My first thought yesterday upon seeing that Cisco Partners was asking its Twitter audience to help name its new blog was, “What, have these people learned nothing from the Boaty McBoatface kerfuffle?”Alas, the Cisco social media folks weren’t born yesterday, so they had the good sense to limit those wanting to help name the blog to only three choices.
As of this morning, the third option – Weekly Rewind – was enjoying a comfortable lead.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One day the inventorying of electronic equipment in the workplace could be accomplished through radio frequency (RF) noise detection rather than labelling and tagging. The concept is based on the fact that all electronics always emit distinct radio noise when they’re running.Those unique RF prints could be used instead of serial numbers or expensive, attached RFID identifying tags and could quickly ID the gear. Even gadgets of exactly the same model type appear unique when analyzed, say researchers (PDF).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The database landscape is much more diverse than it once was, thanks in large part to big data, and on Tuesday, one of today's newer contenders unveiled an upcoming release featuring a major boost in security.Version 9 of MarkLogic's namesake NoSQL database will be available at the end of this year, and one of its key new features is the inclusion of Cryptsoft’s KMIP (Key Management Interoperability Protocol) technology.MarkLogic has placed its bets on companies' need to integrate data from dispersed enterprise silos -- a task that has often required the use of so-called ETL tools to extract, transform and load data into a traditional relational database. Aiming to offer an alternative approach, MarkLogic's technology combines the flexibility, scalability, and agility of NoSQL with enterprise-hardened features like government-grade security and high availability, it says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) has released surveillance camera video of an unintentionally driverless Red Line train zipping through two commuter stops in December, a potential catastrophe triggered by the operator’s decision to wrap a rubber cord around the vehicle’s accelerator before stepping out to address a signal problem. The train left without him and travelled through a total of four stations before stopping after power was cut to the third rail.While the episode itself was dramatic, to say to the least, the video – even this edited version from WCVB Channel 5 TV -- is underwhelming.
Even the people on the platforms didn’t seem to realize anything was wrong.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
LAS VEGAS -- Apparently Ethernet isn’t all THAT ubiquitous. That is judging by the number of new applications, speed changes and future options for the networking standard that were discussed at the Interop symposium here.“We are now beyond the ‘let’s just go faster’ development of Ethernet and are now looking at developing Ethernet for specific applications,” said David Chalupsky, Ethernet Alliance BASE-T subcommittee chair and principal engineer at Intel.+More on Network World: Ethernet everywhere!+That’s not to say Ethernet won’t continue to get faster – it is. There is currently work to develop 50Gbps, 200Gbps and 400Gbps Ethernet in the next three years. But perhaps more telling, the Ethernet community is also looking to standardize on slower speeds 2.5Gbps, 5Gbps and 25Gbps.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At the 2016 Interop show, David Chalupsky from the Ethernet Alliance chats with Network World about its six new data rates and 2016 Ethernet Roadmap. Chalupsky also explains why the networking standard is not only getting faster, but slower for some particular applications and use cases.
In this next installment of my ongoing PowerShell series, I want to focus on putting PowerShell objects to work for you. Let me warn you in advance, however: Put on your advanced thinking caps for this piece, especially if you are a non-programmer or non-developer and are used to pointing at things and clicking them once or twice to accomplish some tasks. I'm going to get abstract with you here but, as far as I know, there is no way around it.Using multiple properties with hash tablesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
More than half of all DDoS strikes have resulted in some kind of customer data loss, intellectual property theft or disappearance of money, according to a new report from Neustar.It’ll happen again, too. The IT firm also discovered that the vast majority of organizations (82 percent) are attacked again after the first DDoS onslaught.“DDoS attacks continue to pose a legitimate threat as a dangerous weapon used to create chaos and hold organizations hostage,” Neustar says in the report.Not many are “spared,” the security outfit says, and almost half of those blitzed once were thrashed six or more times.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
