A major hurdle for students wanting to achieve the various Cisco Certifications has always been equipment. Sure, a student could purchase a few used devices via an auction site for something like the entry-level CCENT Certification, but what about more complex certifications that might require thousands (or more) worth of gear? Rack rental companies tend to come and go and can be very unreliable. Cisco is finally really attacking this issue for students thanks to exciting virtualization technologies. This article presents some current options available today. First up is Cisco VIRL. VIRL stands for Virtual Internet Routing Labs. What makes VIRL so exciting is a low price tag for its annual subscription (approximately $150 per year with a $50 off coupon) and a decent variety of devices for virtualization. The list includes:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google is rolling out a new service that lets users buy retail items directly from the search results page on mobile devices, in an effort to make mobile search more useful and give advertisers a new way to attract customers.A new link reading “Buy on Google” will appear in the ads that show up after users search for certain retail items. Clicking on that link will take you to a retailer-branded product page hosted by Google where you can get more information about the product, like reviews, and select item quantities. A checkout button will let you enter and save payment information, and provide a shipping address, before placing the order.Google had been rumored to be prepping the service, which it calls Purchases on Google. On Wednesday, the company talked a little more about how it will look and work, in announcements online and during a retail-focused event in New York.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google and seven other ISPs have joined a new U.S. government pilot program to connect 275,000 low-income households to the Internet for free or at reduced rates.U.S. President Barack Obama will discuss the initiative, called ConnectHome, Wednesday in Durant, Oklahoma. Durant serves as the capital of the Choctaw Tribal Nation, one of the communities taking part in the program.In Durant, like in many parts of rural Oklahoma, the library is a town’s only location with a high-speed Web connection, the state’s director of libraries said in a statement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel’s second quarter numbers likely shadowed by falling PC salesIntel reports earnings Wednesday and it’s expected to be a lackluster quarter for the chip giant as PC sales continue to slow. Analysts expect revenue to be down 6 percent from last year, and profit is forecast to fall as well. PC shipments declined 10 percent last quarter, according to Gartner, and Intel’s results are likely to reflect that.Hacking Team CEO insists customers’ spy tools aren’t compromisedThe founder of the Italian surveillance software company that suffered a disastrous data breach last week sought to reassure clients on Tuesday, insisting that Hacking Team’s anti-terrorism tools have not been jeopardized. “If the client has followed our instructions there are no problems for security. Only a part of the source code has been stolen,” Hacking Team CEO David Vincenzetti said, adding that the hack, which resulted in the theft of 400GB of data and the publication of around 1 million company emails on the WikiLeaks website, had not compromised its most innovative products.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Newly leaked figures reveal that the vast majority of people who exercised their right to be “forgotten” by Google’s services in Europe are everyday members of the public, with just 5 percent of requests coming from criminals, politicians and high-profile public figures.Europe’s highest court affirmed last year that people have the right to ask Google to remove certain results from its search engine, on the grounds that the information might be outdated or otherwise unfairly cast them in a negative light.Google has protested the decision, arguing that removing links requires “difficult value judgments” and can go against the public interest. It has pointed to “former politicians wanting posts removed that criticize their policies in office; serious, violent criminals asking for articles about their crimes to be deleted; bad reviews for professionals like architects and teachers; comments that people have written themselves (and now regret).”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A U.S. appeals court should immediately shut down the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of domestic telephone records because the practice is illegal, the American Civil Liberties Union said.The ACLU, in a request for an injunction filed Tuesday, asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to act now on its ruling from May that the bulk collection of U.S. phone records is illegal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As partner conference kicks off, Microsoft details Win10 launch plans and moreWith Windows 10 set to roll out in just two weeks, Microsoft on Monday shed some light on the marketing support it will put behind the launch: a worldwide, year-long “upgrade your world” ad campaign. And at its annual Worldwide Partner Conference that started in Orlando, Microsoft rolled out a new analytics tool that aims to democratize access to big data using the Cortana voice interface, as well as Project Gigjam, which can pull data from multiple applications into a shared workspace.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Undersea cables carry virtually all transoceanic Internet data these days, replacing satellites as the preferred medium. Google and some telecom companies invested in one of them, called FASTER, that will stretch 9,000 kilometers between the U.S. and Japan and is due to go into operation next year.With six fiber-pairs in the cable, each carrying 100 wavelengths at 100 gigabits per second, it will have a peak capacity of 60 terabits per second (Tbps). That’s about 10 million times faster than a standard cable modem.Here are some facts about undersea cables and about the FASTER system in particular.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Power to the people: Facebook news feed tool lets users prioritize postsDespite all that it knows about us, Facebook has conceded that it can’t do such a good job of guessing which items we’d like to see in our news feeds. It’s adding a tool that will let users pick the content they see first. It’s a minor victory for users who want to wrest control from algorithms and have greater influence over the information they get from social networking sites. Selected posts from friends or pages belonging to organizations and businesses will show up with a star in the top right corner.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two sister mobile and telecom service providers will pay a combined US$3.5 million after the U.S. Federal Communications Commission found that they were storing customers’ personal data on unprotected servers accessible over the Internet.TerraCom and YourTel America failed to adequately protect the personal information of more than 300,000 customers, the FCC said. The settlement stems from a 2013 incident when an investigative reporter found customer records from the companies’ low-income Lifeline programs online, the agency said in an October 2014 proposal to fine the companies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The broadband market has been rocked by a handful of major unexpected developments over the past few years, from Google suddenly stepping into the market with significantly faster broadband at much lower prices to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) removing nearly all legal barriers to municipal broadband projects.The fallout from the FCC's ruling is beginning to gain some steam, with a 101-city coalition called Next Century Cities aiming to smooth the path for municipalities to bring affordable, gigabit-speed broadband to their cities.See also: Inside the bold plan to bring gigabit fiber to Detroit
