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Worth Reading: A bleak picture of internet trust

The 2017 CIGI-Ipsos Global Survey on Internet Security and Trust paints a bleak picture of the current state of trust online. A majority of those surveyed said they are more concerned about their privacy than the year before, with an almost even split between those “much more concerned” and those only “somewhat more concerned”. When asked whether they agree with the statement “overall, I trust the Internet”, only 12% of respondents strongly agreed and a further 43% somewhat agreed. This means only a little more than half agreed that they trust the Internet, and some even expressed some reservation by choosing to respond “somewhat agree”. —The Internet Society

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Worth Reading: Avoid falling into the hybrid cloud hype

Despite the many cloud benefits, most IT departments have yet to figure out how to manage their cloud usage effectively. DevOps is often still in control of cloud deployments and, in many cases, costs are spiraling out of control. A reaction has been to treat cloud management primarily as financial management by focusing on bills. To truly optimize cloud decisions and build an effective hybrid-cloud strategy, however, organizations must ignore the hype and take a methodical, data-driven approach to evaluating the options against the business requirements and the associated applications. —Data Center Journal

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Troubleshooting: Basics

It’s 2AM, the network is down, and the CEO is on the phone asking when it is going to be back up—the overnight job crucial to the business opening in the morning has failed, and the company stands to lose millions of dollars if the network is not fixed in the next hour or so. Almost every network engineer has faced this problem at least once in their career, often involving intense bouts of troubleshooting.

And yet—troubleshooting is a skill that is hardly ever taught. There are a number of computer science programs that do include classes in troubleshooting, but these tend to be mostly focused on tools, rather than technique, or focused on practical skill application. I was also trained in troubleshooting many years ago as a young recruit into the United States Air Force—but the training was, again, practical in bent, with very few theoretical components.

Note to readers: I wrote a short piece on troubleshooting here on rule11, but I have taken that piece down and replaced it with this short series on the topic. I did start writing a book on this topic many years ago, but my co-authors and I soon discovered troubleshooting was going Continue reading

Worth Reading: How to choose a sandbox

Businesses have become painfully aware that conventional approaches — virus signature scanning and URL filtering — are no longer sufficient in the fight against cyberthreats. This is in part because malware is constantly changing, generating new signatures with a frequency that far outpaces the updates of signature detection systems. In addition, malware today tends to be targeted to specific sectors, companies, or even individual members of a management team, and such targeted attacks are difficult to spot. It has become necessary to use state-of-the-art technology based on behavioral analysis, also known as the sandbox. This blog examines how a sandbox can increase security and it looks at what to consider when choosing a sandbox solution. —Coud Security Alliance

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Worth Reading: Joining together to fight spam

Last October, in the vibrant city of Bangkok, the Internet Society joined regulators for an in-depth conversation about how to eliminate spam and its harmful effects. Our kind hosts were the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and the International Institute of Communications (ICC). The CRTC has published a comprehensive and insightful report on the workshop, capturing the key issues, observations, and ways forward. We encourage you to read it carefully. First and foremost, take note of the answer to “why act now?” – it’s a shared responsibility. —The Internet Society

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Worth Reading: Hijacking merchant accounts

Last month Yours Truly got snookered by a too-good-to-be-true online scam in which some dirtball hijacked an Amazon merchant’s account and used it to pimp steeply discounted electronics that he never intended to sell. Amazon refunded my money, and the legitimate seller never did figure out how his account was hacked. But such attacks are becoming more prevalent of late as crooks increasingly turn to online crimeware services that make it a cakewalk to cash out stolen passwords. —Krebs on Security

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Worth Reading: The Telsa Bubble

Tesla has carved out a small niche by selling a $50,000 car for $100,000 to customers who are willing to pay a premium to be able to say that they’re on the cutting edge or that they’re saving the planet. It’s now trying to go to a larger market by selling a $20,000 car for $35,000. It’s not clear that this business model works without government subsidies. What the regulatory support for Tesla has actually managed to achieve is to inflate a massive bubble that sucked billions of dollars of private capital into a company that probably doesn’t have a sustainable long-term business model. At the very least, money and capital are being diverted from places they would otherwise have gone and instead are being used to support a politically favored innovation at a very high risk of failure. —The Federalist