LAS VEGAS --The growing number of vendors supporting 2.5 and 5 Gigabit Ethernet over twisted pair copper cabling demonstrated the interoperability of a variety of new gear at the Interop event here.The NBase-T Alliance showed off an assortment of 2.5 and 5GBase-T products – from switches to NICs -- it says show new applications for NBase-T products, including the ability to aggregate data at 2.5G and 5G Ethernet data across 802.11ac Wave2 access points and improved speed links to network-attached storage devices. The Alliance noted that Dell’Oro Group predicted recently that there will be a doubling of ports shipped every year in the 2.5G and 5G Ethernet market over the next 3 years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You thought it was buried. You forgot. Someone didn’t document it. A ping sweep didn’t find it. It lay there, dead. No one found it. But there was a pulse:It’s still running, and it’s alive. And it’s probably unpatched.Something probed it long ago. Found port 443 open. Jacked it like a Porsche 911 on on Sunset Boulevard on a rainy Saturday night. How did it get jacked? Let me count the ways.Now it’s a zombie living inside your asset realm.It doesn’t matter that it’s part of your power bill. It’s slowly eating your lunch.It doesn’t matter that you can’t find it because it’s finding you.It’s listening quietly to your traffic, looking for the easy, unencrypted stuff. It probably has a few decent passwords to your router core. That NAS share using MSChapV2? Yeah, that was easy to digest. Too bad the password is the same as the one for every NAS at every branch from the same vendor. Too bad the NAS devices don’t encrypt traffic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Star Wars video gamesStar Wars, as an enormous building block of nerd culture, and one that got popular right when home computing was really taking off, has an unsurprisingly huge number of video games set in its universe. Some of them are very good, and some are the opposite of very good. Here’s a look at four of the former, and four of the latter.RELATED: Cool ways to celebrate Star Wars DayTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When evaluating hyperconverged infrastructure products, IT Central Station users most often examine their price, simplicity and ease of manageability, compared to more traditional storage systems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Not the same old flowers, chocolate and jewelryThis isn’t a gadget-heavy list of Mother’s Day gift ideas. It’s a collection of gifts inspired by science, technology, engineering and math. The tech quotient is low, but the design bar is high. Each of these gifts shows how artists, craftspeople and industrial designers can put a geeky spin on the usual jewelry, flowers and accessories.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Over the past 30-plus years, Cisco has almost single-handedly carried the flag for network-centric innovation. Its many brand campaigns along the way have told us that Cisco can “Empower the Internet Generation” and connect the “Human Network” and that “Tomorrow Starts Here.”
Each of those branding initiatives was tied to a different era in networking. For example, “Tomorrow Starts Here” was targeted at the Internet of Things (IoT).
Now that IoT is well underway, Cisco is changing its brand to be more reflective of the next wave in business: the “digital” era.
This morning, Cisco’s Chief Marketing Officer, Karen Walker, outlined the thoughts behind Cisco’s new brand campaign of “There’s Never Been A Better Time.” Cisco’s tagline is supported by a number of use cases that explain what it is that there’s never been a better time to do. Below are a couple of examples that illustrate how “there’s never been a better time to make cities smarter” or “… to save the rhinos.” Along with the headline, Cisco provides stories and data points, quantifying the value of digitization.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The worst part of this mistake – other than the pain caused to innocent weasels – is that it should have been avoided, at least here. After all, as I was typing last Friday’s post about an electrocution-sparked electrical outage at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) the question did occur to me: Is a weasel actually a rodent, as I am about to allege?Unfortunately, I failed to act upon that inquisitive impulse and the answer to the question is no, a weasel is not a rodent. And I am hearing about it from those who know better.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Robo-versatility on displayImage by ReutersWhile some of us wait patiently for a real-life version of the housekeeper from The Jetsons, today’s “working robots” are taking on a surprising variety of tasks, as evidenced by this collection of recent photos provided by Reuters.Waiting to buy an iPhoneImage by Reuters/Robert GalbraithTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In a battle between a rodent and a 17-mile-long superconducting machine designed to smash protons, one might expect the rodent to fare poorly. And in this case, it did, though not without the little guy doing some damage of its own.From a BBC report:
The Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at Cern is offline after a short circuit - caused by a weasel.The unfortunate creature did not survive the encounter with a high-voltage transformer at the site near Geneva in Switzerland.The LHC was running when a "severe electrical perturbation" occurred in the early hours of Friday morning.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
5 things containers need to win the enterpriseImage by PexelsContainer technology like Docker and CoreOS is growing in popularity as companies to realize the benefits of the flexible service and application delivery platform they offer. But the technology is not without its challenges in the enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
“Government, we have a problem”—to paraphrase the crew of the 1970 moon flight reporting back on Apollo 13’s technical fault. But it sounds about right to describe, in one line, the somewhat frightening state of U.S. government infrastructure—including that of NASA, which is the worst of the federal agencies—exposed recently in a report.Network infrastructure weaknesses and vulnerabilities abound, according to SecurityScorecard.The tip of the iceberg appears to be the now-famous 2015 Office of Personnel Management loss of 21 million people’s Social Security numbers and other Personally Identifiable Information (PII).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here