Networking device manufacturer Netgear released firmware updates for several router models in order to patch a critical vulnerability that's publicly known and could be exploited by hackers.The vulnerability was disclosed by a researcher Friday and affects multiple Netgear router models, many from the company's Nighthawk series. The company initially confirmed the flaw in three models -- R6400, R7000, R8000 -- but it has since expanded the list to include five more.The models confirmed to be affected so far are: R6250, R6400, R6700, R7000, R7100LG, R7300, R7900 and R8000. This list might not be complete as Netgear continues to analyze the flaw's impact to its entire router portfolio.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The thin, lightweight design makes this hub a great travel companion to expand one USB 3.0 port into four. Each port has its own power switch so you can control each port independently. It currently averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 4,300 people (read recent reviews). Its typical list price of $30 had been reduced 67% to just $10. See it on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Many of us cordially detest virtual LANs (VLANs). They require complicated configuration, and consequently they are error-prone. They do not offer fully satisfactory solutions for the problems they are employed to solve, primarily limiting broadcast traffic and segregating devices and their traffic for security purposes. But as the least-worst alternative, they are a fact of life in many networks.Recent developments in WLAN and data center networking offer opportunities to escape VLANs.In the enterprise Wi-Fi world, it has long been important to reduce broadcast traffic over the air, and WLAN vendors have been developing techniques along these lines for years. An early feature allowed an access point to act as an ARP proxy for its client devices, answering on their behalf. The success of proxy-ARP functions engendered intervention in other broadcast/multicast protocols to reduce unnecessary traffic and improve performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When we first started evaluating SD-WANs, the market was pretty straightforward. You had a few appliance (virtual and hardware) providers, a service provider and that’s about it. Today, more than 30 vendors deliver some kind of SD-WAN.Mind boggling? A bit, but we can help. There are three categories of SD-WAN offerings today. You can buy SD-WAN equipment (and software) and do it yourself (DIY), subscribe to an over-the-top (OTT) SD-WAN service, or have your SD-WAN bundled with a carrier network, such as MPLS or Direct Internet Access (DIA). We’ll look at each one of them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Calendar year 2016 was a big year of change at Cisco.Coming into the year, I wasn’t sure how aggressive new CEO Chuck Robbins would be at making changes. It turns out, he was far more active than I would have ever imagined, and 2016 will be remembered as the year Robbins stamped the company with his own thumbprint.During the year Cisco made several, the biggest of which was Jasper Technologies. That transformed Cisco from being an IoT evangelist into a major player. We also saw the company enter the analytics market with its Cisco Tetration Analytics Platform.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
PowerShell is an enormous addition to the Windows toolbox that gives Windows admins the ability to automate all sorts of tasks, such as rotating logs, deploying patches, and managing users. Whether it's specific Windows administration jobs or security-related tasks such as managing certificates and looking for attack activity, there is a way to do it in PowerShell.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Some 2.7 million AT&T customers will share $88 million in compensation for having had unauthorized third-party charges added to their mobile bills, the Federal Trade Commission announced this morning.
The latest shot in the federal government’s years-long battle against such abuses, these refunds will represent the most money ever recouped by victims of what is known as “mobile cramming,” according to the FTC.
From an FTC press release:
Through the FTC’s refund program, nearly 2.5 million current AT&T customers will receive a credit on their bill within the next 75 days, and more than 300,000 former customers will receive a check. The average refund amount is $31. ...To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The IT infrastructure that powers an organization's business strategy has become increasingly more dynamic and distributed. The introduction of new technologies to increase IT agility has made it significantly more difficult to manage and secure the infrastructure using traditional tools.That challenge has given rise to several new specialized tools that network managers have had to figure out how to integrate into their environment. The explosion of new security and management applications has something called “tool sprawl” where the number of tools has become unmanageable.Trying to connect every tool to every network device is extremely complicated and inefficient. The desire to simplify things has created strong demand for network packet brokers (NPBs). If you’re not familiar with the technology, it sits between the network infrastructure and a tool layer and performs a number of tasks to make tools more efficient and easier to deploy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bluetooth is aiming straight for the internet of things as the fifth version of the wireless protocol arrives with twice as much speed for low-power applications.
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), which gains the most from the new Bluetooth 5 specification, can now go as fast as 2Mbps (bits per second) and typically can cover a whole house or a floor of a building, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) said Wednesday. Those features could help to make it the go-to network for smart homes and some enterprise sites.
