Worth Reading: Large scale image processing with KAFKA

The digital world is becoming ever more visual. From webcams and drones to closed-circuit television and high-resolution satellites, the number of images created on a daily basis is increasing and in many cases, these images need to be processed in real- or near-real-time. This is a computationally-demanding task on multiple axes: both computation and memory. … At the Seventh International Conference on Computer Science and Information Technology held in Zurich, Switzerland last month, two researchers from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Korea University presented a paper outlining their software-based approach to solving this problem. —Next Platform

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Worth Reading: Just Press Reboot

After you pass security at Schiphol, Amsterdam’s international airport, go past the Christian Dior boutique and leave the Pretentious and Overpriced Mediocre Chocolate Shop (maybe not the exact name) on your left. On the wall you will see a big red button labeled “Reboot Schiphol.” Just press it in case your flight is delayed. Not really, but that is what Reuters seems to believe. —ACM

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Is the cloud the bee’s knees?

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Worth Reading: Optical encryption moves to ubiquitous

When initially introduced into the market, optical encryption was a niche application looking for a market. Optical encryption protects primarily against fiber tapping and traffic cloning, which were not viewed as widespread threats a few years ago. Optical encryption has some very definite benefits such as adding no latency and providing no information at all about the underlying services. Optical encryption made some headway with industries that were especially security conscious (financial and government), but not much further. News reports in the last few years of a wide range of cyber-attacks and infrastructure compromises have made every industry more aware of security, and suddenly optical encryption has taken off throughout the telecommunications market. As a result, the price and availability of optical encryption engines have improved dramatically. The solutions are also much more flexible, enabling optical encryption to be added easily to existing networks and all types of services. —ECI

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Worth Reading: As if random telephone and email spam weren’t enough

Google’s smart home speakers on Thursday played an unprompted promotion for Walt Disney Co.’s new “Beauty and the Beast” movie, the first sign of how the world’s largest advertising company could shoehorn ads into its growing number of voice interactions with users. Users of Google’s voice-controlled speaker, called Google Home, heard a 17-second promotion for the movie, after asking the devices about the their schedule. “By the way, Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast opens today,” the device said, according to user videos. —Market Watch

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On the ‘net: Nothing to Hide, Everything to Gain

The IETF Journal published an article by Shawn and I last week about open source, open standards, and participation by vendors and providers.

Why should a provider—particularly a content provider—care about the open standards and open source communities? There is certainly a large set of reasons why edge-focused content providers shouldn’t care about the open communities. A common objection to working in the open communities often voiced by providers runs something like this: Isn’t the entire point of building a company around data—which ultimately means around a set of processing capabilities, including the network—to hide your path to success and ultimately to prevent others from treading the same path you’ve tread? Shouldn’t providers defend their intellectual property for all the same reasons as equipment vendors?

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Worth Reading: Why there won’t ever be a CCIE SDN

There’s a lot of work that’s been done recently to bring the CCIE up to modern network standards. Yusuf and his team are working hard to incorporate new concepts into the written exam. Candidates are broadening their horizons and picking up new ideas as they learn about industry stalwarts like OSPF and spanning tree. But the biggest challenge out there is incorporating the ideas behind software defined networking (SDN) into the exam. I don’t believe that this will ever happen. Here’s why. —The Networking Nerd

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Worth Reading: My Data, Your Business

In times like these, it’s easy to be paranoid. Almost every day there is a new story about an app, a TV or a child’s toy that is collecting too much data, or a massive data breach, or the latest kind of ransomware doing the rounds of the Internet. We may not know the specifics, but we do know that somewhere out there someone is tracking us online: in fact, most of the data monetization machine is invisible to consumers — the individuals whose data fuels it. —The Internet Society

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Middleboxes and the End-to-End Principle

The IP suite was always loosely grounded in the end-to-end principle, defined here (a version of this paper is also apparently available here), is quoted in RFC2775 as:

The function in question can completely and correctly be implemented only with the knowledge and help of the application standing at the endpoints of the communication system. Therefore, providing that questioned function as a feature of the communication system itself is not possible. … This principle has important consequences if we require applications to survive partial network failures. An end-to-end protocol design should not rely on the maintenance of state (i.e. information about the state of the end-to-end communication) inside the network.

