open, foundation based standard that can be used by all vendors to build equipment Continue reading

Worth Reading: Transform your career with public speaking

Don’t sit around waiting to be picked. Pick yourself. That simple, low risk step, started a journey. That little step toward fear is how I ended up here, writing this post at a bar on an international flight. Who saw that coming?! Of course, I’m glossing over a many steps in between. After speaking at my job, I worked my way up to speaking at local user groups, then regional conferences. I presented sessions at over a dozen conferences across the US before I worked up the courage to speak overseas. But that first lunch & learn made all the difference. —Free Code Camp

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Worth Reading: These words should be banned

Client: “Our Big Data Rock Star ideated a cloud-based, scalable, native programmatic tool set that produced excellent learnings.” [Consultant]: “Well, it sounds like he took it to the next level … efforting 110% to craft a best practices, robust solution you can leverage, and it’s clearly out of the box thinking … but maybe you shouldn’t try to boil the ocean … it’s got a lot of moving parts and I’m not sure it’s something you want to take ownership of. … You might be accused of punching the puppy, so the optics are all wrong. We should probably put this in the parking lot.” —Shelly Palmer

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Worth Reading: Ten habits you should never take to real life

Too many adults have taken a Facebook page from a preteen. The problem is not that young people will never leave their metaphoric snowflake bank or literalist university campus, it is that people never quite leave the virtual world of their social networks. So here’s a list to help keep these tendencies out of our un-virtual lives. —The Federalist

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Worth Reading: The future of ransomware

Ransomware isn’t new, but it’s increasingly popular and profitable. The concept is simple: Your computer gets infected with a virus that encrypts your files until you pay a ransom. It’s extortion taken to its networked extreme. The criminals provide step-by-step instructions on how to pay, sometimes even offering a help line for victims unsure how to buy bitcoin. The price is designed to be cheap enough for people to pay instead of giving up: a few hundred dollars in many cases. Those who design these systems know their market, and it’s a profitable one. —Schneier on Security

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Anycast and Latency

One of the things I hear from time to time is how smaller Internet facing service deployments, with just a few instances, cannot really benefit from anycast. Particularly in the active-active data center use case, where customers can connect to one data center or another, the cost of advertising the service as an anycast, and the resulting requirement to keep the backend databases tightly synchronized, is often played as a eating a lot of complexity for the simplicity of having a single address in the DNS system, and hence not losing customer interaction time while the DNS records are timing out so the customer can reconnect to the service.

There is, in fact, some interesting recent research in this area. The research is directed at the DNS root servers themselves, probably because they are publicly accessible, and a well known system that has relied on anycast for many years (so the operators of the root DNS servers are probably well versed in the ways of anycast). One interesting chart from the post over at APNIC’s blog is—

The C root has 8 servers, while the L root has around 144 (according to the article pointed to above). Why is it Continue reading

Worth Reading: Hi gamut monitors

For the last 20 years, the display industry has settled on a limited, standard range of colors, called the sRGB gamut. If the lopsided, chopped-off-rainbow-disc below (technical name: the “1931 CIE Chromaticity Diagram”) represents all of the colors that human eyes can see, the sRGB gamut is circumscribed by the little triangle in the middle. —Web Designer Depot

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Worth Reading: ISO 27018 for the cloud

Cloud computing technologies have revolutionized the way organizations manage and store their information. Where companies used to house and maintain their own data, a host of organizations have now made the switch to a cloud-based model due to the ease of use and cost-saving benefits promised by the cloud. But what is a cloud without a little rain? The benefits of cloud technologies have not come without their costs. —Cloud Security Alliance

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Worth Watching: The Impact of Encryption

In episode 4 the panel discusses the ever increasing pervasiveness of encrypted traffic on our networks and how that encrypted traffic impacts the services that we run today. —The Network Collective

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Worth Reading: A few secrets of successful learning

Turn off every single distraction, put your phone into silent mode and leave it in another room, shut down all applications on your laptop (or tablet) and study. Also, don’t push it. You can’t absorb a complex topic in a few hours. Take a few small chunks at a time, try to understand them completely, think about them for a while (great ideas happen when your brain is totally bored while you’re brushing your teeth), figure out how you could use that knowledge in your network, and then proceed to the next chunk. —ipspace

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Colorful Corner

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Worth Reading: There is no free market for electricity

Electricity is an input in virtually everything we do as a modern society. Few Americans remember what it was like to live without it and its attendant benefits on quality of life, labor productivity, and human health. Electricity is today largely taken for granted, yet for middle-class and older Americans utility bills often constitute a significant share of household expenses. In the manufacture of everything from aluminum to silicon to chemicals, electricity is usually the largest operating expense; for many other manufactured goods, it is second only to labor. —American Affairs

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Worth Reading: Who controls the Internet?

Who controls the Internet? How much influence do they have? And what would happen if one of those parties launched an attack or was compromised and used to launch an attack? Previous works have looked at the individual core services, but this paper focuses on their inter-dependencies along attack propagation paths. —the morning paper

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Worth Reading: A better way to compare yourself

Comparing your work or abilities to someone else’s can be an unproductive and self-destructive activity. Yet we compare ourselves all the time. In my own experience, it feels like every day I’m comparing my work against those I admire. Even now, a decade into my career, I can always find someone doing something I wish I could do even half as well. These types of comparisons can often leave you feeling unmotivated or discouraged, afraid of a seemingly waning future, completely deprived of a way forward. When I compare myself I end up feeling like I’d rather watch TV or play video games than do anything else, because why bother? I could never do what those I admire have been able to. —Free Code Camp

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Worth Reading: Who pays security costs?

Computer security costs money. It costs more to develop secure software, and there’s an ongoing maintenance cost to patch the remaining holes. Spending more time and money up front will likely result in lesser maintenance costs going forward, but too few companies do that. Besides, even very secure operating systems like Windows 10 and iOS have had security problems and hence require patching. (I just installed iOS 10.3.2 on my phone. It fixed about two dozen security holes.) So — who pays? —CircleID

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Reading List: WannaCry and Ransomware

A good bit has been written about the recent WannaCry outbreak over the last few weeks; rather than stringing the best out through Worth Reading posts, I have collected the three best posts on the topic here.

There are a number of takeaways and lessons to learn from the far-reaching attack that we witnessed. Let me tie those to voluntary cooperation and collaboration which together represent the foundation for the Internet’s development. The reason for making this connection is because they provide the way to get the global cyber threat under control. Not just to keep ourselves and our vital systems and services protected, but to reverse the erosion of trust in the Internet. —CircleID

Over the weekend a cyber attack known as “WannaCry” infected hundreds of computers all over the world with ransomware (malware which encrypts your data until you pay a ransom, usually in Bitcoin). The attack takes advantage of an exploit for Windows known as “EternalBlue” which was in the possession of NSA and, in mid April, was made public by a group known as “The Shadow Brokers.” Microsoft issued a patch for the vulnerability on March 14 for all supported versions of Windows (Vista and Continue reading