While the success stories are much more well-known, such as Chattanooga, Tennessee's long-running municipal gigabit fiber network, others have failed in spectacular fashion, like the city of Provo, Utah, whose municipal broadband project struggled before the city ultimately sold its existing fiber to Google for $1. This nationwide group could help provide access to information and expertise on broadband deployment to ensure the taxpayer money devoted to such a project doesn't go to waste.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With the arrival of El Capitan on Google Street View last month, you can now haul yourself virtually up one of the most famous rock faces in the world. Navigating certain streets in urban areas, however, can still be a challenge.As Google expands Street View into ever more exotic places, it appears to have a problem in many of the towns and cities where the service has been available for years. Look closely at any major city, especially the residential areas, and Street View is littered with hundreds, even thousands, of little gaps. And although it’s hard to be sure, the problem may be getting worse.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
NYSE halts trading as IT systems go down... but it’s no cyberattackTrading on the New York Stock Exchange halted for over three hours Wednesday due to unspecified computer problems. The exchange quickly ruled out a cyberattack, which means there are likely to be red faces in the NYSE IT department when the cause is uncovered.Microsoft lays off 7,800 staff as it dials down its smartphone ambitionsA little over a year after buying Nokia’s smartphone division, Microsoft is laying off all but one-sixth of the division’s staff, and writing off $7.6 billion, almost all of its purchase price. CEO Satya Nadella reportedly never liked the acquisition, set in motion by his predecessor Steve Ballmer, and now plans to slim down the bewildering array of Lumia phones the company makes, more tightly integrating them with Windows 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
United Airlines grounded its planes for about an hour on Wednesday, reportedly because of a router failure. That’s a wide path of destruction for one piece of equipment, but it’s the kind of hazard that comes with networking, where each piece is always linked to everything else.
The grounding, which started around 8:30 a.m. Eastern time, caused delays across United’s routes and stranded passengers. It came on the same day that a computer-related outage halted trading on the New York Stock Exchange, and just weeks after another technology-related service interruption at United.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Road trip! Google’s self-driving cars test out the streets of Austin, TexasGoogle has picked Austin, Texas, as the second location to test its self-driving vehicles, expanding the trials beyond Mountain View, California. One of Google’s self-driving Lexus sport utility vehicles is already on Austin’s streets, the company said Tuesday. Until now, public road tests of Google’s self-driving technology took place only around Mountain View, where the search company has its headquarters. Expanding the trial area will allow Google to test its software in a location with different road conditions, traffic patterns and driving situations, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sprint this week quickly reversed plans to impose a 600 Kbps limit on streaming video as part of a promotion called "All-In" that charges $80 a month for unlimited talk, text and high-speed data.The All-In plan, announced Tuesday, ironically was intended to "end consumer confusion & frustration," according to a press release.But the 600 Kbps video stream cap, originally contained in a footnote about the plan, incited widespread frustration and anger on social media sites and elsewhere.MORE: 10 mobile startups to watch
The 600 Kbps limitation was interpreted by Roger Entner, an analyst at Recon Analytics, as a violation of Title II net neutrality rules, which Sprint had supported before the Federal Communications Commission. "To throttle video is such a clearcut violation of Title II," he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe. In recent weeks I've written about several vendors in the software defined wide area networking (SD WAN) space. There's one thing I've learned as I've talked with these companies: each one takes an approach to wide area networking that plays to the company's strengths. Silver Peak just had a major announcement pertaining to SD WAN, and not surprisingly, this company is building on its deep expertise in WAN acceleration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A Boston-area hosting provider briefly knocked several large services and websites dependent on Amazon and AWS offline on Tuesday night, thanks to a configuration error.Somerville, Mass-based Axcelx said in a tweet that the problem was caused by a route leak, which is an issue that can cause a small service provider to advertise itself as a different and much, much larger one, attempting to route huge amounts of traffic across its routers and generally causing the traffic in question to grind to a halt.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: How Cisco brings communications to disaster relief efforts + One third of enterprise iOS devices vulnerable to app, data hijacking attacks +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the big problems with fiber has always been that the more power you add to a signal—to get the signal to travel further—the more distortion you get. That distortion degrades the quality of the data.
It's a problem because ideally you want fiber to travel long distances. It's cheaper to run one long cable than multiple pieces with added repeaters, as is the current process now.Deciphering data at 12,000 km
Scientists reckon they've got a solution, though.
Researchers at the University of California San Diego say they've been able to send data 12,000 kilometers along fiber without repeaters and still decipher the information at the end.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For the first time in a number of years the use of authorized federal wiretaps decreased 13% in 2014 over 2013.According to the 2014 Wiretap Report, released today by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts a total of a total of 3,554 wiretaps were reported as authorized, with 1,279 authorized by federal judges and 2,275 authorized by state judges. Compared to the applications approved during 2013, the number approved by federal judges decreased 13% in 2014 and the number approved by state judges increased 8%. One state wiretap application was denied in 2014, the report stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here