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Worth Reading: Tracing diet pill spam

Reading junk spam messages isn’t exactly my idea of a good time, but sometimes fun can be had when you take a moment to check who really sent the email. Here’s the simple story of how a recent spam email advertising celebrity “diet pills” was traced back to a Washington, D.C.-area defense contractor that builds tactical communications systems for the U.S. military and intelligence communities. Your average spam email can contain a great deal of information about the systems used to blast junk email. If you’re lucky, it may even offer insight into the organization that owns the networked resources (computers, mobile devices) which have been hacked for use in sending or relaying junk messages. —Krebs on Security

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Worth Reading: Learning blockchains

A blockchain is a digital ledger of records that’s arranged in chunks of data called blocks. These blocks then link with one another through a cryptographic validation known as a hashing function. Linked together, these blocks form an unbroken chain — a blockchain.
The reason that this type of data structure is useful for things like cryptocurrencies is decentralization, meaning the records inside this chain aren’t stored in any single location, are accessible by everyone, and are immutable by any one party. —Free Code Camp

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One the ‘net: The Network Collective and Choosing a Routing Protocol

The Network Collective is a new and very interesting video cast of various people sitting around a virtual table talking about topics of interest to network engineers. I was on the second episode last night, and the video is already (!) posted this morning. You should definitely watch this one!

In episode 2 our panel discusses some key differences between routing protocols and the details that should be considered before choosing to implement one over another. Is there any difference between IGP routing protocols at this point? When does it make sense to run BGP in an enterprise network? Is IS-IS an old and decaying protocol, or something you should viably consider? Russ White, Kevin Myers, and the co-hosts of Network Collective tackle these questions and more.

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Worth Reading: Password and security recommendations

Rather than just regurgitate the usual unworkable advice (make each password 14 different random characters, change them every week, and never write them down) we tried to look at the real threats on the current Internet and offer advice that makes sense today. The password advice does recommend strong passwords or pass phrases, but then mostly talks about operational issues: do encrypt channels where passwords are sent via HTTPS or the like, do use multiple factors where possible, do use federated authentication to minimize the number of passwords people have to use, do make users change default passwords before using a new account, and don’t do hard account lockouts after password failures (an easy way to harass your enemies.) While it does say to make it easy for users to change passwords when they want, it doesn’t recommend required password changes, since that is counterproductive–people use a pattern like password1, password2, password3, write them down, or most likely both. —CircleID

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MegaSwitch: an interesting new data center fabric

Data center fabrics are built today using spine and leaf fabrics, lots of fiber, and a lot of routers. There has been a lot of research in all-optical solutions to replace current designs with something different; MegaSwitch is a recent paper that illustrates the research, and potentially a future trend, in data center design. The basic idea is this: give every host its own fiber in a ring that reaches to every other host. Then use optical multiplexers to pull off the signal from each ring any particular host needs in order to provide a switchable set of connections in near real time. The figure below will be used to explain.

In the illustration, there are four hosts, each of which is connected to an electrical switch (EWS). The EWS, in turn, connects to an optical switch (OWS). The OWS channels the outbound (transmitted) traffic from each host onto a single ring, where it is carried to every other OWS in the network. The optical signal is terminated at the hop before the transmitter to prevent any loops from forming (so A’s optical signal is terminated at D, for instance, assuming the ring runs clockwise in the diagram).

The receive Continue reading

Worth Reading: AI driven networks

Few realize how little has changed in the way that carriers and operators build, utilize and manage their networks. Whether due to the fact that carrier-grade performance relies on stringent, rigid equipment, or because the industry is held captive by giants who enjoy the status quo, the sad fact is that the industry has stagnated over the years. With the advent of 5G, this ‘stability’ will likely soon to come to an end. The sheer amount of traffic, and the different types of traffic traversing the network, will require a different way of networking. Networking will need to evolve to a new level, one where more of today’s currently manual tasks will be handed off to automation. Networking will require the induction of artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data, leading to a more ‘cognitive, self-driven’ type of network. —ECI

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