The home IoT field is pretty open right now because most people haven’t started buying things like connected thermostats and door locks, ABI Research analyst Avi Greengart said. Bluetooth starts out with an advantage over its competition because it’s built into most smartphones and tablets, he said. Alternatives like ZigBee and Z-Wave often aren’t.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
U.S. web-hosting giant GoDaddy has agreed to buy German company Host Europe Group in a move that will take the number of domain names it manages to 70 million.Host Europe, based in Germany, has 1.7 million customers and manages 7 million domain names, while GoDaddy has 14 million customers and 63 million domain names under management.The acquisition values Host Europe at €1.69 billion (US$1.79 billion) and will make GoDaddy market leader in small business cloud services in Europe, the U.S. company said Tuesday. It expects to close the deal during the second quarter of 2017.Both companies focus on services to small businesses. A deal will allow them to scale up existing systems to sell one another's products to existing customers, GoDaddy said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The days when hotel Wi-Fi just connected travelers to the Internet are going away. Now it can be part of a system that helps give guests more personalized service – if they don’t mind the hotel tracking their location on the property.The new MR30H access point from Cisco’s Meraki division will work with Bluetooth beacons - small wireless location devices that stores and other businesses are starting to use so they can tell where people are.The benefits, as long as guests are willing to opt in, could include things like having an attendant walk up and offer a drink or a towel as you go out to the pool, thanks to your frequent-guest status, said Pablo Estrada, Meraki’s director of marketing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The terms digital, speed and agility all go hand in hand. In the digital era, companies need to make decisions and implement them quickly. This has put new pressures on the IT department to responder faster than ever before. To accomplish that, IT needs to be agile, which is why there has been such heavy investment in things such as containers, the cloud, virtualization and other technologies that make the infrastructure more dynamic. The drive to be more agile has been the primary force behind the shift to software-defined networks (SDN). SDNs increase dynamism through programmability, orchestration and network virtualization at a network level.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Like a man eager to show off his new watch, Google is encouraging anyone running IT operations to ask it for the time.The company will let anyone use its NTP (Network Time Protocol) servers, a move to help IT shops cope with the next “leap second,” which will be tacked onto 2016 just after midnight on Dec. 31.Leap seconds help to keep clocks aligned with Earth’s rotation, which can vary due to geologic and even weather conditions. But an extra second can wreak havoc with applications and services that depend on systems being tightly synchronized.Most Internet-connected devices get their time through NTP, an open-source technology that's used all over the world. NTP has its own problems, mainly around funding, but it's long been the standard. Google runs its own NTP servers and uses them to ease its systems through leap seconds, according to Michael Shields, technical lead on the company’s Time Team, in a blog post on Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Boost the range of your existing WiFi and create a stronger signal in hard-to-reach areas with a WiFi range extender like this one from Netgear, which is highly rated and currently discounted 43% on Amazon. . This compact AC750 wall-plug WiFi booster delivers AC dual band WiFi up to 750 Mbps, and is small and discreet, easily blending into your home decor. Well over 13,000 people have reviewed the AC750 on Amazon (read reviews) and have given it an average of 4 out of 5 stars. Right now its list price of $70 has been reduced to $36.93. See it now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Boost the range of your existing WiFi and create a stronger signal in hard-to-reach areas with a WiFi range extender like this one from Netgear, which is highly rated and currently discounted 43% on Amazon. . This compact AC750 wall-plug WiFi booster delivers AC dual band WiFi up to 750 Mbps, and is small and discreet, easily blending into your home decor. Well over 13,000 people have reviewed the AC750 on Amazon (read reviews) and have given it an average of 4 out of 5 stars. Right now its list price of $70 has been reduced to $50. See it now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The substantially high cost of MPLS circuits ($200-$400/Mbps/month) compared to easily deployed, lower cost broadband Internet (with a price tag of $1/Mbps/month) has triggered a shift in enterprise architectures to the software defined WAN. SD-WAN provides the flexibility to choose the most optimal transport and dynamically steer traffic over a mix of MPLS circuits, the public Internet, or even wireless LTE circuits.
The access transport selection depends on a variety of factors, including the type of application, traffic profile, security requirements, QoS and network loss and latency. When implemented correctly, SD-WAN truly has significant advantages: Faster service deployment, increased flexibility, unified management and improved application performance, to name a few. But, while familiarity about SD-WAN has increased over the last year, a survey by Silver Peak and IDG shows only 27% of small- to mid-sized enterprises have shifted to SD-WAN.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Raspberry Pi 3 today has only Wi-Fi connectivity, but soon it will also be able to handle low-throughput cellular communications and let users control devices over long distances.Altair has completed testing of its ALT1160 Category 1 LTE chip on Raspberry Pi, and is now making it available, a company representative said. That's significant, as it will bring much-needed, long-range communications to the popular board computer.The LTE chip is ready for sale by Altair and its partners, a company representative said. The chip will be included in various third-party add-on LTE expansion boards and sensor modules for Raspberry Pi; otherwise, Altair will take volume orders for the chip. Each chip will cost roughly $15 to $20, though prices are coming down, said Eran Eshed, co-founder of Altair. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Success in the digital era requires a significant rethink of IT strategy. Technology approaches have historically focused on the compute platforms, but in today’s digital world where billions of devices are being connected and the cloud and mobility have become the norm, IT strategies must become network-centric.In a digital organization, the network will evolve from being a tactical resource into a high-value, strategic asset that will have a direct impact on the success of new business initiatives.However, if the network is to become the foundation for the digital enterprise, it must evolve to do the following:
Ensure the availability, flexibility and scalability of digital services.
Provide security that cuts across silos and eases operations.
Automate compliance tasks.
Unlock meaningful insights to transform the organization.
Provide full visibility and operational efficiency to make the network a competitive differentiator.
Accomplishing the above requires IT to find a way to control and automate processes. This can be achieved through the use of actionable network intelligence (ANI) that ensures network and service availability, improves risk management and operational efficiencies, and transforms the network into a competitive advantage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There is a fundamental differentiator between companies that are winning the digitization race and transforming industry segments and those that have traditional business models.I’m talking about companies like Airbnb, Uber, Facebook or Amazon. Those companies don’t just create stuff for their customers, their customers create stuff for them, and for each other. The value of their product or service, therefore, is co-created by the people who use it.+ Also on Network World: Is your network a platform for business innovation and growth? +
Facebook is the most obvious example of this. We are the product. Facebook just provides a platform. Its customers create all of the content and thus create the reason to engage as well as the value of the platform. Without us, there is no reason to be on Facebook.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Getting a handle on electricity use in the data center, home or even Navy ships at sea is no easy task, but a system under development by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Office of Naval Research aims to tame that challenge. Office Of Naval Research/Bryce Vickmark
MIT researches have developed a system that could figure out exactly how much power is being used by every appliance, lighting fixture, and device in home or business...Office Of Naval Research . Credit: Bryce Vickmark
With backing from ONR, MIT have designed what they call a portable system to precisely measure and cheaply monitor the amount of electricity used by individual household appliances, lighting fixtures and electronic devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here