How are the Internet and (by extension) IP networks in general doing in regards to the end-to-end principle? Perhaps the first notice in IETF drafts is RFC2101, which argues the IPv4 address was originally a locater and an identifier, and that the locater usage has become the primary usage. This is much of the argument around LISP and many other areas of work—but I think 2101 mistates the case a bit. That the original point of an IP address is to locate a topological location in the network is Continue reading

Worth Reading: So You Want to get Certified

So you want to get certified. Nearly every technology vendor you can think of offers a certification program. You might have a few different reasons for wanting to get certified, and vendors have just as much incentive to get you certified in implementing and supporting their platforms. —Netcraftsmen

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Worth Reading: Building better ransomware

This is kind of a funny post for me to write, since it ransomwareinvolves speculating about a very destructive type of software — and possibly offering some (very impractical) suggestions on how it might be improved in the future. It goes without saying that there are some real downsides to this kind of speculation. Nonetheless, I’m going ahead on the theory that it’s usually better to talk and think about the bad things that might happen to you — before you meet them on the street and they steal your lunch money. —Cryptography Engineering

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Raptor

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Worth Reading: The Internet’s gilded age

The rise of the Internet has heralded rapid changes in our society. The opportunities presented by a capable and ubiquitous communications system and a global transportation network have taken some corporations from the multinational to the status of truly global mega-corporation. Good examples of these new corporations include Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. There are a handful of large scale winners in this space and many losers. But this is not the first time we’ve witnessed a period of rapid technological and social change. —Potaroo

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Worth Reading: Three attitudes that lead to maintainable code

When writing code, there are many specific principles that aim to make your code more maintainable: DRY, the single responsibility principle, the Law of Demeter, the open/closed principle, etc. These are great principles to follow, but it can be difficult to keep all of them in your head at once. I’ve found it’s often easier to keep a few broader ideas in mind. —Atomic Object

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Worth Reading: Web audio API

Web Audio API lets us make sound right in the browser. It makes your sites, apps, and games more fun and engaging. You can even build music-specific applications like drum machines and synthesizers. In this article, we’ll learn about working with the Web Audio API by building some fun and simple projects. —CSS Tricks

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Worth Reading: Digital security assessment quiz

As our reliance on digital devices increases, so does our digital vulnerability. Cyber attacks and hacks are growing both in number and sophistication, making it more important than ever that we take control of our own cybersecurity. But for those of us with limited technical knowledge, anything prefixed with “cyber” seems shrouded in a baffling binary fog. We at CDT wish to clear this intimidating haze by illuminating some effective security strategies. —Center for Democracy and Technology

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Worth Reading: Redundancy does not imply fault tolerance

It’s a tough life being the developer of a distributed datastore. Thanks to the wonderful work of Kyle Kingsbury (aka, @aphyr) and his efforts on Jepsen.io, awareness of data loss and related issues in the face of network delays and partitions is way higher than it used to be. Under the Jepsen tests, every single system tested other than ZooKeeper exhibited problems of some kind. But many teams are stepping up, commissioning tests, and generally working hard to fix the issues even if they’re not all there yet. —the morning paper

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Worth Reading: Fearing Facebook

I used to greatly admire Mark Zuckerberg. Now, I fear him. Here’s why. Facebook is now a supranational company. It spans the globe with about 2 billion subscribers, its 2016 revenue reached $27.6B—54% more than in 2015; it’s immensely profitable (37% of revenue) and cash-rich with $29.56 “in the bank”. Decades ago, European Communists complained about “multinationals”, companies whose spread over multiple countries allowed them to escape full accountability in any one location. —Monday Note

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On the ‘net: PCEP

The original Path Control Element Protocol (PCEP) work dates from the early 2000’s, with the first IETF RFC (4655) being made informational in 2006—which means PCEP predates the time when SDNs were “cool.” PCEP was originally, because of the increasingly complex nature of computing Traffic Engineering (TE) paths through (primarily), Service Provider (SP) networks. Three specific developments drove the design, standardization, and deployment of PCEP —ECI Blog

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Worth Reading: Fat Finger Folly

You see, many newly created production systems, when they first come online, focus more on functionality and less on supportability. They are built to provide a specific capability. Of course, the services must be maintained, but maintaining these services often involve manual tasks by operations individuals, tasks such as logging on to servers and rebooting them, or terminating processes, or updating a configuration file. For many production systems, this is how they are maintained. Individuals login to the production servers and high privileged or “superusers” and manually perform necessary actions. This is, unfortunately, a very common process in the industry. —The New Stack

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