It's not every day I come across positive sentiments about Comcast, so I thought I'd share this example that I stumbled upon in a local blog focused on, of all things, ghost stories.
Author Liz Sower writes realistic but fictional accounts of the paranormal at "Ghosts in the Burbs," and she caught my eye with this recent headline: Xfinity vs. Verizon. I thought for sure she was going to dive into haunted DSL or eerie broadband experiences.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
U.S. plans to transfer the oversight of key technical Internet functions to an international multi-stakeholder governance model have run into hurdles with two bills being introduced on Wednesday that would require the government to first take the approval of Congress for the transition.A bill proposed in the Senate by Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, called the Protecting Internet Freedom Act, would prohibit any transfer of Internet domain name system functions except if expressly allowed under a federal statute passed after the new legislation has been enacted.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As deadlines go, Jan. 1, 2017, isn’t far away, yet many organizations still haven’t switched their digital certificates and signing infrastructure to use SHA-2, the set of cryptographic hash functions succeeding the weaker SHA-1 algorithm. SHA-1 deprecation must happen; otherwise, organizations will find their sites blocked by browsers and their devices unable to access HTTPS sites or run applications.7. Get the new certificateTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
IP traffic will grow in a massive way as 10 billion new devices come online over the next five years.
Those are just a couple of the amazing facts found in Cisco’s 11th annual Visual Networking Index look at all things in the communications world.
+More on Network World: The most momentous tech events of the past 30 years+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Four Cisco Systems executives who led “spin-in” ventures that became important parts of the company have resigned.The longtime leaders decided to leave the company on June 17 because of “a disconnect regarding roles, responsibilities and charter” after a new Cisco business unit was announced, according to an internal memo posted Monday by CEO Chuck Robbins and seen by IDG News Service. The move was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.Engineers Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain and Luca Cafiero, and marketer Soni Jiandani, nicknamed “MPLS” after their first initials, started several companies with Cisco’s backing that later were absorbed back into the networking giant. The companies included Andiamo Networks in storage, Nuova Systems in data-center switching and Insieme Networks in SDN (software-defined networking).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
From PCs to servers, Intel is trying to redesign the way computers operate. We've already seen how PCs are changing, with 2-in-1 hybrids and tiny Compute Sticks, but some of the chip maker's groundbreaking technologies will initially appear in servers.The PC market is in decline, and the chipmaker has cut unprofitable products like smartphone chips. Intel is redirecting more resources to develop server and data-center products, which are already money makers for the company. Intel is also focusing on markets like the Internet of Things, memory, silicon photonics, and FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), all of which have ties to the fast-growing data center business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Paul Marcarelli – an actor better known as the “Can you hear me now?” guy – spent nine years profiting from a Verizon ad campaign that made his face famous and that phrase a part of the lexicon. That gig ended in 2011.Now he’s begun selling Sprint. In the new commercial he says he switched teams because Sprint’s service has become so wonderful. In real life, we all know he switched because Sprint is now helping him pay his bills. That’s fine. If AT&T had wanted Marcarelli’s services it would be the wonders of AT&T that the actor would be extolling on TV. Here’s the ad:
Now there’s absolutely nothing to criticize about an actor earning a living. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing wrong here.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Had enough of those perky and quirky wireless phone provider commercials from the likes of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile? Comedian Amy Schumer takes direct aim at these inane promos in a new episode of Comedy Central's Inside Amy Schumer (warning: a bit on the NSFW side of things...)
MORE: 6 Techiest Commercials from Super Bowl 50 | Wi-Fi hotspot block persists despite FCC crackdownTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In what the Federal Trade Commission is calling a first-of-its-kind verdict, a jury has found that a Utah man and his three movie companies are responsible for a variety of “deceptive and unlawful” selling practices that include 117 million illegal telemarketing calls.In a case that has already dragged on since 2011, the jury ruling enforces both the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule and its enormously popular Do Not Call Registry rules. The judge has yet to access civil penalties, but since they can be as high as $16,000 per violation it’s safe to assume the total will fall somewhere south of the $1.9 trillion maximum for just those illegal calls.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The health care industry provides an alluring target for malicious hackers. Personal health information has a much longer shelf life than financial information, making it a major draw for identity thieves. But a new and more troubling threat has arisen: the potential disruption of critical hospital systems by cybercriminals.With a diverse array of digital systems, hospitals have evolved into complex technology operations. Yet they remain singularly ill-prepared to defend against attacks, in part because the multiplicity of systems forms a wider surface area to attack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Technology vendors love to grab terms that are hot and then overuse them to the point where no one really understands what it means any more. I understand the desire to catch a market trend and have the “rising tide” lift the vendors along with a number of others. But the overuse of terms tends to confuse buyers while they are trying to figure out what’s what.This is one reason why Gartner’s Hype Cycle has the phases it does. While I think some of the terms are a little silly, the fact is that the first upslope creates vendor overhype and then technology goes into a lull while users do their own research. Gartner
If you’ve been around the network industry for a while, you probably remember the days when the term “stacking” became such a term. There’s some debate as to who invented stacking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An annual customer satisfaction survey says that T-Mobile is now the highest-rated of America’s big four wireless carriers, and that Comcast is no longer the least-popular ISP in the country, among other results.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: New JavaScript spam wave distributes Locky ransomware + Google cleared of infringement in Oracle lawsuit over JavaThe American Customer Satisfaction Index, released today, found that the percentage of users satisfied by T-Mobile’s service rose 6% in year-over-year terms to 74%, while the wireless service provider industry as a whole saw a 1.4% improvement, to 71%. The only named provider to lose ground was TracFone, which dropped to 75% from 77% in 2015, though that still makes it the highest-rated in the category.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
So we live in a world where a guy can’t begin to sell vaping-related goods over the Internet without being shaken down by a patent troll claiming a legal right to the courtesy of sending USPS tracking codes via email.
From an Electronic Frontier Foundation press release:
In a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, EFF is representing Jason Cugle, who last year began running a small business selling accessories for electronic cigarettes. Cugle, a Maryland resident, received a letter accusing his company and website (Triple7vaping.com) of violating Shipping & Transit’s patents, which relate to ideas for monitoring and reporting the status of delivery vehicles. Cugle simply sent customer shipments through the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) and manually emailed each customer a message saying the package had been shipped and providing the USPS tracking number. Florida-based Shipping & Transit claims its patents cover a variety of methods of notifying people when a vehicle is about to reach its destination, including Cugle’s.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Some 40,000 striking Verizon workers are poised to resume their regular job duties next week after their unions and the company reached a tentative contract agreement today.The strike has caused widespread service and installation delays, concerns among corporate customers that their needs would be neglected, as well as violent confrontations and allegations of vandalism and sabotage.Though the details of the pact have yet to be made public, it reportedly will run for four years and for the first time cover Verizon Wireless workers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Six technology companies, including Google, are working on trial projects in multiple U.S. cities to test out shared 3.5GHz spectrum wireless communications under an innovative model adopted recently by the Federal Communications Commission.The companies are working in an coalition that is tentatively being called the CBRS (Citizens Broadband Radio Service) Alliance, which borrows the CBRS terminology from the FCC. Some of the companies in the alliance have already demonstrated what they call OpenG technology, which uses 3.5GHz shared spectrum to improve indoor wireless communications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Juniper Networks’ Unite architecture is living up to its name, bringing more enterprise network gear into its system for simplified management and scaling.The latest additions to the lineup are entry-level and midrange access switches that also include other features for ease of use.Unite, introduced last year for the EX9200 core switches and other Juniper and third-party components, is designed to help enterprises turn their own infrastructure into private clouds and link those to public clouds in a hybrid architecture. It’s built around Junos Fusion Enterprise software, which collapses multiple network layers into one for simpler management. That gives administrators a single point of management.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Comments by Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins last week that the networking giant is open to collaborations with VMware in virtual networking raise the question: Just how would Cisco's ACI and VMware's NSX platforms could work together?In an interview with CRN last week, Robbins spoke vaguely about potentially exploring collaborations between Cisco’s ACI and VMware’s NSX, but did not commit to any specific integrations of the two products, which have typically been seen as competitors in the market.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: VMware narrowing SDN gap with Cisco | The future of auto safety is seatbelts, airbags and network technology +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The original title for this story was "Transitioning from IPv4 to IPv6," but when we started researching, we quickly realized that most organizations are adopting an outside-in strategy, rather than moving over from all-IPv4 to all-IPv6 deployments. This means that they're often taking steps to accommodate incoming and outgoing IPv6 traffic at the organizational boundary and translating between the two stacks, or tunneling one protocol over another, for internal access and use. The majority of internal clients and other nodes are using IPv4, with increasing use of IPv6 in dual-stack environments (environments that run IPv4 and IPv6 protocol stacks side-by-side).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Satellite-based data centers with room for petabytes of data may start orbiting Earth as early as 2019. But when it comes to keeping secrets safe from the long arm of the law, the black void may not be far enough.Cloud Constellation, a startup in Los Angeles, is looking upward to give companies and governments direct access to their data from anywhere in the world. Its data centers on satellites would let users bypass the Internet and the thousands of miles of fiber their bits now have to traverse in order to circle the globe. And instead of just transporting data, the company’s satellites would store it, too.The pitch goes like this: Data centers and cables on Earth are susceptible to hacking and to national regulations covering things like government access to information. They can also slow data down as it goes through switches and from one carrier to another, and all those carriers need to get paid.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Looking to continue tapping a market IDC says will be worth $6 billion by 2020, Software-Defined WAN company Viptela today said it raised $75M in a Series C round of financing.The new round of funding brings Viptela’s total funding to about $110M.The company said it would use the proceeds to grow sales, marketing, technical support and research and development.+More on Network World: What network technology is going to shake up your WAN?+This funding round was lead by investments from Redline Capital and new investor Northgate Capital as well as existing investor Sequoia Capital. Also as part of the financing, Tatiana Evtushenkova, Director of Redline Capital has joined the Viptela Board of Directors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here